Reaping the fruits of city's wholesale trade

TradeNames Being versatile and open to change has kept the Leonard name to the fore of fruit 'n veg wholesaling in Dublin for over 100 years. Rose Doyle reports.

Coming up to the end of the 19th century in Dublin the city authorities decided, with what time has shown to be wisdom, that its fruit 'n vegetable traders deserved a proper, enclosed market from which to operate.

By 1892 the Smithfield markets were up and running, Victorian redbrick with a glass ceiling giving shelter to those who'd sold in the streets around Dublin 7 for years out of number. Kate Leonard was one of their number, and one of the first to move into the new market buildings. She couldn't have known she was starting a business which, coming up to the end of 2003, would be still growing, faithful to its roots and reaping the benefits, as her great-grandson puts it, "of being versatile and open to change".

Jackie Leonard & Sons of the Corporation Fruit Market and The Old Schoolhouse in nearby Cuckoo Lane, is run these days by Kate's great grandchildren - Derek, Therese and Justin Leonard. Schools and schooling, as the story unfolds, are something of a theme in the family.

A lot has changed, and a lot has stayed the same, in the 111 years since Kate Leonard moved into the market buildings. Tastes are different these days and the availability of fruits and vegetables infinitely so. But the buzz is surely much as it always was, the early morning urgencies as demanding, the camaraderie a way of life that has always fuelled the markets.

Justin Leonard says he's steeped in the history, life and business. So too are Derek and Therese. But for all three, working in the family business was a conscious decision, not an inevitability.

Their father, Jackie Leonard, was the third generation to run things and believed in education, and choice. He died last February and Justin speaks for him when he explains: "He always told us that learning was no burden, that we should have an education first and then, if we really wanted to, go into the business." Justin wanted to, as soon as he left Belvedere College. So did his older brother, Derek. Therese came on board more recently, after time spent in TCD and as a merchant banker. The company is thus well-equipped and directed for the future.

Justin, with a passion for detail, tells the family, and company, tale while we sit in a once-upon-a-time schoolroom, now his office. "The markets were given the same design as Covent Garden in London," he says. "The original market hall had a glass roof to catch the light of the cool, early morning sun and a slate roof on the other side for when it moved around and got warmer; the Victorian way of keeping heat off the produce. The corpo replaced the glass with Perspex in 1988/1989."

Kate Leonard's son, John, who was Justin's grandfather, took over from his mother in the early 1920s. He had three sons: Thomas, Michael and John Jnr. Tom became a Dublin North Central politician for Fianna Fáil and Mick worked in the company until he died in 1983.

It was John Jnr who grew up to marry Patricia Eustace (whose mother was also a trader and customer of John Leonard Snr) and to father Justin, Derek, Therese and their older brothers, John and Gary. In time, and in order to distinguish him from his father, John Jnr became Jackie. The company became Jackie Leonard & Sons in 1983 when Derek joined his father in the markets. Justin came on board in 1986 and Therese more recently.

Derek looks after the wholesale end of things in the market buildings while Justin, in a rounding of life's circle, is based in the school building they now own, where Jackie once went to school and from where Justin and Therese organise deliveries and the expanding company. "Dad went from the NS here to Brunswick Street Christian Brothers," Justin explains, "but left to go into the business with my grandfather when he was 14. He worked in the markets until he was 66 and died in February 2003, when he was 69."

Justin's mother worked alongside her husband until the mid-1990s when she "took a back seat and looked after her grandchildren!"

In the early years the Leonards sold only home grown produce - turnips, parsnips, carrots and cabbages from north county Dublin. "Cabbage arrived in horse-drawn carts driven by the farmer growers, 140 dozen heads at a time," Justin says.

"My grandfather would auction it off, as all produce was auctioned then. There were no sacks and boxes, so the cabbages would be in pyramids on the carts. The farmers would drive on afterwards to deliver to villages like Rathfarnham, which were outside the city limits. That's the way things were until the 1960s."

Until the 1960s, too, a lot of fruit came into Dublin by ship, and was auctioned. The Leonards only came to fruit-selling in the late 1950s when Justin's father bought a pallet of Jaffa 105 oranges. "My grandfather said 'you'll be burned with them' but my father made a profit, started to buy in French apples and to build up the fruit side of things."

Justin, when he joined in 1986, brought with him his conviction that the company should have the independence of directly importing their fruit.

His father, believing he was right, "let me go with it and we moved to importing from France, Spain - wherever the source was. In those days, too, we'd sell between 500-600 dozen cabbages a day but the whole business turned on its head in the mid-1980s and the likes of iceberg lettuces and aubergines became big business. Cabbage became a thing of the past."

In the 1980s, too, the company took over the market stands of N J King. "Myself and my brother, Gary, who now lives in Wexford, took over the running of them and specialised in selling exotic fruit. It was a great business and we ran it for a good while. In 1991 this building became available and we bought it. I'd always been at Dad about us needing a store but he'd held out, saying 'there's only one space for a store and that's my old school'. It's only a football pitch away from the markets. We deliver from here to restaurants, caterers, the defence forces in Dublin, the Curragh, Dundalk and Meath. We supply about 14 hospitals too."

The building's on the way to being developed for another use, too, with an entire area nearly equipped for the pre-preparation and packaging of vegetables. "You have to look ahead and the way people live now they want things prepared," Justin says. "We were affected by what's called central purchasing, which means supermarkets buying from one source and cutting out independent wholesalers like ourselves. We supply a lot of the better greengrocers still but it was logical to look at other avenues of sales. We found that the way to grow the business was to do the preparation of vegetables ourselves."

Other changes have had nothing to do with market factors. "I used come in at 7.30 a.m. and finish about 5 p.m.," Justin says. "Now, because of traffic congestion, we have to start at 5 a.m. to get produce out to customers. Our first van leaves at 6 a.m. for St Michael's hospital in Dún Laoghaire. The lads go home at 2 p.m. but I'm still here at 5 p.m. We work Monday to Saturday, never Sunday."

LUAS is yet another factor. "It'll run right down the bottom of the markets and, with market container trucks measuring 40ft and the LUAS trams measuring some 50ft, no one knows how things will work out. They're talking about scaling down wholesaling in the markets to deal with the clash," he grins, philosophical, "but when I came to work here 17 years ago they were talking about the same thing."

Today's company has five vans on the road, employs up to 14 people (more in the summer). Van deliveries are necessary since "customers who used love to come into the market can't any longer because of traffic. Our wholesale customers still come in from the country however."

Justin Leonard is more than a little cheerful about the future, assuring that, "there's a line of young Leonards to come! Derek has two children and I've three. Margaret, my four-year-old, is already anatural for the business. She's very wide, forgets nothing and has a photographic memory like my grandfather and myself. We've plenty of ammunition to send in between us."