Trade Names: A C Taylor has changed owners several times in its 80-year history, but it's still doing innovative work with glass. Rose Doyle reports

Glass has never had a brighter future. Ask anyone in A CTaylor, the venerable glass company in Sandwith Street, and they'll recommend you look around, take note of the amount used in new buildings, how easy a substance it is to maintain and install, what a boon to light - whether reflecting it or letting it in.

Glass has a history too, but they don't talk about how it's existed, in its natural form, for billions of years. A C Taylor is a relative newcomer. The company was started in 1923 when one Arthur Cyril Taylor, an English schoolteacher, left his homeland for reasons unknown, came to Dublin and set up a glass- making company in the Christchurch area.

Jackie Larkin, a present day director of the company and daughter of the man who worked for and took over the company from Taylor when he died, met Arthur Cyril. "He was an entrepeneur, a man with a hugely inventive mind who was always dreaming up things.

"We don't know why he came to Dublin. After a while in Christchurch, he moved the company to Percy Place. He had a factory there, made signs and aeroboard and manufactured mirrors."

All this despite health difficulties posed by his diabetic condition. In l954/55 Jackie Larkin's father, Kenneth, came to work for him.

"My father had served his time in Brook Thomas, where he was a manager in glass," says Jackie. "He came to work for Mr Taylor as a manager. Mr Taylor was married but had no family, and suffered ill health on and off. Even when he went blind he was determined to continue mowing his lawn and I remember him working out a way he could do so by using a piece of string to guide him. He was full of inventions and ideas - before his time in many ways."

By the time A C Taylor moved to Upper Sandwith Street in l974, Kenneth Larkin was a director of the company. When Arthur Cyril Taylor died in l975 it was Kenneth Larkin - another man cut from the inventive/imaginative mould - who took over building up and running the company until he died in l998. "Though he was semi-retired for the last few years of that period he still came to work," Jackie says.

"He was always thinking ahead and planning. Years and years ago he saw a bevelling machine at a trade faIr, came home and made one. We were using his bevelling machine here long before they came into the country."

"I joined the company about 20 years ago and my brother Donald, who worked here during his summer holidays from school, came in about the same time. Donald and myself, along with our mother, are now in charge of things and the directors of the company."

Back in 1923, when A C Taylor first got going, the company made up its own mirrors using glass from the factory, silvering it (ie., applying the thin layer of reflective silver to the back) themselves. Glass these days arrives already silvered but, Jackie Larkin says, "we still do silvering and also resilver if people want old mirrors repaired. I think we're the only people doing resilvering at the moment, certainly in the Republic."

She talks about the technigues and skills which are still part of the everyday job in A CTaylor. "Hand silvering is doing very small pieces," she explains, "and is a very old trade. Donald can silver and we've another man can do it too. These days we've got automatic bevelling machines, which put a sloping edge on the glass - though we also do hand-bevelling, which is done on a stone. The glass is ground down and polished. We do 'brilliant cutting' by hand - 'brilliant cutting' is when you cut designs into the glass and polish it. It's like Waterford but using smaller wheels."

She says that a lot of this work can be done by machine. "But machines only tickle the surface, don't go as deep - and there's no craftsmanship in a machine !"

Talk of craft brings foreman Paddy Hyland into things. Working for A CTaylor almost 40 years now, he was reared to it you might say, since his father before him worked for Dublin Glass "all his life; God, the work he had to put into it in those days".

Paddy Hyland started his working life with City Glass in Thomas Street, still going strong but now located in Dolphin's Barn. He moved to A C Taylor to serve his apprenticeship. That was when the company was in Percy Place and he remembers glass being delivered to them "on floats drawn by horses from the docks.

They were low loaders and we had to have lads on benches to take the weight of the glass. They would only bring us two cases at a time, packed into heavy joints of timber. Now we get great loads of glass at a time, packed just with end caps and steel bands."

A C Taylor, in those earlier days, "did a great deal of fancy, bevelled mirrors for the likes of Roches Stores. We did spoon, oval, scallops and cross bevelling. They're styles which are mostly gone now, not the fashion any more."

Other things have changed too. EU strictures, metric measurements and safety consciousness mean safety laminated glass is de rigeur. The job is easier too. "The work would kill you years ago," Paddy Hyland says. He recalls fellow workers. "There was George Anderson, who who used stoke the boiler and actually lived in Percy Place, and Dick Power, Matty Walsh, who went onto Dublin Glass and died a young man, a great spoon beveller, very talented. Then there was Paddy 'The Whack' Gordon, a real character."

A C Taylor did all the glass for the Burlington Hotel when it opened in the early l970s. Paddy Hyland remembers the "massive, floor-to-ceiling mirrors and the really lovely fanlights in the ballroom. They were about 31 feet long. We bevelled every bit of glass, individually. "We did a lot of work over the years for P V Doyle - the Tara Towers, the Montrose, most of his hotels in fact. We did a lot of pubs too, some of them gone now."

He points out that glass was never actually made in Dublin. "Not float glass anyway. The Glass Bottle Company made sheet glass, which is a different, rougher kind. Some kinds of glass have gone. Bottle end glass went because it's hard to make. Others, like the Miraflex used in discos in the l970s, is making a comeback. Glass bricks, which we make, are very fashionable."

Latter-day jobs include work for such art-in-glass establishements as Ryan's of Parkgate Street, Dwyer pubs, Trinity Hotel in Pearse Street and Dawson Street's Café en Seine. "A lot of it's very intricate," Paddy Hyland reminds, "all of the cutting notches out of glass in different shapes and sizes."

Machinery has brought lots of changes to the business, with the safety end of things more emphasised these days. A C Taylor employed about 10 people when it was in Percy Place - and employs the same number today. It does artwork in glass, Waterford glass repairs, glass tops, engraving, display aids - the lot. "Glass is the future," Jackie Larkin says, with quiet certitude.