Dublin family Robinson make their own beds . . .

. . . and everyone from designers to diplomats love lying on them. Rose Doyle on a company that has helped people sleep soundly for nearly 90 years

For more than 80 years now, through the thick and thin of the nation's march and over three generations of the family, Robinson Sure-rest has been supplying handcrafted beds to discerning sleepers. Orthopaedic beds are a speciality but they do a full range of traditional beds too, custom-made with natural materials and pocket sprung.

The great and the good go to Sure-rest; actors, politicians, designers and the diplomatic corps all seeking the imperative of a good night's sleep on a good mattress. So do the descendants of decades-ago customers - Surerest has been there serving many of its customers for several generations. The company offers a personal service it's proud of and has moved only twice in the 82 years since being set up by John Robinson in 1922.

The Surerest story is one of an early 19th century triumph over adversity, proof that fact really is more interesting than fiction.

John Robinson was born in England in 1900. His father was a member of the Royal Army Medical Corps and his mother, Emily, an Irishwoman who came home to Dublin with her three small children when her husband died.

John Robinson's great-grandson, David Robinson, tells some of his great-grandfather's story. His mother, Gemma, adds her memories and so does his aunt, Pauline. David's father, Aidan Robinson, chips in on the end of a phone line. We drink coffee and eat Gemma's home baked scones. It's all very convivial and relaxed. Customers get the same treatment. Sometimes, they even get the coffee.

"Things were horribly tough for Emily, my great-grandmother, when she came home," David says, "she had no pension and there was no social welfare. My grandfather, her son, John, told me he remembered her putting cold tea on her eyes to keep herself awake while she sewed buttons onto army shirts, just one of many things she did to make money."

Things reached a stage when the only way to manage was to put John in St Vincent's orphanage in Glasnevin. "He had nothing but good things to say about it and about the education he got there," Gemma assures. John Robinson's education got him a job in O'Dea's Bedding in Mary Street, where he worked on the accounts. Things were still tough for his mother and sister, living in Cabra, but now he was able to help out.

John Robinson liked camping and Sutton, then a place of green fields and sand dunes, was his preferred location. It was also where he met and fell in love with another camper, Polly Tutty from Drumcondra.

"He wanted to marry her but couldn't afford to," Gemma says, "so he went to Berkeley Road church to pray and look for guidance. The idea of setting up a bedding company came to him there."

John Robinson opened his bed-making factory in Hardwicke Lane, off Dorset Street, in 1922, when he was 22 years old. He called it J R Bedding and he worked day and night producing hog and horse hair mattresses. Hog hair makes the better mattress, David explains, the hairs being shorter, shaped like a coiled spring and providing more bounce.

The object of the exercise was more than achieved when he and Polly married and, in 1930, expanded the business, moved to Mercer Street and changed the company name to Surerest. John and Polly Robinson had five children - Damien, Aidan, John, Paul and Marie. In the fullness of time, in the 1940s, Aidan became the one to join his father in the business.

In the 1940s, the company had a staff of 20 and was run by John Robinson senior, his son, Aidan, and Polly's younger brother, Roy Tutty, the accounts manager. "He was a gentle, gracious and courteous man; people still talk about him," Pauline says.

Other workers are remembered too. Women like Edith (Edie) Worley of Shielmartin Terrace, Fairview, and Christine Smith from Kelly's Corner, SCR, seamstresses who earned £6.5.0d a week in 1964. Mick Berkley, Joe Glennan, Paddy O'Connor and John Farrell were all long-time bedmakers; hard and patience-demanding work involving hand teasing the heavily compacted flock apart, cutting materials, handstitching mattress and tufting. "A massively arduous handcrafting industry," is how David describes it.

Jack Kenny drove a van for the company for many years. Before that, local deliveries were made by horse and cart and before that again a handcart was used. Time was, too, in the 1940s, when beds were delivered by canal barge from Broadstone to Limerick, when hair mattresses that rolled up into canvas sail bags went to lighthouses, ships and yachts and others were specially made for monasteries and caravans and, famously remembered by many, the penitential Lough Derg. Designer Sybil Connolly was a customer; Surerest has always had a definite design edge. Today's beds are delivered by van by the company's excellent Dutch courier, Ron Consenheim.

Then, as now, Surerest beds were designed in-house to a time-tested specification. All of their models, David points out, "are called after the lighthouses around the Irish coast; they look after you in the dark hours".

Some things do change however: their Skellig model, a high quality standard 3 ft orthopaedic bed, cost £60 in 1985. It costs €520 today.

"We don't do built-in obsolescence," David says, "we've customers who bought beds during the war and are still using them. And they still work. We make to order, to customers' own designs - we've made circular beds and 7 ft square beds."

The company worked out of Mercer Street for 43 years, "across the road from the house where Noel Purcell lived", David says, "and where another local industry at the time was cutting sticks into bundles of firewood for sale by the local kids".

In 1973, a compulsory purchase order was put on Surerest's Mercer Street premises because of the development of the St Stephen's Green Shopping Centre. "No one really wanted to move," Gemma says, "everyone was used to the old place."

The idea of closing was mooted but then they moved to where they are today, a stone's throw away to a premises which had once been a stables on Bow Lane East, just off Mercer Street in Dublin 2. John Robinson senior, Aidan Robinson, Ray Tutty and Seamus Thornton got things up and going again, albeit in a smaller way.

Through the 1970s and 1980s, Surerest sold directly to customers and to shops like Carrolls of Bachelor's Walk and, later, Switzers and Clerys. Medical referrals built up, so did the numbers of psysiotherapists recommending Surerest beds. In the 1990s, interior designers looking for uniquely designed beds grew customer numbers even more. John Robinson senior died in 1988 when he was 88 years old, the age of the century through which he'd cut such a swathe.

Through all the years, word of mouth and repeat business have been at the core of the Surerest business story - along with a quiet assurance about the quality of its product.

"We'll continue as we are," David Robinson says, sage and sure and echoing the confidence of his parents and aunt.