For Peats' sake, this company won't quit Parnell Street

Trade NamesSynonymous with Parnell Street, Peats has moved with the times - and with the vagaries of CPOs - for seven decades. Rose Doyle reports

For seven decades now Peats of Parnell Street has been synonymous with electronics in Dublin. For 70 years, too, through lean and flush times, business and street have forged together in the area of the city most starkly to chart the changing face of the capital.

They'll be going on together too, according to Ben Peat, to bigger and better-than-ever things. "Peats and the world of electronics will be staying, most definitely, in Parnell Street," he affirms. "We're not known as Peats of Parnell Street for nothing."

Peats was first set up in number 198 Parnell Street by William Benjamin (WB) Peat in 1934. He'd been working for Bewleys, as a van driver, and one day decided he'd had enough of the strictures and routine and would instead make a living from his hobby, electronics.

That first shop sold prams and furniture along with radios, gramophones and, most famously, electronic parts and accessories. Famously too, there was a repair service. "You'd bring along your wet battery and we'd charge it up, that sort of thing," Ben explains.

WB and his wife, Bridget (who came from Belfast), had five sons and a daughter. "As the years went on we all came to work in the business, each of us developing our own niche interest. That's the way a family business survives, by expanding automatically into different areas as new members join. Everyone's given their own area of responsibility and off they go."

It survives when family members move on, too, as they do. Ben has been running things since 1985, all the time abetted by his older sister, Pat, who has been a part of the company since 1948.

We stand together in the electronic purr of the new, custom-built premises of the ever-expanding Peats as Pat remembers how things were. "There were tram tracks outside when I came," she says, "and ladies of the night occupying a house opposite. The people around were very, very poor at the time. There used be 15-16 living in tenement rooms. They were very big rooms and they were great, great people.

"Kate Comiskey, who was the Queen of Moore Street and sold flowers at the top of the street, came in one day with a radio she wanted repaired. It was brand new, she said, because she'd only ever played one station, Radio Éireann, on it. Jack Hurley, who was an itinerant repair man, told her the noise she was hearing on it was the Spanish Civil War."

Such tale and anecdote went hand-in-hand with Peats' peripatetic history along Parnell Street. "We moved in the 1950s to number 30," Ben explains. "Then in the 1960s a CPO landed on us for the ILAC centre and we moved to number 26, where we are now. We were there through the 1970s and 1980s, then went back to where we started off, to number 198, until another CPO was put on that building for road widening in the 1990s. We moved back here last year so as we could give ourselves a custom-built shop."

Parnell Street and environs are as vividly a part of his memory as they are his sister's. He remembers, in the 1950s, how "cattle used come down North King Street from the NCR markets to be slaughtered where the ILAC Centre is now. The slaughterhouses there used supply the butchers in Moore Street, where every second shop was a butcher at the time. You'd see blood flowing in the streets."

He remembers the desolation of the 1970-1980s, for Peats and everyone else doing business in Parnell Street. "The VAT rate went up to 35 per cent and there wasn't any disposable income about. Buildings were knocked down and left. Noyeks went, though they're still trading, and Williams and Wood went - they made jam and tomato sauce and you could smell the tomato sauce on Fridays. Parnell Street began its come-back in the 1990s, though the ILAC has been here since the 1980s.

"We've a Jurys Hotel now and new apartments here and in Smithfield and a whole influx of new people living in the city. Peats has seen it all come and go; we've survived in spite of all the hardship we've been through and now we're looking at easier times."

Good times, for Peats, came with a change in culture as much as the economy. "There used not be much emphasis on home entertainment," says Ben Peat, "but nearly everything we sell nowadays is in that area and our big customers now are young people."

He's been part of the business since he was "about 14, in 1965. We lived over the shop then and I came in straight from school, from St Paul's in Raheny. I wanted to work more than I wanted to go to school, simple as that. We sold the early TVs; when you switched them off you'd to wait five minutes for the dot to disappear. Colour TVs came in in the 1960s and we were in demand for aerial erections."

WB Peat had moved back from the company before he died. "He knew electronics was a young person's world," his son explains. The Peat offspring all had their own special areas of care within the company.

"Pat looked after hire purchase arrangements and finance, Liam concerned himself with the technical and services. Harry's area was aerial erections, Geoff developed the spare parts and accessories end of things, and Andy was involved in sales.

Harry and Liam are retired and out of the business now and Andy, though he still has an interest, is not actively involved. Geoff has set up his own business in Peats Wholesale. Ben's passion was for Hi-Fi: "The change from mono to stereo came after I joined - in those days you'd radiograms which were big coffins with radio and tape recorders in them. The buzz thing of the moment are MP3 players, onto which you can download music from the web and store thousands of CD's on one small device."

Liam's son, Ken, is now the company's sales director and two of Ben's three sons are involved - a third is still in school and neither of his two daughters will be joining the company. His wife, Louise, pursues the working life of an artist.

Peats, always and famously the place to go for accessories and parts unavailable elsewhere, has always had a city-wide customer base. These days, alongside megapixel camcorders, digital cameras, , state-of-the-art Plasma TVs and the wide,wide home cinema screens in their unique and designated demonstration area, you can still buy stylus needles for record players, valves and old-style Roberts' radios with new technology.

"The only thing that's constant in this business is change," Ben Peat says. "We're selling things now we didn't even know about three years ago. We've a philosophy of looking after the customer and have made our name on repeat business. There's a community growing in the city centre but we're bringing in people from the outskirts who want a bit more, too. LUAS is really reviving the city. We like to think we offer a wider range of products, and quality brands, than the multi-nationals and shopping warehouses. We pride ourselves, too, on having a staff who know what they're talking about, who can explain everything to the customer. Technology is their job as well as their hobby."

Which is what got WB Peat into the business in the first place.