Repair shop that worked well on the silver screen

There is no sign that the recession will pull the plug on a repair shop for vacuum cleaners which featured in the Oscar-winning film Once, writes ROSE DOYLE.

IF THE small hoover repair shop at 270a Harold’s Cross Road looks familiar, even intimately so, there are a couple of good reasons.

The first is because it’s been there almost 50 years, a sometime meeting place and social service as well as repair shop, a beloved, intrinsic and surviving part of the strip of shops along that part of the Dublin 6 road.

The second is because it's the repair shop which so atmospherically starred in the film Once, setting for the most poignant of cinematic leave-takings. Once seen never forgotten, the reality is as you saw it on screen. It is also, according to Fergus Doyle, the second generation of Doyles to run the place, unchanged since 1960.

“Nothing was ever done to change it,” he says with more than a little affection. “I replaced the window because it was rotten and I was literally afraid it would fall out on someone, but that’s all. My father’s great passion was Shelbourne Football Club; he’d no real interest in the business. He followed, played, managed and was chairman of Shelbourne.” (Much more than the sum of those roles, Gerry Doyle was in fact legendary in football circles.) “He died coming up to his 80th birthday, not long after coming back from Italia ’90.”

Fergus Doyle’s approach to the job is that of a craftsman: he respects the workings and design in the best of old machines, says – and it’s true – that he can tell by looking at a machine what’s wrong. He works with his father’s old tools and customers come and go in a slow, steady, satisfied stream through the morning.

Fergus Doyle is as much a part of the shop as it is of him, happy to work in and own “this little bit of Harold’s Cross Road”. I ask why people keep old machines and know, instantly, that this is a stupid question.

“Because they still work, of course. They still do the job they were designed to do. A woman picked up her machine yesterday; a 1954 model they’ve stopped making; it was in perfect working order. I would always advise the owner of a really good old Nilfisk to spend the €200 or whatever on a new engine. I’ve a machine here at the moment that my father sold to the customer’s mother in 1965. I’ve just serviced it and it’s still working perfectly, doing the job it was designed to do.”

His parents, Gerry and Alice Doyle, were childhood sweethearts: Gerry from Kevin Street, Alice from Harry Street. Fergus is the third last of the family of 10 they reared in Drimnagh. He’s more than equipped to relate the shop’s past and present, even to take a hopeful swipe at its future. All with the occasional mandatory digression of the storyteller.

“My father opened this place in 1960. He’d been working for Hoover and they let their service engineers go and gave them their service areas. This was his area. In those days your job was both selling and repairing Hoovers. He rented a place briefly in Capel Street before opening here with two others, Dick Gregory and John O’Dea. They dropped away in time and he ended up buying the place. Dick Gregory was almost like a second father to me; we got on really well. My father’s life was built around football, even to bringing us kids to Irishtown Stadium on Saturday mornings to give my mother a break.”

Fergus Doyle has a great sense of the early life of this corner of Harold’s Cross. “There would have been a farmhouse where these shops are now, originally. The farm was gone by the middle of the 19th century and the nearby chemist’s building went up about 1870. Paddy Walsh’s bike shop was one of the oldest shops around; Paddy used be known as the mayor of Harold’s Cross.

“The front room of Mrs O’Brien’s next door used be a sweet shop. But this shop is now the longest running business on the strip; everywhere else has changed hands.”

Fergus Doyle came to the business by default. “My father broke his Achilles tendon the year I was doing my Leaving Cert and, because my older brothers were away, I was the one had to drive him to and from work. What with one thing and another after I did the Leaving Cert I ended up here, doing different training courses with Hoover. I was 17 and stayed for six-seven years, until I married and went to Denmark when I was 24.

“It wasn’t just vacuum cleaners then: Hoover brought out the first front-loading washing machine, a completely new technology at the time.

“Billy Beausang was the general manager for Hoover, a lovely, lovely man from Cork and a great friend of my father’s. He was a brutal driver and had the first five-speed gear box I’d seen and I used go all over the city with him to the houses of customers who were having teething problems with the new washing machine.”

He remembers some of the bigger houses, like Lord Moyne’s in Chapelizod and how, in the Guinness houses, they always seemed to be preserving fruit in jars for the winter. And he remembers buying out the ground rent on number 270a.

“It was owned by a fellow called Percival Dalyrmple Townsend, who was master of the Rotunda. He left in the 1930s and went to Kenya and it was his grandnephew, Jonathan Dalyrmple Townsend, I had to deal with. He charged the commercial rate, £5,000.”

When Fergus Doyle married Cepta Hopkins from Tallaght village they went to Denmark for five years. After that they lived in Clane, Co Kildare, and in time were instrumental in setting up the Dublin Resource Centre in Temple Bar.

“Before Temple Bar was a trendy place we were there. This place was being run by my father and my older brothers, Brian and Gerard, who’d come back from England. Brian left and when Gerard, after my father died, asked me to come back I did. Gerard retired about four years ago and now it’s just me.”

Home Services had its 15 minutes of fame when Fergus's nephew, Rory Doyle, then the drummer with The Wall and now with Bell X One, "suggested to a young fella making a movie, but who had no money, that he ask me if they could use the place for a day or two. I said 'go ahead, all right'. I only saw Onceat Christmas, when Cepta bought me the DVD."

And, yes, it's true that people come looking for the place. Austrians had been there taking pictures a week before Trade Namesarrived.

“Shops like this,” Fergus says, “were part of the community. A meeting place and information centre. I still get old people coming in and asking how they should get in touch with the Vincent de Paul and such.”

A customer collects a repaired machine. “The things we Nilfisk lovers will do to keep our machines going,” he says as he goes, happily. Fergus laments the cost of parts. “They talk about recycling but then charge so much for parts that people are forced to buy new machines.”

How does he charge, for his time and patience and skill? “I charge people for what I know, not what I do. Most places send things away but everything that comes through here I do myself, in the shop.”

The recession is not a negative in his business. “In one sense I thought this might be a dying trade but, with the recession, I think it’s in for a revival. This place has been through a depression and the Celtic Tiger and it’ll come through what’s happening now.”

Neither of his and Cepta’s offspring, Fiachra (who works in RTÉ) or Aoife (studying psychology in Maynooth) have come into the business but he’s hopeful. “This place will go on. Maybe Fiachra and Rory (Gerard’s son) will decide to come in and run it.”