Vintage garage still motoring on

Trade NamesFrom Fords to Minis to E-type Jags, the Smith family of Sandford Service Garage has been tending the capital's cars for over 80 years. Rose Doyle reports

The Sandford Service Garage has been there for Dublin city's automobiles in the aftermath of two wars, tended the Fords (60 per cent of all cars then), the Austin and Morris cars of the 1950s, the Ford Anglias, Volkswagen beetles and Minis of the 1960s - and in passing earned itself a memorable place in literature.

In the beginning, in 1918, there was Mr William McCabe, builder and property owner, who rented the Sandford Road site for use as a garage. A few years later, in 1925, a very young William Smith, aged 13 and living in Albert Place off Charlemont Street, arrived to work as an apprentice mechanic.

The garage never looked back: William Smith's sons, Frank and Fred Smith, run today's highly regarded business.

The work and times of the Sandford Road garage may chart the city's dance with the automobile, but it was a fire on the premises, in or around 1925, which made it the dramatic high point of a story by writer Maeve Brennan. In one of her Stories of Dublin, written in the 1950s in New York, this is how she remembers the fire: "It was a really satisfactory fire, with leaping flames, thick, pouring smoke, and a steady roar of destruction, broken by crashes as parts of the roof collapsed. My mother wondered if they had managed to save the cars, and this made us all look at the burning building with new interest and with enormous awe as we imagined the big shining cars being eaten up by the galloping fire."

Maeve Brennan was about nine or 10 years old when the Sandford Service Garage went on fire. Frank Smith adds a few of his father's memories.

"He recalled the flames reaching to the sky," Frank says, "and told me how the pit later used for working under cars was originally built for the storage of petrol in old twogallon cans. I would imagine those cans were the cause of the fire being so strong. In those early days, people came with empty two-gallon-cans and exchanged them for full ones which were stored underground for safety. In this instance it looks as if they went up . . ."

Set well back from the road, in a quietly industrious niche surrounded by the sort of redbrick Ranelagh house Maeve Brennan once lived in, the garage is much as it always was. The kerbside petrol pumps by the entrance are still there - and will remain when Dublin City Council, in the interests of safety, fills the holding tanks underneath with cement.

On a timeless wintry evening in his small office, Frank Smith tells the story of the garage and the Smith family. "My father worked here until 1931, then moved on to a job with Huet Motors in Mount Street. They worked on bigger cars there so it was more experience for him. Then the war came, there were no cars on the road and mechanics were all let go. My father worked around Ireland for those years, doing compressors in airfields and railway stations, anywhere he could. I was born in 1942 and I remember him not being at home when I was very, very young."

The Smiths had travel, as well as cars, in the blood. Frank's grandfather served as a cavalry groom with the British Army in countries like India and returned home to a job with Gunns. His son, William, married Rose (née Rorke) who came from Milltown and they had nine children. Frank was born on Ranelagh Avenue. "I haven't moved much over the years," he admits, without regret. When the war ended, William Smith went back to work in Huet Motors, where he heard that the Sandford Garage had failed to reopen. "He decided to rent the place himself; after a few months, he left Huet Motors and moved here."

A brave step for a man with a wife and a growing family (the first of William and Rose Smith's nine children was born in 1935, the last in 1955). By 1946, the Sandford Service Station was an up and running business.

"At that time a lot of cars had been off the road and laid up for a long time, needing work done," Frank explains. "My father would get them going again and back on the road. Because he'd been working with Huet Motors, they sent him Bentleys and Rolls Royces, the old fashioned, box kind. Even up to 1951 there were cars arriving by train from west Cork and Kerry with tags on them to be stripped down. I remember them too well," he says, with a rueful look at his hands.

"The chassis had to be lifted off and the engine taken out and sent to England to be worked on. The chassis would be here for up to eight months," he nods towards the darkened area of the garage. "I would work on them, scraping them down for repainting and respringing.

"I was working here when I was 10 years of age, during the summer. Can't say I loved it; it was just part of my life. We were living in Drimnagh by then and used go home at lunchtime - the traffic wasn't so bad then, the journey only a 15-minute drive along the canal."

Frank began working full-time in Sandford Road in 1956. "I never wanted to do anything else. Fred's eight years younger and used come in to help before he started full-time in 1964. We took over the kerbside pumps in 1956."

In 1956 cars got serviced at 1,000 miles and at 3,000 miles; 60 per cent of cars were Fords, 99 per cent of them black and most female car owners were widows. Austins and then the Morris 8 were popular too." Mechanics Steve and Johnnie, along with Frank and his father and apprentice Ernie Dickson, made up the garage staff in the 1950s.

Then came the 1960s and the Ford Anglia 105E, with an improved engine and greater power. "They were the first car to be hyped big, with yellow and pink models paraded around Dublin," Frank recalls.

"It was a dramatic change from the black. The Mini had come in in 1959, then the Austin 1100 and Morris 1100. The Volkswagen Beetle arrived; a complete change of engineering for us and, because Germany had a bad reputation after the war, no one else would work on them at the beginning. We could take the engine out of a Beetle in 20 minutes! There are still Beetle maniacs out there but we don't get them any more."

Oil crises came and went too. "In 1965 we were selling Arrow petrol from the kerbside pumps for 6d cheaper than elsewhere because we weren't tied to a garage.

There were queues up and down the road. Changes came in the business with the introduction of electronic ignitions and fuel injection systems where before there had been plugs and contacts.

"Now we're into fuel management systems and there's a lot more equipment needed for testing. We now use synthetic and semisynthetic longer life oil too and service cars once a year or every 10,000 miles. Or even after 20,000 miles in some cases."

Notable customers and cars which have been through Sandford Service include a young Michael Smurfit with his E-type white Jaguar in the 1960s and Senator Michael Yeats with his Morris Minor in the same decade.

Dr Ciaran O'Driscoll, ex-Master of Holles Street, had a Peugeot 403 cared for there - "a lovely car at the time".

William Smith died when he was 86 in 1997, Rose two years later. "My father continued as boss/consultant until he died. We were a three-way partnership, my mother and father as a unit along with me and Fred." Cars continue in the family blood - Frank's son, Derek, is a member of AA Patrol.

Frank says he usually drives "a banger - a Toyota Corolla at the moment. Fred drives a BMW. We'll continue to work here - I love my work. If I retired I'd only be looking at cars and wondering what sort of transmission systems or fuel injection systems they had." He would too.