IT ALL BEGAN with an almost throwaway remark by George Stacpoole, the antiques specialist from Adare, Co Limerick. He’s the head of the Irish Antique Dealers Association and I’ve known him for years. One day, he said to me that he had lots of old photographs of Adare, suggesting they might make a book.
Simple as that, the beginnings of a long quest that is finally completed, with the publication due in April of my next book, Bygone Limerick, with many photographs taken 100 years ago. I've known and written about Limerick, city and county, for years, but researching this book introduced me to wonderful people I'd never met previously and I heard many intriguing stories.
I soon discovered a veritable network of people, each a passionate expert on the history of their own locality: John Cussen from Newcastle West; John Harrold from Bruree; Noel Collins from Kilmallock; Tony Browne from Limerick city; Tom Keogh of the city museum, with his personal collections of thousands of old picture postcards; Frank O’Connor, an expert on Limerick’s postal history; Michael F O’Sullivan, the creamery historian from Hospital; Fr Mark Tierney, that prodigious historian from Glenstal, and Vincent Browne, a thoroughly unlikely altar boy in his native Broadford, Co Limerick.
Introductions to other people were equally rewarding. From Lady Vivienne Lillingston of Kilmallock, I found that her husband, Allan, rode a one-eyed horse called Winning Fair, to victory in the Cheltenham Champion Hurdle in 1963.
Other curious historical facts came to light from the time of the War of Independence and Civil War. I was told about Tomás Malone, whose nom de guerre was Seán Ford, head of the old IRA in east Limerick. He was able to travel around the county with impunity, never discovered, because he was good friends with a judge, O’Callaghan Westropp, who had an Armstrong-Siddeley car with a capacious boot. He was never asked to open it for inspection.
Peter Tait, commemorated by the Tait Memorial Clock in Limerick city centre, had extraordinary business achievements in Limerick. He arrived in the city in the early 19th century from his native Shetland Islands as a penniless orphan and he began his career in the city as a pedlar. He went on to invent the notion of mass production clothes, with the same principles that Henry Ford applied to car production. This notion made Tait a fortune.
The last business venture in his life was a cigarette factory in northern Greece, which failed. His life ended, almost penniless, in a desolate hotel room in what was then southern Russia, now part of Georgia.
On the contemporary side, Denis Leonard, the driving force behind the Limerick Civic Trust, was enormously encouraging as soon as I approached him. The trust has done much restoration in Limerick in recent years. Sadly, he died at a comparatively young age, at the end of last year.
I also discovered all about Seán Ó Riada’s father, who was the garda sergeant in Adare for 28 years. At weekends, when he went to sit on a wall at the top of the town at 2.30am, all the local publicans knew it was time to shut up shop. During the week, he used a special knock on the doors of local pubs late at night; 20 minutes later, he would go in and find the place miraculously empty. Adare never had any “found-ons” in his time!
Another great personality I unearthed was John Enright, who made fishing rods in Castleconnell, just outside Limerick city. In the late 19th century, the runs of salmon on the Shannon at Castleconnell were vast and the Enright rods were so well regarded around the world that Tsar Nicholas II of Russia once declared that he would use none other. The opening of the Ardnacrusha hydro-electric dam and power station on the Shannon in 1929 finished the glory days of fishing at Castleconnell.
Just over a decade later, the ferry across the Shannon here ended when a bridge was built; I found that one of the ferrymen became blind in later life, but was able to navigate the Shannon with unerring accuracy.
Someone else I heard much about was the late Tommy Bowen, who by day worked in a hardware shop in Kilmallock. He was a walking encyclopedia of genealogical and historical information about the medieval town and did much to keep the town museum going.
The places, too, that came up in my research were amazing: the old bacon factories in Limerick, the Cleeves dairy factories and the short-lived soviets in Limerick, Bruree and elsewhere. One day, a friend of mine in Dublin, Denis Bergin, asked me whether I’d heard of Limerick’s hanging gardens. I hadn’t, but soon found out that a Limerick banker, William Roche, in the early 19th century, had constructed vast roof-top hanging gardens in the centre of the city that were the talk of the populace. I also discovered that Roche had managed to survive the great banking crash of 1820, an event which surely proves that much history merely runs in an endless loop.
Of all the century-old photographs used in the book, those that most captured my imagination were those of Adare and all its thatched cottages.
The streets are absolutely deserted, not a car in sight, just the odd pony and trap. For anyone who has done what I’ve done recently, driven through Adare to try to find a parking space, it was a salutary lesson.
Bygone Limerickis published by Mercier Press, Cork, next month.