Coffee corruption and day-olds

(A bit before my time, but the bus stop in 1929 was the same place as this piece is about.)

When I was growing up, our family pub in Kilcullen was also the bus stop, one of the important ones on the main Dublin to Waterford run because it gave both passengers and crews alike the chance for some quick relief and a coffee or stronger.

That was a time also when the bus service — three each way in the mornings and evenings — was also the DHL of its time, and there would always be a bundle of parcels of varying sizes, for personal collection as well as the commercial stuff such as the fulfillment of orders of tools for the hardware store and rolls of cloth for the draper.

Other interesting things carried included the semen collected from local bulls and transported to the Department of Agriculture division responsible for artificial insemination. It was sent in small sealed churns, and I always presumed that the local AI man got by the return churns bullish stuff from other parts of the country to do the needfuls down our way.

People would also send letters by bus, and many years later as a freelance journalist I would often meet the early bus with my copy and photographs to be brought to the main bus station in the city for collection by the relevant national newspapers.

A community's relationship with the buses and their crews in rural Ireland was very close. Once a parcel or a letter had been collected off the counter by the driver or conductor we always felt content that it would safely find its way to its destination. There was always time for a short chat too, while waiting for the last of the passengers to get back out to the bus, and the local news from the various similar stops along the route was exchanged in the process. It kept villages on the route in touch with each other.

All that is gone. It used be that stops would last up to ten minutes. Now the drivers don't even get time to leave the bus for a call of nature, let alone for a coffee while their conductor had a whiskey. In fact, there haven't been conductors for years either. And the news comes in newspapers that are delivered by truck a lot earlier than the first bus comes through.

But even before I left the pub business almost thirty years ago, another very unique regular bus delivery had ceased. One which provided both an audial and occasionally olefactory experience in the front bar where the parcels were deposited, at the end just under the dartboard. The chicks.

Day-old chicks was a big business through the fifties and the early sixties. They'd be sent out all over the country from the hatcheries, in flat square boxes with holes in them, to small chicken rearing operations. People who would raise them to full chickenhood and a career on local dinner-plates or egg provision.

My grandmother was one of them. When the day-old chicks would come on the bus, she'd put hers into an indoor rearing pen, heated by infra-red lights. Released from the confines of the square box, they'd run around in their yellow down and pick at the meal that was their first food. Meal carefully formulated to fatten them quickly and get them out from under the infra-red. Electricity cost money.

Several times a week, day-olds would come on the bus. And each evening somebody would mostly come and collect them. We behind the bar — and our customers on the other side of it — were always glad to see the backs of the twittery-chittering creatures whose noise output seemed to grow in direct relation to the amount of time they had been waiting.

Occasionally somebody would fail to come for their chicks. Maybe they didn't know they were coming, and we'd not managed to contact them. Not everyone had telephones in those days. Then we'd arrive in the morning to a more quiet bar, and the realisation that we would have to get rid of the now-silent square boxes before they began to smell.

Sometimes we were too late ...

Growing up in the pub that was the bus-stop had its own advantages, as we Byrnes were therefore also entitled to free bus travel. Officially only once a year, but the ticket inspectors used also get their free coffees as they got off one bus and waited for the next, and they never asked any of us kids for a ticket whenever they came across us on the way to or from Dublin.

Coffee Corruption of a state bus company. These days they'd have tribunals for less.

We got to know them all, the busmen. Mick, Charlie et al. And later, as they retired and we grew up, they faded from our memories. Until we began reading their death notices over recent years. Well, that's life. And death. Part of the whole experience of contact and disconnection.

Nowadays we never connect on the buses. And the chicks don't tweet on them either.

Valentia Chronicle: Ross's guests

The first time I went to Valentia Island was with my Dad. I had recently learned to drive. In other words, I had reached the age of eighteen and bought my licence for a pound — there was no such thing as a driving test then.

One morning he asked me to drive him the seven miles to Kildare to discuss some business with a friend. Of course, the 'business' would be discussed over lunch in a pub, and my being able to drive him meant it would likely be a long and probably quite a liquid affair. But I didn't mind, I was happy for any excuse to take the car out.

As it happened, his pal wasn't there, so Dad said drive on. We ended up that evening in Cork, a hundred and twenty miles away ...

To make a long story short, we arrived home eight days later after having driven around half of the coastline of Ireland, and in every village we stopped Dad knew somebody, usually a fellow publican.

One of whom, about halfway through that extended week, was Norman Ross at his Royal Hotel in Knightstown on Valentia.

The hotel had been a former home of the Fitzgerald family, holders of the title Knight of Kerry. It faced out over the haven of Valentia Sound and the Kerry mainland beyond it.

Dad had known Ross since the man had lived in Dublin, where he'd built up quite a reputation as an astute businessman. One of his ventures was the result of a bet. He'd wagered that he could set up a barber shop in Suffolk Street from scratch and have it profitable within a year. All without any experience of barbering except from being in the chair himself from time to time.

He won his bet, establishing a new Dublin landmark and a model of service and efficiency in the barber shop trade. It remained such for many years after he sold it on, though probably few of its customers by then knew anything about its founder.

The business he'd got going on an island that is the most westerly piece of inhabited land in Europe was just as much a model. It was based in a popular holiday mode of the time, the coach tour. Ross had organised that the Royal Hotel should be a regular, even an exotic stop for many of those coach operators who brought tourists into and around Ireland. The fact that it was an island accessible only by open boat was the exotic part.

Though thirty or forty people, if soaked from spray or rain or both, soon lost that exotic feeling.

They were mostly groups from Britain, while one or two a week would be made up of mixed foreigners from as far away as Australia or as near as that closest foreign country, Northern Ireland. One tour a week was comprised of Dubliners. The regularity of the thing was one of the elements of the business that probably appealed to Ross in the first place.

The guests were programmed from the time they got off the ferry. When they struggled up the short hedge-enclosed path that was the entry to the world of the Royal, Ross would be waiting.

He would greet them in a manner that indicated they should appreciate how fortunate they were to be in his 'kingdom'. He was laying the ground rules straight away.

Tea and fresh scones would already be available to keep them from asking for anything more awkward. Then they were recommended to take the 'Maxi Bus' tour of the island, Ross's name for a Ford minibus which was operated for him by a local man, Willie Sugrue. At the time there were no more than a couple of score vehicles of any kind on the island and the 'Maxi Bus' was easily the most modern. And Willie Sugrue could tell the yarns of the island well. It's the kind of thing that comes in the DNA or Kerrymen.

Most of the visitors took the tour, in relays over the afternoon. And it was a pretty one.

The island is a pleasant rise of two hills, and at that time once you drove up the main street of Knightstown (named after the Knight of Kerry), the roads to the back of Valentia were all dirt ones. All the more reason that anyone having a car there would use an old one. Or preferably a tractor, which could do double duty as a working farm vehicle and a way of getting to and home from the pub at night.

But the Maxi Bus drive had good scenery and good blarney from Willie. The route took its way first along by Glanleam Estate — another home originally built by the Fitzgeralds — and up along the north side of the island to the slate quarry.

The quarry had an international claim to fame. It was opened in 1816 and among the noble roofs the slate from it covered were the House of Commons in London and the train station in San Salvadore. Through the nineteenth century it was the mainstay employment on the island, but by the time I got there in the early 1960s the only reason to visit it was the Marian grotto set into the massive cave that was its entrance.

After his charges had spent twenty minutes or so wandering through the grotto, Willie would round them up and bring them to the back of the island. He'd show them the Skelligs rocks further off the coast, and tell how many people came to spend time on Valentia so they could take a boat trip out to see where monks once lived on the two bleak and often-inaccessible spears of Atlantic outpost. No matter that they wouldn't be around long enough to take the trip themselves, Willie made them feel they'd been there.

Then it was back along the south side of the island, which is steeply cliffed and forbidding, and where there are dinosaur track fossils in the rock.

The last part of the run back to the hotel was through the little backwater of Chapeltown and then along the only other bit of macadamed road to Knightstown, where Willie would pick up his next group. They had usually followed Ross's suggestion and taken the air past the old Marconi station, originally the Europe end of the first Trans-Atlantic communications cable which had been laid by the Great Eastern.

The business end of the Cable Station at Valentia was a major employer in its own right, with around 150 people working there in 1915. By the sixties though, the distinctive buildings that had housed them and their once state-of-art equipment were all long since privately owned*. Communications had moved on, there were many more cables, and we were already beginning to understand a little how the space race was going to change our technologies and the virtual size of our world.

Ross's own interest in improving communications at the time centred around attempts to get successive governments to build a bridge across to the island. Eventually, long after my early sojourns there, and I think after Ross had himself had left, one was built. For me anyway, the island never had the same magic afterwards.

In the meantime, Ross's management of the people and his 'Maxi Bus' operation all worked perfectly. His short term residents were kept busy and/or made tired and weren't in a position to need the services of staff in the hotel after they'd had their afternoon tea and scones. It meant that most of those same staff could then have the afternoon off until it was time to produce the evening meal. More efficiencies.

For that meal, there was no choice of time or menu — apart from the fact that there were two main courses. Nobody on the tours stayed for more than one main meal, so there was no need to vary the menu in any way. The food was good, but being able to produce the same stuff every day made things more efficient, more organisable. Though creamed scallops in their shells for every starter was really too much ... and it also meant that we had many more shell ashtrays than could be used by even the heavy smokers of the times.

After dinner, Ross insisted on getting his guests off to bed early once he had extracted as much as he knew they'd spend comfortably in the residents-only lounge bar. For most of them that amounted to two rounds of drinks. In between the floor show.

During the two summers that I spent working in the Royal after my first visit my job was two-fold: barman and entertainer. As well as pouring Guinness and Powers Gold Label, I played guitar and sang for half an hour, then went back behind the bar to serve the second and last round. Then Ross would shoo them off to bed, on the basis that they had to be up early the next morning to take the ferry back across the sound to the comfort of their bus and the remaining beauty of the Ring of Kerry.

The system worked for six out of seven of the tour groups. Where it didn't work, where they just wouldn't go to bed until he called 'time' himself, were when it was his own people, Dubliners. The fact that they'd want to drink on annoyed him. They couldn't be managed.

He shouldn't have been surprised. They were simply reflections of his own cultural outlook. Most nights, when the tourists had dutifully trotted off to bye-byes like the obedient little children he treated them as, Ross would stay up drinking bottles of Guinness with me in the bar until I would finally call 'time' myself. There might occasionally be one or two others, Ross's few cronies on the island. A landowner and a guard come to mind. We'll remember them another time.

The next day, he wouldn't get up to see his guests off. They were leaving, and didn't need to be managed. Time enough to be up to organise the next group.

Ross kept this beautiful little business working like clockwork right up to the early seventies, when the advent of the Troubles in Northern Ireland snuffed out the life-blood of the enterprise, the British working class man and woman who loved to tour Ireland by bus and didn't count their holiday as successful unless they went home with the couple of hundred pounds they'd brought in their back pockets well and truly spent.

He was still the consummate businessman, though, and had managed to sell the hotel off to a local consortium before it became a liability. The consortium failed to make a go of it, as far as I know.

But long before all that happened, I had made some memories. With any luck, and some bubblings from the dormant depths of my recall, there may yet be a few more Valentia Chronicles.

---

*NOTE: An absorbing and comprehensive account of the history of the Atlantic Cable & Submarine Telegraphy is available here

Valentia Chronicle: Ross is dead

Ross is dead.

He came into my mind a while back. Perhaps even the day he died. Maybe even the time of his death. I was mentioning him to a friend. Telling the story of Norman Ross. How I'd met him, on Valentia Island, on a trip with my Dad. Telling the stories about him which my Dad had told me. And Ross's own stories.

I'd wondered at the time if he was still alive. Now his death was in The Irish Times.

The end of a legend in many parts of his own lifetime. Like when Dad himself died.

Except that now most of the people who had known the things that made Ross legendary are probably now themselves dead. Apart from his family, mentioned in the Times. A brother, nieces and nephews, I think.

And a few of the old islanders, no doubt.

Strange, really, that a man from Dublin, immersed in Dublin, proud of Dublin, and who had proved himself a successful businessman in Dublin, should ‘exile’ himself to an island off Kerry which is about as far as you can get from the capital.

But he made himself a new business there. A successful hotel which he filled during the summer with coachloads of tourists from all over the world. Including the ones he disliked most, the Irish and particularly his fellow Dubliners. Them because he couldn’t control them.

Ross was a control freak, before the term became generally known in a psychologically-enthralled world. Before it came to Ireland, anyway.

It was in his nature to need to have everything organised. People, systems, logistics. Even the weather, ideally, though he didn’t quite manage that in real time. But he was always able to tell the latest sodden batch of visitors (Kerry in those days got the country’s highest rainfall) that ‘it was really sunny here yesterday’.

They could bask in a kind of secondhand warmth. And they weren’t going to be around long enough to expect a change for the better.

Ross had the tourist business running his way. All coaches, pre-booked. Casual arrivals were deliberately turned away, with a ‘booked out’ apology. And all his coachloads were carefully timed, to fit in with the running of the hotel rather than the needs of the tourists, or the tour operators. The overnighters arrived around four-thirty in the afternoon, and left the next morning. A separate group, for lunch only, arrived around half-past-twelve and left at two o’clock.

The romance for all of them was that they had to get to the island first. That involved getting out of their warm and rainproof coach halfway around the Ring of Kerry and clambering into an open motorboat, the ferry from Reenaun Point outside Cahirciveen to Knightstown on Valentia.

It was a fifty-fifty chance that they became one of the sodden groups.

That was before the bridge, which is a whole other story.

I know all this because I spent some summers in my late teens working in Ross’s Royal Hotel. Before and during University.

Valentia in the early sixties was a unique place. A true island which was both inhabited and accessable. The natives were a mixture of fishermen, divers, radio technicians, small farmers, and the guests and staff of the Royal Hotel.

The Royal’s hotel section was limited strictly to guests, and locals were restricted to a Public Bar. They didn’t like this much. In fact, they didn’t like Ross much. But it was a good bar, and there was plenty of room in it. (I even, by coincidence, got to visit it last year for the first time in over 40 years - that's me above.) And even though Ross imposed Dublin-type closing times, they still came there to drink. What they did after he closed was their own business. Or sometimes for the other publican in the area.

Ross did things his way, and that was that.

I'll write more about him anon, because that was a period in my life when I was on the cusp of living it, and now that I'm on the homeward road again, I keep remembering things. Some of them, in retrospect, were quite formative.

(To be continued.)

Looking for a change of place

It seems that in Ireland over the last decade, anybody with a bit of spare loot is buying a bolthole in the south of France, or Portugal, or south of Spain.

I don't have spare loot. But I've spent time in both France and Spain over the years. I've done many flying visits in both countries, and also in Portugal. I like them all.

Still, if I wanted to live somewhere else for a while (retirement isn't on the horizon, and I never expect to be able to afford it anyway), it would probably be Italy, and either Tuscany or up further around Alba.



There's something special about Tuscany. Though I've only been there four or five times, mostly short overnights on business, once over a few days on a trip from Milan to Rome. The long way. One of my few longish holidays in recent years.

In general I like Italian food, but I don't eat either pasta or risotto. When I'm at a big-shot formal restaurant in Milan or Turin or Siena or wherever and the pasta plate comes along, I ask instead for a dish of chopped tomatoes with olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Absolutely scrumptious ...

Other than the pasta or risotto I like pretty well everything else about how the Italians eat. Especially when I'm in a very ordinary place, where ordinary Italians go to eat on a nightly (and daytime too) basis. The food is simple, recognisable. Edible in toto.



The wine is invariably super, whether just the house's table stuff or something special from my favourite areas of Alba or Chianti. There's a thing about Italy's winemakers that I found some time ago — they don't export their best, they keep it for drinking at home. Another reason to consider spending some of the rest of my life in a part of the world where you drive into a piece of history every time you turn a corner. Or happen on a family winery.



I can't just up and go. I have commitments here, business and personal. I have work I still like to do. And I need to be in Ireland to do at least part of it.

Now here's a thought. If I was to decide to move to Tuscany for a year, what's to stop me commuting home for half of every week? Or every second week? I could line up my review cars for the times I'd be back in Ireland, and through the modern miracle of the internet (and a suitable broadband connection) I could manage the writing and design part of my work from wherever I might be renting in the Italian countryside.

At least every other week I'd be scheduled to fly somewhere else in Europe anyhow, and it would be as easy to arrange flights from Italy to the launch events as from Ireland. Easier, in fact. I could even drive to some of them.



One of the miracles of modern transport is an Irish-based airline that flies people all over Europe at very low fares. Ryanair is the quintessential European model of the low-cost carrier. One of the most successful airlines in the world, in fact. Ryanair flies to Pisa. That's a handy connection to where I'd like to be. To anywhere else I'd have to be.

I'm not looking for the 'Year in Tuscany' thing, trying to make a new life in the hardship worlds of farming or tourism. I don't want any new hardship at this time of my life. So I'd be aiming to do a location shift while maintaining my current work.

This is a muse piece. Nothing decided, just developing an idea.

So stay tuned to see if I get it moved on.