Memories of the traditional Mayo family grocery shops

by Sean Horkan

The retail food trade, like many other areas in Irish life, has seen major improvements and new directions as a result of social changes over the last half century.

It has also seen the loss of many great community personalities who were part of our daily retail life of those days.

None more so, in my view, than in the traditional family grocer, like my retail mentor Christy Hoban of Castle Street, Castlebar, a high class traditional grocer, in ‘Castlebar's The Bacon House of Repute’.

He undertook his grocery apprenticeship with Lipton's, Glasgow, before returning to Mayo to trade.

Here are my memories.

I grew up in a busy family home above our grocery shop in Spencer Street, Castlebar, a retail business where I learned the skills of the grocery trade, a trade of seasonal supply, product knowledge and sales skills.

Such business skills also required product and seasonal knowledge of stock for sale and records of daily cash sales and credit sales for customers accounts, recorded daily in the counter book.

Credit sales had end-of--week payment from the weekly paid customers or a month-end payment by salaried customers.

The skills of across-the- counter retailing included nightly bookkeeping, work I learned from my mother Sarah Horkan (née Hurst), who had learned it from her Spencer Street shopkeeper aunt, Elizabeth Hughes, who also came from Mayo Abbey.

My mother, along with her cousin Della Hughes, another Mayo Abbey native, came to reside with their aunt in Spencer Street, to attend St. Joseph’s Secondary School and both enrolled as a school day pupil.

I also had an additional early mentor, the real traditional grocer in the great Christy Hoban, an ideal grocery man, a great bacon man and a leading Salesman, who I looked up to as a role model.

Christy operated and ran his grocery shop, Castlebar’s leading traditional Grocery Store, located in Castle Street, Castlebar, and weekly advertised it in The Connaught Telegraph as ‘The Bacon House of Repute’.

The Hoban shop was just across the street from Horkan’s original home in Castle Street, the residence of P.A. Horkan and location of his plumbing business set up in the 1890s.

This was my half-way stop each day coming from school and where I kept a close eye on the business operations across the street in Hoban's shop, the leading Castlebar traditional grocery store.

Christy got to know me and figure me out when one day, like other school pupils, I lifted a 2lb empty jam jar from his returns crates of empty jam jars, stacked nearby outside, and I presented the jam jar to his counter staff to get the one penny return reward to finance a purchase in Mai Leonard’s sweet shop across the street.

Hoban well spotted my actions and allowed the scam, such was his decent nature and he enjoyed the drama of it all.

I later got to know Christy Hoban well in the 1950s at another of my favourite Castle Street stops, Pat Lavelle’s Saddlery, where I dropped in for a sports chat with Pat, our Castlebar boxing club coach. Christy was often there during his short cigarette break from the grocery store.

The retail trade had held onto the pre-war grocery high standards of over-the-counter service, food requirements weighted out, as required to the customer’s needs and mostly on credit sales that were recorded in the counter credit book to be transferred into the larger credit ledger that evening.

By then the retail trade had got rid of 1940’s war ration books and the returning records of weekly and monthly ration book stamps and dealing with shortages of many rationed items.

In sea-coast rural Mayo farmland, the grocery trade was well prepared for the new mixed retail trade life of the forties and fifties.

Daily local shopping for fresh foods was the norm for town folk, like for their daily purchase of fresh bread, milk and fresh vegetables.

Rural shoppers were Saturday shoppers and were mainly self-sufficient with their own home baking, fresh milk, butter, bacon, eggs, potatoes and vegetables. Their extra supply of eggs and popular country butter was bartered weekly in town shops for their supply of tea, sugar and flour. Their surplus supply of potatoes and vegetables made it to a Saturday market on Castlebar’s Market Square.

Rural milk dealers developed their own milk round, so Castlebar was never short of fresh food.

Castlebar, of course, had a thriving Castlebar Bacon Company that not alone provided the wages to many local family homes but also provided the bacon products, which were local foods that featured in morning fries and regular bacon and cabbage dinners. The local butcher then supplied the weekend roast.

Castlebar bacon products to local shops were supplied daily by the ever cheerful Tommy Byrne, 1936 All Ireland GAA medal holder with Mayo. He was a brother of Mrs. Nancy Hoban.

He ensured that all local grocery shops had an early morning supply of rashers, sausages, black and white puddings, lard, pork fillets, bacon ribs, ham shanks and knuckle bones.

Christy Hoban instilled the high quality bacon counter standards of the white coat and apron, providing quality bacon product cut to size and choice of his regular customers.

I had the midweek bicycle trip to the Bacon factory to purchase a two gallon can fill of pork blood, the main ingredient for my mother’s homemade black pudding supply for the weekend sales, again a business training trip, into the bacon factory world, first to the office to pay and get a sales docket to produce at the kill line, docket to the foreman, a filled can then and home with a fresh ingredient for home-made black pudding production.

Christy Hoban had the Lypton UK traditional grocery store bacon counter training, Lypton turned out the top UK traditional grocers of that generation and Christy Hoban turned out the top bacon men that carried on that great bacon counter tradition in Castle Street, Castlebar.

I was fortunate to train and learn from Matt Connelly (former Hoban’s bacon counter manager), who had the Christy Hoban business style of grocery, when I served in 1955, under Matt, who managed United Dairy’s Maypole Grocery in Chester, England.

I learned from Matt the top class Christy Hoban grocery management and bacon counter operation skills in England’s top multiple food-store, Maypole.

Food products in larger containers were weighed out in our flour store, Tuam sugar from the two cwt, canvas sugar sack, Irish white flour and flake meal from the one cwt. cotton bag, tea from India in the large timber tea chest, all filling, weighing and closing, from where I got my first lesson on how to fill, weigh and properly close a paper bag of scarce food products.

The empty container then found another use, the tea chest became a child’s play-pin, the biscuit tin with close fitting lid became an airtight container for many valuable kitchen food goods, the large canvas sugar bag had great use to hold potatoes and other farm products, the cotton flower and flake-meal bags became pillow cases with many used in children clothes and the sweet jar had many uses for storing the household items you wanted to see at a glance.

The coming 1960s brought the changes to the old retail trade style of over the counter sales that featured the weighing scales that weighed out most food lines as required, giving adequate time for chat and news that the arrival of the pre-packed products and self-service had come to change.

Biscuits now came in nice bright packages and had not have to be filled from square biscuit tins and weighted on the counter, home baking had dried fruit in small containers, with packaged raisins, sultanas, currants, dried cut peel or whole peel, all self-service ready products and not being weighed out from their original continental boxes.

Pre-packed sweets had now taken over from May Leonard's long shelf row of glass jars of boiled sweets and her sweep scoop that ensured each school child got their correct sweet number in their paper sweet bag.

The home fridge and the family car changed the daily shopping way, too.

I admired how Christy Hoban met this new challenge and adapted to the change.

With Tuam sugar factory going over to the pre-pack sugar supply, this changed the way their sugar was sold, instead of the old 2 cwt. canvas bag, sugar now came in parcels of 2lb. self-service packets.

Christy arranged with Tuam sugar factory to have a wagon load of sugar parcels arrive weekly at Castlebar Railway Station for his Monday morning deliveries.

As wholesaler for a day, Christy arrived at the station in his station-wagon salon car, filled his car with sugar parcels and supplied Castlebar grocery shops and other local shopkeepers with their week supply of sugar.

He supplied the Castlebar hospitals with their main supply of daily fresh foods and other urgent fresh food requirements.

Christy also ran the sweet shop in the sweetshop in the new County Cinema.

When he finished there he recommended me for the change of operator. As newly married with our new house bank loan, I accepted this as a very special consideration, for which I am so especially grateful.

The new area of pre-pack goods eliminated the traditional grocer and the local family grocer and introduced the self-service open display shopping and led to the supermarket and now the many international multi-stores, with so few now Irish owned. . .and all with large car parking space that is required for modern shoppers.

Many established traditional grocery shops like Hobans consequently lost put.

Others also to go were Peter Devers, Ellison Street, Danny McEllins, Main Street, Stephen Garavan, Rush Street, Martin Quinn, Castle Street, Martin Moran, Main Street and Moran Brothers, Linenhall Street.

Unlike other retailers, I was fortunate to be able to change, having great garden space at the rear and our next door living accommodation where I could expand both ways and gradually change from 90% grocer to full time outdoor operation of a garden centre.

People like Christy Hoban will never be forgotten.

His community generosity and customer care were very much appreciated by the people of the town.