Nostalgic glimpse of life on east Mayo street in the 1940s

By Tom Gillespie

PART 1

IN the 1989 Ballyhaunis Annagh annual magazine, Joe Kenny took a nostalgic look back at growing up in Knox Street in the town in the 1940s.

He wrote: It isn't easy to see how there could have been magic in Knox Street, but magic there certainly was.

A long narrow street, it ran north/south from the sandpit to the Market Square. Our side got very little sun in the morning, even in summer, and the three-storey houses cut out the evening sun early enough, unless you lived at the lower end opposite Gilmore's garden.

In winter you could always tell if the snow would stick. If it came from the Square it melted early. But when it came from the sandpit it would last and if there was enough of it there might be no school - maybe.

In its entire length there was hardly a building of any architectural significance, but the construction of three-storey houses surely was a feat of masonry in the early 1900s.

Knox Street had no public building of any kind, no church, no friary, no school, except for a brief period when Mayo Vocational Committee rented rooms for classes at the back of Forde's. When these burned down the school on the Knock Road was built.

Knox Street had no place of public entertainment.

It had no chemist shop, no barber, no doctor. Indeed there was very little reason why any person from any other part of the town should venture in, unless it was to release some straying animal from the pound in Pat Tarpey's yard.

Not that it was cut off from other parts of the town. It was, still is I suppose, in fact a shorter journey to either house of worship from Knox Street than from the centre of town.

That is, as the crow flies, or as long as the crow could find a plank to cross the Friary River, or take a short cut from the lower end of the street up the back of Main Street.

There were areas too of common ground, such as the Lochán where Knox Street met Main Street and the river between Knox Street, P.A.'s field and the friary field, where occasional outbreaks of war were as fiercely contested as those raging farther afield at that time on the banks of the Vistula.

Ballyhaunis, then as now, was a small town and it's no use pretending that any part of it was foreign territory to anybody else.

There were, however, strange divisions in such a small community. For instance, it is hard to imagine that in a town of roughly a thousand inhabitants, all Catholics, you could pass a year without going to the same church as your neighbour.

Even in such a context Knox Street had a touch of individuality. Indeed when there was no Ballyhaunis GAA team there was a Knox Street Rovers team! At one stage in the late '40s Joe Waldron, almost single-handed, kept the GAA alive in Ballyhaunis and has never really got credit for it.

There were 30 to 40 children in Knox Street at most times. Usually we played in P.A.'s field, in the Lochán, in the sandpit and, I'm talking now about the ’40s, mainly on the street itself. Without traffic, it was an ample playground. The fastest vehicle, the only one doing over 15 miles an hour, was the mail car from Kilkelly.

The only time the street was occupied was on fair days, when carts lined both sides of the street, and on Sunday when a row of traps and sidecars, shafts raised heavenwards, lined one side of Knox Street while the horses were tended in the yards at the rear and the drivers and passengers observed the cocktail hour in any of the street's 14 public houses.

The real magic of the street was in the people and the amazing variety of activities that were carried on - trades and crafts that have since died and that, had we only known it, were dying then.

Next door to me was Pat Tarpey, among other things, custodian of the pound.

Pat's daughter, Nora, mother of Neil and Myra, was married to George (Denis) McGillicuddy of Killarney, and what memories these few lines bring back for me. Tarpey’s meant horses, not common beasts of burden that drew turf carts or sidecars or ploughs, but thoroughbred animals - racehorses, highly bred, fragile and beautiful.

They represented to us another world, a world of glamour and excitement. They ran at Ballinrobe and at Galway and we saw their names in the daily papers, Perpetual, Lord of Appeal, and others.

Nobody ever got rich on them, but they ran profitably in other places as far away as Dingle and won, albeit in less exalted company and without benefit of Rules of Racing.

There were two coach-building concerns in the street. First there was Johnny Gilmore's. Johnny also had a stone-cutting business where headstones for graves, as well as other monuments, were dressed and designed.

The dressing was usually done by one of the journeymen stonecutters who spent a term, often many years, with Johnny.

These were characters straight from Seamas Murphy's great book on the trade, Stone Mad, 'the wise and silent men who learned their silence from the stones'.

I hope they were all wise for they certainly weren't all silent. The one I remember most was silent - Owen Murray of Stradbally, Co. Laois. His family is mentioned by Seamus Murphy as one of the stonecutting families.

Owen stayed in Tarpey's and worked with Gilmore's for many years in the ’40s. The design work on the headstones was done by Johnny Gilmore himself. We watched, and he allowed us to watch, as he cut out the intricate Celtic interlacing, the floral work and the lettering.

Next week: The end of the coach-building era.