Mayo memories: The ceremonial solemnity attached to the shoeing of a wheel

By Tom Gillespie

PART 2

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

He wrote: Limestone was the most common material and Owen Murphy’s stonework can be seen in many cemeteries around and in many monuments such as the Land League memorial at Irishtown. Needless to say, almost all of the work was done by hand.

Next to Gilmore's was J.T. Smyth, saddler and harness-maker. Here we were watching the end of a craft. The work, of course, was limited to the era of horse and donkey, which was fast dying as the car took over.

As often happens in the case of humans, the harness-maker’s trade had a sudden resurgence just before it began to die.

The petrol shortage of the war years gave it a new lease of life, but we didn't realise as we sat there watching J.T. and his son, Liam, stuffing collars and straddles, stitching bridles and britching, that this was the end of an era, and poignantly in the ’50s Liam had, as it were, gone over to the enemy as he plied his hackney car.

Further down the street was the second coach-building establishment, that of Pakie Waldron (Golly), one of Knox Street's great originals.

Pakie was in fact a public figure, a Peace Commissioner and a former chairman of Mayo County Council. Though by then he had long since passed from public life, it was he who read the 1916 Proclamation in the Square at Easter, 1949, after the government had passed the Republic of Ireland Act, and it was a measure of his importance that the first news I had of his death some years later when I had left Knox Street was in a Radio Éireann news bulletin.

We saw in Knox Street too the end of the coach-building era and the end of its skills and secrets. Of that, my main memory is of the ritual and it had that sort of ceremonial solemnity attached to the shoeing of a wheel when the iron rim was fastened around the assembled spokes, felloes and nave of the wooden cart wheel.

The iron wheel was laid flat and a fire built around it. Naturally the heat caused the rim to expand and when it had expanded sufficiently it was lifted from the fire and carefully placed in position around the wooden wheel which was placed nearby on the ground or on a special circular concrete platform as Waldron's had in the alley between Brodie Morley's and O'Malley's.

When this had been set in position it was drenched with buckets of water, which caused the rim to contract again, fastening the wheel securely together. We did not know that there were principles of physics being applied there. We were hardly aware of the timing needed for the operation or the skills involved.

The combination of fire and heat and feverish activity, smoke and sizzling steam, excited and fascinated our youthful senses.

Across from Waldron's, Tom Forde and his family mended shoes, a crucial trade at a time when leather was scarce and shoes were comparatively expensive.

Further up Michael Loftus tailored, while on either side Mrs. Forrie and Nonie Carney carried on dressmaking.

Pat Keane was further down as he and Joe and Kitty had not yet moved into their present premises. For some reason or other used spools were important to our childhood activities, so all these people were called on from time to time. It is most trying to work in front of an audience and it must have been doubly trying to do a job while being subject to the interfering, meddling, inquisitive audience that we must have been!

Still I can never recall a cross word or any time when we were given the impression that we were not wanted.

There were other people and places of interest in the street too, but I have concentrated on places where people worked with their hands.

We had no television, we listened very little to the radio. We really lived life in the slow lane. Maybe it was that that made these tradesmen and craftsmen and women so interesting.

I have confined myself, too, to the 1940s. Eddie Biesty and his bicycle repair shop came later (I think). Of course, there was also Michael A. Keane's joinery. But that somehow was different. It was big, a major workshop, a factory in fact, there was no time there for hanging about or talking to youngsters and the constant hum of machinery sent out these signals.

There then is part of what I recall as the magic of Knox Street. It is a look back over almost half a century. It is exactly as if somebody at that time was looking back to the end of the 1900s. We're getting on. And, of course, it all seems so pleasant and carefree. Nostalgia tends to be like that.

There was a darker side to Knox Street. I know that and I knew it then. Our memories are inclined to be selective. We discard what we do not wish to recall. I don't see anything wrong with that.

In spite of everything there was a lot of happiness around. Since then so much has changed. So much has improved. Maybe the big change is that we have more and more of everything except happiness.

When things were bad you could always hope. Even in winter when it snowed, when you looked out the window at night, maybe you saw that the snow came up from the sandpit. Maybe it would stick and maybe there would be no school tomorrow, maybe!

Concluded.