'It was a magical time': Roches Stores staff in Cork share memories ahead of reunion

The very mention of the name Roches Stores evokes fond memories for the staff who spent many enjoyable and eventful years working underneath the green dome in Patrick Street, Cork city.

“The 28 years I worked there encompassed four decades of dramatic change in retail, while all the time feeling part of a unique family business which reached out to the people of Cork like no other company before or since,” says one former employee, Finbarr Buckley.

“It was a magical time, and it brought us all together.”

Finbarr has organised a reunion of Roches Stores staff in the Clayton Hotel on October 30, where no doubt many memories and stories will be shared. The iconic Patrick Street store closed 19 years ago, in October, 2007.

Talking to Finbarr and his former Roches Stores colleagues, John O’Donovan and Rene O’Halloran, about work relations and events, it’s clear they enjoyed a great relationship with their bosses.

“On one of his frequent visits to oversee the running of the store, Mr Stanley Roche, son of founder William, needed to use the staff lavatory in a hurry,” recalls Finbarr.

“After finding all the cubicles to be engaged, he proceeded to knock on the first door, only to be met with a gruff reply, ‘Who’s there?’

‘Stanley Roche’, came the response.

‘Ah f**k off, that’s what they all say.’

“No doubt the intervention of the employee’s supervisor speeded up Mr Roches’s use of the facilities!”

Mr Roche would often mingle with staff too on walkabouts.

Rene worked in the underwear department, in handbags and gloves, and then in the fancy goods department.

“I used always get, ‘Are you being served?’ from my pals slagging me,” says Rene.

“One of my jobs was to dress the mannequin in the underwear department. One day, a manager arrived up to me after viewing the mannequin that was dressed in a mixture of colours. He asked me, ‘Miss Healy, would you wear something like that that?’ I remember blushing. I was only 16-and-a-half!”

“He then said, ‘Get rid of it! Leave it naked!’”

Rene was able to assist all her customers.

“A nun came in one day who was on the large side,” says Rene. “She said she was sick of wearing corsets because the bones stuck into her and had I anything more comfortable in the underwear line?”

Rene had the very thing.

“I opened the curtain where she was changing and I dropped in a maternity roll-on to her,” says Rene. “The hook and eyes on the garment allowed for expansion. She was delighted. Another satisfied customer!”

John O’Donovan was a satisfied employee of Roches Stores too.

“You’d meet all the Roches Stores workers in the dance halls at the weekend,” says John.

“If you happened to be doing a line at the time, you’d be asked, ‘What are you doing here? What did you do with ‘your one?’”

John was in demand.

“When I worked in Roches Stores, I could have been married three times!” he jokes. “All the ladies working in Roches were fine ladies; lovely ladies.”

John was a practical joker.

“A worker in menswear was a very good salesman,” he recalls. “And he was very fussy.”

John rang him up one day and pretended to be a customer called Mr Brown, who had bought a suit off the peg and got home to discover the trousers only had one leg!

Did the worker swallow the ruse?

“He said, ‘I’ve worked in Roches all my life. How in the world did that happen?’ He swallowed it!” says John laughing.

During the store’s long tenure on Patrick Street, there were difficult times as well as good times.

“In trying times, when negotiations on expansion were often fraught with difficulty, former general manager, Tom Walsh, who retired in 1980, kept a picture hanging on his office wall of the burned-out premises of 1920 to give him consolation that, ‘Things might be bad, but they couldn’t be as bad as all that!’” says Finbarr.

As a former employee of Roches Stores, Finbarr was always struck by the many expressions of loss from various members of the public when it closed, such was its uniqueness among city centre shoppers for generations.

“Even today, people still comment, ‘You could get anything in Roches,’” he says.

Former salesman Peter Murphy paid tribute to the store in the 2006 edition of the Holly Bough.

‘Roches was always the place to meet up, whether it was a date outside the front door at eight o’clock on the way to the cinema or a lunch break in the coffee shop,” he said. “What made the store so special was the great mixture of staff who worked there for so many years.’

Finbarr often looks back fondly at those halcyon days, which no doubt will be discussed further at the reunion later this month.

He says: “When one looks back now to the pre-mobile phone era, and remembers the nerve-wracking experience of waiting for a date outside the store’s main door, it always struck you that whether your date showed up or whether the passing bus conductor indicated she wasn’t going to show by writing 50 on the misted passenger window, you were always consoled that there ‘were plenty more fish in the sea’.

“And you’d be back again on Patrick Street before very long!” says Finbarr.

The three staff members are interested in my memories of the store.

When I got four kettles and three toasters for wedding presents, I took the bus to Patrick Street with my wares in a large shopping bag, hoping to exchange the goods in Roches for somethings more appealing.

“And you did change them!” says Rene, guessing the outcome. “And I bet you had no receipt!” Rene is right on the money.

“Roches was the only place in Cork to buy wedding presents,” says Rene.

“I’m sure that things not even originally bought in Roches were often exchanged.

“People came up from the country especially to buy wedding presents. If anything proved faulty afterwards, Roches had their own repair shop where the goods were repaired free of charge for the customer.”

Many will recall that you could have found anything you were looking for in Roches Stores. And then some…

The staff at Roches stores had great times over the years, and they have rich memories to share.

“We have the unique opportunity to come together almost 20 years after Roches Stores closed its doors for the last time to revive memories and friendships in the past that continue into the future to live long in the memory,” says Finbarr.

For more information about the Roches Stores reunion, email finbarr@gmail.com, call Finbarr on 086-0712638, or Christine on 087-0527033.