Nostalgia: The day black clouds engulfed the Sunbeam industrial estate in Blackpool 

“BLACKPOOL’S darkest hour” reads the headline on the Evening Echo of Friday, September 26, 2003, over Vincent Power’s report on the previous day’s fire at the Refond textile plant on the Sunbeam industrial estate in Blackpool.

The front-page photo showed smoke still billowing through the ghostly ruins of the destroyed multi-storey building, an image which Vincent Power notes recalled the then-still-recent memories of Ground Zero in the aftermath of the attacks on New York’s World Trade Center.

“Rays of autumn sunshine filter through the empty shell of the old Sunbeam factory that meant so much to generations of Cork families,” he wrote.

“Amid this morning’s eerie silence in what was once a place of dreams, firemen thanked God no lives were lost.”

He added that it was the biggest fire in Cork since the Opera House fire of 1955, although later writers would mention the fire that destroyed Suttons on the South Mall in 1963.

“The cost of the inferno will run into millions of euro. It is, above all, a human tragedy with the loss of 110 jobs and the final end of the northside’s link with the textile industry.”

Bishop John Buckley, Catholic bishop of Cork and Ross, is quoted as saying: “It is a great calamity for the city and particularly for the northside of Cork”.

The Blackpool fire had broken out shortly after 2pm in Refond’s bottom-floor dye room, quickly engulfing the factory, before spreading to the adjoining building, the former Sunbeam plant.

A listed building with more than 200 years of history attached to it, the Sunbeam building had been unoccupied for a number of years prior to the fire, but was used as a store room by Refond.

A distraught Chris Smith, Refond’s general manager and director, is quoted by Claire O’Sullivan on page two of the Evening Echo as saying the management and staff were shellshocked. “The place has been totalled,” he said. “We’ll never open again. It is the end of the textile industry in Cork’s northside.”

The Sunbeam industrial estate began in the 1930s, when, wishing to expand his business, William Dwyer moved his textile factory from the old Butter Exchange in Shandon down to Blackpool. Known as Millfield Textiles, the company grew to employ 1,100 people at the height of its success in the 1960s.

Acting as what would nowadays be considered an anchor tenant, Millfield helped to attract other businesses to the industrial estate, which in time became a major centre of employment on the northside. In the mid-1970s, as the traditional textile industry in Ireland was increasingly undermined by cheap imports from the Far East, Millfield was sold to UK giants Courtaulds and then, in the early 1990s, it was taken over by Sunbeam Industries Ltd, based in Westport.

In 1995, what was by then Sunbeam Knitwear closed its doors for the final time, and eight years later, a vital chapter in the industrial and social history of Cork’s northside ended forever in flames and smoke.