My friend Johnny, and tales of turkeys and Black and Tans
Then you discover that wasn’t the name of the person at all.
I was born in 1957 and by then Johnny Shine, who lived above in Bartlemy village, on the Tallow Road, was about 57 years of age.
Growing up in the 1960s, I always thought of Johnny and his wife Julia as very old people and I suppose half a century of an age gap is a long spell.
They were a couple who kept very much to themselves but seemed to get on well with neighbours nearby.
Julia was for many years the ‘Chapel woman’ for the local church. In an era when Sunday Mass meant a packed church -even the two galleries were full - the opening and closing and cleaning of the building was an onerous task. No vacuum cleaner or any fandangle like that, so it was the sweeping brush and mop.
The Angelus Bell was tolled twice daily. Confessions, Sunday Confraternity, Rogation days, funerals, weddings, First Communions, the visit of the Bishop, and November prayers for the dead meant Julia had plenty to do.
She was related to us in a manner that I could never fully trace, but in fairness, Arnold is a scarce enough name, and as for Shine, well there wouldn’t be thousands of them either. Strange, then, that two other ‘minority’ surnames, Marks and Swayne, were also in Julia’s family tree.
I heard it said, maybe 50 years ago, that in the 1700s a number of tradesmen came into the general Bride Valley area from England or Wales - including families with the Lee, Gettings, Bowdren, and Marks name. This ‘theory’ has never been fully verified, but descendants of all these clans are still around today.
A William Lee, born in 1769, married Mary Marks, and their son Richard married Mary O’Leary. The Lee family lived in Bartlemy village and the menfolk were variously stonemasons, farm labourers, and thatchers.
A son of Richard and Mary was Patrick Lee - he died in 1931, aged 79, and is commemorated on a headstone in Gortroe cemetery. He married Mary Swayne from Conna in 1872. The couple had five children but Mary Lee died in 1888 at the age of just 35.
Patrick Lee married secondly in 1896, to Mary ‘Minnie’ Arnold from Rathcormac. A year later, Patrick Lee’s first-born daughter, Ellen, married a Patrick Arnold, also from Rathcormac, but about ‘two steps out’ from her stepmother!
With Minnie Arnold, Patrick Lee had two children, John, born in 1899, and Julia, born four years later. Family lore has it that Minnie’s father Thomas and my own great grandfather Daniel were cousins.
I enquired one time about this relationship and was sharply told ‘yerra, ’twould take a greyhound to trace it’. Be that as it may, I’ve no doubt that we are all the one clan back along the decades.
Eugene Turpin, of Glanmire, told me once that he heard that seven Arnold brothers were each offered the tenancy of a farm from different landlords (around the early to mid-1700s) for an annual rent of £7. The story goes that the brothers all took up the offer, except for one who hadn’t got or couldn’t get the £7.
Six of the Arnolds became farmers whilst the seventh had to eke out a living as a farm labourer. This man was the ancestor of Julia’s father, Thomas.
I heard a story one time about how family relations were slightly ‘strained’ for generations after.
In the 1920s, my grandfather kept a turkey cock – he had a ‘Station’, as they called it, where people brought their turkey hens to the cock for inter-poultry relations.
If the transaction went well, my grandfather would get maybe five shillings of a fee – a kind of Turkey Stud Farm!
Anyhow, Julia Lee cycled down from the village one day with her turkey hen in a basket on the handlebars. When she came in the boreen, my grandfather is reputed to have said: “Away with you, we’re busy, we’ve no time for your oul hen.”
Indignantly, Julia turned the bike and shouted back: ‘Yerra, if we had the seven pounds long ago, we’d be as good as ye.” Some things are never forgotten!
This was the Julia Lee who I knew as Julia Shine.
I got a bit of a land lately when doing some research on the various strands of the Arnold tangled web of relations and their connections. As I said, I knew Johnny Shine well growing up. In his younger days he’d worked for farmers and later then in the forestry. I’d say he retired in the mid-1960s. He died aged 78 in 1977.
I could find neither trace nor tidings of Johnny or John Shine anywhere, not even in the 1911 Census. Then the penny dropped! I found a record of his marriage to Julia in Rathcormac Church in 1930- his name was Eugene and that’s what he was christened after his birth at Ballinamona, Fermoy, in 1901.
His father was Eugene also. In the 1911 Census, both father and son were Owen! His grandfather was Con Shine. How or why did Eugene become John or Johnny? Those things do happen as time goes by. The reason for ‘the change’ has long since slipped from human memory.
Julia Shine died in 1986 - both herself and Johnny are buried with her father in the Lee ‘ground’ in Gortroe. The Lee/Shine house was demolished in 2003 - the last of a small ‘terrace’ on the Tallow Road that had included the Bandroom, home of the Bartlemy Fife and Drum Band.
During the ‘Troubles’ in the 1920s, Pat Lee was thatching the roof of his home. A lorryload of Black and Tans arrived at the Cross of Bartlemy and accused him of hiding guns or ammunition and forced him, at gunpoint, to throw off all the thatch, scallops and all. Naturally, there was nothing hidden in the roof.
Around this time, the Tans raided the nearby Bandroom and the musical instruments were never again seen. It was when an t-Athair Peadar O Laoghaire was curate in the parish in the 1870s that the band was reformed.
Ironically, it was a British Army Bandmaster named Matthews, from the Army Barrack in Fermoy, that trained those interested in paying both fife and drum in Bartlemy.
It was quiet people like Johnny and Julia Shine that I remember so well from my childhood days. I have a picture of their house but no picture of the couple who lived there.
App?
