John Arnold: Chats and tunes I recorded with Roche brothers... 50 years ago
With Charles Stewart Parnell in the ascendancy at the head of the Irish Party, great hope was held out for a form of Home Rule for Ireland.
British Prime Minister William Gladstone put forward his Home Rule Bill, but on June 8, 1886, it was defeated by 343 votes to 313.
Another general election was called with 70 Irish Nationalists returned – Ireland had 101 MPs out of a total Parliament of 670. In the 1886 election, Gladstone’s Liberal Party was defeated and he was out of office - though he returned again as PM in 1892.
Gladstone has his critics, but in fairness, he tried at least to ensure more people were entitled to vote after 1884.
Anyone that paid over £10 a year in rent or owned property to the value of £10 or more was now entitled to vote - women were still excluded.
In the 1886 election, Lane was returned as MP for East Cork. From the well-known butter merchant family on the Northside of Cork city, his firm was part of the farming ‘industry’ of rural Cork back then.
Places like Bartlemy were famous for butter production on individual farms. After churning and salting, it was collected and transported to the Butter Market in Cork, and from there all over the world to far-flung places with strange-sounding names.
In the month of May in 1886, James and Mary Roche, of Ballyda, were overjoyed with the birth of their second child - a little boy, Jeremiah; the couple already had a son James, born in 1884 - two years after they were wed.
Jeremiah Roche - he was always better known as Jerry - worked as a farm labourer, and when a new national school was built in the parish in 1903, the then 17-year-old got work as a labourer with the builders, Coffey’s of Midleton.
In later years, after his father had died, in 1911, his mother Mary Roche opened up a little shop in their home at the fork in the road where the family dwelt. Tea, sugar, ‘fags’, butter and bread were the main items sold.
I can vividly recall that cold January night half a century ago and still think how lucky I was to have called on that occasion.
The local Macra na Feirme branch was researching a project on parish history. At that time Johnny was 78 and Jerry was 89 and they had great recall and memories of days gone by.
I was just only 17, but equipped with a battery-powered tape recorder I asked the brothers if I could record some of their memories. In fairness, they were only too glad to oblige.
The school I had attended from 1961 until 1969 was the building that Jerry had helped to construct 60 years before that. Having grown up in a pre-electricity, radio and television era, the Roche brothers were able to tell of times spoken of by their own parents – the years of the Great Famine and the immediate aftermath of the disaster that it was.
Johnny told of “people ating the yalla meal - stirabout, they used to call it” when the potato stalks were dead with blight. He said: “We (our family) never ate it but a lot of ’em had to.”
When they had the huckster’s shop in the 1920s and afterwards, they talked of “going out the country”, buying eggs from people and selling them in the shop. They mentioned “the best bread of all times - Simcox’s bread, John”.
They used go with a jennet and car five or six miles to meet the bread-van from Cork city and they’d load up with loaves and sell them along the way home.
Living at a fork in the road, their home was always a focal point for locals and strangers. People from west Waterford who took the ‘Tallow Road’ on their way to Cork, tanglers, trick o’ the loop men and dealers on their way to Bartlemy Horse Fair -yes, the Roches met them all.
In his younger days, Jerry had been a great accordion player - Johnny played too. By the mid-1970s, Jerry was suffering from arthritis in the hands and could no longer ‘knock a tune out of the box’, but Johnny still played. With his eyes closed, a fag in his mouth, and his hob-nailed boots beating time on the flagstone floor, he played away for me, and luckily I left the tape recorder ‘on’.
In his own imitable style, Johnny Roche launched into a series of tunes. He played , , , , and . He transported me on wings of music from , , , and . Once or twice, Johnny might be a little uncertain of how such and such a tune would start and Jerry would ‘de diidle, de dee’ and get him going.
In between tunes, Johnny would give the order to his older brother, “Blow up, blow up” - asking Jerry to give the fire machine a few turns to keep the embers glowing in the big open fireplace.
The brothers also talked about how things were in their younger days - about schooldays, their shop, the Fair, Gaelic games in the parish, and the Fife and Drum Band.
As I walked home that moonlit Saturday night with the tape recorder under my arm, I was thrilled with what I had collected. A few weeks later, I planned a return visit to the Roche brothers for more talk and tunes. Unfortunately, that second ‘recording session’ never happened because, in March of that year, 1975, Johnny Roche died. His brother Jerry died the following year.
Two lines from Phil Coulter’s came to my mind: ‘For what’s done is done and what’s won is won/ and what’s lost is lost and gone forever’.
I was lucky to have garnered so much from Johnny and Jerry Roche. You know, in later years I often reflected on that January night.
Jerry was born in 1886 and grew up with people who had lived through the Famine of the 1840s - indeed, he lived in historic times. We fuss and fooster over many things, often minor irritants, in truth, life is easier now than when the ‘stirabout’ was all that was on ‘the menu’ of our forefathers. I suppose society today has higher expectations and we take so much for granted.
Thomas Moore
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