John Arnold: The life and times of Bartlemy Billy as he enters his 98th year

Imagine a little boy of 11 years old, during the ‘Emergency’ around 1939 or 1940. Times are tough with food rationing on the way and money is scarce.

There is a Sports Meeting on in Rathcormac - just three miles away. He is anxious to go - back then the Annual Sports was a major event in the lives of country people.

Travelling to faraway places like Cork or Dublin was out of the question. Even a trip to ‘town’ in Fermoy was a novel experience. You can imagine the sense of anticipation in the boy’s mind when his grandmother pressed two pennies into his hand - tuppence was a great ‘stand’.

The penny coin had the hen with the clutch of chickens. One could get two ha’pennies for the penny - with the sow and bonhams. For that same penny you could get four farthings -with the woodcock.

I often heard old people say that ‘for three farthings, you’d get a pile of sweets’. Back then, Peggy’s Legs, Clove Rocks and Bulls Eyes were amongst the favourites. In the shop they’d be in big tall glass jars and you could buy the sweets in a ‘twist’ of newspaper.

He was a happy lad heading off to Rathcormac. He told me he came down to the School Cross, over the narrow bridge, up past the lime kiln and up the hill beyond our boreen.

It was late August and the blackberries were hanging from the briars. Above our kiln field gate he started picking berries from the ditch. Suddenly, from the ground where he had stood came an angry, buzzing sound - he had just put his foot down on a swarm of bees. They were in war-like mood. Though he ran he got several stings on the face.

Below in the haggard, my grandfather Batt Arnold heard the boy’s shouts. He came running up the boreen - thinking the lad had been attacked by our bull!

He removed all the stings he could and then picked broad dock leaves and, squeezing out the juice, treated the boy’s ‘burns’. Gradually, the pain subsided and the lad said he’d keep going and walk on down to the Sports. As he left, my grandfather gave him another ‘stand’ - two more pennies!

Just last week, that ‘boy’ - now in his 98th year - recalled that story to me. “I was the happiest boy ever with fourpence in my pocket as I went to Rathcormac,” he said.

Thanks be to God, isn’t the gift of human memory absolutely wonderful? In today’s ‘modern’ and ‘sophisticated’ world, we marvel at computers and AI and the latest inventions and, don’t get me wrong, they are all great, but the afternoon I spent last week with Billy O’Regan was better than any education.

Born in 1928 - the same year our local GAA Club, Bride Rovers, was founded - Billy and his wife and family spent decades in Australia before returning to Ireland and buying a house in ‘the middle of Ireland’, Co. Kildare.

As a youngster, like all the others, he played pitch ‘n toss - an object sometimes called a ‘jack’ was placed on the ground and one tried to get the penny coin as close as possible.

Billy told me they used to call the jack a ‘bob’ and he had the job of placing it and moving it so lads called him ‘Bob’ - a nickname he carries with nine decades!

His father Maurice, or Moss, as he was known, was born in 1895 - his father, Pats was a shoemaker.

I heard from old people down the years that Moss Regan was ‘a great scholar’ and ‘could turn his hand to anything’. As a teenager Moss joined the Royal Navy.

Billy told me a story of a Sunday morning on the High Seas. Moss was the only Catholic on the ship. While the crew were at Sunday Service in the ship’s hold, Moss was on deck alone. He spotted the periscope of a German submarine scanning the horizon.

Alerting the crew immediately, depth charges were fired, disabling the submarine and probably saving the lives of the naval crew.

When Moss came home on his first ‘shore leave’, things had changed in Ireland. The 1916 Rising had taken place and the leaders had been executed. He quit the navy, deciding to serve his country rather than an English King.

At his ancestral home in Ballinwilling, Moss took his naval Greatcoat out behind the house and burned it. Billy told me that about 50 years later Mick O Regan - a nephew of Moss’s - whilst tilling the land, dug up the ‘brassy buttons’ of the uniform! They are now in Australia in the possession of Billy’s son.

Moss joined the Bartlemy Column of the IRA and was very active during the War of Independence, but did not want to see ‘brother against brother’ so took no part in the bitter Civil War.

Billy told me of his father’s later job as an ITGWU Organiser over in Sligo. Moss was gifted with words and could compose poems and songs at the drop of a hat.

Billy was going ‘out on the wran’ on St Stephen’s Day in 1943 and his father made up a verse for him which ended something like this: “So give us a penny or maybe some more, and we wont be back ’til 1944!”

I knew from of old that Billy was a great hurler. He played Minor (under 18) when just 13 and was playing junior two years later. The club here was going bad at the end of the 1940s and fell through. Then, in 1951, a new club was started in Bartlemy. At a meeting in the National School, Billy recalled: “We all paid in half a crown to get it started.” I have the Minute Book from back then and, of the 39 people who paid 2/6 each on January 24, 1951, Billy O Regan is the only one left.

In 1955, when no club existed in the parish, Billy, his brothers Paddy and Moss, and Jim ’Coach’ Coughlan, joined Castlelyons and helped them win the East Cork Junior Hurling Championship for the first time ever. He is the last surviving member of that team.

Before the year of 1955 was out, Billy told me he had emigrated to England for work. He married Peggie Murphy, from Watergrasshill, and, availing of a ‘Subsidized Passage Scheme’, the family emigrated to Australia.

He had been earning £24 a week in the building trade in London and was promised ‘you’ll double that in Australia’, but when they arrived ‘Down Under’ they were met with ‘No Jobs Here’ signs. In his own words, Billy said, “I kicked up a stink” and, using “unparliamentary language”, he “persuaded” an official to find him a job, which he did!

The O’Regans settled eventually in Adelaide where Billy worked for decades. He gathered up a few hurlers and they started a club – he kept playing hurling until his fifties and kept refereeing for another 20 years after that!

His three cherished hurling medals are one he won in Australia, the 1955 East Cork medal, and a Carnival Tournament medal he won with the Bartlemy Club!

Billy told me of a ‘black dog’ that used to be seen below at the School Cross long ago.

His own grandfather, William O’Regan, was born in Ballymacoda in East Cork in 1832.

When we spoke of his ancestral parish, Billy recited a lovely poem about the Fenian, Peter O’Neill Crowley from Ballymacoda.

He spoke of Bartlemy village in the good old days when two shops, two pubs and a band-room were all situated around ‘the cross’.

It was evening time before I left Monasterevin on my journey home, and still I gazed and still the wonder grew, how his head could carry all he knew.