Throwback Thursday: Memories of marla, and a visit home from US to beloved Cork...

THE picture we had last week in Throwback Thursday, of children at Glasheen school discovering the delights of plasticine, evoked many fond memories.

“Marla, it was called,” said Mary Holly. “It came in packets containing seven or eight ribbed strips in various colours.

“You tried to keep the colours separate, but inevitably, after a few days’ use, ended up with a brown amalgamation. Happy days.”

Ger Fitzgibbon agrees wholeheartedly.

“Oh yes. Loved the old marla. A fantastically inventive (and uniquely smelly) substance. I wasn’t much gone on the multi-coloured stuff. I think my childish aesthetic preferred it when the plasticine had got so mushed up that all the colours blended into a kind of murky brown!

It did, occasionally, cause trouble though. Well, how was I to know that my mother had just polished the table and I shouldn’t go making marla snakes on it? Or that my sister was going to squish one of my plasticine soldiers with her elbow and ruin her new cardigan?

Quite seriously, says Ger, it was from playing with plasticine that he discovered a love of making things with his hands.

“I later went to School of Art night-classes where we did a lot of clay-modelling (which just seemed like a grown-up, messier version of the same thing). I loved it, and would almost certainly never have done those classes but for the said marla.”

Yes, Ger, this writer recalls vividly long wet winter afternoons spent absorbed at the kitchen table making little islands and huts and tiny figures. My sister and I would stay quiet for hours with a few strips of that stuff – although there was occasionally a fight over a particular colour!

I do remember one of my brothers coming by one afternoon, looking at my splendid desert island, complete with coconut palms (well that’s what I said they were), simple hut, and stick-like figures. Then he laughed and put his hand over it all, squashing my hard work flat! I was furious, but went patiently back to peeling them apart and reshaping them. That was something you could do with Harbutt’s great product – use it over and over and over again.

Richard remembers making little model soldiers, forts,and villages with his plasticine.

“I loved the creativity of it, finding that your own hands and fingers could make magical things. At least they seemed magical and wonderful to me!

“In later years I hadn’t lost that love of making things with my hands, but by then I was on to Meccano, which had the great advantage of being firm and solid and not vulnerable to accidental squashing! I still used plasticine though, to hold things in place when working on something fiddly. Still do, in fact, although it’s probably not the original product any more.”

No, similar products such as Playclay and Play-Doh seem to be popular now, but it’s not the same at all, say those of the vintage which remembers the traditional stuff which you could buy at several places in Cork.

Did HCC have it? Woolams? The Lee Stores on the Grand Parade?

Where did you get yours, and what was the colour you always chose first from the strips? And, most important of all, what did you make? Was it a stepping stone to a future career in sculpture, architecture, or theatre design?

As SpringChicken comments on his popular website (springchicken.co.uk): “Who could imagine a childhood without plasticine? That feeling when you knew your house was too cold because your plasticine wouldn’t soften up? The ribs and ridges of each coloured slab; the smell that can take you back to playtime in a heartbeat? The hours spent trying to make your own Noddy or your own Morph?”

Plasticine was the brainchild and lifelong passion of a primary school art teacher called William Harbutt, who in 1897, looking for a clay for both his students and his six lively children, one that didn’t dry out and didn’t need firing, came up with the famous product.

“They filled the house with plasticine castles, model boats, battle scenes and fountains,” he wrote to a friend of his pupils, “and in their delight, I soon realised that I didn’t just have a teaching aid, I had something other children could enjoy, something I could sell.”

By 1915, it had been awarded numerous medals and was sold by Harbutt up and down the country. By the 1920s there was a pamphlet entitled ‘101 Uses for Plasticine’, which included filling cracks and holes in a leaky boat and protecting the inside of a cheek from the rubbing of a broken tooth. Even pianists were urged to model with it to make their fingers stronger and more supple.

In later years, as well as enthralling children, plasticine was used to more skilful effect by professional artists, military planners in World War II, architects and even NASA, modelling the first space suit. Morph the TV character is a plasticine manikin, and of course how could the legendary Wallace and Gromit and all their friends ever have come to the screen without Nick Park’s ability to create in plasticine?

Now, we haven’t heard from Tom Jones at Key West in Florida in a while, but he is alive and well, and recently came home on a visit.

Although it’s been too long since I last offered my thoughts or recollections, nevertheless, I am still enjoying your Throwback Thursday column on De Echo every week as always. 

Long may it reign and keep me in touch with my heritage from the days of my childhood,” said Tom.

“As I recently enjoyed a trip back to my old home town, I saw many changes but also met up with people I had not seen in perhaps 40 to 50 years, in pubs like the Cork Arms, The Corner House, Pa Johnsons, Na Piarsaigh Club, and others. Not forgetting The Groves, and The Bera in Blackpool.

“Ah ‘Sweet Blackpool,’ as mentioned in a famous Cork song, incorporated Goulding’s Glen, Murphy’s Rock, Fitz’s Boreen et al, as mentioned by your readers’ recollections of Northside heritage in recent features. It certainly was the wonderland of our childhood.”

Many of the old pubs in the Shandon Street Area, says Tom sadly, have now alas faded into oblivion, but to those that hadn’t, and to the old friends he met there on this visit, he says “Thanks for the memories, guys!”

“We spoke fondly of picture houses, in particular The Lido in Blackpool and how afterwards, enthralled by the movies we saw, our imaginations would soar and for one brief shining moment in time, we would vicariously re-enact all we had seen on the silver screen.

“Also, we reminisced about the old dance halls of yesteryear. St Francis Hall on Sheares Street, The Gresham on Maylor Street, ‘Grawn’ Hall, Father O’Leary’s Hall on Barrack Street, and so forth. Of course the Ballroom of Romance, The Arc, came up, where so many of Cork’s young people of the 1950s and 1960s met as teenagers and so began their lifelong relationships.

“These dance halls were, as I recall, where many of us had our first dance with the opposite sex. If memory serves me well, a dance consisted of three songs, and if they were slow songs, that was considered a clinger.”

Now Tom raises a question which he hopes can be answered by other readers. Which was the genesis of the beat clubs in Cork of the mid-sixties? Was it the Cavern Club on Leitrim Street, near the Blood Bank, also on Leitrim Street? Or was it the Crypt on MacCurtain Street?

Now, I know there were many others later in their day, but a school friend of mine from Blarney Street CBS, Dean Falvey (aka Dennis Falvey) along with Don Gallagher (Rory Gallagher’s brother) were involved in the Cavern Club back in the day. So, challenge me on my recall if you may.

We seem to remember one of the Prendergasts ran the Cavern in the ’60s, Tom, and Rory certainly played there with Taste, but we are sure others will come forward with their own recollections on how and where the beat clubs originated, and separated us forever from our parents’ days of dancing at the Arcadia.

Tom did notice on this trip home that traditional ‘Cork spake’ expressions of his boyhood, like ‘C’mere like, how’s it going boy?’ are no longer commonly heard. Ah, take a little longer, Tom, turn down a few more side streets. You can still hear it in many parts of the city, along with other classics like ‘I will, yeah!’ Don’t readers agree?

He waxes lyrical on the evergreen tradition at Pa Johnsons on a Monday night, “a real trip down Memory Lane. Old friends and acquaintances having a last lash of the good old times, interspersed with their young offspring enjoying the disappearing era of their forbears. An emigrant or two recollecting times long ago. A foreign visitor or two seeking the real Cork city pub experience, as yet untouched by the modern world. Barry Johnson the perfect host, helping everyone to acquaint or reacquaint.

I guess Cork is now much more cosmopolitan than when I came of age there all these years ago; 64, Shandon Street, circa 1950, was where I first saw the light of morn.

“My nearest neighbours were O’Connor’s Funeral Home, dealing in death, and William Jones Pawn Shop Ltd, dealing with debt. Later in life, Lower Spangle Hill became my muse.”

Tom also stopped by the Oliver Plunkett Pub and Restaurant.

“At one time that was called Good Time Charlie’s, and previously to that The Palm Court, which was once owned by somebody of renown, though I can’t recall who. There I had the pleasure to hear ballad singer Roy Buckley, a northside lad like me, and in my estimation, the last of the old-time ballad singers.

“Although many years younger than me, his voice and performance are of exceptional deliverance and quality, and he has that natural ‘growl’ in his voice which harks right back to the days of the ballad boom here.”

Musing on pubs, Tom recalls the dramatic changes of the mid ’60s when for the first time women began to frequent the new and elegant lounge bars.

“Before that, as I recall, ladies could only be served in the snug, not the bar.”

Oh, do we have any snugs left today? This writer remembers one on the Coal Quay much frequented by ‘shawlies’ taking a break from their stalls outside and producing thick slices of bread from underneath that capacious cloak to eat with their pint. We would be delighted to hear of any which still exist.

“T’was good to touch the ‘green green grass of home’ once again,” observes Mr Jones.

“In my heart, I never left you, as you have never left me. Oh, how oft do my thoughts in their fancy take flight to the home of my childhood away…”

Let us hear your memories. Email jokerrigan1@gmail.com. Or leave a comment on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/echolivecork.