Era of pedal power, and bicycles made for 2!

A LOT of you enjoyed that great picture of Santa’s slide at Kilgrew’s, unearthed from the archives for last week’s Throwback Thursday. It was a real treasure from the past.

Frank Desmond writes: “Jo, it’s almost as if you were reading my mind when you wrote the latest Throwback Thursday: ‘children could taste the delights of going down a long slide to Santa’s cave. Do any of you remember experiencing that?’ Well, I certainly do!

“For me, that is my definitive item of childhood nostalgia. The sheer thrill of sliding down that slide is still a vivid memory to this day. The problem, however, is that seems to obliterate OTHER details, such as the actual presents available!

“No matter how hard I try, I cannot remember what the brightly-wrapped package contained.”

From our own memories, Frank, we suspect it might have been a fairly inexpensive game like Ludo or Snakes and Ladders. Certainly the two piles on either side of the Santa at the Munster Arcade were simply marked Boys, and Girls. You got your package and that was that.

The real attraction there, of course, was the film, The Night Before Christmas, which you were allowed in to see after getting your gift.

“You have a picture of Santa on that slide in the late 1940s,” continues Frank. “It must be the very same slide I experienced in the early 1960s, although I do not remember Santa actually accompanying me on the slide.”

Well, we suspect that one was carefully posed for the photographer, Frank, with Santa and some obliging children being placed in position. One hopes they were rewarded with another trip down the slide, don’t you?

“A couple of weeks ago, I did read that Kilgrews in Kyle Street was going to close,” adds Mr Desmond, “and that brought back all those memories. Your own repeat of that story at least keeps it alive for me that bit longer.

“For some reason, I can almost ‘pinpoint’ where Kilgrews actually was and think it was more or less where Costa Coffee now is.”

Is that about right, other aficionados of this page? My own recollection is of a huge and imposing frontage about a third of the way down the quay from Patrick’s Bridge, and that it was always regarded with some respect, whereas Roches Stores was rather taken for granted. Other opinions please?

And we have received another lovely letter from Rose in Ballyvolane, handwritten and carefully posted to Throwback Thursday, The Evening Echo, Cork. Just shows - you might turn De Paper into a morning one, but ‘The Evening Echo, Cork’ still gets it there. More power to our post offices!

“Hi Jo,” writes Rose cheerfully. “Got a lovely surprise to see the Fontana mentioned last week. Yes, they were on before the big bands in the Arcadia, but they also played on their own in Douglas Hall, and the rugby club in Ballyphehane too, as we used to go to them.

“And aahh, doing Pana! Loved it. Every Monday night a group of us would do it, down the left side and up the right. Go into (I think) the Old Bridge for our chips and burgers before heading back home. Those were the days, not a care in the world!”

Lovely to hear from you again, Rose. Do write more of your happy recollections and memories whenever you have time, and send them to us. We are delighted to get them, and I know readers enjoy reading them very much.

Kevin Long tells me that Cork Cycling Campaign have a photo exhibition of great old images of cycling in Blarney Library until November 20, and thoughtfully sends us the poster. It will be moving to more city library branches in the near future, he adds.

“We’ve got some good feedback from the public on this, and attached are a couple of photographs and collection of memories from Paddy McCarthy.

Often, stories like this can encourage people to come forward with their own memories of cycling in Cork, and that would be very valuable information for our book project, Cycling Cities: The Cork Experience.”

Let’s hope they do, Kevin, it’s such a worthwhile project you are undertaking.

Paddy really does have vivid cycling memories of both his parents and his grandparents.

“Attached please find a photograph of my paternal grandparents, John and Ellen McCarthy, on a tandem bike,” he says,

“The photograph was taken, I estimate, in 1945, outside my grandparents’ house in Ballincolly, the house I subsequently grew up in.” (No, readers, that isn’t a misprint for Ballincollig. Ballincolly is out beyond Dublin Hill and would have been largely green countryside at that time.)

Paddy adds: “If my date of 1945 is correct, my grandfather is 69 and my grandmother is 67 in this picture. “However, the tandem itself belonged to my father. He and my mother married in August, 1945, and went on their honeymoon, on that same tandem, to Courtmacsherry... how exotic can you get!

“I think I can see a derailleur at the back, so for its day I think it would have been a nice bike.”

We do wonder, though, where their (probably minimal) luggage was carried on that exotic honeymoon, Paddy!

Paddy’s father, John McCarthy (only ever known as Jack), cycled competitively in the 1930s. “When I was a boy, our mantelpiece for many years was adorned by two trophies, or cups, one of which he got for winning a time trial up Patrick’s Hill. I also remember him telling me that one time he won ‘a suit length’ - enough cloth to make a suit, which he took to a tailor in Cork and duly had a suit made.

“He was born in 1913, and would thus have been in his mid-twenties when doing all that energetic exercise.

“He had a good buddy in the cycling, Jim O’Leary, who lived on Dublin Hill. But I don’t believe that he cycled competitively after he got married in 1945.

“I also remember him telling me that in the summer evenings he would go for a ‘training spin’, down to and up from Youghal, a 60 mile round trip, after work!”

It reminds this writer of her own father, who would bike out to climb Carrauntuohill at weekends in the 1930s, and think nothing of it. (For the record, he would leave his bike in a farmyard in the Hag’s Glen, climb up the mountain, camp on top, and then come back down to make the long run back to Cork on Sunday evening.)

Richard Mills also recalls his own father leaving Renfrew with a pal on Friday evenings in the 1930s, and cycling all the way out to the Isle of Skye to climb the Cuillins before heading home on Sunday evening.

That’s a good 200 miles each way if you can believe it, but there is no doubt they did it, because Richard still has the pictures they took at the time. “On the return journey, he used to tell me, they would always expostulate to each other, ‘Never again!’, but by midweek they would be saying, ‘OK, where will it be this weekend?’. It was what you did back then when bicycling was one of the few ways you could seek adventure.”

Back to Paddy McCarthy’s memories.

“I have been reminded of another story in relation to my father. Apparently, there used to be races held on a circuit that ran from Victoria Cross, out the Carrigrohane Straight road and back in Model Farm Road? My father and a partner competed in these races on a tandem. There is a spot, which I’m sure you know well, where the Tennis Village used to be, where the road has a sharp dip, and bends, I imagine it was even more pronounced in the 1930s. It was common for riders to slow down coming through that section, but in my father’s case this did not apply!

“On these races, father would always sit at the back of the tandem, because his partner had poor eyesight and, apparently, literally did not see the need to slow down. My father’s job was to ‘put his head down and drive on’, while the other guided them through the section at speed. They gained ground on each circuit at that point and were often very competitive in those races apparently.”

Sounds pretty terrifying, Paddy, but it would certainly have given them that edge on the other, less fearless competitors, one imagines!

Tandems... that reminds me. Didn’t George Harding, the man with the bike shop on South Terrace, have a special three or four person bike back then? I know he had a penny farthing which he or one of his sons would ride in parades, but I seem to remember a multiple-seater bicycle too. Anyone have a better recollection than me?

Also, comments Paddy, it was not uncommon in those days for people to take their bikes on the trains, which were far more extensive and reached far further into the countryside than they do now. “I wish of course that I had spoken more to my father about his cycling escapades, ‘ach tagann ciall le haois’ - sense comes with age.”

Don’t we all wish we had asked our parents and grandparents more about their early lives? But back when you’re young yourself, nothing seems to matter but the present. The older folk are just there, taken for granted. It’s only as we age ourselves, that we wish we had learned more about their past. And thank you for sharing those memories, Paddy.

That whole topic of cycling back in the day, when a bike was the only way of getting anywhere further than a mile or two, is a fascinating one, and everybody should grab the chance of seeing this exhibition now in Blarney and thereafter in several other local libraries.

Just to see the old photographs and accounts, to browse through those memories, is to bring back to your own mind incidents and stories you had almost forgotten, taking place as they did in the golden summers of youth.

Your first bike ride to Crosshaven for example, or to Robert’s Cove (that bit further, with more hills thrown in). The daily cycle to school and home again, twice a day if you were part of the ‘dinner in the middle of the day’ years. The need to have one of those cumbersome bicycle lamps for the homeward run in winter, when school didn’t finish until 4.30 or 5pm, and the police might be keeping a sharp eye out for transgressors.

The major trips, planned far ahead, when you might go from one youth hostel to another, each one in an even more remote part of Ireland than the last, and inevitably reached in the final stretches by a rutted muddy lane.

You can thank people like Prof M. J. O’Kelly, the archaeologist, George Harding mentioned above, and indeed my own father, for deliberately choosing these remoter locations for An Oige hostels in the 1930s. “Give them a bit more exercise to get there,” was the reason I was always told, and many is the time I muttered imprecations as I slogged along a rainy laneway in desperate search of that roof and (hopefully) a fire at the end of the road.

Today, cycling is a fashionable sport, with its own huge commercial market for helmets, special clothing, bike bags, gloves, shoes, everything you can think of. Superbly-clad experts meet up for organised outings planned well in advance and with supporters in cars following along to bring them home at the end of it. It’s a long. long way from the bike rides of the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s, for sure.

Sometimes, you get the distinct feeling that these riders of the New Age look down on anyone who pedals along to the local shops for the bag of potatoes and the brown loaf. Yet that was how we all got around way back when.

Do you have memories of your own or of your parents cycling in the good old days? Did you ever go off on adventures on your bike? Remember having to fix punctures by the side of the road? (Why haven’t they come up with a no-puncture tyre by this time?)

Tell us your own stories. Email jokerrigan1@gmail.com. Or leave a comment on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/echolivecork