Throwback Thursday: Berry-picking season and the pubs of Blackpool

Tomorrow is Lunasa, the big Celtic festival of summer. People will be tackling the steep slopes of Croagh Patrick, Mount Brandon, and Cnoc Aine, as they have done for millennia.

The tradition of climbing to greet the sun god and make offerings for a good harvest to come is a lot older than Christianity, although the Church was quick enough to put its own paintwork and logo on the custom once it got here from faraway Rome in the 5th century or thereabouts.

We have always been an agricultural country, well aware of the hazards and dangers of dealing with weather and crops, and it made sense to propitiate the sun god while there was yet a chance he might let us have a good season instead of heavy rains or high winds, which could ruin those fields now warming into golden heaviness.

So, if you’re heading out to one of our sacred mountains, remember that you are paying your respects to our ancient gods of nature who still rule this land, deciding what the weather will or will not do to help us survive. It’s a relief to know there is still something that modern technology cannot rule.

In many parts of Ireland, this is also the time to gather fraochans or bilberries, those tiny blue-black fruits growing low to the ground, which can be found in peaty soil on hillsides everywhere.

Down here in Cork, though, the blackberries are already ripening, and as every Cork child knew in years gone by, it was time to haul out the tin gallon cans and head off to the known hedgerows on the outskirts of town to spend the day getting your hands dyed black and your fingers constantly pricked by tiny thorns, as you collected tinful after tinful of the black treasure.

Ogilvie & Moore on Parnell Place would actually pay you good money for that fruit, which they would then boil up into delicious jam to grace kitchen tables in the months ahead.

Where did you go blackberrying? What was the favoured lane, the reliable route? Was it known only to your gang or did others sometimes invade your secret supply?

This writer still can’t resist a hedge glowing with ripe blackberries and a supply of containers is always kept in the car at this time of year so the ancient tradition of gathering from nature’s generous sources can continue as it has always done.

Jam, jelly, but also irresistible blackberry pies with which to bribe my brother to carry out repairs on one or another of the old and battered garden forks and spades. There is something about the familiar feel of a well-worn spade that is far more comforting than the shiny chill of a new one, isn’t there?

The outskirts of Blackpool, and that area around the Fox & Hounds pub above Dillon’s Cross, used to be popular blackberrying areas. That, of course, was when there were outskirts to our city, and country lanes could easily be reached by young legs.

Today the city is ever stretching out, greedily snatching at more and more fields and green lanes, covering them with endless identical housing estates, so today’s fruit pickers have to travel ever further. I hope they still do though.

Reader Tom Jones enjoyed last week’s memories of old Blackpool, and writes to say so.

“While looking at the aerial view of Blackpool in circa 1967. I noticed the old Blackpool National School in the lower right-hand corner. That was a school that many an old friend of mine attended when I lived in Spangle Hill. I enjoyed having a few pints with some of them and others still remaining, a couple of years ago in The Berehaven Bar, aka The Bera.

“They now affectionately refer to that school as The Brocklesby Street Academy. Actually, a brother of former taoiseach Jack Lynch, more commonly known as Baggy Lynch, was once a teacher there.

“While I would not have the excellent recall of Sheila McMahon Cahill (and well done, Sheila!), nevertheless, I thought I would offer to share these recollections of my own on Old Blackpool.

“Dan Lyons was mentioned: he operated, as I recall, a popular pub in the same location in the late 1960s or early ’70s.

“There were many pubs in Blackpool in the era I remember, from around 1958 to the mid-’70s. Maybe eight to ten establishments from just by the church out to the pole field and Dublin Hill.

“One pub was practically attached to the rear of the church, and I thought it existed until maybe as late as 1965 or ’66. As the photo caption states 1967, it was obviously demolished by then.

“Healy’s Bakery was alongside Blackpool Church. Benjy Healy was also a well-known guy who delivered the bread and other products.

“The more famous locations along that route were the Glen Rovers Hall, and the Glen Boxing Club, which was on Spring Lane. Around the Church and Bridge area were the following places of business:

“A fish and chip shop, colloquially referred to as John Trout’s, and close by it The Pantry, a shop with a small room attached, where you could sit and enjoy the delights of a glass of diluted Raza and a slice of Donkeys Gudge.

“And of course, The Lido, forever intertwined with the memories of Sweet Blackpool.”

Tom adds: “I’m sure many also recall Bertie the Butcher, whose small shop, a legend of olden days, was located on the Commons Road there.

“And a few doors down from there was also a general store that sold drapery or clothing fabric, plus toys and other bric-a-brac items. I believe it was called Matthews. This was where many a child of the zeitgeist handed over a few pennies down each week to ‘put away’ a certain item which would eventually be bought as a Christmas present of choice.

“Oftentimes, it was something as simple as a flash lamp with a tri-coloured gel lens to change colour by turning the head of the flash lamp. Or a cork gun, which was a toy pop gun with a cork placed in the muzzle and tethered to the same with a piece of string. Or a cap gun with a roll of caps.

“I really don’t know why I try to explain these things in some form of detail, except that some readers may be too young to remember them. Today they have far more sophisticated toys. Yet, even though these I mention may seem silly and trivial nowadays, they were highly valued back in those days of yore.

“It was a time when we entertained ourselves by running alongside and driving a hoop with the aid of a small stick. A hoop (if it’s necessary to describe it for clarification purposes here) was the wheel of a push bike. One without spokes was a bit more upscale, while one without spokes and a tire was ‘me daza’.”

Tom says: “Speaking of a push bike - or should that be expressed as a High Nelly? - how many can recall tying a ‘faga’, ie, the remnants of an empty packet of fags, Woodbines, Players Navy Cut, Sweet Afton or whatever, or some piece of cardboard to the front or back fork of the bike, perhaps both of them, in order to create a little noise as it brushed against the spokes?

“Also, a ‘Thrasher’ back then meant finding bits and pieces of a bike and assembling them yourself for your own use. Now how many kids would know how to do that these days?”

Not many, we fear, Tom. It’s distressing when you go to a recycling centre and see perfectly good children’s bikes simply dumped in a skip.

Back in the 1950s and ’60s, that just wouldn’t have happened. Bikes were handed down, given to small cousins, traded among friends. They were items of value and treated as such.

The thought of dumping one simply because you yourself had grown out of it would have been impossible.

And we like your memory of the coveted item in a toy shop being ‘put away’ safely while you came in religiously each week to pay off a little more on it.

Katie O’Brien remembers her sister and herself doing this at Woollams in MacCurtain Street in the months before Christmas.

“We would select a girls’ annual – usually Bunty or Judy, with its brightly coloured cover – and the shop assistant would tuck it away for us.

“We usually got the chance to glance at a few pages every time we went in to pay, so by Christmas morning we had often read most of them!”

The thing was, explained Katie, that despite surreptitious peeps, you didn’t get the item itself until you had paid for it in full.

“I think we realised that there would be no fun at all – even if the shop had allowed us to take it on hire-purchase, so to speak, which they wouldn’t have – in getting something, reading it from cover to cover, and then still having to pay for it for weeks more. Waiting for the day that it would be yours was half the fun.”

Meanwhile, Pat Kelly has contributed some more fascinating details on that great old store, Woodford Bourne, where they roasted savoury coffee beans at a time when the majority of us were only acquainted with jars of the instant granules.

“On the Throwback Thursday of July 10, you mentioned Woodford Bournes and their sheer volume of beer, fine wines and spirits. They had the royal warrant to supply the royal family. They had built a customs house, with an officer from the Inland Revenue to value the beer, wines, and spirits. That’s quite something, that they could build a customs house just to check for duty.

“You could perhaps still find their bonded warehouse if you take a stroll down Sheares Street. From memory, the long and low building later became a snooker hall or bowling alley. Just look for a building with vine leaves and grapes carved around the door.

“Not far away, on a red brick building with a series of small shops, and also on the turn into Courthouse Street, is a limestone name plate, inscribed Fenns Quay.

“That’s because, at one time, there actually was a quay here, as Sheares Street was an open channel of water. During the early 1700s though, the channel was culverted and filled. It then became Nile Street, where the hoi polloi of the city had their homes and their businesses.

“The Sheares family had their office, where Thomas Addis Emmet was born. Later the Emmet family moved to Dublin, where the brothers were born.

“Always remember to look up, and you will discover some new aspects of our history,” advises Pat.

“I used to lead a walking tour of Parnell Place, and early in 1985 I was stopped by a lady on Georges Quay. She told me she had enjoyed that tour and asked when I was giving my next one. However, later that year I was struck down with a brain haemorrhage .

“But I write to you whenever I can, where my memory is slowly coming back...”

You are making such great progress, Pat, and everyone loves learning from your encyclopaedic knowledge of our city. Long may you continue to share that with us!

And the rest of you, do so too. Email jokerrigan1@gmail.com or leave a comment on our Facebook page: www.facebook.com/echolivecork.