Industrial Packaging’s Fred laid to rest in cardboard tube
THE late Frederick (Fred) Norman Lee was laid to rest in Redford Cemetery last week, in a cardboard tube rather than the traditional coffin.
This was Fred’s wish, and his family members were happy to oblige.
The founder of Industrial Packaging Ltd in Bray, Fred may be the first person ever to be buried in a cylindrical coffin made of cardboard.
Cardboard tubing was one of the company’s specialties, and this manner of burial was something Fred mentioned often over many years.
Fred lived in The Park, Cabinteely, and saw out his final moments at Earlsbrook Nursing Home in Bray, where he died peacefully in the presence of his daughter at the age of 97.
His packaging company on Killarney Road was established in the 1950s and is now being run by some of Fred’s sons.
His remains were taken past the factory last Friday prior to his funeral Mass at St Patrick’s Church in Greystones.
Mr Lee is buried alongside his late wife Patricia. His tube is 650mm in diameter and would usually be used to cast concrete columns. An engraving on the tube says that he was the loving husband of Patricia and proud father to his children.
Fred was born in Dublin in May 1920 to Norman and Frances Lee, less than two years after Norman returned from four years of trench warfare in France.
Europe and Ireland were in deep financial depression with high unemployment and Norman had tried emigrating with some cousins to Canada before the war. That didn’t work out, so in 1921 he grabbed an opportunity to manage a coffee plantation in central India and took his wife and son Fred with him.
A second child, Moyra, was born in India in 1922. The children were brought up as frontier or jungle babies until they reached junior school age, after which they boarded during school term in Bedford (Fred) and Dalkey (Moyra) with shorter holidays in Dublin and longer ones in India with steam ship travel each way via the Med, Suez and the Indian Ocean followed by train and Ox cart through jungle to the ‘ bungalow’ in the jungle.
In the jungle, comforts such as air conditioning, electricity and running water didn’t exist but mosquitos, snakes, tigers, crocodiles and lots more exciting things did. In the intense heat and humidity doors and windows were always open and dogs slept under the beds to keep snakes at bay and as sacrificial decoys for silent night visitors such as Cheetahs or leopards.
Unfortunately the bottom fell out of the coffee market and Norman died of illness related to his time in the trenches when Fred was 11 or 12 and the family ended up back in Dublin in dire financial straits.
Frances took various jobs ranging from pianist for ‘silent movies’ to manager of a hotel in Castletownbere in west Cork.
Money was so short that Fred finished out his schooling in very primitive conditions in a charity school for the sons of war victims near London.
He found the food inedible and lost so much weight that he was often sick come holiday time. If it wasn’t for food parcels sent by his aunt Iris in London he might not have survived.
After school he studied engineering in London, lodging with aunt Iris and when war was declared in 1939 he was in Dublin on holidays. He had difficulty getting back to finish his course due to Ireland’s neutrality.
His first job after college was in England as a rep for an engineering tools supplier and he was given a Rolls-Royce to get him past armed sentries at the gates of customers who were involved in the war effort. Sentries stood to attention and waved him through while stopping everyone else. The Rolls had no heating so he had to improvise by adding an electric heater.
He volunteered for the Royal Navy, due to his his father’s advice to avoid the army and his love of sailing, and got called up and trained in 1941, going to sea in 1942 as an Engineer Sub Lieutenant on a Corvette called the ‘Loch Fada’ based in Liverpool and Derry escorting convoys and chasing U-boats in the North Atlantic.
He assisted at D-day off France and when Germany was defeated he accidentally volunteered for the Royal Indian Navy and was based in Bombay and Ceylon in a Minesweeper flotilla, clearing Japanese mines from the coasts of India and Burma until 1945 when Japan capitulated.
After putting down a mutiny of unpaid Indian sailors and being reprimanded by his Commander in Chief, and fellow Irishman, Lord Louis Mountbatten for ruining a carefully planned strategy of fomenting rebellion to be put down harshly as an example to others, he was personally de-mobbed shortly after that by Mountbatten to get back in haste to Dublin and Patricia the love of his life, who was being courted by another.
Fred was smuggled back to Ireland by his friend Archbishop Roberts of Bombay, who stayed on long enough to officiate at his wedding after vouching for his character to his prospective father-in-law.
Fred worked in Guinness’s brewery in Dublin for a short time but wasn’t happy with the work pace there, so with the help of his father-in-law Henry Maloney and his younger cousin Raymond McGowan he started a laundry catering for nursing homes, hospitals and hotels and offering an American-style nappy service to mothers at home.
He then took on a bankrupt business that had a small packaging section making cardboard tubes and composite cans. By the early fifties he managed to buy this out with loans and he renamed it Industrial Packaging (IP).
Through a huge amount of hard work, ingenuity and luck he made a success of IP, which provided the means to keep his ever-growing family from starving and get them all educated in expensive fee-paying schools (sending those who were interested to university as well), while expanding the company and providing employment for growing staff numbers.
Along the way he taught his children to sail in a motley fleet of home built and scavenged boats from an ideal base in an old Lifeboat House in Balbriggan which they rescued from the dereliction it fell back into after they all grew up and moved on.
They have fond memories of happy sunny days swimming, sailing and working on local fruit farms and trawlers and not so fond memories of scraping and painting roofs, windows and boats that had to be done every year.
‘Dad’s own difficult upbringing affected his character and the oldest of us in the family suffered from this initially but gradually he mellowed and his real caring and helpful self, won through to benefit us all,’ said his son Norman.
‘No matter how tired or busy he was, he always found time to befriend or help anyone – family or not – he felt needed it. He was far from religious, but his motto taken from the Bible was “do unto others as you would wish them do to you” and he practiced that all his life.
‘He loved all of us and he loved mum so much that when she got sick and bedridden he wouldn’t leave her side, convincing himself against the evidence that she would get better again, but the spark went out of him then and by the time she died he had lost interest in life and the ability to look after himself.
‘His life is a great example to all of us to work hard and stay true to the ideal of helping others whenever we can.’