Pat Power puts pep into the past
REPORTER DAVID MEDCALF DROPPED INTO ARKLOW TO ENJOY ELEVENSES WITH PAT POWER, WHO SHOWED HIM HOW THE TOWN HAS CHANGED OVER THE COURSE OF TIME AND HOW EVERY BUILDING AND SCRAP OF LAND HAS A TALE TO TELL
ARKLOW. We all know Arklow. It’s the town with the long bridge and a statue on the Main Street helpfully pointing the way. And isn’t it the birthplace of Ronnie Delany, the athlete? And don’t they celebrate Halloween in Arklow gusto? And…
Truth to tell, some of us may not have been paying as much attention to Arklow as we should have. But then your reporter swung an invitation to spend a morning tapping into the store of knowledge held by local historian Pat Power. His mission was to re-ignite my interest in Arklow. Two hours in his erudite and enthusiastic company left me feeling I knew the town a hundred times better than I used to. Here was a man who mixes history with geography and then adds a dollop of sociological understanding to the blend.
Of course it helps that the past is something that he has witnessed at first hand in large slices. At the age of 74, Pat has lived through many of the events that he describes. Yet he also retains a vast lore of truly ancient lore in his wise old head.
When first encountered, he was holding court in the Old Ship over a cup of tea at the bar in a public lounge packed with many another of his generation. The rules of conversation were informal and the place was clearly a hive of good-natured intellectual activity.
The reason for our tryst was that I managed to miss his recent public talk entitled ‘Arklow: A Century of Change’. When approached to regurgitate at least some of the material on that occasion for the benefit of ‘People’ newspaper readers, he was very amenable to the idea.
But it soon became obvious that he had no formal script from his ‘Century of Change’ speech prepared to supply to his interviewer as a cribsheet. Moreover, he was not at all minded to confine himself to any one century. That would have made things far too easy. Perhaps every century is a century of change.
At least we started, Mary Poppins style, at the very beginning. Why Arklow? That is, why Arklow where it is rather than a few miles up the coast or perhaps as few miles inland? The answer is plain when you choose to think about the matter – it is all about the river.
The original inhabitants of the region were able to cross the Avoca here without getting too wet. And then once the crossing point began to attract settlers and traders and travellers, there was a rocky outcrop close to the ford which provided the obvious site for a castle, from which the local overlord could keep an eye on the traffic.
If you look hard enough, it is still possible to identify the location of the castle – or so Pat told me. But it was drizzling outside and we had not yet finished our tea. So we stayed put with our elbows on the counter as Pat moved on to consider why the ford and the castle were not the only factor conducive to establishing a town.
Sailors and merchants and fishermen discovered that the mouth of the river offered a safe haven for small ships. A third economic driver was in place and Arklow was set to become a place that has more often been expanding than contracting over the course of the eras.
Mention of geography prompted the scholar at the bar to remind anyone who cared to listen that the Arklow of the early 21st century has taken on a shape very different to the Arklow of the early 19th century.
Approach the town from the south and you are treading on land which has been there for countless generations, back beyond the birth of man. Approach from the south, however, and much of the ground is relatively recently reclaimed from the estuary.
In an age of global warming, this Ferrybank polder remains very low-lying and adjacent to the ocean lapping ominously at the sea wall. Once you realise this, you may look at the town with a fresh and informed gaze.
‘Ferrybank is a modern settlement and it really only came in since 1820,’ confirmed Pat Power sagely. ‘Previously it was just uninhabited fenland.’ The remaining reed beds are reminders of the days when this was an area of muddy islands rather than a playground of retail and recreation with added accommodation and industry.
The reclamation which created the new territory was a result of embankments built to alter the course of the river ordered by the mining companies in Avoca. But enough of such talk. As the rain had cleared, it was time to take a walk, though we did not get far before becoming distracted, barely more than 20 metres.
‘Main Street is very old,’ observed Pat. If there was pride in his voice, then this was understandable vanity on the part of someone reared at the lower end of this venerable thoroughfare.
He estimated that the line of the street was laid down at least 500 years back, maybe more, though the original buildings have not survived.
He indicated a lovely redbrick Georgian classic on the other side of the road as probably the oldest still standing of the lot.
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Needham as he plotted the downfall of the United Irishmen in 1798, it has served in more recent times as a hardware shop.
And now it is set to have a modern re-invention, with planning permission sought for a health centre.
Pat was clearly familiar with all of the various premises, so his interviewer picked one on a whim – the Sue Ryder shop, on the other side of Main Street from where we stood.
Ah, now that used to be part of the commercial empire run by Arthur B Brennan and his wife Kate, complete with delicatessen and ice-cream parlour. Pat learned as a chap employed at the deli that there was such a thing as caviar, though he never got to taste the stuff as it was sold in a ludicrously expensive tin. The couple were the town’s biggest employers at one stage in the 1920s and 30’s with their selection of shops as well as dance halls and a bakery.
‘ They were the biggest employers up to the mid 1930s – simply because there was nothing else in the town,’ mused the historian. ‘Fishing was a bit hit and miss – no one ever got wealthy on it.’
A former employee at the NET fertiliser factory, he and his generation of Arklovians know a thing or two about economic devastation caused by the disappearance of major industry. Long before Arklow had a fertiliser plant or a pottery factory, the town provided the Kynoch’s munitions factory with a site and a 1,000-strong labour force.
Pat promised to tell a little more about Kynoch’s but first we finished our random sample of Main Street emporia. Orla’s Kitchen over there used to be the Cigar Box which not only catered to nicotine addicts but also offered a biro ink re-filling service in the 1950s.
Number 56, an abandoned pub where the last pint was pulled a couple of years ago – that was originally Kavanagh’s Hotel on a site occupied with 1300.
Further up, this vacant building was once the garda barracks where schoolboys such as Pat used to be shown the cells as a cautionary measure by the men who enforced a more leisurely and personal law than their modern equivalents.
And this place near the top of the street used to be Kavanagh’s chip shop, the only takeaway in a town that now reeks from top to bottom of deep fat fraying.
‘Bumpto’ Kavanagh offered the most alluring of part-time employment, as Pat recollects.
After school, the young Power might be found peeling spuds for Bumpto, for which his reward was four shillings a week, as many chips as he could eat and free admission to the town’s two cinemas, the Ormonde and the Paramount.
Enough of such meanderings. We hopped into the car and ventured over the famous bridge (built in 1756 with 19 arches) to look at Arklow’s polder. The Bridgewater Centre is now the prime draw in what used be a watery waste – ‘ like an Amazonian delta with muddy islands’. We stood on the town’s north sea wall to admire the shopping centre and the blocks of modern apartments which have transformed this part of the world. We also looked up along the shoreline, now protected by an impressive rock rampart, installed in emergency response to the flooding of 1988.
Pat revealed that this used to be Kynoch’s, a stretch of land close to one kilometre long where once workers worked with dangerous substances such as ammonite and nitro-glycerine to make the instruments of war.
It was a vast complex, named after a family who never visited the place, and it is all gone, or is it? My guide pointed to a grey water tower in the far distance – apparently that used to serve the factory. The rest of it has been dismembered, demolished, dispatched, an industry rendered redundant by the onset of peace in 1918 and the British government’s fears that Ireland with its revolutionaries was no place for such an industry.
Pat has many more tales to tell – of lifeboat stations and quarries and stables and boat-builders - but they will have to wait for another day.
THE BRENNANS WERE THE BIGGEST EMPLOYERS UP TO THE MID 1930S – SIMPLY BECAUSETHERE WAS NOTHING ELSE IN THE TOWN