Message to everyone - never throw anything out!
THE publication of a new book on Francis Ledwidge certainly makes you think about what can be lost with a good clear out - and what can be saved.
Back in the early part of the 1900s, the future poet and soldier Francis Ledwidge submitted articles to the Drogheda Independent.
Many were his early poems and some were from a series he wrote - ‘Legends and Stories of the Boyneside’.
And it was that series that prompted Eamon Matthews from Excel Print in Navan to pen his latest publication. And it all arose from looking in a skip during a clean out of the Drogheda Independent in the 1970s.
He worked at 9 Shop Street back then and the paper was printed on the premises, with the newsprint stored in a room called ‘McCormack’s’.
In 1979, a ‘clean out’ was ordered and various items went to the ‘dump’ - the ‘Cement’ tiphead on the North Road.
One item was a tea chest full of old glass negatives priceless.
But Eamon managed to have a look in the skip and spotted brown paper packages, tied with string. He asked around and was told he could keep them as they were going to be thrown out.
They turned out to be the unprinted stories by Ledwidge of the Boyne Valley.
He has now printed them in a smashing book and well worth a read. -