Volunteers operated Millmount’s Sampson’s
IT GOT me thinking.
Recently, I was asked what is the oldest pub in Drogheda and decided to embark on a little journey into the past.
No doubt, others will have more detail, but I’ll go with ...
Tom McPhail, writing some years ago, said it was the then Sampson’s at Millmount, reputed to be 300 years old.
At one stage, it had just 50 customers, but it’s survival was based on a code of honour among customers, who formed a five-man voluntary bar staff. The system came into play in the 1970s when the then owner Miss Agnes Sampson took over, on the death of her brother, Billy.
She had no worries about staff. In her seventies at the time, she’d sit beside the open fire, discussing everything from local gossip and history, to politics. Around her, customers sat on boxes and rough seats drawn up along the wall. Miss Sampson was queen.
Sing songs were spontaneous and human rather than contrived.
Head “barman” was Mattie Reilly, who had been in the licenced trade from boyhood. Since his retirement he helped to run the pub.
Another of the voluntary staff was 52-year-old Joe Gibney, a regular in Sampson’s for 25 years. The rule was stout, beer, whiskey or brandy—and no pints served.
Only 50 yards away is the fort of Millmount and Miss Sampson could then still vividly describe the shelling of the tower by Free State Forces in 1922.
The bar was ornamented by two delph beer pumps. Offered money for them, Agnes turned it down bluntly, in true Sampson tradition.
Casual drinkers from among the hundreds of tourists who visited the nearby Tower could also see a fine set of antique glasses kept in the pub, and a replica, in cork, of Drogheda’s Laurence’s Gate.