John Lee’s stories of joy and of sadness
The first match in Markievicz, work at Snia and tragedy in Sligo hospital are recalled as natural storyteller John Lee speaks to reporter Gerry McLaughlin
IT IS ALWAYS refreshing to meet up with a natural seanchaí – a storyteller. These are the ones who could always put a skin on a story, through what they say and always through the way they say it.
The energetic, electric John Lee from Ballinode is one of that select band, and he leaves you with a warm glow when the story is over. And he is deadly accurate in his recall.
For John can capture the mood of a moment in his own inimitable style, the style of a man who is 84 but has the spirit and soul of a man of 24.
And that is what makes him quite a special person, allied to a forensic memory of events and stories of great joy and great sadness.
John is a man who loves life, loves people and their stories, and has a lived a very full life.
He is very well known in Sligo GAA circles – especially as the outstanding goalie who was man of the match at the opening of the famous Markievicz Park in 1955.
John was working as a steward but was pressed into service and made nationwide headlines for his unique debut.
And his ardent GAA father James Lee was a director of the park, having been one of 50 people to donate £100 to pay for its construction, which was a huge sum in those days.
John played for Sligo in goals from 1955 to 1960, including in a Connacht final against the all-conquering Galway side in 1956.
He later took up the whistle in 1970 and went to referee all over the northwest and west, including the Railway Cup final of 1978 and an All-Ireland Colleges final.
John kept at the whistle until the 1990s and was a well-known figure at IT Sligo matches.
He refereed right up until the late 1990s when he was well in his 50s, and was and is a very well-known and wellliked figure around the town.
And in a town much more noted for its rich soccer heritage, John was a torch bearer for Craobh Rua, whose original base was Circular Road. He also won three Sligo Senior
Football Championships with Craobh Ruadh as a teenager from 1952 to 1954 – a remarkable achievement by any standards at a time when the real powerhouse of Sligo GAA was in the south of the county.
Apart from goals, John also lined out at wing-back for Craobh Rua.
His passion for GAA in Sligo is undimmed. And has a great grá for Sligo Rovers as well – the club came looking for him in the 1950s, but his father would not allow him to cross the great divide in the days of the infamous ban.
He still goes to as many Sligo GAA matches as he can and is sad that Sligo are in a fallow period.
John believes there was an All-Ireland title in that Sligo team of 2002 and is convinced they were robbed of a certain goal in the drawn All-Ireland quarter-final with Armagh
John has had an interesting working career as well, beginning with Heron and Banks Hardware Shop in High Street and then to the famous Snia in Hazelwood, where he remembers the great fire of 1976.
He later got employment as a porter in Sligo General Hospital. There, he became a very well -known figure and was very popular with the patients and staff.
His friendly, outgoing nature is infectious. But he has seen tragedy too, and none greater than in 1988 when John was in the hospital when a young Mayo nurse was shot dead by her ex-boyfriend. He shortly afterwards turned the gun on himself in a tragic murder-suicide in the hospital. John had been speaking to the young man not long before that terrible event and it is something that will always haunt him.
And he was there too when Donegal man John Gallagher shot and killed his ex-girlfriend Ann Gillespie, 18, and her 56-year-old mother Annie Gillespie in the grounds of the hospital, also in 1988.
John also once came on the scene of a horrific car crash in which a mother and her two children lost their lives.
It is clear that these events have
taken their toll on one who is an essentially sunny spirit.
John later worked in Markievicz House, not far from where he went to primary school in Forthill in the early 1940s when war was raging and ration books and coupons were needed to survive.
John was born in Ballinode in 1936 and both of his parents were psychiatric nurses in the nearby Sligo Mental Hospital.
JOHN SAID: “There were not too many houses in Ballinode at that time and the biggest industry we had here at that time was the mental hospital. “It was just down the road from us and my father and mother both worked in it as psychiatric nurses. “And all those who lived in the houses in Ballinode worked in the hospital.
“At one time there was nearly 1,000 in the hospital – 500 staff and 500 patients. It was in two sections, one for men and the other for women.
“It was always full and never empty, and it was a great industry for the neighbourhood and for the Sligo-Leitrim area in general.
“They paid well, and it kept us all. “I knew what it was like. I used to go down to the hospital now and then and we used to have a great chat around a big fire. I was only at school at the time. “That was the 1940s. They had a great Gaelic football team down there too and they played in the inter mental hospital competitions. “Sligo-Leitrim had a great team. I played with them. We reached an All-Ireland semi-final but were beaten. “There was a chap called Paddy Duggan from Sooey, who was very good, and John Haran, who was on the Sligo Junior team. And there were quite a few lads who played with Leitrim, lads like Liam Costello.”
John was a war child and Hazelwood House became the headquarters of the Sligo Battalion of the then Free State Army.
John said: “They used to train, and they marched from Finner Camp, Bundoran, all the way to Hazelwood, which was around 30 miles. That was a long walk.”
John went to Forthill School. He said: “It was St Edward’s school on the Hill. The master was Mr Connaughton and Connaughton Road is named after him. There was a Mr Thornton, who was a great man for singing and he coached us in that, and in music. There was a Mrs Walsh too. And there was no football.
“It was all lessons. You went home to a fire as there was no such thing as electricity during the
War. The electricity came late to Sligo. “I remember O’Connell Street when Woolworth’s, Sligo Wood and Iron, Bellew’s and O’Connor Brothers were there. They were all famous firms there in the old street, and there were great public houses and shops.”
John later went to school with the Marist Brothers on The Mall called St Mary’s, where one of his contemporaries was Fr John Carroll. He spent a year in the Tech and then went to work in Herron and Banks Hardware on High Street.
John said: “The poor man Banks died and it is derelict now, but we used to sell all sorts of stuff and they were good times.
“Herron then went into wholesale hardware and I stayed with Banks until he died as a young man of 47. This was in the 1960s.”
“Sligo was a lot quieter in those days and times were harder.
“Martin Scanlon from Carraroe and I were both 16 when we started working in Banks.
“We went in on two bicycles and there was no such thing as going to Summerhill College.
“I then went to Snia, in the early 1970s, where I knew Sligo Weekender founder and former editor Brian McHugh very well – he worked out there too .
“I have daily papers with reports on the Snia fire of 1976, which was very traumatic.
“Snia was a great factory, and if you were lucky enough to have a car they paid for your insurance. And you could do shifts of overtime if you wanted.
“It was originally an eight hour shift and there was night work and you went in at midnight and finished at 8am. They changed that to a 12-hour shift, but you were off then for a few days, which was not too bad. They paid very well.
“I worked in a finishing spot called beaming which was the last stage in making nylon.
“Brian McHugh was further down the factory and he was a shop steward. “It was dusty but where we were working was pretty clean as the nylon came in big rolls and we had to put it on beams to ship out to other countries.
“There were up to 1,000 working there over the years. Ninety per cent were men with 10 per cent women.” John recalls the Snia fire in 1976, which wreaked so much havoc. He said: “It was something like a chemical that leaked on to a hot motor and ignited at 11am on a Tuesday morning.
“We had just come off nights and I was at home in bed when my mother came up and told me.
“‘Your factory is on fire’. I said, what? It could not be. She said, ‘yes, and the road is packed with ambulances and fire brigades’.”
“I got on my bicycle to get a look and there it was, smoke billowing out of it and it was burning all day.
“We were very lucky in the beaming area as we got 12 months’ work afterwards as there was another supply for us to keep making beams. They were going to be exported to Italy.
“The people who were laid off when the fire started did better than us because we got no overtime, and we got the minimum.
“The head office of the union in England let us down in my opinion, but not the local branch.”
SNIA CLOSED in the early 1980s and John then got a job as a porter in Sligo General Hospital. He said: “That was a lovely job, and I had some great days there and got to know an awful lot of people. And there were some sad days, too. “I was made permanent gradually, having worked on the post temporarily around Christmas just before I got the job in the hospital.
“I was always working, and I always tried my hand at different things. “I worked there until I retired in the Noughties. I was in Markievicz House as a caretaker. That was my last job. I was 18 years with the Health Board. “But there were tragedies too and the biggest tragedy was when I was working in the hospital when that poor young nurse was shot in 1988.
“She was a student nurse, a lovely