PART 3
BY JOHN FITZGERALD
The Callan Electricity Board
Twenty years before the advent of the ESB, Callan already had its own somewhat limited supply of electricity. Local business people, acting with the full sanction of the Town Commissioners, set up the town’s privately run electricity board in 1909.
Seamus O’ Brien, in his researches, unearthed the names of the board members for that first year: James O’ Mahony, Pierce Fennelly, Michael Shelly, Pat Pollard, James Lyons, Clark Lynch, Patrick Grainger, William Keogh, Dr. Shee, John Phelan, Martin Hayden, John J. Dunne, Patrick Molloy, James Lanigan, Thomas Kerwick, Bernard Delahunty, and Edward Callanan.
The scheme’s engineer was an Englishman, Albert Laytham. Aiding him in the early days of the enterprise were two of the town’s first electricians: John Connolly and Harry Beale.
People in other towns and villages looked on with envy and astonishment as Callan blazed a trail by initiating this technological feat in an age dominated by oil and gas lamps.
Seamus O’ Brien discovered that the Callan Electricity Board, as the company called itself, had been inspired by a similar scheme in Loughrea, County Galway. Though Callan was a smaller town, the fact that its main streets radiated from a central point made it ideal for the kind of operation envisaged.
A generating plant was rigged up in premises in Mill Lane acquired from the Lynch family. Emblazoned in large block lettering on the front of the wooden building containing the plant were the words: ‘Callan Power House.’
By the mid to late 20s, the Power House was operating at full blast. Seamus, returning from school in the convent; could see the two large generators powered by Japanese engines that in turn required anthracite coal to drive them.
He recalls: “The dynamos emitted a galaxy of sparks as the friction of the mechanism transformed the power into stored electricity.”
In Seamus’s childhood, the engineer in charge of maintaining the generators was Michael Power and the electricians were Frank O’ Regan, Joe Kennedy, and Joseph Carroll.
The downside of Callan’s famed electricity supply was that only the larger shops could afford to have it installed. Apart from these lucky recipients, the main streets were also illuminated many years before private houses began to avail of electricity. Curiously enough, the early streetlights were not attached to poles but secured on iron wall brackets.
The remnants of two of these can still be seen: One on a wall in West Street, near the Creamery, and the second on the Clonmel Road, opposite the priest’s house. Some of the wall brackets used for this purpose had originally carried oil lamps in the days before electricity. Barry Walsh of West Street had, at one time, been employed by the Town Commissioners to light the oil lamps.
The vast majority of families in Callan had to wait a bit longer- some longer than others- for the comfort of electric light in their homes. Seamus had fond memories of the oil lamp that hung on the kitchen wall in his parents’ home in Bridge Street.
It had a crudely made battered old tin shade around it, tacked to the ceiling. The shade was to prevent the smoke from blackening the ceiling and walls. A table lamp was lit in the sitting room-but only on special occasions. At bedtime, enameled candlesticks were lit in the kitchen and carried upstairs.
In almost every house, Seamus recalled, a small lamp with a red shade was positioned underneath a picture of the Sacred Heart. The flame burned constantly, day and night. Luckily for the householders, paraffin oil cost only a penny a pint, and that amount kept the lamps flickering for a month.
This was considered a small price to pay to keep your soul out of Purgatory, or to shorten your sentence in that unhappy place of confinement in the afterlife.
The privileged few who could afford electricity in the days of the Callan ESB had their use of current measured by meters. Their bulbs did not shine as brilliantly as later models.
Despite being ahead of its time in having electricity, Callan did not embrace the concept of the electric bulb without some reservation. It took a long time to catch on in certain quarters. Even into the 1940s many Callan people thought electricity might be a gigantic hoax or a kind of urban myth.
Seamus heard the reaction of a Callan woman who saw a light bulb for the first time. Weeks after she witnessed the switching on of the bulb in the house of an affluent neighbour, she was still assuring her friends: “Whatever anyone says, there must be paraffin oil involved somewhere in that thing!”
The Callan Power House no longer exists. The arrival of the semi-state Electricity Supply Board made the Callan Company redundant. The old Power House building later became a section of the Bacon factory. The hum of generators gave way to the squealing of pigs, until the abattoir likewise fell to the march of twenty-first century progress.
To be continued…
(Callan in Words and Pictures is available from Amazon)
