BY JOHN FITZGERALD
(Part two)
Apart from black-marketing during the “Emergency”, people resorted to unusual ways of easing the pain of rationing.
In Callan, Seamus O’ Brien came across a group of County Council workers on the Clonmel Road who, he learned, had developed a procedure for ensuring that every tea-break would be enjoyable…even if it poisoned them. For each morning break, the kettle was put on and the billycan filled with boiling water.
This was then passed around to every worker, and each of them added his own contribution of tea, coffee, or cocoa to it. The brew was then stirred and shared out among the team. But one day, a new worker who had joined the group wasn’t quite au fait with the routine. His mates paid no attention to what he was dropping into the billycan.
Then they relaxed to knock back their enamel mugs of “morning glory”, as they called the daily beverage. As they drank, they winced. One man began coughing and spitting. Another turned pale. The “gaffer”, perplexed by the group’s reaction and not liking the taste himself, asked the new recruit: “In the name of almighty Jesus, what did you put in the feckin’ can?”
Timidly, with a worried look breaking out on his face, the man replied: “Two Oxos. What do ye think?” After getting over their initial shock and annoyance, the men drank their fill and Seamus was certain that all of them survived to serve their county for decades to come.
He recited another instance that underlined how precious the rationed commodities were to the people who lacked them: While undertaking repairs for the Board of Health as a carpenter on a farm in the Callan district, he heard the woman of the house shouting that the kettle was boiling for the lunch break.
He stepped inside the farmhouse from the yard where he was working and saw a large steaming teapot resting on a hob. He emptied the pot and dropped two spoons of rationed tea from a tin can into it for himself and his assistant. He then returned to work for a few minutes while he waited for the tea to “draw.”
The woman, who hadn’t noticed him enter the house, emptied the pot again and filled it with more tea and water. When Seamus informed her that she had inadvertently thrown out a pot of tea, she became emotional and broke down, crying. She was inconsolable and had to be comforted by Seamus and his workmate.
Such was the value placed on the habitual cup of tea that Irish people took for granted and that the war had made a delicacy to be appreciated as never before in our history.
After being used once, tealeaves were carefully removed from the pot and spread along windowsills to dry out. They could then be used again. Some people tried dandelion ash, or herb tea, but no substitute could replace the real cup of tea that the nation pined for.
At the time, Ireland was the second highest consumer of tea in the world, and tongues were literally hanging out all over the country for the want of it. It was an addiction of sorts and the war subjected many decent Irish men and women to tortuous withdrawal symptoms of the kind normally associated with giving up cigarettes or drink.
Jimmy Somers had been famous in the 1930s for his “Black and Amber” tea, and it wasn’t just the association with the Kilkenny team colours that made it such a local success. Rita O’ Neill revealed that Jimmy devised a top-secret formula whereby two different brands of tea, one of large amber leaves and the other a fine black concoction, were mixed together.
An additional ingredient that he added to the mixture to complete the formula is unknown to this day. But whatever it was, locals and visitors from far-flung districts loved the taste of the Black and Amber tea, as Jimmy himself christened it. Jimmy also designed a special bag to contain quantities of this unique blend, and this had a picture of the legendary Kilkenny hurler, Lowry Meagher on it.
It must have been heartbreaking for the great grocer-publican to enforce State-sanctioned rationing of this much sought after commodity, which some black marketers could sell at exorbitant prices due to intense and unflinching demand for it throughout the Emergency.
In the second half of 1940, locals began to miss the loaves of white bread that up to a few months earlier had filled the shelves of grocery shops. Keogh’s of Bridge Street, who transported bread to customers in the district on a horse-drawn cart, had to explain as best they could to them that the familiar and much-loved white bread would not be available for a while owing to the war.
The government then clamped down in earnest on this “luxury” by obliging bakers to include bran in the flour used for bread making. Previously, bran had been eliminated from the process. The arrival in early 1942 of what came to be known as “black bread” in homes throughout the land was greeted with yet another sigh of resignation by families already getting their heads around not having enough tea and sugar on their tables.
The new government-approved bread, made from one hundred percent wheaten flour, was browner than black in colour, not badly unlike a loaf of wholemeal bread but a deeper brown. It got progressively blacker as the war dragged on.
(Picture: Callan LDF men at Pickardstown camp Tramore 1943. Back row: Sonny Rochford, Jim Doheny, Jimmy Moore, Michael Bradley, Jack Shelly.
To be continued…
