By John Fitzgerald
(Part three)
Continuing the story of Callan in Seamus O’ Brien’s youth, when Upper Bridge Street was the busiest street in town…
Fennelly’s house in Upper Bridge Street was at number thirteen…two doors from Seamus’s home at number eleven. It was a spacious two-storied building with an archway and a large farmyard that seemed to be always humming with activity. People called day and night to the yard to collect their buckets of milk. The house encompassed a bar and grocery.
Dick Fennelly ran this part of the business, as well as the hardware and undertaking, while his brother Billy, ably assisted by the dedicated Bat Roche (originally from Cork) ran the farming side of things with great efficiency.
From morning to evening, hens and a cock darted about in the yard, and townspeople came and went with their buckets of milk, supplied by Fennelly’s substantial and much-envied dairy herd. Pigs were also kept in the farmyard off the street, creating a daily concert of squealing and clucking that for years remained an essential part of the Bridge Street symphony of life.
The coffins were stored in premises on the opposite side of the street, which doubled as a light hardware store that catered for all phases of life’s journey, with coffins, cradles and cots being in constant demand to meet the eternal cycle of births, deaths, and happy marriages in the area.
The Fennellys were a hard-working and ambitious family, owning the historic Moat, fields near the Fair Green, and having land in Tullamaine. In later years, Dick’s wife Margaret took over the business after Dick died.
Next to Fennelly’s, beside the bridge, stood Adelphia House. Seamus couldn’t quite remember when it had been a hotel, but his father assured him it had once been one of the finest hotels in Ireland, and that it opened in 1884, continuing to thrive into the early years of the twentieth century.
William Keogh, father of Kevin the renowned baker, acquired the building in the late 1920s and in 1928 Jimmy Somers bought it from him, opening his acclaimed pub and grocery.
Jimmy hailed from Killenaule and owned the stately corn mill at Mallardstown, located close to where the noted local historian and farmer’s rights campaigner, Philip Lynch, now resides.
Jimmy was a top-notch community activist. He was instrumental in getting the Callan Ploughing Association up and running, aided by his wife Peig and Jack Dunne of Maxtown.
The dispensary provided an excellent medical service to the people of the district, offering the services of a doctor and midwife. Seamus remembered a Mrs. O’ Dwyer as being the local midlife in his teens. She lived in a room above the dispensary. A Nurse Flynn who married a Henzy Gavin later replaced her.
Doctor Frank Walsh held a regular clinic at the dispensary.
In later years, Jimmy Somers bought the dispensary building next door after the doctor’s surgery opened in Newmarket Lane.
Next to the “coffin shop” beside the river stood the impressive building that housed Maher’s grocery. James Maher was a respected local historian, author of such publications as Romantic Slievenamon and Chief of the Commeraghs.
When he and his family moved to Mullinhaone in 1927, Tom and John Garry from Athlone took over and added a bar to the grocery.
(The business thrived for fifteen years until the next owner, Larry Carroll, acquired it. It was he who had the name Avonree House emblazoned on the gable of the building. Tom White was the next owner to move in. The business then passed to Pat and Margaret Lennon and later still to Harry and Olva Dowdall.)
Michael Bradley, who lived at number nineteen, was an outstanding carpenter and builder. Among the construction projects to his credit were the Parochial Hall and the Curate’s house.
His wife Mary was a dressmaker, and she often asked young Seamus O’ Brien to try on various garments she had fashioned and gave him an English three-penny bit for each fitting.
He refused her offer only once…when she wanted him to try on a lovely new First Communion girls’ dress for size! It was the builder’s son, also Michael Bradley, who in later years opened a chemist’s shop.
If you needed any essential or fashionable garment, suit, or a nifty new hat, you dropped in to view the merchandise at number twelve, a drapery and millenary shop run by Tom and Ellen Kerwick.
Tom was the town’s master tailor, who employed Jim Maher and Tommy Brennan as tailors on the premises. They were always busy, forever sewing and stitching and cutting to serve the clothing needs of the community.
Tom and Ellen also owned the boot and shoe shop at number ten so there was no danger of going without footwear unless you were very poor.
Seamus remembered Mrs. Kerwick’s sister, Miss Lanigan, as a kind-hearted woman who lived elsewhere in the town.
The boot and shoe shop thrived throughout the 1920s and 30s but came to an abrupt and untimely end in 1939 when fire engulfed the premises. There was no fire brigade in Callan, and the local guards, using hoses stored in the Town Hall, tried desperately but in vain to quench it.
Seamus was emerging from the old cinema at Prologue after watching a Western when he and other film buffs beheld the raging inferno and smoke billowing into the night sky over Callan. Luckily, nobody was injured.
Also looking after footwear requirements was Pat O’ Reilly, originally from Thomastown, who married Kitty Burke of Attatinoe.
Dick Pape ran a hairdressing salon for a brief period in a house later occupied by Mrs. Isabella Madigan. Later, he converted a building that once housed Montgomery’s chemist shop for use as a hairdresser’s. Decades later, Olva and Gina Keating also ran a hairdressing salon on the premises.
To be continued…
