At that time it could be purchased for 8d a bushel or 1s 4d a half-hundredweight. To the
uninitiated (and for those whose minds are now metric-programmed) a bushel
weighed 28lb or two stones or ~12.5 kg.
For reasons unknown to me, Mondays and Fridays were
the days most people arrived at the gasworks for their bag of coke. They needed to have their own bag and be able
to hump it home alone. You’d get the
allotted measure – or an extra shovelful – depending on who was manning the
scales. I was always happy at the sight
there of Willie Hanna or Tommy McKeown of Pool Lane. The latter man was my own grandfather! Then I was sure of a good measure!
There were other hazards. The coke was often newly extracted from the
retort and might still be smouldering! You might on the journey home get the whiff of a scorching smell and you’d
know the warm coke was burning through the sack on your back at least – if not
the clothes on your back. You’d have to
find some lying water quickly – and heave the bag off your back into it.
There was an old lady by the name of Sarah Neale one
time humping her bushel of coke to her home in Kilmorey Street, oblivious of the fact
that it was smouldering away. She had a
big, six-foot lazy galoot of a son sunning himself there on the tide wall.
‘Hi, Ma,’ he offered laconically,
‘You’d need to hurry home or that coke will burn the
back off ye!’
You may have heard of him. He was better known as The Rat Kelly!
Reminiscence 
