Newry News and Irish Fun
True story!! Honest!
Dickie Rodgers was always very fit in his younger days and was up at the scrake of dawn walking his greyhounds. Believe it or not there are a few others constantly about at that time – insomniacs, milkmen and people like me, just on the way home.
In the spring or early summer, many residents would whitewash their yards and outside toilets. Lime purchased from J S Fishers of Merchants Quay would be used. However from the ground to a foot or so up, tar would be painted. The dual object was to disguise spattered dirt with the black colour and to deter insects and tiny creatures from crawling up the walls.
Some of the most amusing anecdotes originate in the classroom.
I was teaching a class one time, a ‘rough’ class in a ‘difficult’ school in a ‘deprived’ area. Still everybody likes a story and I was reading them one.
Coal was delivered to the Gasworks by horse and cart. The carts were filled from a collier at
Those of you who were children in Newry in the 40s/50s will retain both pleasant and unpleasant memories of the Newry Gasworks.
The gas used to fuel domestic supplies was extracted from coal. Apart from tar, coke was the chief by-product. In the town it was used extensively as a cheaper alternative to coal.
It would not have been an area of expertise for which the boys of St Joseph’s Secondary School Newry was especially renowned in 1966.
It was our fortune that year to have a number of loquacious and competent speakers. Yet we were serious underdogs when we travelled to Lurgan for the Schools Final. The home team had won the previous two years.
The year was 1985. I was employed by Fords at Dagenham and I happened then to be player manager of a departmental football team.
Farewell to every hawthorn hedge, from Killeen to Belleeks
And every pool of sticklebacks and every shady creek
To sloping fields, the lofty rocks where ash and willow grew
Killeavey Old Church yew tree, to friends of youth I knew.
Though forty years since last I saw, I see them shining still
The Lough that cuts us North from South, the view from Fathom Hill
Adieu to Camlough’s crooked lake, to ‘Cross and ‘Blaney fair
To Gullion’s Ring, to everything of childhood days we shared.
From Carlingford beneath Slieve Foye and dark Mournes’ brooding slopes
I sailed away to foreign shore with pockets full of hope
In Durham Town where I’m bed-bound, each day is long and drear
The doctors offer little time, some weeks, a month, a year…
But I can fly on fairies’ wings to fields of dry-stone walls
To flax-holes in the meadow where the lonely corncrake calls
I stroll past Jack the Farrier’s place, to ringing metal blows
Of hammers struck on anvil’s plate to forge the Shire horse shoes.
When neighbours call to ask a hand to save the summer’s hay
I volunteer like e’er before and labour all the day
We ceili of an evening, or at the crossroads dance
To the fiddle and the squeeze-box, on rough boards wheel and prance.
In mind’s eye still I wander, in lanes of twisted thorn
And stray with my first sweetheart through fields of golden corn
The Mummers call at Christmastide, with many a loaded rhyme
In thatch, and mask, and costume dressed, in couplets fair they chime.