Memoirs of a Dublin Craftsman

John Slater

John Slater is my father. He is now 86 years old. He spent 64 years of his life,
starting at the age of 12, working as a plasterer, a builder and a cook in and
around Dublin. In the process he garnered a Doctorate from the university of
life. He has always underestimated his own talents, his own achievements
and the respect and love he enjoys from his family, his many friends and the
strangers who stroll him, however briefly, on his path to heaven.
Born in 1924, he comes from a very different age. In some ways, it could be
another planet. Here are some of his own “scribblings”.
Thursday July 20th 1995

Having been requested by my family to set to writing as much as I

could remember of my long and happy life, which my Creator has given me
as a stepping stone to my ultimate union with Him, I take up my pen in the
second month of my seventy-second year and go back in memory to the
Liberties of Dublin in the year of Our Lord, nineteen hundred and twenty four
when, on the twenty second of May, I first saw the light of day. Two days
later, I was baptised in the church of St. Nicholas of Myra in Francis Street
and was given the name “John, Augustine” – John after my paternal
grandfather and Augustine because my mother had a great devotion to St.
Augustine and belonged to the Confraternity of the Cineture in the
Augustinian church in John’s Lane. Strange as it may seem today, at that
period, the majority of people belonged to some confraternity or Sodality.
Our family lived at 13 Lauderdale Terrace, New Row. The house
contained three bedrooms, a living room (which we called the “kitchen”), a
scullery (which we called the “back-kitchen) and a parlour. Outside the “back-
kitchen” door was a “yard”, a concrete area measuring about 12 feet by 8
feet. At one side of the “yard”, a wall five feet high separating us from our
neighbours and on the other side (an extension, if you like) of the “back-
kitchen” were two sheds (?). One was the “coal-hole” the other was the
“lavatory” (toilet!). The “coal-hole” had no window at all. The “lavatory” had
an eight inch opening over the door which allowed in a certain amount of
light. At the end of the “yard”, and dividing it from the garden, my father had
built a two story structure in timber. In the upper story, which was reached by
an open stairway, he kept pigeons which he raced from time to time. This
was called the “loft”.
When my father eventually got rid of the pigeons, the “loft” was used
as a store- room for his tools and all the bits and pieces he used, or might
ever want to use again. When we were children, we played in the “loft”. It
had windows all across the length, from which it was possible to see not only
into our garden, but also into any garden in “The Row”.
Money in the family was always very scarce, so any toys we got were
usually made from bits of things that were discarded by the more affluent
children in the houses in which my father worked. Our “toy soldiers” were
slab nails which could be stood on their flat heads and “paraded” on top of
the bench in the “loft”.
The lower part of this timber structure went by the grandiose name
of the “summer house”. On the yard side, it had an opening with timber and
trellis work on either side. On the garden side it had a door with a window on
either side.
The “summer house” was the laundry. It contained a wooden stool on
which was precariously placed a large wooden tub. The water was heated on

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the gas stove in kettles, pots or whatever receptacle was available – the tub
was filled and the “Hudsons Powder” poured in. Clothes were washed by
soaking them in the soapy water and then rubbing them vigorously between
the knuckles and a washing board placed in the tub. One can imagine what
an hour of this sort of work would do to a woman’s hands. “Hudsons Powder”
wasn’t meant to be “kind to the skin”. I’ve seen my mother’s hands after a
day’s washing – not a pretty site.
But, despite the day’s drudgery and despite the fact that my father
was as often idle as he was working during the early years of the family, my
mother seems to have been always cheerful. I suppose, no better or worse off
than any of the other mothers who had to cope with idleness and bad
housing.
My mother’s father and mother – William and Ellen Jacobs arrived in
Dublin from Tralee. My grandfather was a soldier. He was bandmaster in the
Munster Fusiliers. His son, my uncle Willie, followed in his footsteps and was
wounded in Ypres in World War I.
When they arrived in Dublin, they got a flat in Bride St. Buildings, but
later moved to New Row when a house became available. There were six
children in the family; five girls - Maud, Hannah, Sally, Cissie and Ellen – and
one boy, Willie. Maud or Hannah never married, although I’d often heard
Maud’s name connected with some man who served with the Fifth Lancers in
the First World War. He seems to have died for King and country. Maud kept a
pair of buckskin cavalry gauntlets in her chest-of-drawers. We used to play
with them when we were children. Sallie married a soldier and had five
children – Terry, Willie, Nellie, Mabel and Alfie. Terry (a girl) died young.
Cissie married a policeman from Tipperary. Ellen married my father.
When my mother and father married, buying a house would not have
been possible and never even contemplated by the working classes, although
my paternal grandfather owned his own house in Prussia St. they also had
my grandmother’s house in Trim. The name of this latter house was
“Monasboy”, situated in Lanacor on the Trim to Summerhill road.
As I said, when my mother and father married without the prospect of
having a house, they were given a room in New Row, a house that was
already overcrowded. As well as my grandmother and grandfather, it also
housed Maudie, Hannah and Sally, who had been deserted by her husband in
England and had brought her four surviving children - Willie, Nellie, Mabel
and Alfie -home to Dublin. Another cousin - Fonsie – a son of Uncle Willie
Jacob’s who spent most of his life doing odd jobs in England and Ireland, was
also found a place to sleep. Usually with Willie and Alfie: three to one bed!
Despite the fact that the house was very overcrowded (in our room,
when we were very young, my mother and father slept at one end of the bed,
Marie, and myself at the other end) it was a very happy household. Later on,
when we got a bit older, the sleeping arrangements had to be re-arranged.
By that time, Wille, Mabel and Nellie had got married.

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 On Sunday mornings, the place was in an uproar. Masses were every
half our from seven until twelve. You could get 6.00 a.m. mass in the order
churches or 5.30 a.m. mass in Clarendon St. This latter was regularly used by
Saturday late-night revellers but, as the Eucharist fast was from midnight,
you couldn’t receive Holy Communion.
There were three churched quite near to us: St. Nicholas of Myra in
Francis St., The Augustinians (John’s Lane) in Thomas St. and the Carmelite
church in Whitefriar St.
Each of the grownups I the house belonged to some choir or sodality
in one church or another – all at different times. There always seemed to be
some confusion as to the ownership of socks, stockings and other garments
too numerous to mention.
My maternal grandparents went by the names of Nana (what else?)
and Daddy Billy (a term of endearment used by his children and
grandchildren). They were daily mass-goers and always brought something
home for the children.
Daddy Billy was a very placid kind of a man. He didn’t smoke or
drink; at least, I never saw him doing either. I never remember him going to a
pub, although he may have done.
Nana on the other hand was, I believe, a very crochety person
although personally, I never had any experience of this. They always seemed
to me to be a very united couple and any memories of them are always
happy ones.
Sometime in my early teens, I got into the habit of sneaking out of
the house on Sunday mornings to get 6.00 a.m. mass and home to get my
mother and father’s breakfast before they were awake. I suppose I
recognised, even at that early age, the hardships they had to endure and the
sacrifices they had to make in order to bring up a family in the late twenties
and early thirties when work was scarce and your next week’s wages
depended on the whims of an employer.
The work of a plasterer was “hard graft” and, no matter what effort
one put into it, the weekly wage was the only indication of gratitude
expressed by the employer. I can remember my father coming home in the
evenings with insulating tape covering the cracks in his fingers caused by
“cement burn”. I can remember him coming home, drenched to the bone
having spent the afternoon trying to protect some area of outside work that
he had put on in the morning. I have to say it about him, as I heard him say
about his father: “he was a great man”. He had a great concern for others.
He arrived home in the “small hours” of one morning to explain to us,
who had waited anxiously for his return, that he had been sent to repair the
ceiling in some tenement room where some old lady, who had nearly been
killed by the collapse of the same ceiling, was waiting in a somewhat
deranged state in the room of a neighbour. My father and his helper, John

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Christopher (Higgins’s Horse) worked to clean up the mess, repair the ceiling
and give the lady her room back.
The reason John Christopher was called “Higgins’s Horse” was that,
whenever a job was to be done, everything except the kitchen sink was piled
on to a hand-car and John had to push it. I think, sometimes, it had the
kitchen sink on it!
Maudie and Hannah worked in Jacob’s biscuit factory in Bishop St. My
mother had also worked there before she was married. The factory was a
great source of cheap biscuits. Each worker was entitled to buy what they
called “job lots” of biscuits each Friday. Those were biscuits that had become
slightly deformed during manufacture and weren’t suitable to be sold in the
shops. They were sold to the workers for a shilling a bag for whole biscuits
and sixpence a bag for broken biscuits. They came home hot from the ovens.
Jam puffs, Figrolls and Pralines were given a sudden death while we searched
the bag of “mixed broken” for our favourites. Job lots of Club Milk were also
sold separately. You got about 15 or 20 for a shilling.
Although it was frowned upon by the factory management, some of
those biscuits were sold by the workers to the local shopkeepers who resold
them at a profit.
When were young, my mother rarely kept us in the house. We didn’t
want to be in the house anyway; there wasn’t much room to play. We could
play in the loft, but that left our movements very restricted. The street
offered more scope for adventure.
There were old broken-down tenement houses at the corner of New
Row and Wards Hill. Poor people had rooms in them. There were passages
from the front to the back through which we could run like madmen. There
was a large overgrown mound of bricks and rubbish which was once
someone’s home a hundred, maybe two hundred years before. But to us, it
could be “Dead Man’s Gulch” or “Black Buttes” if we were playing “cowboys,
or it could be “Pitcairn Island” or “Dutchman’s Cove” if we were pirates. It
held endless possibilities for adventure, but when the light started to fade
and we heard my father’s whistle from down the Row, it was time to saddle-
up and head back to the ranch-house.
On rainy days when we were very young, my mother would tog us
out in raincoats, sou-westers and Wellington boots. We’d knock endless fun
out of sailing match-sticks down the channel between the road and the
footpath. As well as the amusement, we got plenty of exercise because as
soon as our “craft” would get to the bottom of the Row, we had to carry it to
the top and start all over again.
If the rain got too heavy, we could always have a party. This
consisted of bringing our pals into the hall and sitting on the floor while our
mother served us broken biscuits on plates and lemonade in tumblers.

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 It was fairly cold in that hall; we’d never heard of central heating. We
just kept our raingear on and enjoyed the party! We didn’t expect much from
life, so to us it was something out of the ordinary – an adventure.
So at last it came, the dreaded day. I’d been hearing whispers all
through the summer and now it had finally arrived – school-time. As Marie
was already going to Warrenmount Convent School and as they had a class
for mixed infants, it was decided that I should start there. But alas, this was
not to be. My mother brought me by the hand and left me I the charge of the
dreaded Mother Magdalen, a lady of immense proportions with a moustache.
My mother left, but I caught up to her before she was half way down
Blackpitts.
I don’t know where I’d learned the term, but I told her that I didn’t
want to be left with those “hooded terrors”. Alfie had been to Blackpitts
National School so, after a lapse of twelve months, myself and Louis started
on the same day. Infants class was referred to as “babies”. The teacher was a
Mr. McQuillan; a very kind young man; always in good humour.
The school was divided into “upstairs” and “downstairs”. The
downstairs teachers were: Mr. McQuillan (“babies”), Christie Kelly (1st class),
Stanley Shaw and Mr. Brasil (2nd class) and “Daddy” Quinn (3rd class). The
upstairs teachers were “Twinnu” McGrath (4th class), Teddy Levins (5th class)
and James Shaw (6th class). Oh, I forgot: we also had a Mr. Dempsey and a Mr
Whitney, who took a second 4th and 5th class respectively. Both the upstairs
and the downstairs consisted of one large room (two classes) and two,
smaller, terraced rooms. Each of the larger rooms had a fireplace at the back.
During the winter-time, the desks were turned around so that the teacher
could get a little heat.
Out in the yard, there was a timber construction called the “Hut”. It
too was divided in half; one half for the seniors; the other for the juniors. Each
half contained a paraffin oil stove which was used during the winter-time if
some teacher bought the oil.
In my list of teachers, I forgot to mention Austin Nestor. He was a
good teacher, but slightly “dipsy-doodle”! I think he was fond of the “jar” and
when the Hut was warm, on a summer’s day, which it often was (insulation
was unheard of) he was inclined to fall asleep during class, much to the
amusement of the pupils who took the opportunity to be even more unruly
than usual.
Amid the uproar, he’d awake with a start and, when he’d realise
where he was, and when he’d get everything into focus, he’d bang the desk
with a cane and bellow “the following boys, come out!” But, before he could
decide which of us was to be the sacrificial victim, Morpheus once again
wrapped his arms and he was transported to the land where there were no
unruly boys, no smell of classrooms and ink, just the sound of glasses clinking
together and the smell of sawdust and beer in the local bar.

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 Don’t get me wrong if I seem to be painting a dismal picture of my
schooldays. I was interested in learning things and the teachers, by and
large, were a good bunch. There were some who had short fuses but, looking
back at it, it was only to be expected. The work was hard; the pay and
conditions weren’t the best and who knows what troubles they might have
had in their private lives.
Anyway, for whatever reason, I loved school. I hated exams (I always
felt physically and emotionally ill) but always got first place in class and
highest marks in the school in the “Primary Exam”. We only lived about five
minutes walk from the school and so my mother used to bring us our lunch
every day. Sometimes she would give us a penny each and after school, we
could go to Molly’s shop which was across the road from the school in
Blackpitts Buildings and buy some home made toffee. “Binky” Molloy, the
owner’s niece, went to school with Marie.
…

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