RUNNING like a spine from the top of Sheares Street all the way to the Sacred Heart Church on the Western Road, The Middle Parish, or The Marsh as it is fondly known, was once the pulsating heartbeat of Cork city.
Born in 1941, Liam Ó hUigín lived much of his young life with his parents in 5, Henry Street, a tenement house next door to the Mercy Hospital and just up the road from Grattan Street. His grandmother, aunt and uncle lived in the two storeys above them.
Liam attended St Joseph’s Primary School on the Mardyke. When his mum died suddenly of a heart condition, the nine-year-old Liam divided his time between his dad in his childhood home and his mum’s sister and her five daughters in Vicar Street, off Barrack Street.
Times were tough. Families and neighbours lived side by side, often in the same house, and from day to day.
They, in turn, supplied a bustling community of resourceful, supportive, industrious and resilient inhabitants.
“We were survivors. We led a charmed life but had no material things,” says Liam. “We were very poor, but we didn’t realise it. We had no electricity or gas so used oil lamps, and cooked dinner on a two-hob fire: one hob for the potatoes, the other for the kettle.
“We didn’t know anything else. We actually felt wealthy. Our collective mentality was we were all in this together.
“At one point, there were 18-20 pawn shops in our general area. They kept us going week to week. It was the original ‘circular economy’ as people pawned the same things week in, week out.
“City Hall provided subsistence for the poor people of Cork at that time. Each week, families were given a blue voucher for coal and turf, free shoes, bread and milk (from Gills). My aunt got the voucher when her husband died because, not only had she five kids of her own, she had me to mind as well.”
“Most of my friends lived in a house we called the Sunburst Hotel; despite having just one toilet and one cold outside tap, it was home to ten families.”
Nobody had doorbells, so, when calling for his friends to go to the Mardyke, Liam and the lads developed their individual cat calls for each other.
“Everything for us happened in the Mardyke. We played sports like cricket and tennis, fought ‘world wars’ with imaginary guns and childhood gusto, learned to swim off the Shakey Bridge, and picked apples from the orchard gardens.”
Liam Ó hUigín: “We were survivors”
“I don’t know how many times we were chased out of the cricket grounds or the tennis club for robbing the balls,” he chuckles. “We were also very adept at slogging apples from the orchard at the back of the little shop opposite the band stand in the Mardyke.”
Liam and his childhood friends were innately industrious, from swapsies (swapping bottle tops), to collecting waste paper to sell to the National Paper Company on Lavitts Quay, using the money to buy a 4p cinema ticket or a 5p sneaky pack of Woodbine cigarettes to smoke in Grattan Street graveyard, while playing cards under the lamplight.
Hours of fun were had kicking large chunks of ice that the weekend delivery boys gave them on their way from Sullivans Cold Storage to the English Market, skating the length of the street on a homemade ice-track in winter, or swimming down the River Lee in summer.
“As kids, the Lee was the epicentre of our entire lives,” says Liam. “That’s where we spent every day. If you couldn’t swim, you were left behind.
“When I hear The Banks (Of My Own Lovely Lee) being sung, it actually makes me emotional as I can relate to everything in the song.”
Of course, they swam in public pools too. Entry to the Lee Baths was free and had separate days for boys and girls. “We’d regularly sneak down on the girls’ day to have a gawk,” laughs Liam.
“The polio epidemic of 1956 impacted on us as the baths shut. That was a disaster.
“After swimming in the Lee Baths, we’d go across the road to Jennings’ wood on Orchard Road to play cowboys and ‘injuns’ among the trees, then buy our sweets in the Carmelite Stores on the Western Road.”
Liam also remembers riding Dinny O’Mahony’s horses from the quayside to their feeding ground at the Lee Fields. A self-employed carrier from Henry Street, Dinny had a fleet of horses and floats which transported goods from the ships to businesses around the city.
“I have vivid memories of his stables,” recalls Liam, “and I was playing on the bales of hay they had stored for the horses the day my aunt came to tell me my mum had died. I’ll never forget that day.”
An only child, Liam’s aunt moved to Henry Street to live near him. Soon after, her husband died from TB. “I can clearly remember standing on Henry Street while they were fumigating our house.”
Before Liam’s dad became a docker, he drove a horse for Seamus Sullivan’s coal merchants. “We had a coal fire and he’d often come home with lumps of coal hidden up his sleeves,” Liam says. “While I can remember scraping the ice to peek out the windows, I don’t remember ever being cold.”
Despite the poverty, drink was a big problem at that time. “In Grattan Street alone, there were seven pubs,” says Liam. “As well as glove-makers, button-makers, two barber shops, the Henrietta Stores, Mannings corner shop, a fire station, and an alms house around the corner.
“There was a massive sense of community in the Marsh. 100% marvellous people who had each other’s backs.”
A chance meeting with Joan Manning at the merries in Togher, a spin on the swingboats with his last few coins, and a chat at The Lough on the way home, left 17-year-old Liam smitten and ultimately lured him to the Southside. They had five children and a wonderful marriage for 58 years, before she passed away in 2018.
“We thought our home in Turners Cross was a mansion,” laughs Liam.
Purchasing his first fridge in 1961 was a real watershed moment. “It was great to put the bottle of Tanora into it at night, and have a slug of it straight from the bottle the following morning.”
