Throwback Thursday: Oil refinery was one of the biggest things to happen East Cork

Well it’s Halloween this very night. This has always been the most important festival of the ancient Celtic year, our very own New Year’s Eve in fact, when The Good People (and a few evil spirits too) come out of their fairy forts and go wandering around to see what we’re up to. That’s why we still maintain the traditions of dres as ghosts and goblins ourselves, so that if they come by our houses with mischief in mind, they will see our kids looking like trouble-makers, and say, ‘Oh they’re already being dealt with, we’ll leave them alone so.’

Hope you have your barm brack all ready for slicing (wonder who will get the ring this year?) And a bowl of nuts near the fire. Don’t forget the storytelling as the shadows fall. We should preserve these old traditions – they are a more important part of our culture than any Facebook or Twitter . Bet you have many Halloween memories from your own childhood. If you do, then share them with us. What isn’t recorded gets forgotten and that is not right.

And speaking of memories, next week sees the opening of the 69th Cork Film Festival. What pictures of glamour and glitz does that evoke in your mind? when the famous Hollywood stars emerged from their limousines outside the Savoy, clad in the most resplendent of gowns and dinner jackets, flashing brilliant smiles on the crowds who packed the pavement? Did you ever go to the Festival Club? We would love to hear your recollections of past film festivals. Yes, even Dawn Addams and the scandal over that required milk bath which really rocked the city!

Now, do you a couple of weeks ago, we had a lovely tribute from Michael O’Flynn to one Jim Coady who recently ed away after a long and energetic life doing so much for his community?

Jim ran The Marian Weightlifting Club on Daunt’s Square, explained Michael, and was himself a legend in weight lifting/ powerlifting/ bodybuilding when there were only a handful of gyms in Cork city.

“He and the other old timers who trained there knew from experience and common sense how to train, and they ed their knowledge freely to newcomers.”

Michael wondered if others had fond memories of Jim and that club up a creaky wooden stair in Daunt’s Square, and we are happy to say that we have had a surge of responses confirming his view that Jim Cody was much loved and appreciated by those for whom he did so much. Here is one from Denis Ahern: “I read with interest Michael O’Flynn’s of the Marian Weightlifting Club. My involvement with the club was from 1962 to 1964 when it was situated in a stable to the rear of the big houses on St Patrick’s Hill. The club was accessed via an alley off Hardwick Street. It had been founded in 1952 - the Marian year, hence the name - by Lou Burns and Jim Coady. The Knapp’s Square premises would have seemed spacious in comparison!

“In two years under Jim’s guidance I progressed enough to win Munster Junior Champion. At that time Jim had no formal qualification as a coach but everything he told us youngsters proved to be valuable. Emigration - or restlessness - took me abroad where I continued weightlifting. 

I trained among top international lifters under leading coaches. All that added only a little to what I learned from Coady.

“An occasion of pride for Jim was the Irish Championship in Dublin, 1969. With his encouragement I won the 90kg class and became the first Cork man to clean and jerk 300lb (kilos and pounds confusingly used in the same sentence back then).

“Michael O’Flynn’s comment on Jim’s distain for performance-enhancing drugs I wholeheartedly agree with. Like Michael I can be nostalgic about the old sweat and sawdust gyms but I’m happy to use the sparkling hygenic gear in today’s clubs. (As a matter of interest I I worked out this morning - 5kg dumbells, enough having turned 80 earlier this year!)

“So what’s changed? As many women as men in the gyms? An improvement, to my mind. A lighter atmosphere and better behaviour. Roll on the first Cork woman to clean and jerk 300lb (136.36kg.).

It’s sixty-two years since Jim Coady first instructed me on handling a barbell, and it’s a treasured memory. Thanks, Jim.

Spoken from the heart, Denis, and thank you for sharing those thoughts with us.

Here are some equally heartfelt memories from John Morgan: “Jim Coady was 91 when he died only recently, and he was involved in weightlifting, bodybuilding, power lifting, etc for over 70 years. To my mind he was a phenomenal person and he ran the Marian weightlifting club for many years. He trained right into his 80s and his ion for everything in life was unbelievable. I knew him for nearly forty years and I trained in the Marian myself from the age of 13.

 We always remained friends. He was an amazing man, an absolute legend, and a massive loss. Truly the grandfather of weightlifting in Cork.

Well, that’s a fitting tribute to a great man, John. Any more of you out there with fond memories of Mr Coady?

We have had a rare of the building of Ireland’s very first oil refinery, from Mícheál Kenefick, who as a small child was there and saw it happen.

“Sometime around the middle of the 1950s there was a major debate about the location of Ireland’s first Oil Refinery. My earliest recollection of that era is either reading or hearing, on coming from first mass on Sundays, the newspaper headlines: Oil Refinery for Foynes, which would be greeted with great doom and gloom, or Oil Refinery for Whitegate, greeted with great joy.

“We always went to first mass in those days as we had the bus both ways. Both young and old of us had only a bare notion what an oil refinery was but we knew that if it came to Whitegate it was going to be the biggest thing ever to happen not just to the locality but to all of East Cork and even the county itself. Eventually it was agreed that Whitegate was to be the chosen spot and it would be up in Furney’s farm and over in the Island.

“If we didn’t really know what a refinery was we had no idea at all what a bulldozer might be. We did, though, know when they were coming and there was as much excitement in the village all day as there would have been on Christmas Eve. 

I was the only inhabitant of the village not on the street when they ed! 

"To this day I have been trying to figure out why and the only conclusion I can come to is that my mother was afraid I’d be drowned or run over by a bulldozer as there was a crowd in the village as big as there would be for Whitegate Regatta.

“We soon got used to the bulldozers and though impossible to imagine today, we would spend many evenings watching the site being cleared from a few feet away and sit on the bulldozers and pretend we were driving them when the work had finished. How we survived is still a mystery. Anybody with any doubts about Guardian Angels should have a rethink as not one of us even got hurt!

“There was, of course, a lot of digging while the Soil Mechanics were on site and the smart alecs in the village would regularly ask some of the local workers ‘did ye find any oil yet?’ to be told ‘not a drop, plenty of rocks but not a drop of oil.’ During construction we had children in school from various parts of the world but like children the world over, those who came from New York, Chicago or Amsterdam fell in with us and we with them as if they came from Roches Point or Guileen.

“A great pastime in those days was sitting on the quay wall writing car registration numbers into notebooks. It was a simple task normally as there were so few cars but during construction there was such a stream of cars every evening that we couldn’t keep up. Several of us writing the same numbers into different books and again for no reason that I can think of but would love to see one of the notebooks today. Did anybody keep one?

“Eventually it was finished and for some reason I got to be the altar boy holding the cross at the official opening and blessing. I was probably unrecognisable as I was scrubbed so much that I was minus a layer of skin. At the reception - the one for the masses not the big shots – I saw small sausages for the first time, millions of buns with different coloured icing, and sandwiches cut up small without a sign of my favourite bit - the crust!

“Soon really wonderful things began to happen several of which will be ed by my generation forever. The Club was fantastic and we adored it, regularly waiting for the door to open at 7 and staying until closing time. Amongst other things it was our first introduction to games like billiards, snooker and table tennis which up to then we only read about in the papers. But surely the jewel in the crown to come from the Club was the greatest band of all time — The Musketeers — and all of them still playing and, if it is possible, better than ever.

“Also, after the retirement of the first manager who was chauffeur driven, came The Minibus. The chauffeur who was no longer required bought a 10-seater minibus for hire. Now we were away for slates. We could go dancing in Ballycotton, Knockraha (true and we loved it), Midleton and Ladysbridge, and we could get to see the big showbands like the Royal and the Dixies in the Arcadia in Cork, the Majorca in Crosshaven and finally our weekly pilgrimage to the Mecca which was affectionately called The Barn.

I never worked in the Refinery but I did do a couple of stints in the Club as apprentice to Lar and for whom I did a bit of relief work in the sixties as club steward and also for awhile as groundsman. 

"Then after graduating with second class honours from the Anchor I got an ‘ould tangle’ up in ‘the Gas’, which came to Whitegate because of the Refinery, for three days, and came down the hill 41 years later.

“May the Hooter, which told us the time for 50 years, continue to blow for another 50 and well beyond!”

Wonderful, Mícheál. You have taken us all there! Let’s hear from the rest of you. Email [email protected] or leave a message on our Facebook page: www.facebook.com/echolivecork.