Thowback Thursday: 1950s Cork life and a mysterious blow-in

Throwback Thursday reader Brian Cronin, who lives in Spain, was listening with great pleasure recently to an RTÉ1 radio interview with John Creedon.

“John grew up in Coburg Street, a street I am very familiar with as I attended school in Christians - a mere stone’s throw away from the Creedon home,” says Brian.

“I knew John’s father - Johnny Creedon, a marvellous character - very well and recall a certain incident with him in a London taxi way back in the 1960s - but that’s a story for another day!”

After that teasing line, Brian continues: “In his new book, This Boy’s Heart, John recounts many memories of his childhood days.

“One was about three Russian sailors who wandered into their shop in search of items not easily come by in the Soviet Russia of the ’40s and ’50s, such as lipstick, ladies’ nylon stockings and cigarettes, with which Mrs Creedon supplied them in exchange for vodka, of which they had a plentiful supply.

“John recalls that meeting Russians - and in fact any foreigner - was very unusual in Cork during his growing-up years.

“That reminded me of one of the first real ‘foreigners’ I encountered in those far-off days. (other than Dubliners coming off the train across the road!).”

Brian explains: “Our mother, Rose Cronin, was widowed at a very young age, followed shortly after by the death of her mother, leaving her to take over her father’s small family hotel on the Lower Glanmire Road, a business with which she had no experience, and raise five young children as well as looking after her ailing father.

“She wrote to a staffing agency asking them to find a manager, and one fine day Mr Stevens arrived as the answer to her prayers. His real name was Lubo Stevanovitch, which none of us could cope with, so he asked us to just call him Mr Stevens.

“His arrival caused a bit of a sensation in our area. In Cork city of the 1950s, foreigners living in the community were rare. Yugoslavs would have been viewed almost as visitors from another planet.

“However, we kids were delighted with the new arrival. He looked so FOREIGN! Dark, saturnine features and always dressed very formally.

“l don’t ever seeing him wearing a sweater or cardigan. We got a glimpse of braces occasionally when a beer barrel needed to be changed, but other than that it was invariably a dark pin-striped business suit.

“My brother, Denis, and I were delighted when he told us that he had spent the later war years as a fighter pilot with the Free Yugoslav Airforce, which was based in England and came under the jurisdiction of the RAF.

“He told us that he had shot down several German planes during the Battle of Britain.”

This must have been very exciting to hear for a young boy in Cork.

“The nearest that we had ever got to wartime action was in the pages of the Eagle comic which we devoured every Friday,” recalls Brian.

“Other features in that great comic were Dan Dare (who got to the moon light years ahead of the actual American landings), PC 49, Jeff Arnold the cowboy, the Lone Ranger, his friend Tonto and his famous horse Silver.

“Anyway, this was the real thing and the boys down the Lower Road were green with envy. We had an ex-fighter pilot living in the hotel!

“Mr Stevens never had any trouble finding helpers at weekends amongst our friends to do the bottle sorting, which was a great relief as we hated doing the job ourselves - particularly when it was lashing rain as it frequently did in Cork from time to time!

“During the first few days, Lubo spent a lot of time sitting in the bar reading his newspaper and apparently checking the racing results. In fact, he was observing the staff working behind the counter. He then told mum that she was being robbed by the two girls as he observed them pocketing some of the takings. Apparently, this was an ongoing problem for her. The girls were fired and that was the end of the matter.”

Brian adds: “Lubo never really explained the 10-year gap between the end of the war and his arrival in Cork. He did say something vague about political problems in Yugoslavia and not being able to return home because of the communist government which came into power after the war.

“He was a devout Catholic and attended Mass regularly. He also hated Germans with a ion.

“He told us of the day that the Nazis rounded up all the young men in a neighbouring village and took them away in cattle trucks. That evening they heard the sound of distant gunfire from the nearby forest. None of the young men ever returned…

“Lubo and three of his college friends crept away in the night following a tip-off from their local priest that their village would be next to suffer the same fate. They travelled through , hitching lifts where they could, and eventually took the ferry from Calais to Dover.

“All of this added immeasurably to Mr Steven’s mystique and we drove our school friends to distraction adding legs to the original tales. They weren’t just green with envy. More like puce!

“Mr Stevens was a great help to our mother. He worked from morning to night and proved to be very popular with our bar customers.

“One of the big changes he made was to root out all the old bar furnishings and fittings, including the two old snugs, and, hey presto! We had a modern lounge bar.

“We became the most popular place on the Lower Road. Unfortunately, many other bars followed suit and Formica table-tops, built-in seating, neon strip lights and - worst of all - piped music became the norm. Not a snug in sight for the priests and the ladies!

“Mind you, it was around that time that ladies started frequenting public houses.”

Mr Stevens’ influence did not end there, adds Brian.

“He also introduced continental-style lager beer. The first two brands to come on stream were Patz 39, from Czechoslovakia, and Amstel, from Holland. Amstel was the more popular one, not so much because of its flavour but because the Amstel label bore the Cork colours - red and white! So also did the new filter-tipped Carrolls No 1 cigarettes which came in red and white packets. Very patriotic are Corkonians!

“Lubo was a great ideas man from the word go. I suppose the profit margins in a small hotel in those days were pretty lean and he invariably came up with new ways of increasing our profitability.

“One of his less successful ideas was to get us into the chip business. In those days, Cork had only two chip shops - Pop’s in Drawbridge Street and Jackie Lennox’s in Barrack Street.

“One day, Lubo came back from town with a large potato chipping machine. It spelled the end of what had up to then been a happy relationship between him and the Cronin brothers. My brother Denis and I were set to work over the kitchen sink; one brother washing and peeling the spuds, and the second one putting them through the hand-operated chipper.

“The chips were then plunged into buckets of cold water with lemon juice to keep them from discolouring. The idea then was to cook the chips in a deep fat frier and ferry them out to the hall door and sell them to people waiting in the queue to enter the Arcadia ballroom next door to the hotel.

“I seem to that we had two portion sizes; tuppence ha’penny for small packs and fourpence for larger ones.

“Another target market for the sale of our chips was the crowds of fans streaming down from the city to catch the ferries crossing over the river to watch Cork hurlers and footballers in action in Páirc Uí Chaoimh.

“It was hard work, and the struggle over whose turn it was to wash and peel the spuds and whose to operate the hand chipper caused a certain amount of discord between us boys.

“The operation also led to a perpetual odour of deep frying, which seemed to impregnate every curtain and bit of clothing in the upstairs coffee room.

Eventually, the idea had to be abandoned. I don’t think Mr Stevens ever got over the disappointment as he thought we were definitely on to a winner!”

Brian continues his reminiscing: “One of the lasting benefits to the family was his creating in all of us a love of classical music.

“We had a record player in our drawing room and every now and then Mr Stevens would arrive home with a record or two. One day it might be Mantovani And His Cascading Strings, or Paul Robeson singing negro spiritual songs; the next Lizst’s Hungarian Rhapsody, a Chopin nocturne, or a Beethoven symphony.

“I shall always be grateful to him for stimulating our love of good music.

“Though our mother was a very good cook, Lubo also expanded our culinary horizons with the introduction of new dishes such as Hungarian goulash, curries, and pasta.

“He ed us for meals when he wasn’t occupied in the bar, and always made a point of urging us children to kiss and thank our mum for the good food before leaving the table.

“However, shortly after the demise of our chips operation, his manner towards us seemed to change. No more extravagant praise or bags of clove rocks or bulls eye sweets, which up to then had been the norm. He started to get very strict with us children. Only the youngest, Patricia, stayed in his good books and he spoiled her unmercifully. This worked to our advantage as she kept the rest of us supplied with sweets…”

Lubo eventually left, and Brian recalls a letter arriving from him in Belfast.

“It was a great pity in many ways as he had been a tower of strength during his time with us,” says Brian.

“I know, however, that some of my uncles and aunts were relieved to see him go. They presumably, in those straitened and conservative years of 1950s Ireland, never felt comfortable with us having a strange man in the house.

“For myself, I don’t think he ever behaved other than as a perfect gentleman towards our mother, and I know that in many ways she was sorry to lose his services.

“Sometimes, I stop and wonder what happened to him all those long years ago…”

Gosh, what a wonderful story, Brian! And such an evocation of those 1950s with their prejudices and innocence of all that was happening in the world outside.

Come on the rest of you, let’s hear your memories of times and people past. Email [email protected] or leave a message on our Facebook page: www.facebook.com/echolivecork.