THE FORGE

(As told by Tom Lyons)

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OLD PHOTOS OF TOM WORKING IN THE FORGE

"My father and grandfather and great grandfather worked there beyond in the forge and I don’t know who before that. All my uncles, they all immigrated except the one died at home. Two of them went off to South Africa, one to New Zealand and one to California. Once I left school around fourteen years of age or that way I went into the forge and I used to be pulling the bellows and doing a bit of sledging and things that way.’Twas a big bellows with a big beam out of it and a chain. You’d buy bars of iron at that time. They’d be tied up in bundles of a hundred weight and you’d buy a hundred weight of them and you’d cut out the pieces for the shoes. About a foot would do a fair good size shoe. Nine inches smaller and ten inches and if you had big horse maybe a foot or one foot two or that way. The iron would be plain. There was no fullers nor punch or anything in them. You’d turn them and you had a little, what they call a fuller and then you’d punch the nail holes in that. That way it would save the heads of the nails. That way they wouldn’t wear away too quickly. The nails would be soft you know. There was another forge over the road about two miles and then in Whitegate there was two more. Minogues then started a foundry and then they started making trailers and all this kind of stuff. Welding and everything. Then the war years you know, stuff got very scarce. No iron. But there was a man here who was trading with a lorry to Limerick. He got on to us. He used to bring stuff for us all right. He got on to us and he said things were going to go terrible scarce entirely. Put in a stock! So we got in a lot of coal and shoeing iron and that lasted the most of the war. Any bits at all that you could make a shoe out of. The farmers, every one of them had nearly three horses. Two working horses, a smaller one for going to town and going to mass and everything with the trap. So there was a lot of horses to be shod then. I often remember of a wet day and there’d be a queue of them out there waiting to be shod. Then sure, ‘twas the tractors and all the machinery came into being that finished the horse. There was some riding horses then and hunting horses. A good few kept them around and they had to be shod. Four shillings to shoe a horse. There was some doing it a bit cheaper but by the end of the war the price started rising. It rose to five and after a bit it was up to ten and then went to a pound. A pint of Guinness was nine pence, nine old pennies. Ten shillings was good money at that time."

RAY'S PHOTO GALLERY