Breda Sheehan: Blackpool, Childhood games, Lido cinema, Spring Lane.
Title
Breda Sheehan: Blackpool, Childhood games, Lido cinema, Spring Lane.
Subject
Life History: Blackpool, Childhood games, Ellis’s, Goulding's, Lido cinema, Spring Lane.
Description
Breda grew up in Spring Lane, off Thomas Davis Street, Blackpool. She grew up with five sisters. Her father was a soldier in the Irish Army and was away a lot.
She grew up in a row of cottages that she believes dated back to the Seventeenth Century. People rented their houses until the 1950s, when they began to buy them. In the 1970s, the area bounded both the city and the countryside. It was also an industrial area, with Goulding’s fertilizer factory and Ellis’s gravel yard. During the 1950s men queued at Gouldings looking for casual work.
She lists the games and pastimes she played as a child: catching stones, marbles (‘glassy allies’) and scraps (scrapbooks). She names the lanes around Thomas Davis Avenue, which residents called by its old name, Foster’s Lane. Neighbours looked out for each other’s children and for each other.
She tells a story about looking for apples at the Ellis family house, nearby.
The Lido cinema in Blackpool showed episodic films, which she loved to see with her grandmother; she describes the seating inside.
She talks about how Blackpool has changed, and how the lanes have gone or been renamed and the old shops have gone. Changes came in the way shopping was done, with the arrival of city centre supermarkets, while the lanes were replaced with new housing. Yet she thinks that Spring Lane has basically remained unchanged; she remembers that there was an orchard behind the lane, which was replaced by Glen Rovers GAA club.
She comments on Blackpool Post office, about which there has been a local dispute; she mentions that one site of the post office had been the home of Thomas MacCurtain, Mayor of Cork, who had been shot during the War of Independence. She mentions Madden’s Buildings as being among the oldest social housing in Cork, built in 1885 [1886].
She comments that demolishing Blackpool’s lanes meant removing people and that its community spirit declined as a result; she notes the arrival of immigrants.
She grew up in a row of cottages that she believes dated back to the Seventeenth Century. People rented their houses until the 1950s, when they began to buy them. In the 1970s, the area bounded both the city and the countryside. It was also an industrial area, with Goulding’s fertilizer factory and Ellis’s gravel yard. During the 1950s men queued at Gouldings looking for casual work.
She lists the games and pastimes she played as a child: catching stones, marbles (‘glassy allies’) and scraps (scrapbooks). She names the lanes around Thomas Davis Avenue, which residents called by its old name, Foster’s Lane. Neighbours looked out for each other’s children and for each other.
She tells a story about looking for apples at the Ellis family house, nearby.
The Lido cinema in Blackpool showed episodic films, which she loved to see with her grandmother; she describes the seating inside.
She talks about how Blackpool has changed, and how the lanes have gone or been renamed and the old shops have gone. Changes came in the way shopping was done, with the arrival of city centre supermarkets, while the lanes were replaced with new housing. Yet she thinks that Spring Lane has basically remained unchanged; she remembers that there was an orchard behind the lane, which was replaced by Glen Rovers GAA club.
She comments on Blackpool Post office, about which there has been a local dispute; she mentions that one site of the post office had been the home of Thomas MacCurtain, Mayor of Cork, who had been shot during the War of Independence. She mentions Madden’s Buildings as being among the oldest social housing in Cork, built in 1885 [1886].
She comments that demolishing Blackpool’s lanes meant removing people and that its community spirit declined as a result; she notes the arrival of immigrants.
Date
16 April 2008
Identifier
CFP_SR00328_sheehan_2008
Coverage
Cork: Ireland; 1950s-2000s.
Relation
As Interviewee: CFP00328, CFP00387, CFP00388.
As Interviewer: CFP00389_Healy, CFP00396_Lane, CFP00398_Jones, CFP00399_Savile, CFP00401_Marshall, CFP00402_Marshall, CFP00450_Dwyer, CFP00480_Cremin
As Interviewer: CFP00389_Healy, CFP00396_Lane, CFP00398_Jones, CFP00399_Savile, CFP00401_Marshall, CFP00402_Marshall, CFP00450_Dwyer, CFP00480_Cremin
Interviewee
Interviewer
Duration
52m 43s
Location
Blackpool, Cork.
Original Format
MiniDisc
Bit Rate/Frequency
16bit / 44.1kHz
Transcription
The following is a short extract from the interview transcript, copyright of the Cork Folklore Project. If you wish to access further archival material for this interview or other interviews please contact CFP, folklorearchive@gmail.com
BS ‘Twould depend now on whether I was very very close to my grandmother so my mother was a very bad cook even though my father was a cook in the army so I suppose that compensated a bit but she was a very bad cook. But then I learned from a very young age that my grandmother, my grandmother was a great cook, so my grandmother lived in Farranree in St.Michael’s Road, so I would go from school maybe at half-past twelve to my grandmother’s house, for my dinner and then I’d go back to school then for two o’clock and I think we’d finish at half past three.
Then I’d come home and then I’d have, I suppose we’d play on the road for a while. We’d do our homework. That time we had no television so a lot of our activities would have been outdoors, you know, we would have been maybe on the street until maybe half eight, nine o’clock in the evening playing games.
S HG What type of games would you play?
B S I suppose when I was kind of maybe ten, eleven, twelve, we would have been playing, it would have varied, there would have been boys games and girls games. You know girls would have played skipping now and we would have been, there was a game we used to call, I can’t remember what we used to call it but we would get five small little stones that would have been very smooth so you’d throw one up and while that’s coming down, you’d try and catch the one that’s below, until eventually, you’d catch the five, you’d have the whole five in the palm of your hand. We’d have marbles that you’d, you know you’d put up against the kerb of a footpath and we used to call ‘em glassie allies and you’d get those in all different shapes and colours they were. They were lovely glass marbles and you know they’d reflect colours and everything in ‘em. So you’d have to hit one, so if you, if you managed to hit one you won it. But if you lost then and you didn’t hit it, you forfeited your marble.
We’d have scraps, that time you could buy scraps like they, they were like for all the world, they were paper but they were shiny paper if you know what I mean of all different shapes and you could get circus animals, you could get anything at all in the scraps so we’d swap those, and we’d have copy books then and we’d have all our scraps in the copybooks.
We’d play chasing, then we had a game where, I can’t remember the name of it, but we’d like say stand at the footpath and run, where I lived now there was no houses opposite me, like there was the wall of the factory, which would have been Gouldings and that wall would have ran the whole length of Spring Lane, so opposite our house we just had the wall, a big wall, so we would run from there to the wall, but you’d be told stop. So you could take so many steps and stop and whoever would reach the wall first would be the winner of the game, you know. So that’s what we did to occupy ourselves.
I was sixteen, I think when we got a television and we were the first on the road to get a television. And it was in black and white, we had one station and everybody in the road came in, to look at the television. So.
S HG And just to go back, you mention the pocket money you’d get for you’d save it from the bus, what would you spend your pocket money on?
B S I would spend my pocket money on whatever would last longest and I would, that was something that I really thought out, I didn’t spend it now stupidly. I would buy Cleeves Toffee which was, it was like squares of toffee but you would buy it in a bar, for all the world now, it would be like a Cadburys bar of chocolate but instead of it being chocolate, it would be toffee where you could break off one square at a time, so I think that was around sixpence and that would last you for a long time. But as a result like that had, we didn’t realise going back that time about you know the danger of sweets or sugary foods with your teeth so I lost a lot of my teeth when I, before I was eighteen and it was over, over the Cleeves Toffee. [laughs]
S HG [laughs] Where would you buy your toffee? Was there a sweet shop or?
B S Oh there would have been lots of shops. When I was growing up in Blackpool, Thomas Davis Street was all shops. Like it was residential and commercial but it was mainly commercial. There would have been, the main street would have been mainly commercial but off the main street then which was Thomas Davis Street, you’d lots of laneways. You would have had Bird’s Quay, Welshs Lane, Green Lane, Slattery's Lane and Fosters Lane which would have been renamed and it would have been called Thomas Davis Avenue after we got our independence but nobody locally referred to it as Thomas Davis Avenue, we always called it Fosters Lane. And on the other side of the street then, you would have Prosperous Place and you would have Wherlands Lane and there was Haylans Lane as well. There was Corcoran's Quay.
So you had the commercial main street but you had all these laneways running off the street and running parallel then to Thomas Davis Street would have been, what we would have called locally as the High Bank. It was, it was part of the Glen, it was the Glen River, the Glen river ran through Gouldings Glen and came down behind Spring Lane, behind Gouldings and down, running parallel with Thomas Davis Street so that would have been a place where we would have played as well because it, you had stream, it was a bank for all the world and you had a stream running down the side. Growing up we were very lucky, as I said we were very near the country at that time and we had Gouldings Glen which is literally on our doorstep so Gouldings Glen was like kind of set in a valley, and you know you had the Glen River running through so you could swim there in the summer. Oh, you could, you’d spend hours up there, you know in a glen you’d have great fun.
S HG Would a lot of families go down to take their children or would children just go down to play or?
B S Oh, we’d play there on our own, that’s a thing now that has changed as well, you couldn’t leave children out today and especially going to, what would have been really a very lonely place looking back on it, to us it was tranquil and it was a fantastic place like to play you know, because there was all high furze bushes, now I don’t know what the proper name for those would be, but they would have been, you could hide and play, you had the streams and you could be, you know running over the streams.
It was great and also we had another stream, not very far from us as well, it was Ellis’ House, Ellis’, I told you about Ellis gravel yard, but they had a house, not very far from us, and running by their house as well was another stream. I don’t know the name of that stream.
S HG How would you, you said children could go off and play on their own back when you were growing up, how would you compare that to today in terms of safety and you know leaving your child go off to the shop or is that even possible?
B S It is possible to a degree. Today now it is possible to a degree to leave children out, where I live now at the moment which wouldn’t have been very far from where I was reared, I live now in Dublin Hill. And children are always playing in Dublin Hill on the streets, and it is quite safe and they could go to the shop as well, but to leave them go off out to somewhere in the country, you know what would be regarded now as the country and to leave them go into woods, you know that wouldn’t be safe.
You know, I think even I was more nervous even when my own children. Even though I did it as a child and we all did and it was quite safe even when my own children were growing up, you would have been more wary. They were allowed to go but they always had to have older children with them, like maybe somebody twelve, thirteen minding the smaller ones but today now again that wouldn’t be safe.
S HG And going back as well to the old laneways, can you just describe those laneways and what sort of activities that take place?
B S I suppose as a child, you take things for granted and you don’t really take in much about what’s going on around you, you just take it for granted, but the laneways in Blackpool, I suppose they would have been very similar to Spring Lane only Spring Lane like was a very very long lane, you know, Spring Lane like went from Thomas Davis Street right up to, to where actually to where the fire station is now, on the new ring road, the new north ring road, Spring Lane would have ran parallel with that the whole way up nearly as far as there. Whereas with the laneways in Blackpool, they were much shorter little laneways and I’d say they were, they were communities. I’d say the neighbours were very neighbourly as they were in Spring Lane.
I can only compare the laneways now I suppose to my own laneway and in our own laneway, if a child came home and there happened to be nobody at home, the neighbour always brought you in and cared for you. If you were sick the neighbour was always sent for to come in and diagnose what was wrong with you. Just looking back on it, I thought it was normal at the time but looking back on it was very very unusual, we had a family that lived next door to us, and they were a large family because both, both parents had been widowed, and with, had lost their partners and they had remarried so in a sense there was like three families.
There was the woman’s family and the man’s family, and then their family together, so they would have had, the bread man used to come around that time, well I don’t know if the bread man goes around now, but that time the bread man would come around and her windows, she had two windows, she had a window at either side of her door, and the two window sills would have been full of bread. Now all homemade bread, so if I came home from school or if my mother wasn’t there and I’d, there was no bread, I’d go out and I’d have a look at what kind of bread they’d have on the window and she’d have all different varieties of bread so I would choose what loaf that I would, that I would fancy and I would take it in and then when my mother would come in, oh I’d say to my mom, mom I took a loaf of bread belong to next door. So we’d be sent to the shop then to get it to replace it, but you know, thinking about it that woman never ever objected to me going out and taking a loaf of her bread. You couldn’t do that today, you know.
S HG Its amazing the difference in the.
B S Yeah, you couldn’t do that today. And you know you could have a neighbour up the road that would maybe, we had one single neighbour up the road now, and if she cooked a stew for herself and she’d cooked too much, she’d come down with her big jug and all the stew in it for us, you know, because like I suppose my father’s wages weren’t very good and like, there was, we were a large family but it was a different world, you know, totally different world to what it is now.
BS ‘Twould depend now on whether I was very very close to my grandmother so my mother was a very bad cook even though my father was a cook in the army so I suppose that compensated a bit but she was a very bad cook. But then I learned from a very young age that my grandmother, my grandmother was a great cook, so my grandmother lived in Farranree in St.Michael’s Road, so I would go from school maybe at half-past twelve to my grandmother’s house, for my dinner and then I’d go back to school then for two o’clock and I think we’d finish at half past three.
Then I’d come home and then I’d have, I suppose we’d play on the road for a while. We’d do our homework. That time we had no television so a lot of our activities would have been outdoors, you know, we would have been maybe on the street until maybe half eight, nine o’clock in the evening playing games.
S HG What type of games would you play?
B S I suppose when I was kind of maybe ten, eleven, twelve, we would have been playing, it would have varied, there would have been boys games and girls games. You know girls would have played skipping now and we would have been, there was a game we used to call, I can’t remember what we used to call it but we would get five small little stones that would have been very smooth so you’d throw one up and while that’s coming down, you’d try and catch the one that’s below, until eventually, you’d catch the five, you’d have the whole five in the palm of your hand. We’d have marbles that you’d, you know you’d put up against the kerb of a footpath and we used to call ‘em glassie allies and you’d get those in all different shapes and colours they were. They were lovely glass marbles and you know they’d reflect colours and everything in ‘em. So you’d have to hit one, so if you, if you managed to hit one you won it. But if you lost then and you didn’t hit it, you forfeited your marble.
We’d have scraps, that time you could buy scraps like they, they were like for all the world, they were paper but they were shiny paper if you know what I mean of all different shapes and you could get circus animals, you could get anything at all in the scraps so we’d swap those, and we’d have copy books then and we’d have all our scraps in the copybooks.
We’d play chasing, then we had a game where, I can’t remember the name of it, but we’d like say stand at the footpath and run, where I lived now there was no houses opposite me, like there was the wall of the factory, which would have been Gouldings and that wall would have ran the whole length of Spring Lane, so opposite our house we just had the wall, a big wall, so we would run from there to the wall, but you’d be told stop. So you could take so many steps and stop and whoever would reach the wall first would be the winner of the game, you know. So that’s what we did to occupy ourselves.
I was sixteen, I think when we got a television and we were the first on the road to get a television. And it was in black and white, we had one station and everybody in the road came in, to look at the television. So.
S HG And just to go back, you mention the pocket money you’d get for you’d save it from the bus, what would you spend your pocket money on?
B S I would spend my pocket money on whatever would last longest and I would, that was something that I really thought out, I didn’t spend it now stupidly. I would buy Cleeves Toffee which was, it was like squares of toffee but you would buy it in a bar, for all the world now, it would be like a Cadburys bar of chocolate but instead of it being chocolate, it would be toffee where you could break off one square at a time, so I think that was around sixpence and that would last you for a long time. But as a result like that had, we didn’t realise going back that time about you know the danger of sweets or sugary foods with your teeth so I lost a lot of my teeth when I, before I was eighteen and it was over, over the Cleeves Toffee. [laughs]
S HG [laughs] Where would you buy your toffee? Was there a sweet shop or?
B S Oh there would have been lots of shops. When I was growing up in Blackpool, Thomas Davis Street was all shops. Like it was residential and commercial but it was mainly commercial. There would have been, the main street would have been mainly commercial but off the main street then which was Thomas Davis Street, you’d lots of laneways. You would have had Bird’s Quay, Welshs Lane, Green Lane, Slattery's Lane and Fosters Lane which would have been renamed and it would have been called Thomas Davis Avenue after we got our independence but nobody locally referred to it as Thomas Davis Avenue, we always called it Fosters Lane. And on the other side of the street then, you would have Prosperous Place and you would have Wherlands Lane and there was Haylans Lane as well. There was Corcoran's Quay.
So you had the commercial main street but you had all these laneways running off the street and running parallel then to Thomas Davis Street would have been, what we would have called locally as the High Bank. It was, it was part of the Glen, it was the Glen River, the Glen river ran through Gouldings Glen and came down behind Spring Lane, behind Gouldings and down, running parallel with Thomas Davis Street so that would have been a place where we would have played as well because it, you had stream, it was a bank for all the world and you had a stream running down the side. Growing up we were very lucky, as I said we were very near the country at that time and we had Gouldings Glen which is literally on our doorstep so Gouldings Glen was like kind of set in a valley, and you know you had the Glen River running through so you could swim there in the summer. Oh, you could, you’d spend hours up there, you know in a glen you’d have great fun.
S HG Would a lot of families go down to take their children or would children just go down to play or?
B S Oh, we’d play there on our own, that’s a thing now that has changed as well, you couldn’t leave children out today and especially going to, what would have been really a very lonely place looking back on it, to us it was tranquil and it was a fantastic place like to play you know, because there was all high furze bushes, now I don’t know what the proper name for those would be, but they would have been, you could hide and play, you had the streams and you could be, you know running over the streams.
It was great and also we had another stream, not very far from us as well, it was Ellis’ House, Ellis’, I told you about Ellis gravel yard, but they had a house, not very far from us, and running by their house as well was another stream. I don’t know the name of that stream.
S HG How would you, you said children could go off and play on their own back when you were growing up, how would you compare that to today in terms of safety and you know leaving your child go off to the shop or is that even possible?
B S It is possible to a degree. Today now it is possible to a degree to leave children out, where I live now at the moment which wouldn’t have been very far from where I was reared, I live now in Dublin Hill. And children are always playing in Dublin Hill on the streets, and it is quite safe and they could go to the shop as well, but to leave them go off out to somewhere in the country, you know what would be regarded now as the country and to leave them go into woods, you know that wouldn’t be safe.
You know, I think even I was more nervous even when my own children. Even though I did it as a child and we all did and it was quite safe even when my own children were growing up, you would have been more wary. They were allowed to go but they always had to have older children with them, like maybe somebody twelve, thirteen minding the smaller ones but today now again that wouldn’t be safe.
S HG And going back as well to the old laneways, can you just describe those laneways and what sort of activities that take place?
B S I suppose as a child, you take things for granted and you don’t really take in much about what’s going on around you, you just take it for granted, but the laneways in Blackpool, I suppose they would have been very similar to Spring Lane only Spring Lane like was a very very long lane, you know, Spring Lane like went from Thomas Davis Street right up to, to where actually to where the fire station is now, on the new ring road, the new north ring road, Spring Lane would have ran parallel with that the whole way up nearly as far as there. Whereas with the laneways in Blackpool, they were much shorter little laneways and I’d say they were, they were communities. I’d say the neighbours were very neighbourly as they were in Spring Lane.
I can only compare the laneways now I suppose to my own laneway and in our own laneway, if a child came home and there happened to be nobody at home, the neighbour always brought you in and cared for you. If you were sick the neighbour was always sent for to come in and diagnose what was wrong with you. Just looking back on it, I thought it was normal at the time but looking back on it was very very unusual, we had a family that lived next door to us, and they were a large family because both, both parents had been widowed, and with, had lost their partners and they had remarried so in a sense there was like three families.
There was the woman’s family and the man’s family, and then their family together, so they would have had, the bread man used to come around that time, well I don’t know if the bread man goes around now, but that time the bread man would come around and her windows, she had two windows, she had a window at either side of her door, and the two window sills would have been full of bread. Now all homemade bread, so if I came home from school or if my mother wasn’t there and I’d, there was no bread, I’d go out and I’d have a look at what kind of bread they’d have on the window and she’d have all different varieties of bread so I would choose what loaf that I would, that I would fancy and I would take it in and then when my mother would come in, oh I’d say to my mom, mom I took a loaf of bread belong to next door. So we’d be sent to the shop then to get it to replace it, but you know, thinking about it that woman never ever objected to me going out and taking a loaf of her bread. You couldn’t do that today, you know.
S HG Its amazing the difference in the.
B S Yeah, you couldn’t do that today. And you know you could have a neighbour up the road that would maybe, we had one single neighbour up the road now, and if she cooked a stew for herself and she’d cooked too much, she’d come down with her big jug and all the stew in it for us, you know, because like I suppose my father’s wages weren’t very good and like, there was, we were a large family but it was a different world, you know, totally different world to what it is now.
Citation
“Breda Sheehan: Blackpool, Childhood games, Lido cinema, Spring Lane.,” accessed April 23, 2024, https://corkfolklore.org/archivecatalolgue/document/4.