Nine decades of memories keep Kevin talking

KEVIN Stapleton lived and worked for 46 of his 90 years in England. Resident in Ennis since his return to Ireland in 1989, the Kilkee man has a reservoir of anecdotes and tales, which he doesn’t need much encouragement to divulge. Even his birth in 1922 had a tragic twist to it.

“I was born in Limerick but I was in Kilkee at nine weeks old. My mother died at birth, so I never saw her,” he recounts sadly.

Kevin and his twin brother, Thomas, were reared by their grandmother, Bridget Stapleton, whom they thought of as their mother. She was a woman with straightforward convictions as evidenced by Kevin’s name change around the time of his confirmation. It turns out his name is not really Kevin.

“When I was christened, I was christened Bartholomew Stapleton. When I got confirmed, my grandmother added Kevin because she said it was too much of a mouthful to be called Bartholomew.

So if anybody here in Ennis, down in Kilkee or anywhere else was looking for Bartholomew Stapleton, you couldn’t find him because the name was Kevin,” he explains.

The twins’ father, who was a Kilkee man, remarried in Limerick so they were reared in Circular Road, by the seaside, in West Clare.

“We lived next door to Nurse O’Connell. Her husband was a guard, with the green flag, in the West Clare Railway. The station master’s name then was Mr Honan. The station was about 150 yards from Kilkee GAA field going towards Circular Road. It used to go out to Moyasta. You’d see the steam of it as it approached,” Kevin reveals.

“I made a few shillings from the West Clare Railway. It used to come in every evening at about half six. We used to go up with the ass and car and hope to get some bags to take over to the lodgings that were there then,” he recalls.

Decades later, Kevin can almost smell fair day in Kilkee. “Sometimes you’d have good oul’ craic on fair day. We’d get up at six o’clock in the morning and go out towards Carrigaholt. You’d meet people coming in with the cattle because the cattle fair used to be around the street. You’d get two or three bob off the farmer. It was handy for them to have an extra hand stopping the cattle. It was the same with pig fairs,” he says.

Kevin finished school at 14 and had to scratch a living out before emigration reared its inevitable head.

“I got to the age then where I started to work. I worked for Clare County Council in Tullaher bog cutting the turf, saving it and putting it out. That was around 1939 or 1940. They used to carry it in lorries down to the West Clare Railway and pack all the turf in. I don’t know where it went off to. As well as that, you might get a couple of weeks in Haugh’s Quarry on the Dunlickey Road. Then at Christmas time, you’d get two weeks’ Christmas grant. But there was no work and no money about either. The pint was 10 pence a pint,” he remembers, shaking his head in disbelief.

He recalls spending a short period of time in Limerick before joining the labour force in Kilkee. “The father got me up to Sexton Street College in Limerick. I went there for a while but I don’t know for how long. One day I got money for books from the stepmother. She was a good woman but my father and my grandmother didn’t get on together.

“The grandmother had sisters in Limerick and I used to go up and down there. They told me that if I got the money for the books, ‘go away down to Kilkee for yourself’. So when I got the money for the books I came back down to Kilkee. I was lost in Limerick. From there on, I did what I could for the grandmother,” Kevin says.

By Kevin’s account, life in West Clare was more colourful in the 1930s than is the case today. “Before I left there was a great boxing club in Kilkee and there was also a greyhound track. I was one of the lads in the white coat with the dog. The vet, Tubridy, used to look at the muzzles and the ears on the dog.

“The track was behind the Olympia. In other words, up in Merton Square at the back. Dan Falvey was over it. He owned the Royal Marine and the West End Hotel. Himself and Paddy ‘Con’ McMahon from Ennis ran the dog track,” Kevin adds.

The town was even on the world sporting stage in the 1930s. “While I was there, I saw the world wrestling championship fight. The two that were fighting were Dan O’Mahony from Balldehob and Charlie Strack from some part of America. I was passing up by the Marine Hotel later on in the night and I saw the two of them in the bar.”

Gaelic footballers in the area had quite a choice of who to play for. “As far as I could see, we had five football teams in the area. We had Kilballyowen, Doonaha, Blackweir, Kilkee and St Kee’s. St Kee’s was run by Marty Marrinan and Kilkee was run by the Foran’s. I was with St Kee’s but my uncle, Gerard, played with Kilkee. He was a lifeguard down on the strand,” he recalls.

His days were numbered in Kilkee however. The boat to England had a spot for Kevin. “I had to go. I didn’t have a job. These bits of jobs were in the summer time. I was 21. Five or six of us used to stand down at Kent’s Corner. That’s where Haugh’s is now. Then there was the hole in the wall where the fairground is now. There was a bit of a wall that would block the wind from coming up. Then there was Brew’s Corner. That was our side of Kilkee. The other side of Kilkee was up in Stella Maris,” he says wistfully.

All too soon, those carefree days were behind him. “At a quarter to nine of a September morning in 1943, I got on a bus outside Scott’s [in Kilkee]. We were met in Dublin by an agent and brought to a hostel. There were three or four of us in the one bed. There was a movement all the time of people back and forth to England. The next morning we were away for Dun Laoghaire to the boat. We landed over in Holyhead. Of course, it was all blackout then in the evening time,” he vividly remembers.

“That time, when I emigrated, it was like going to Australia because it took you 24 hours to get to London from Kilkee. When you left here for London, it would take a fortnight before you could get a letter from London to home.”

On his arrival in England, Kevin was first fumigated and then showered, before being brought down to Taunton in Somerset near an airforce flying field.

“I was working for John Laing [Civil Engineering]. We had a camp there. We were on about two shillings an hour and you got your lodgings. We were there a few days and the next thing we were moved. We were brought down to a place called Truro in Cornwall.”

Kevin remembers his time in Cornwall very clearly. “A blanket silence came over the whole place. Letterboxes were closed and no letters would go out or in. That was the time they were getting ready for the Normandy Landings. In effect, I was at the start of the clearance of a big dump going down to the river. There were Americans there clearing all the fields and making slipways for the invasion barges. The Yanks were great people to be with,” he maintains.

Around this time, Kevin met a man who became a great friend and whom he travelled England with in search of work.

“I went around with a chap from Labasheeda. He was an Errol Flynn mark two. A fine man. He had a farm out in Labasheeda. Charlie O’Donoghue was his name. We were two mates together travelling the country for the work. We were never out of work,” Kevin says.

“Charlie would be as old as me now. What I miss is meeting the blokes I used to work with. Charlie was with me up in Cumbria. There were about 5,000 Irish fellas working there. There was a pub across the road. It couldn’t be any better could it? One night I came home after the shift and wasn’t there a bloke on my bed with rubber boots on and half a bottle of whiskey alongside him. I couldn’t wake him up. That’s the kind of a place it was. T’was tough,” he smiles.

Kevin’s twin, Thomas, was also an emigrant. He worked in the coal mines in Burnley. Kevin, meanwhile, continued to travel across England in search of employment. He still has memories of sleeping “under a cock of hay” near Luton.

“We got up the next morning and got the bus to Luton. We went into the labour exchange and we got a job in Farley Hill estate. There were two or three Kilkee blokes there, the Lardners. One of them was a ganger man,” he says, before detailing how he also worked in an asbestos factory for three months near Slough.

Kevin married his first wife Glennis (RIP) 62 years ago. She passed away while they were visiting Kilkee in 1985. He subsequently married Philomena, who lives in Ennis with him.

Work-wise, Kevin left the building sector in 1957. “I thought I’d go in to Firestone Tyre Company in Brentford and try and get a job in there. There was good money in there but hard work. I stayed there 10 years. That was a hard place to work. When you finished you had to go for a shower because you were all black from the rubber. It was all raw rubber going down into hot plates,” he grimaces.

Luckily, he subsequently worked in a “handier number” with what was then called British European Airways, now British Airways.

“T’was beautiful. I did 20 years of nights there – 10.30pm until 7am but some nights you’d get away at 4am. The aircraft would come in for tyre changes. I was an odd job man. There were plenty of us there. We used to clean up the inside of the planes. Then I got to go on the towing crew, which used to bring the planes in,” he says, adding that he retired in 1987, returning to Ireland two years later.

Family-wise, the number of his descendants are mounting up. “I’ve six or seven grandchildren and 12 or 14 great-grandchildren,” Kevin calculates.

Throughout his long life, his love of GAA has never left him, to the extent that he regularly tried to pick up the Radio Éireann signal in the UK in an effort to stay in touch with what was happening on the GAA fields.

A few years ago, his passion for Clare GAA had him protesting alone, with a placard, outside a Clare County Board meeting.

“I was outside the West County on my own because I thought that the football was going nowhere – the same circus but different clowns. That’s what I said. Now we’re going at it again,” he believes, referring to the current county football managerial vacancy.

Kevin has lived a varied and eventful life. Yet, when he dwells on it, love of his native heath surfaces regularly. He fondly reminisces about seemingly innocuous elements of life in Kilkee 80 years ago.

“There used to be lads at Dixon’s Corner, across from the train station, tossing up the ha’pennies. We’d be up there watching them. They might win half a crown or two shillings,” he said, marvelling at the simplicity of those poignant memories.