When I was a young lad, my dad’s best friend was Sean Turner. They both worked at Johnstown Castle, which was just a few miles from our home place, and was the headquarters of the Irish Agricultural Research Institute. Dad and Sean were lab technicians at the time. Above them the chain of command was pretty loose. Their direct boss was a man named Peter Murphy who, like many at the institute, had a PhD in agriculture. At another time I may recount how the PhD became a requisite precursor for early demise in Johnstown of the 1970s, but let’s leave it at that for now. Around 1973 Dr. Peter decided that he was off to the US to do post-doc research, so he took a fellowship for two years in Kansas. He disappeared without giving the two boyos in his charge even a goodbye, let alone any instructions, and so, for that two-year period, the two were basically left to their own devices — footloose and fancy-free as Dad would say.
Besides practical jokes which were elaborately planned and carried out like a TV production, they taught themselves Italian, specifically to write an Italian Opera. Which they completed and tried to produce for the Wexford (light) Opera Festival — unsuccessfully it turned out. But that didn’t greatly impact their enjoyment of a truly relaxing work life — 9 to 5. But not so relaxed before and after work — at their real jobs as farmers on small farms and fathers with not so small families.
The reason I recount the story so far is because Sean Turner, in his younger days, was a very fine footballer — and was one of the few Wexford men who ever played for Leinster and in a prestigious tournament between Ireland’s four provinces: Ulster, Munster, Leinster and Connaught, known as the Railway Cup. And in those days, the Railway Cup final was played on Saint Patrick’s Day, and always in the rain.
Well, in their day, the other Wexford man who was selected a Railway Cup player was Willie Goodison. Willie was not a friend of my father’s — as my father was not a sports participant, having a mother who highly valued labor including his — but still an acquaintance. And Willie, as successful sportsmen of the day ofttimes did, had a Public House of his own. This was Goodison’s Shop and Bar — The Sportsman’s Inn, I think — in Bishopswater. Bread by day and Brews and Boxing by night. Bishopswater was and still is an older section of working Wexford town, just up the road from Pierce’s factory where my grandfather worked when he ‘retired’ from the British Navy a few years after WW1.
Pierce’s, long gone by the time of this winding story, was the town’s big employer back in the day. It was a cast shop as well as a forge, and made crude — in contrast to refined — machines and specialty parts, all the way from farm equipment such as plows and harrows to hubcaps for lorries. Incidentally — and because I’m off on a tangent already — my grandfather ended up building his own furnace in the back garden of 17 School Street, which was about big enough to swing a cat, and butted up to the Wall of Wexford. The town wall first built by the Vikings around 850 AD and rebuilt by the Normans around 1200 AD — it didn’t much slow down Cromwell or for that matter any later invaders, but being about 12 feet high, it was still formidable to a pig. And my grandmother kept two sows and a fair few chickens back there, where the chickens kept watch and the pigs ran security.
There, in his furnace, and after work at Pierce’s, my grandfather made hubcaps for cars and small trucks — when hubcaps were still a thing. His furnace would only handle brass and bronze — softer metals. He couldn’t get the heat up to work with cast iron without burning down the shed and probably roasting the pigs in the process.
I’ve got so many tangents running now. I need to get back on point with Willie’s pub.
Well, as some pubs did — at least in boxing towns like Wexford and Drogheda, funnily enough both christened in blood by Cromwell back in 1649, the town walls of both being an inadequate deterrent — Willie’s place had a full-size boxing ring known as ‘the ring beyond the bar.’
So, now you have the larger context, I have a body drop story about Willie’s pub. I must’ve been 17, and there was a fight I needed to participate in — set for Willie’s ring on a Saturday around five. For some reason I didn’t ride the bike, and as Dad dropped me off outside the pub he asked, “What are you up to in there?” I said, “It’s a Kung Fu thing.” “Right enough,” he said, and headed on. The parents thought I was mad anyway, as I’d be training and stretching in the kitchen from about ten to midnight every night, the AGA cooker keeping the temperature up almost to Bikram levels.
Kickboxing events in our day were elementary. We didn’t have belt or grades or body-weight categories or age categories — none of that. So I was up against some lad from Carlow or Kilkenny. I don’t remember too much because it was long ago — and he definitely knocked me out to end the contest — because I remember waking up, or you might say reviving, out back of the pub beside the rubbish bins, where the boys had pulled me out to get some fresh air.
Anyway. That’s one of my earlier body drops — a very different type of body drop altogether.
Paul Reynolds
Two Suns Rising