Tag: Ballymena

A Bed of Silage

In the photograph below, taken in summer 1957, my father stands on the bed of silage, legs akimbo, hands on his hips, looking knowledgeable, he hopes, while to the left, my grandfather in his show-day suit, shirt and tie, observes this farm innovation on hitherto unseen industrial-scale agriculture. Both men wear hats. The third man is Gerard McGuckian of AA McGuckian’s Ltd at their 700-acre farm near Antrim. Granda is making plans to take this new idea back to the Free State. In the lower picture, you would be forgiven today, thinking he could be checking his phone, but more likely he is making a note or filling his pipe with that crooked finger the child on his knee thought was permanently bent for the purpose.

My father, Tommy McWilliams, was a bread-man, and as far as I know, his farming experience was limited to his family’s Ballymena town allotment; and maybe to picking spuds in the surrounding farms. His father-in-law of six years, Richard Davis, had a collection of small hungry farms in North Leitrim, insignificant by comparison to the McGuckian’s spread on the fertile shores of Lough Neagh. However, in Leitrim, granda was a progressive farmer and built the first silage pit there.

Granda was impressed with the scope of his son-in-law’s contacts, and by a progressive Northern Ireland. Daddy was chuffed with the day’s work, though I’ve no idea how he made contact with the operators of such a large farm. It was most likely coincidence that the Special Reporter from the Farmer and Stockbreeder visited on the same day as they posed for the camera. It’s also my guess it was during the 12th fortnight when Daddy got his annual holidays, and granda and granny were on their one and only visit to Ballymena after the recent birth of Nigel, then few months old.

Nigel asked me recently if I had a copy of a picture he recalled seeing among the various family records. If it was anywhere, I had it. He was right. The scanned 1957 newspaper article with these pictures was easily found and emailed to his small olive farm in Spain within an hour of asking. The Special Reporter – no name was used –  was likely drawn to the novel self-feed silage system for wintered stock, and the fact that the cattle lay on A Bed of Silage.

About 1975, after finishing a course at Greenmount College, Nigel landed a job with agitech company, Masstock, which had been set up on this same Antrim farm by the next generation of McGuckians, Paddy and Alistair.  They had a contract to develop dairy farming and milk and yoghurt sales in Saudi Arabia. These were large irrigation-based units, technology- and investment-heavy.

Nigel was one of the first two Irish workers joining the operations manager on their base in Durma, west of Riyadh.  Two years later, the first milk flowed from the imported cows.

Presently, Nigel and Angelika work a small olive farm and their Airbnb southwest of Seville; Nigel has retained enough Arabic to get on well with many people of North African extraction who work in the olive and soft fruit industry there.

The connection between the farming article, with its pictures of my father and grandfather, and Nigel appears to be another coincidence.

The Masstock staff and workers who went out to those arid lands are planning a 50-year reunion, hence the interest in a copy of this rare reportage on an earlier McGuckian enterprise.

Back in 1957, my grandfather’s silage pit at Boggaun was the first in the area. After a couple of disastrous attempts at silage making, it lay unused for many years, built with a design flaw. Had he waited, it would have incorporated sloping sides that ensured the rush-covered grassy heap compacted and didn’t rot. As youngsters, we played in the empty concrete galley. Our Uncle Cecil later used it with a plastic cover, not available until the mid-1960s, to make middling silage from his fields with shallow, dauby soils.

My father remained a bread server and retired to live happily near my granda’s place, care-taking Nigel’s farm while he continued to work in Saudi Arabia.

Masstock Systems and McGuckian brothers expanded their agribusiness beyond Saudi Arabia and in 2008 Masstock was bought out by Irish agribusiness company Origin. The milk and dairy industry did little to liberalise Saudi Arabia.

Nigel and the young men and women who went to Saudi Arabia working in the scorching desert, turning some of it green, living with restricted movement and no – limited? – alcohol, made the best of it; as I hope they will at their reunion.

A full version of the Farmer and Stockbreeder article is available on request.

PDF version here.

Loose Ends.

This blog arose from previous family history posts, a few loose ends that had puzzled me. The first two of these are tidied up with the answers that were in plain sight, I hadn’t realised their significance. The last is perhaps frivolous.

Firstly, I only recently realised that both my parents grew up in families dealing with the consequences of their collapsed family enterprises.

Hugh McWilliams, paternal grandfather, had a thriving coach-building business which collapsed with the rise of the motor car.

Richard and Annie Davis’s County Leitrim family was thrown into a crisis of debt when Richard’s business partner absconded to North America with the assets of their cattle business.

These early decades of the 1900s saw major political tension and flux, which culminated in Irish independence and partition. While both families were Unionist, with connections to the Orange Order, they ended up on either side of the new border.

Each family adapted to changed circumstances. Hugh and Lizzie abandoned their home and Hugh’s workshop for a smaller two-up two-down house. Hugh went out to work as a jobbing carpenter, and it was said that he became somewhat of a recluse. Richard and Annie’s family was deeply in debt for many years, finally reclaiming the last of the mortgaged farm in the 1940s. These decades proved exacting for the growing family of nine, compounded by the loss of toddler Maureen in 1923 and Herbert at nineteen in 1939. Despite their prosperous-looking two-story slated house overlooking a main road, neighbours could easily tell the family was in dire straits, and spending had been cut to the bone.

The second insight was that Robert McWilliams, my great-grandfather’s second marriage in 1867, noted as a civil marriage that could have been in a registry office, was to Eliza Bamber, fifteen years his junior. Eliza was pregnant at the time and Ann, their first child, was born four months later. Ann died of TB at the age of nineteen.

Is this a likely explanation of my Aunt Martha’s single acknowledgement of him with a shake of her head and a look of disgust? And the reason for our strongly Presbyterian family’s disinterest in their ancestors and relations? Were they ashamed of their past? Nothing is known of Robert’s first marriage or how it ended.

James Boyle, writing in 1834 in the Ordinance Survey Memoirs says: Ballymena people are a rather moral race – though the number of public houses there being 107, would lead one to suspect otherwise – they are indeed fond of whiskey and too many indulge in it. On Saturday evenings the number of drunkards on the streets is disgraceful, but they are mostly from the country.

Robert was from the country. He moved into Ballymena following his second marriage and joined Second Ballymena Presbyterian Church, where I suspect he became an earnest member, and raised his family in strict faith and observance.

Robert and Eliza’s church, second building on the right, when they moved to Ballymena after their marriage in 1867, living a short walk away in Alexander Street.

The major expansion of all churches in Ireland and beyond during the mid 1800s was driven by zeal to rescue the general populace from sin and immorality, mainly drunkenness and promiscuity. Shame and guilt proved significant drivers of the increase in church numbers and the subsequent period of new church building. Robert and Eliza were among these new converts.

Lastly, a memory from my grandfather’s knee, where Granny often fed me buttered bread with sugar. One evening, Granda raised a finger to one nostril and blew some offending material out the other and into the wide hearth. Funny how some things stay with you.

So, what it this called? – blowing mucus, snot, down one nostril. It’s common among farmers and outdoor workers, among cyclists and runners. A male thing, perhaps? Searching in English, only slang turns up, a farmer’s blow, which seems appropriate, and a snot rocket. There’s no medical term I can find.

So far, nothing in Gaelic, but the closest might be Smuga a chaitheamh amach, (SMUH-guh uh KAH-huv uh-MOHKH ) to expel snot – a phrase my mother might well have remembered with her achievement of a Silver Fáinne medal. I’ve asked around Buncrana with one positive reply – in West Africa’s Yoruba, the word is, fumu, short and explosive, as it is.

An oil change with Martini Rosso

One summer evening when I was seventeen, around the time of my first driving test, I lifted the bonnet of our Austin 1100, my father in the kitchen at his dinner after coming in from work. I was wondering how all the parts of an engine worked after reading about it. After pouring over colourful diagrams of pistons that reciprocated so fast, of the carburettor that mixed petrol and air, and spark plugs that fired exactly on time. This complicated machine was here in our garage. I felt heat coming off the engine, that ticked as it cooled.

            What are you doing? he said coming in through the side door. It’s just had a service. No need to lift the bonnet. Leave it alone.  I didn’t try to explain, not expecting him to see my point of view, since he chastised me for listening to The Beatles. That was after John Lennon offended his religious beliefs, saying they were more popular than Jesus. My musical taste was on the wrong side of heaven’s gate and I wasn’t for turning.

After that, I had to be sneaky. Make sure he wasn’t around when I traced the wires from each spark plug, the four of them connected to the distributor cap. I unscrewed a spark plug another evening, hoping to see the gap where the spark jumped to ignite the fuel, to shine a torch into the hole in the dark cylinder. The spanner slipped, breaking the top off the plug. In a panic, I cycled round the town until I found a replacement in Fyfes. Then relieved to screw it into place, tighten it home with care, and more relieved when the engine kicked miraculously into life and settled into a steady note.

Anything technical, my father avoided like a disease. In his opinion, the simplest of repairs needed a trained man. Yet, I did a few fixes behind his back, most of the time dodging his rancour. A few years later, I went off to study engineering.

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His father said Tommy would take up a trade, like each of his own generation: a coach builder, cabinet maker, shoe maker, dress maker, seamstress. They were never out of work. The country relations were labourers, but we’d left that behind.

Tommy worked the family allotment. Practical enough it seemed. Moore’s garage was looking for apprentices and he would give it a try. The Second World War was still raging with its nightly blackouts. So, why not? There was some slagging at the start but he’d had money in his pocket, that meant a lot.

But something happened in those first weeks. It wasn’t good. A big mistake? Two, maybe? On one of those flashy Humbers? More likely an Austin Ten or Morris Eight. Dropped an engine from a hoist and cracked the case? Forgot to put engine oil back after a service? It cost a fortune to fix. The slagging got worse. Hold that brush tight young fella. Ya know he washes his hands in grease. Here! Catch! The foreman put him on something else. He soon left. Embarrassed to say the least.

He tried driving for a while. Then landed a job as a bread server, with Morton and Simpson’s bakery. A Comer van out on the road all day with no one to bother him. He got on well with customers with his easy chat. His bread and cakes sold well, so he stuck with it. But so too did his fear of fixing anything mechanical.

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One year into my engineering degree, I went on a summer trip around Europe with five school friends. It was a big adventure. Colin’s father gave us their car – a new Renault 12 – some said that was foolish. They had toured on the Continent and didn’t see any problems for us. It would need its first oil change at 5,000 miles. I would do it, I said, it’s straight forward.

I tasted my first Martini Rosso somewhere in the south of France. At a campsite sheltered among coastal pines. The air coming off the azure sea, a sandy heat of scented pine, dried grass and succulents. The first sip of that sweet herb-laced wine, forever carrying a promise of sophistication and camaraderie, and the sensuous Mediterranean. While the car’s cargo, our belongings, lay scattered over the backseat, on the ground and in the small tent.

The oil change came due in Luxembourg. Squeezed under the vehicle, I loosened the bung and spilled the clear oil onto the grassy campsite floor – that’s what you did then. There were a few onlookers interested in the new model Renault, and wanting to help. Then I topped up the oil, and next morning we were on our way towards Calais. Job done.

It started while I was driving. That first short squeal in lower gears. That became longer and unavoidable. I may have broken out in a sweat. It awoke the others. I kept on driving. Into a small town to stop with a long tearing screech. A Renault garage’s reply was instant – Allez! Angleterre! Allez!  Our muted talk was of getting home. No more Martini Rosso.

We squealed to a crawl for finger-waving gendarmes, crossing pedestrians, traffic lights, and at last, and worst of all, into the hollow amplifying sound-box of the Dover-bound ferry.  Every head turned towards us. And I was driving.

Then we sat for ten days in a campsite, walking Canterbury, while the Renault garage tried to figure out and fix the problem. The solution, a new gearbox, later located in Newcastle, finally arriving by train after a bank holiday weekend. The car’s gearbox had no oil. Gears were ceased. The cause of the leak was unknown. Renault would make a final decision in the coming weeks.

For hours we drove quietly northwards, took the Stranraer ferry, back to Ballymena and into the car’s space on the driveway of Colin’s house in Fisherwick Gardens. After a clean and a wash, the Renault 11 looked, and sounded, like it had never left. Never tasted Martini Rosso.

The final outcome? Nothing. I had drained the gearbox. Predictably, it ceased.  I was embarrassed, of course. Renault covered the costs. I said nothing. And qualified two years later, with a degree in aeronautical engineering. And a few years later, Colin’s father and I laughed over the story. I only wish my own father’s experience had left him as easily. That he could have told his story and laughed about it.

End

pdf version here