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40cm x 34cm Limerick In 1929, Limerick city was the home to two large of tobacco factories Spillane’s and Clune’s who imported tobacco from the United States, Egypt and Turkey as well as locally grown tobacco to produce their famed products. Spillane’s Tobacco Factory on Sarsfield Street was started by John Spillane in 1829 and was known as ‘The House of Garryowen’. A hundred years later they were employing a hundred people. The famous Garryowen plug formed 80 per cent of the factories output while they had other products including Popular and Treaty bar plugs, Hazel Nut plug, Special Flake, Handy Cut Flake, snuffs, Cashel, High Toast, White Top and Craven A cigarettes. To meet a special demand from the North of Ireland the factory produced a type of plug known as Long Square. Spillane’s closed in 1958 with the loss of 150 jobs after the building was purchased by Murray Ltd, of Dublin the year previous. Their building is where the old Dunnes Stores building stands today. William Spillane who was the Mayor of Limerick in 1885 built the Spillane Tower which today is better known as the ‘Snuff Box’ on the banks of the Shannon river at Corkanree. The other large factory was Clune’s Tobacco Factory on Denmark Street. It opened in the late 1872 and had about 60 employees in 1929. The firm specialised in Big Bar Plug, every two ounces of which is stamped Thomond. They also excelled in the Far-Famed Limerick Twist. They were also known for Kincora Plug, Sarsfield Plug, Home Rule, Hibernian, Target, Ireland’s Pride and Two Flake. A popular item associated with tobacco factories are the cigarette cards. Cigarette cards were originally produced as a small piece of card which was designed to protect the individual cigarettes from being squashed as the original packaging was paper and not the card boxes that we know today. We must not forget M.Cahill’s of Wickham Street which housed a snuff factory in 1870 in the basement of the building and operated for over sixty years. The business was founded by Michael Cahill (c.1846-1918) who was also the director of the Limerick Race Company. Cahill’s became Ireland’s longest running tobacco store and is still in operation offering a selection of cigar, teas and “gentleman’s gifts” including Swiss army knives, hipflasks and pipes.
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47cm x 37cm LimerickMuch of the last century, and indeed for well over half of the present one, Limerick's importance was directly attributed to her three well-known bacon factories, namely, J. Matterson & Sons, Roches Street, established in 1816 by Mr. John Russell, a Cumberland man in con-junction with Mr. Matterson, using the method of curing then current in Berwick-on-Tweed. W.J. Shaw & Sons, founded in the year 1831 at Mulgrave Street by William John Shaw, a descendant of a County Down family, and O'Mara's bacon factory, Roches Street, which had its origin in Mungret Street some few years before 1839, when James O'Mara from Toomevara started curing bacon in the basement of his house there. Apparently, this basement business flourished, for in 1839 he moved to Roches Street to the premises it last occupied .About the middle of the last century, for some reason now difficult to fathom, Limerick bacon and especially Limerick hams, became well-known for their excellent flavour throughout the English-speaking world. It is on record that Glasgow curers in an effort to produce hams equal in excellence to those of Limerick, imported Limerick workmen who were supposed to know all about the way in which the meat was turned out at home. Apparently, they did not bring secrets with them for their efforts were unsuccessful. There were also much larger bacon factories in parts of the British Isles; for instance, Belfast is reputed to have exported four times the number of hams produced in Limerick, and places like Glasgow and Liverpool had several factories producing very large quantities of bacon as well. None of them, however, quite matched' those produced in the three local factories for flavour and quality.O’MARA’S, MATTERSON’S, SHAW’S and Denny’s were the names that made Limerick famous for its bacon produce for 180 years – earning it the nickname ‘Pigstown’. The reputation of Limerick ham, the food culture that arose from a plentiful supply of cheap products, the story of the pork butchers, the pig buyers, the sounds of the city with factory horns signalling the call to work – all of these still resonate in Limerick in the memories of its citizens and former workers. A definitive account of this industry that operated at the centre of the city, supplied by the farms of rural county Limerick for over 180 years will be documented in a new book called Pigtown – A History of Limerick’s Bacon Industry. Ruth Guiry was commissioned to undertake the research under the guidance of Dr Maura Cronin from Mary Immaculate College and one of the 27 people she interviewed to understand the role the bacon factories had in Limerick was Joe Hayes.Joe Hayes started working in a bacon factory in 1962, aged 16 years old. He worked with his dad, and later on with his two sons until the factory closed in 1986. “When the factory closed, a group of us got our own little unit, we rented it, and produced our own sausages, puddings and things.” It was a huge part of Limerick’s social scene: four generations of Joe’s family worked in bacon factories, with uncles, sisters, brothers, sons and cousins all working in the factory at one time or another: “If one factory was caic, you wouldn’t have a problem getting a job in the other one. And he doesn’t mince his word when talking about the work they did. “They brought the pigs in, we killed the pigs, and prepared the bacon: that’s the way it was in the bacon factories.” When asked about if there were ever animal cruelty protests, he laughs at the idea.People still eat sausages and bacon – where do they think they come from?
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47cm x 37cm Limerick The building itself it is a terraced eight-bay four-storey late-Victorian commercial building, It was built across 1895 and 1896 for J McCarthy and Sons, Wholesale Tea and Wine Merchants. Named the Clancarty (family of Carty) Buildings, the building was designed by architect and built by John Delaney. The Cork Examiner on 10 August 1896 (p.9) describes the impressive building: “No person passing through George’s street, can fail to see and admire the beautiful structure, which has just been completed. The facade is 54 feet long and 48 feet high, divided into four storeys, with round headed windows in the classic style, and extends more than the whole length of George’s Street, as between Cook street and Marlboro Street. The ground floor is divided by handsome wrought pilasters and consoles, each console decorated with floral swags, with a richly-moulded dental cornice immediately over the facia. This basement is perfectly fire proof, the walls being built of brick and cement, whilst the ceiling and floor over are composed of a solid block of concrete. The first, second and third floors immediately overhead are altogether occupied by the firm as warerooms to meet the requirements of their immense business as tea and wine merchants and whiskey shippers, the growth of which necessitates this great extension of their premises”.
J McCarthy and Sons, Wholesale Tea and Wine Merchants as shown in Goads Insurance Map of Cork, 1906 (source: Kieran McCarthy) Description of Clancarty Buildings, Cork Examiner, 10 August 1896, p.9 (source: Cork City Library) -
47cm x 37cm Limerick The building itself it is a terraced eight-bay four-storey late-Victorian commercial building, It was built across 1895 and 1896 for J McCarthy and Sons, Wholesale Tea and Wine Merchants. Named the Clancarty (family of Carty) Buildings, the building was designed by architect and built by John Delaney. The Cork Examiner on 10 August 1896 (p.9) describes the impressive building: “No person passing through George’s street, can fail to see and admire the beautiful structure, which has just been completed. The facade is 54 feet long and 48 feet high, divided into four storeys, with round headed windows in the classic style, and extends more than the whole length of George’s Street, as between Cook street and Marlboro Street. The ground floor is divided by handsome wrought pilasters and consoles, each console decorated with floral swags, with a richly-moulded dental cornice immediately over the facia. This basement is perfectly fire proof, the walls being built of brick and cement, whilst the ceiling and floor over are composed of a solid block of concrete. The first, second and third floors immediately overhead are altogether occupied by the firm as warerooms to meet the requirements of their immense business as tea and wine merchants and whiskey shippers, the growth of which necessitates this great extension of their premises”.
J McCarthy and Sons, Wholesale Tea and Wine Merchants as shown in Goads Insurance Map of Cork, 1906 (source: Kieran McCarthy) Description of Clancarty Buildings, Cork Examiner, 10 August 1896, p.9 (source: Cork City Library) -
37cm x 47cm Limerick Sullivan’s Brewing Company opened for business over three hundred years ago in The Maltings on James’s Street, smack bang in the middle of Kilkenny City.
Up until the early 1700s, brewing on a large scale was a rarity, this resulted in many small breweries springing up all around the country, with little or no consistency in the beer that was being produced. Back then, to guarantee that each pint was as good as the last, required brewing on a bigger, more exacting scale.
Enter Mr. Sullivan, a man of high morals, integrity and a good nose for great beer. Through his belief and hard work he established a brewery the likes of which had never been seen in Kilkenny. He only used the very best local ingredients and the very best brewing methods to ensure that every barrel of Sullivan’s Red Ale that left his brewery was as good as the one that had gone before.
Richard Sullivan was elected to represent the people of Kilkenny in the 1820s. This supposedly put one well-known Irish political figure’s nose well and truly out of joint – Daniel O’Connell.After one particularly heated parliamentary quarrel, O’Connell even called a boycott of Sullivan’s Ale by the people of Kilkenny. But you’ll know if you’ve ever had a pint of Sullivan’s Red Ale in front of you that it can be very hard to resist, and the boycott was soon called off.
Despite this rocky start, Richard and Daniel went on to become firm friends. So good in fact, that when O’Connell was stripped of his seat in Parliament due to some underhand dealings, Sullivan was one of the few who had his back. He wrote to Daniel and offered him his seat to ensure that O’Connell’s Catholic Emancipation Act would get through Parliament.
1802MIXING BUSINESS AND POLITICSGOOD WILL, KINDNESS AND HOT SOUP
1880 was the year of ‘The Great Sullivan’s Brewery Fire’, a day that has gone down in legend among the people of Kilkenny.The story goes that the Sullivan Family took the day off brewing to attend the funeral of a recently departed family friend in a Kilkenny hilltop chapel. Leaving a funeral before all the formalities were completed was the height of bad manners. The Sullivans could see the brewery ablaze from the hillside, but could do nothing about it.
As the first flames began to lick the outside of the brewery, the alarm was raised and the local fire brigade was sent for. But The Kilkenny Fire Brigade consisted of a few volunteers, a horse and a cart and a useless, leaking hose. Due to all their good deeds over the years, the Sullivans were a tremendously popular family in Kilkenny, so men, women and children from far and wide rallied together and grabbed the nearest buckets, pales and pots, filling them with water and battling the fire. Within an hour the fire was under control and the brewery was saved, all because a community came together.
1880A COMMUNITY WORKING TOGETH1918
BLACK SHEEP AND THE LOST WAGER
After Sullivan’s Brewery closed for the final time in the early 1900s the tales of the good deeds of this Sullivan Family began to fade into memory.
Over the coming decades, the independent breweries that were once synonymous with Kilkenny began to drop off one by one, until its final working brewery sadly closed its doors in 2013. However, there wasn’t long to wait for a change of fortunes for Kilkenny-brewed ale, as 2016 saw two great families coming together to return traditional Irish brewing to its spiritual home.
The Smithwick Family in partnership with direct descendants of the Sullivan Family had a vision to re-open the once-great brewery in the city where it all began. They enlisted the help of Ian Hamilton, one of Ireland’s most eminent contemporary master-brewers. Together they are bringing artisan brewing back to Kilkenny.
If people thought that brewing in Kilkenny was dead and buried, they are in for a rude awakening…
2016
TWO GREAT FAMILIES AND THE RETURN OF SULLIVANS
WE’RE BACK AND HERE TO STAY
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47cm x 37cm Limerick Arthur Guinness started brewing ales in 1759 at the St James Gate Brewery,Dublin.On 31st December 1759 he signed a 9,000 year lease at £45 per annum for the unused brewery.Ten years later, on 19 May 1769, Guinness first exported his ale: he shipped six-and-a-half barrels to Great Britain before he started selling the dark beer porter in 1778. The first Guinness beers to use the term were Single Stout and Double Stout in the 1840s.Throughout the bulk of its history, Guinness produced only three variations of a single beer type: porter or single stout, double or extra and foreign stout for export. “Stout” originally referred to a beer’s strength, but eventually shifted meaning toward body and colour.Porter was also referred to as “plain”, as mentioned in the famous refrain of Flann O’Brien‘s poem “The Workman’s Friend”: “A pint of plain is your only man.” Already one of the top-three British and Irish brewers, Guinness’s sales soared from 350,000 barrels in 1868 to 779,000 barrels in 1876.In October 1886 Guinness became a public company, and was averaging sales of 1,138,000 barrels a year. This was despite the brewery’s refusal to either advertise or offer its beer at a discount. Even though Guinness owned no public houses, the company was valued at £6 million and shares were twenty times oversubscribed, with share prices rising to a 60 per cent premium on the first day of trading. The breweries pioneered several quality control efforts. The brewery hired the statistician William Sealy Gosset in 1899, who achieved lasting fame under the pseudonym “Student” for techniques developed for Guinness, particularly Student’s t-distribution and the even more commonly known Student’s t-test. By 1900 the brewery was operating unparalleled welfare schemes for its 5,000 employees. By 1907 the welfare schemes were costing the brewery £40,000 a year, which was one-fifth of the total wages bill. The improvements were suggested and supervised by Sir John Lumsden. By 1914, Guinness was producing 2,652,000 barrels of beer a year, which was more than double that of its nearest competitor Bass, and was supplying more than 10 per cent of the total UK beer market. In the 1930s, Guinness became the seventh largest company in the world. Before 1939, if a Guinness brewer wished to marry a Catholic, his resignation was requested. According to Thomas Molloy, writing in the Irish Independent, “It had no qualms about selling drink to Catholics but it did everything it could to avoid employing them until the 1960s.” Guinness thought they brewed their last porter in 1973. In the 1970s, following declining sales, the decision was taken to make Guinness Extra Stout more “drinkable”. The gravity was subsequently reduced, and the brand was relaunched in 1981. Pale malt was used for the first time, and isomerized hop extract began to be used. In 2014, two new porters were introduced: West Indies Porter and Dublin Porter. Guinness acquired the Distillers Company in 1986.This led to a scandal and criminal trialconcerning the artificial inflation of the Guinness share price during the takeover bid engineered by the chairman, Ernest Saunders. A subsequent £5.2 million success fee paid to an American lawyer and Guinness director, Tom Ward, was the subject of the case Guinness plc v Saunders, in which the House of Lords declared that the payment had been invalid. In the 1980s, as the IRA’s bombing campaign spread to London and the rest of Britain, Guinness considered scrapping the Harp as its logo. The company merged with Grand Metropolitan in 1997 to form Diageo. Due to controversy over the merger, the company was maintained as a separate entity within Diageo and has retained the rights to the product and all associated trademarks of Guinness.
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47cm x 37cm Limerick In 1791 James Power, an innkeeper from Dublin, established a small distillery at his public house at 109 Thomas St., Dublin. The distillery, which had an output of about 6,000 gallons in its first year of operation, initially traded as James Power and Son, but by 1822 had become John Power & Son, and had moved to a new premises at John's Lane, a side street off Thomas Street. At the time the distillery had three pot stills, though only one, a 500-gallon still is thought to have been in use. Following reform of the distilling laws in 1823, the distillery expanded rapidly. In 1827, production was reported at 160,270 gallons,and by 1833 had grown to 300,000 gallons per annum. As the distillery grew, so too did the stature of the family. In 1841, John Power, grandson of the founder was awarded a baronet, a hereditary title. In 1855, his son Sir James Power, laid the foundation stone for the O'Connell Monument, and in 1859 became High Sheriff of Dublin. In 1871, the distillery was expanded and rebuilt in the Victorian style, becoming one of the most impressive sights in Dublin.After expansion, output at the distillery rose to 700,000 gallons per annum, and by the 1880s, had reached about 900,000 gallons per annum, at which point the distillery covered over six acres of central Dublin, and had a staff of about 300 people.
The Still House at John's Lane Distillery, as it looked when Alfred Barnard visited in the 1800s.
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42cm x 32cm Limerick The Jacobs Biscuit Bakery originated in Waterford in 1851,after being founded by William Beale Jacob and his brother Robert.It later moved to Bishop Street in Dublin with a further factory in Peters Row.Jacobs Bishop Street premises was occupied as a strategic location by rebels during the 1916 Easter Rebellion. W. & R. Jacob's were one the largest employers in the Dublin of 1916, and their factory was seized on Easter Monday by perhaps 100 members of the 2nd Battalion of the Dublin Brigade of the Irish Volunteers under Thomas MacDonagh. The factory itself was an enormous and formidable Victorian edifice located on the 'block' enclosed by Bishop St, Bride St, Peter's St and Peter's Row, and between St Patrick's Cathedral and St Stephen's Green. Its seizure helped to complete a loop of building cross the south inner city; the factory had two large towers that could act as observation points, while its location was very close to both Camden St and Patrick St: natural routeways for troops entering the city centre from Portobello Barracks in Rathmines and Wellington Barracks on the South Circular Road. There were only a few staff present in the building when the Volunteers broke into it; a number of smaller outposts were established in the area around the factory. While the garrison saw some fighting early in the week, their principal enemies proved to be boredom and the locals: the factory was surrounded by tenements, and the Volunteers were attacked and abused by residents, many of whom were Jacob's workers themselves. The families of servicemen were also quite hostile, but there may have been another reason for this hostility: Michael O'Hanrahan, who was in Jacob's, expressed his concern that the choice of location might endanger local residents if the British chose to attack. As it happens, the factory was largely by-passed, though it was fired upon intermittently throughout the week by troops in Dublin Castle and elsewhere. MacDonagh surrendered in nearby St Patrick's Park on Sunday 30 April; some of the factory was looted after the Volunteers had left. Three members of the Jacob's garrison were executed. Most of the factory was eventually demolished, though fragments of the ground storey and one of the towers are still visible on Bishop St between the DIT campus on Aungier St and the National Archives of Ireland.
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47cm x 35cm The Jack Daniel's brand's official website suggests that its founder, Jasper Newton "Jack" Daniel, was born in 1850 (and his tombstone bears that date), but says his exact birth date is unknown. The company website says it is customary to celebrate his birthday in September.The Tennessee state library website said in 2013 that records list his birth date as September 5, 1846, and that the 1850 birth date seems impossible since his mother died in 1847.In the 2004 biography Blood & Whiskey: The Life and Times of Jack Daniel, author Peter Krass said his investigation showed that Daniel was born in January 1849 (based on Jack's sister's diary, census records, and the date of death of Jack's mother). Jack was the youngest of 10 children born to his mother, Lucinda (Cook) Daniel, and father Calaway Daniel. After Lucinda's death, his father remarried and had three more children. Calaway Daniel's father, Joseph "Job" Daniel, had emigrated from Wales to the United States with his Scottish wife, the former Elizabeth Calaway.Jack Daniels' ancestry included English, and Scots-Irish as well. Jack did not get along with his stepmother. After Daniel's father died in the Civil War, the boy ran away from home and was essentially orphaned at a young age.
Career
Jack Daniel, founderA plaque on Jack Daniels' office recognizing the distillery's status in the National Register of Historic Places -
50cm x 65cm Imagination is something Guinness Advertising has never been short of… From John Gilroy’s hapless zookeeper and his menagerie of creatures to a Polynesian surfer and a herd of white horses; from messages in bottles setting sail across the ocean to a single, heart-stoppingly enormous wave. Guinness have been carving out their own creative path for almost a century with decades of extraordinary and enduring print, TV and digital campaigns to their name, and hopefully they will continue to push boundaries to tell stories to the world. Here’s to original thinking !
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55cm x 70cm Imagination is something Guinness Advertising has never been short of… From John Gilroy’s hapless zookeeper and his menagerie of creatures to a Polynesian surfer and a herd of white horses; from messages in bottles setting sail across the ocean to a single, heart-stoppingly enormous wave. Guinness have been carving out their own creative path for almost a century with decades of extraordinary and enduring print, TV and digital campaigns to their name, and hopefully they will continue to push boundaries to tell stories to the world. Here’s to original thinking !
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50cm x 65cm Imagination is something Guinness Advertising has never been short of… From John Gilroy’s hapless zookeeper and his menagerie of creatures to a Polynesian surfer and a herd of white horses; from messages in bottles setting sail across the ocean to a single, heart-stoppingly enormous wave. Guinness have been carving out their own creative path for almost a century with decades of extraordinary and enduring print, TV and digital campaigns to their name, and hopefully they will continue to push boundaries to tell stories to the world. Here’s to original thinking !