Lucan Ice Cream Double Sided Vinyl Advertising Banner

250.00

Extremely rare 1950s Lucan Ice Cream Double sided Vinyl Advertising Banner .

Castlegregory Co Kerry  65cm x 46cm

(From the Irish Times 2003 )As our best-known ice- cream factory prepares to close, Kieran Fagan tells its story – and that of one of its staff, who provided a celebrated comedy moment of the 1950s

Horses once grazed in the field where the HB ice-cream factory stands, opposite Nutgrove Shopping Centre, in Dublin. But these were working horses. For a living they pulled milk drays, leaving Hughes Brothers dairy early in the morning, knowing where to stop on their routes in south Co Dublin. The roundsmen raced from house to house, arms laden with milk bottles, while the horses ambled steadily forwards. When they were replaced by electric vans, deliveries slowed down, as the vans could not keep up as the horses had done. Nor did they know which houses to stop at.

When Paul Mulhern started work at HB, as a holiday job in 1959, 40 horse-drawn drays still delivered milk in the Dublin area. His first real job was selling ice cream to shops. Not that it was a year-round business: some winters the refrigerated containers were lifted clean off the lorries, so the vehicles could be hired out for coal deliveries.

The ice-cream business had begun as an adjunct to the dairy, in 1926. Later the operations were split. HB Ice Cream eventually became part of Unilever – the multinational group whose brands include Persil washing powder, Birds Eye frozen food and CK One perfume – growing to hold 80 per cent of the domestic ice-cream market.

In the yard of the factory now closing down, Paul Mulhern shows me an outhouse that clearly started life as a stable. It reminds him of the time in the early 1950s, eight years before he joined HB, when he was on a panel of schoolchildren on Radio Éireann’s most popular programme. The School Around The Corner had come to nearby Milltown, where Paul was a pupil at the local national school. The presenter Paddy Crosbie interviewed the children, who had to sing a song, give a recitation or tell a funny story, usually of the my-granny-fell-down-the-stairs-and-we-all-laughed variety.

Description

Additional information

Weight 1.5 kg
Dimensions 60 × 6 × 6 cm
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