The money collected at the tolling booth on fair days in Callan in the first half of the twentieth century went towards funding the many important services administered by the Town Commissioners.
Two gateways to the green allowed access to the farmers and their livestock and the buyers, and four turnstiles enabled pedestrians to file through without getting in the way of the livestock or transport.
The gateways and turnstiles had been added to the Green in the middle of the 19th century at the same time as the local authorities had sanctioned the building of a wall encircling the entire filed.
A lack of penning enclosures on the Green resulted in cattle running wild, breaking away from their respective “bunches” and getting mixed up with other livestock.
This sparked confusion and rows, and led to vast amounts of steaming dung littering the grounds, into which farmers, buyers, and sightseers alike waded. They would have to remove the strong-smelling manure from their footwear before dining later in town or making for the pubs.
Once the Emergency kicked in, the lack of motorised transport hit the fair days badly.
Nolan’s bus ran an efficient service from Kilkenny, which connected with the Dublin train at seven am, which in turn conveyed many a cattle dealer to Callan. Even so, petrol rationing proved a major obstacle to many would-be buyers and they opted to stay at home rather than avail of slower more traditional modes of transport.
Though the farmers mostly ride alone to the fair early in the morning, their wives and maybe other family members, travelling in horse or donkey drawn-conveyances, joined them in the afternoons.
Interestingly, when a deal was done, the farmer handed the cash over to his wife, referred to in those days as “the woman of the house”, or “herself”, who then proceeded to make her purchases in the town, further boosting the local economy and putting hearty smiles on the faces of busy-bee shop keepers.
She might give the husband a few shillings to have a drink or two in one of the more than twenty pubs that served the town in the early forties. As a rule, he gratefully accepted this, greeting his buddies to renew friendships and celebrate in a mild way his clinching of a deal with the cattlemen that left him and his family a little better off financially.
Once livestock trading was over for the day, the farmers sat up happily beside their families to ride back along bumpy roads and stone-littered boreens to their precious farmsteads.
The cattle buyers headed for home too; satisfied at another profitable series of transactions in a town hailed as one of the Meccas of bovine Wheeler Dealing in the South East.
Due to the wartime petrol shortage, the hapless livestock had to be led “on the hoof” by drovers to Kilkenny Railway Station and loaded on the evening train to Dublin. It was a long hard slog for both the cattle and the men driving them, especially on dark winter evenings. The drovers hired by farmers to convey the animals to the station returned to Callan aboard the late evening buses.
The old “Emergency Blues” also affected the famed and much loved Cheap Jacks line of stalls that sold everything from clothes and gramophone needles to carpentry tools, pipes, and razor blades...
To be continued...
Excerpt from: Are We Invaded Yet? by John Fitzgerald
