My Daddy’s part in the Rural Electrification of Ireland
I don’t know how long I was half awake before I looked at the clock at 0830. I had been denying wakefulness for as long as I could get away with it. The bed was lovely, warm and snug, but my ears were stone cold. Eventually, there was no other way but to take the plunge and face the day. Ignoring the discomfort and risking my half naked body to exposure, I took a few long steps to the kitchen and turned the Superser gas heater on full belt. Whatever is the opposite of courage and determination then hit me and I dived back into the bed to await the heating of the kitchen.
That was Sunday January 26. It would be our third day without a stitch of electricity. Mass would have to be skipped because one half of the electric gate refused its manual instruction.
So, lying there in the bed, I planned my next move – which would be the same as yesterday and the day before. I would light the gas camper stove on the upturned crate on the middle of the kitchen floor. By Sunday I was getting good at that, and there I would first boil a small saucepan of water for a cup of tea for Mrs Youcantbeserious; followed by toasting a full round of batch loaf, held over the flame with a tongs and toasting fork. (Told you I was getting good at this!) Wife now had her tea and marmalade toast in bed… and ‘a happy wife is a happy life’!
I had given myself until 0900 before making the permanent move to a vertical position. Then, at two minutes to nine, something happened: a clicking sound, followed by a bleep from a device, the murmur of a fridge motor and the noise from the coffee machine reporting for work. Through the four-inch gap in the slightly opened bedroom door, I spied the most exciting thing I had seen in a long time… a beam of light in the hall. The electricity was back!
Storm Éowyn created the worst storm havoc of all time across our country. I don’t wish to compare our mere inconvenience with the hardship and destruction inflicted upon thousands of unfortunates, but for all of us it was a meditative experience.
We have asked this ceist before, but it is worth asking again: is there any greater value than what we get from our electricity bill?
Over those few days of bedlam, my mind kept wandering back to the fact that I was reared without electricity in our house. Thinking of that again, I am wonderstruck at how my mother – and all the other mothers – managed to manage. No labour saving devices, no washer or drier, no running water and nothing but a candle or a paraffin wick lamp to confront the darkness with. We had a ‘tilley lamp’ in our house, which was a step above, and gave great light until a moth decided to perform his kamikaze trick into the mantle!
Rural Electrification was one of the greatest programmes in our history. The ESB was founded in 1927, Rural Electrification launched in 1946, but it was the early 1960s before it reached my home place in The Derries.
Had it not been for two great men, there might never have been a glimmer of light within six miles of my house. Those two men were Alexandra Volto… and my daddy!
Volto was the great Italian inventor who in 1880 invented the electric battery. (The word ‘volt’ to measure electricity is named after him.) But volts would be no use to anyone waiting for electricity if there were no ESB poles to carry the wires, to carry the current to the houses under the Rural Electrification Scheme. That is where my father came into the picture.
My father and Judy pulled all the electricity poles from the edge of the road and into position to be erected in the fields within a six mile radius of our house. In case you don’t remember, Judy was our Clydesdale mare, formerly of Westmeath County Council ‘carter’ fame.
This was the best job the two of them ever had. Daddy and Judy got well paid – for the times that were in it. An ESB lorry tipped the poles on the side of the road, from where Daddy hooked a chain and a clever contraption to one pole at a time and headed off trough the fields to the spots highlighted on a rough map. There was the odd contrary landowner, but Daddy avoided confrontation. If possible, Judy made a little detour the way the man suggested, and if that didn’t work, a superior sorted it. Best of it all for Judy was that she got free room and board on tour – and better grass than at home. Daddy would ask the farmer wherever he finished, if he could leave the mare in the field overnight. Few refused… and those who did would be named by my father in the pub for the rest of his life!
So… next time you flick a switch; spare a thought for Alexandra Volto and John Comaskey!
Don’t Forget
Poverty is no disgrace, but ignorance is.