Billy Costine's Flight of a Magpie

I stumbled across this great story in the English Newcastle Chronicle this evening about a man from my home town of Waterford. His name is Billy Costine, he’s 58 years old and his autobiographical book called The Flight of a Magpie is about to be published in the next few months. The reference to Magpies is about Newcastle United Football Club, a side Costine has had a near-lifetime association with. (photo via Newcastle Chronicle of Billy Costine and Peter Beardsley)

Costine has been a Newcastle fan for 50 years. With little cultural affiliation between Waterford and Newcastle, the reason a boy in the south-east of Ireland becomes a fan of a club in the north-east of England takes a bit of explaining. In 1961 aged 8, Costine played the table top football game Subbuteo with his brothers. The game was created 16 years earlier, by British game designer and RAF veteran Peter Adolph who had an interest in both football and ornithology. Adolph wanted to call his creation “hobby” for the Eurasian hobby, a type of falcon. His request was turned down by patent officers because of the wider meaning of hobby so instead he called it by a part of the bird’s Latin name “falco subbuteo”.

The etymology would have been unknown to most boys of Costine's generation, but the game itself was legendary. It was a rite of passage for many boys growing up in Ireland and Britain - including myself about ten years later. Costine played endless games with his brothers until they tired of the standard red and blue colours of the two playing teams. “My brother David said we could send away for other teams,” Costine told the Newcastle Chronicle. “I looked at the small brochure, which featured all the teams in the first division, and saw this team with black-and-white stripes".
The Magpie, he said, was born there and then.

In 1961 it wasn’t easy for a boy in Waterford to become a Magpie. There was no Internet in those days and no access to English television. There were English newspapers available but they tended to concentrate on the big London, Manchester and Liverpool clubs. Instead, Costine became addicted listening to the BBC on short wave radio. Every Saturday afternoon, he would tune in to hear about the progress of Newcastle’s games and listen to the final results read out at 5pm. He became a passionate fan and soaked up every scrap of information he could find about his heroes.

It would take 15 years before he could see them in the flesh. The cost of a flight in those pre-Ryan Air days was prohibitive and getting there by train and ferry was an enormous and time-consuming undertaking. By 1976 however, Costine was making money. He was a glass cutter at Waterford Crystal during a time when the workers there were acquiring significant union muscle. In 1976 A friend from the factory pulled some strings to get tickets to a Liverpool-Newcastle clash at Anfield. Billy hoped to see his heroes get revenge for their cup final defeat to Liverpool two years earlier but he was to be disappointed. His first Newcastle match ended in a 2-0 loss to the Magpies.

Billy went home undeterred, delighted he had finally seen the team he loved and dreaming of when he could finally watch them at home in Newcastle. It would take another 11 years for this wish to become a reality. Costine finally got to see St James Park in 1987. The Newcastle manager at the time was another Irishman with a long and loyal association with the club. Iam “Willy” McFaul arrived as a player in 1966 from Northern Irish football and served as coach, assistant manager and then manager until he was sacked 22 years later. Costine arrived a year before McFaul was ousted and had laid the groundwork with a letter to the manager. McFaul arranged for Costine to meet the team.

As Costine he left the dressing room, Billy spotted his heroes – Joe Harvey and Jackie Milburn. Both men had played football for Newcastle in a golden era in the 1950s. This was before Costine’s time but it didn’t stop him from absorbing either the mythology or the moment. “I remember like it was only yesterday,” he said. “There I was, stood between two of the greatest names ever to play for the Magpies, while Willie McFaul took the most prized picture I own.”

Since then, Billy travelled to Newcastle for the last home game of every season. He has become a well-known figure around the ground and has forged friendships with several ex-players such as John Anderson and Bob Moncur. Over the years he met most of the Newcastle greats including Alan Shearer, Paul Gascoigne, Malcolm McDonald, Peter Beardsley, Kevin Keegan and Bobby Robson. His connections got him a job with the club as a talent scout with a brief to cover Ireland hunting for promising young players for the Newcastle United Academy. “To do a scouting job for the club I have supported since I was eight years old was a dream come true,” Billy said. “Most of the boys I helped send over on trial have been capped at schoolboy level and up for Ireland.”

Costine has turned his story into a book but it hasn’t been an easy path to publication. Costine was made redundant as the state of Waterford Crystal deteriorated and he got a job driving buses for Bus Eireann. In 2005 he was involved in an accident in Cork and accused of careless driving. Costine blamed the accident on the poor quality of the bus and he was vindicated after an inquiry found other drivers too had experienced power surges in Bus Eireann buses.

Then Costine got into a row with his former publisher Francis de Roelman, also of Waterford. Costine claimed he had given de Roelman €5,000 in a contract to publish the book and he provided the publisher with a manuscript as well as photos and memorabilia to illustrate the book. De Roelman said he had not been paid and kept the manuscript and memorabilia. The District Court awarded the case to Costine but de Roelman appealed to the Circuit Court. In February last year, Circuit Judge Olive Buttimer affirmed the decision to grant €5,000 and costs to Costine for breach of contract for failing to publish his life story. The Court also ordered de Roelman to return the manuscript and memorabilia. The Flight of a Magpie is now due out in May, fittingly at the end of the football season.

Journey for my Mother

Posting around here may be irregular for the next couple of weeks as I head off outback to work for the (Charleville) Western Times.

In the meantime, I'd be interested in any feedback about this 2 minute video. It is my first foray into film and the output from the enjoyable 4 day-long Winter intensive digital storytelling course I did this week at QUT. My thanks to all the "co-creators" who worked with me on the course.

The fourth siege of Waterford

The ancient Irish city of Waterford has seen and survived four major sieges in the last millennium. Each siege left its mark on the city and on the course of Irish history. The first siege in 1170 raised by “Strongbow” the Earl of Pembroke, hastened the beginning of English rule in Ireland. Barely two years later King Henry II would arrive in the city to claim the land for the crown of England and seek obeisance from all the Irish kings and bishops. The second (and only unsuccessful) siege occurred in 1495 when forces led by the Earl of Desmond attempted to foist Perkin Warbeck on the people as the pretender to the English throne. The resistance of Waterford earned it the motto “urbs intacta manet” ("remains the untaken city") from another grateful King Henry, the seventh. The third and longest siege was during Cromwell’s Irish reign of terror. For almost a year, his armies isolated the city and thousands died of starvation and disease before General Ireton accepted its exhausted surrender in August 1650.

The fourth and final siege came in the warm summer of 1922. While the weather may have been glorious, this was a mean and tragic time for Ireland as it cut itself to pieces in a murderous civil war. The new Free State government besieged Waterford in its campaign to defeat the rebels in the aftermath of the divisive treaty with Lloyd George’s government in Westminster. The odds were stacked. The Free State army had modern artillery and the support of the powerful organs of the church, the press and the captains of Irish industry. However, the defenders did have military expertise as the majority of the IRA’s officers supported the anti-Treaty forces. It was the south of Ireland which bore the brunt of the conflict and Waterford’s turn began on 18 July.

A West Waterford man named Pax Whelan led the Anti-Treaty forces in the city. They were poorly organised and content to wait for the attack. No attempt was made to secure the heights above the city north of the river. Anti-Treaty forces were instructed to operate independently in their own areas leading to slipshod communication and there was no overall plan. By contrast, the Free State side was much better prepared. It was led by former American cavalry officer Colonel John T. Prout assisted by two local men Paddy Paul and James McGrath. Paul was a gunnery officer in WW1 and then joined the IRA as brigadier of East Waterford. Paul and his enemy Whelan had worked together during the War of Independence and the pair led the only attack on British forces in Waterford: the unsuccessful ambush at Pickardstown near Tramore in January 1921.

But at the end of that war, Paddy Paul opted for the Free State side. The new government in Dublin struggled to enforce its authority and on 22 May 1922 they sent Paul with orders to take command of Waterford and secure the barracks. On arrival in town, he was arrested by anti-Treaty forces. Paul was injured in the arrest but later managed to escape from the Infirmary Hospital dressed as a nun. He fled back to Dublin to plot the re-capture of Waterford.

By 18 July he was back on top of Mount Misery overlooking the attack of his native city. It would not be easy. All approach roads were mined. The rebels were reinforced by volunteers from Cork and Kerry and had seized the barracks and fortified Ballybricken jail. They set up outposts in shops and hotels along the quay, the post office and Reginald’s Tower. They also opened the spans on the road and rail bridges across the Suir. They outnumbered their opponents with 700 defenders in the city facing 550 Free State troops, many of whom had served in the British army. But the Free Staters had power on their side: two artillery pieces including an 18 pounder placed over the railway station and one lighter calibre piece. The 18 pounder was initially hamstrung as it faced rapid fire from the quays and a sniper on Ballybricken hill but would eventually prove to be a devastating difference.

All businesses in the city closed down except for the Tramore railway which operated continuously through the four days of the siege. Most townsfolk took advantage of the sunny weather to evacuate to the seaside until the fall of the city. At 6:45pm on Tuesday 18 July the attack began in brilliant sunshine. Paul’s first shell landed near his own home near Brewery House in Newgate St. His mother was working in the kitchen and narrowly avoided injury. But the majority of shells found their mark landing in Barrack St or near Ballybricken jail.

The guns blazed away for four or five hours of firing on the first night. The eerie silence was shattered again at 6am the following morning as the guns opened up in excellent visibility. There were many direct hits on the barracks and the jail on top of the hill. Whelan moved his sharpshooters to Bilberry cliffs west of the quay and they managed to keep the attackers pinned down. The defenders inflicted heavy casualties from accurate machine gun fire from the post office on the quay with garrisons under the command of Ballybricken chemist Pierce Power. But the shelling continued all day.

During a lull in the fire, Prout moved his major artillery piece onto the bridge but was prevented from using it by persistent gunfire from across the river. Prout had to come up with an alternative plan. The following night 150 men led by Captain Ned O’Brien moved down the Rosslare railway to Giles Quay under the cover of darkness. O’Brien’s day job was a journalist for the Waterford News but now he was making the news not reporting it (he would later be killed on patrol in the city). His forces commandeered boats moored at the quay and rowed to the opposite shore. They encountered no resistance and suddenly the back door to the city was wide open.

At Newtown school, they encountered a motorised Anti-Treaty patrol. The attackers quickly captured the car and locked the occupants in the boot. They bypassed a rebel garrison in the park and found a prominent local Unionist known as “Lame” Dobbyn. Dobbyn was anxious to see the Republicans defeated and he gave the intruders the key of the Country Club on the strategic corner of the Mall and the Quay opposite Reginald’s Tower. The men entered the back of the building and overpowered a sleeping garrison stationed there. They had secured a vital corner of the city without firing a shot.

At 7:45am the next morning, they opened fire on the Tower across the road and also raked the Mall and the Quays with machine gun fire. The element of surprise gave Prout the opportunity he needed to secure the artillery on the bridge. Its gunfire from close range suddenly made the Quay garrison untenable. The republicans retreated to Ballybricken. When a direct hit exploded in the magazine of the artillery barracks that evening, the area had to be evacuated. The end was near.

Pax Whelan gathered his Dungarvan, Cork and Kerry units to escape to the west leaving Jerry Cronin in charge of a small band to defend the city. Cronin's men retreated to Ballybricken Hill to fight the final battle for Waterford. At 11:50am on Friday 21 July 1922, shellfire breached the jail walls. After some bitter hand-to-hand fighting, Cronin’s forces surrendered. The fourth siege of Waterford was over.

The rebels were dispatched to Kilkenny and Newbridge jails, none of them taking up the offer to join the Free State army and swear allegiance to the Provisional Government. Prout spent the weekend in an open car with Paul and McGrath touring the city. The two local men were able to point out Republicans who had escaped arrest. The civil war would drag on for almost another year in West Munster. On 24 May 1923 anti-Treaty leaders issued unceremonious orders to “dump arms”. The civil war was over. By its end 3,000 people were dead, and 21,000 prisoners were in jails and internment camps. The war left a legacy of bitterness that infected the Irish polity for decades to come.

New York ball could be Waterford Crystal’s last flourish

Workers in New York are putting the final touches to a dazzling Waterford crystal ball which will descend into Times Square on New Years Eve. The ball is over three and a half metres in diameter, weighs over five thousand kilos and is covered with 2,668 Waterford Crystal triangles. The massive new ball continues a Times Square new year tradition and will have a new permanent home on the roof of One Times Square. The $5 million project has taken a year to complete and engineers built an entire roof structure and reinforced the steel columns to cope with the ball’s weight. The ball was created at the crystal factory in Waterford and is a major marketing boost for the troubled glassware giant. God knows we need some joy coming into this new year," Waterford spokesman Peter Cheyney said. "That's the truth."

Cheyney’s relief for the New York project came on the same day as the announcement a US private equity fund was looking to buy out the company. Negotiators said the unnamed investor group were poised to take a controlling stake in struggling Irish crystal and ceramics manufacturer Waterford Wedgwood PLC for 600 million euros ($846 million). The company has until 2 January to make mounting loan payments or face the possible forced liquidation of assets. The date is the third postponement of loan repayment and there is now a race against time to save the company. Most of the glass is now manufactured in Eastern Europe with only the showrooms and a small operation left at its Waterford base.

If it happens, it will be the second time the industry will have gone under in glass's 230 year association with Waterford. While glass blowing dates back to techniques invented by the Phoenicians in the first century BC, it was relatively late arriving in Ireland. Before 1780 Irish glass was a pale imitation of the British product. England was influenced in the 16th century by Belgium which turn looked to the Italians. Antwerp was the chief glass making centre in northern Europe and attracted glass makers from Genoa and Venice. In 1571 Giacomo Verzelini came to London and was given sole royal licence to produce glass in the “thin fragile” Venetian style. In 1674 George Ravenscroft applied for a patent for a “particular sort of crystalline glass” made from high purity silica which was the forerunner of flint glass, also known as lead glass.

England developed its own lead glass style. German and Bohemian craftsmen brought their engraving skills to England in the peace and prosperity that followed the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. But in 1777 an excise tax to support the fight against the US war of Independence crippled the English and Scottish industry. In 1780 restrictions were lifted on Irish industry including manufacture of glass. Free trade in Ireland lasted until 1825. These 45 years were the great era of Irish glass, what glass historian Phelps Warren called “the Age of Exuberance”. The product was made in Dublin, Belfast and Cork, but it was the Waterford Glass House which quickly became pre-eminent.

The growth of Waterford’s glass industry coincided with a time of great prosperity for the city. Growth was fuelled by a newly improved mile-long Quay and its associated maritime industry which profited from provisions for the expanding Newfoundland fishing fleet. These opportunities were exploited by an emerging astute Quaker business community. One such Quaker family were the Penroses who initially made their money in ships' chandlery. In 1783 George Penrose and his nephew William (often erroneously assumed to be brothers) began glass manufacture with a £10,000 enterprise which employed 70 people to cut, blow and engrave glass.

A week before they opened for business, the Penroses placed an ad in the Dublin Evening Post on Saturday 4 October 1783 under the headline “Waterford Glass House.” The ad read: George and William Penrose having established an extensive Glass Manufacture in this city, their Friends and the Public may be supplied with all kinds of plain and cut Flint Glass useful and ornamental: they hope that when the Public know the low Terms they will be supplied at and consider the vast expense attending this weighty undertaking they will not take offence at their selling for Ready Money only. They are now ready to receive orders and intend opening their warehouse 10th of next month. Wholesale Dealers and Exporters will meet with proper Encouragement. September 22, 1783.”

Public relations aside, the key to the Penroses success was the employment of fellow Quaker, and master glassmaker, John Hill from Stourbridge, Worcestershire. Hill spent three years at Waterford and his knowledge of glass, chemistry, standards and quality and sense of design quickly established the brilliance of the Waterford product. In the early days, the factory obtained sand from nearby Woodstown strand. In later years they obtained high quality silica sand from the English port of King’s Lynn. But despite the quality and elegance of Hill's glass and the Penroses growing reputation, they struggled to make a profit. They sold the business in 1797 to the Gatchell family. Jonathan Gatchell turned it into a prosperous business. He used his connections and business acumen to expand the industry and gain an export foothold in America despite the negative effect of the 1800 Act of Union. He employed close to 200 people at the factory. But by 1826, heavy duties against crystal glass were setting back the industry. Conditions gradually worsened and by the middle of the century, the Irish glass industry was dead. Waterford’s factory shut down in 1851. Another hundred years would pass before glass would be made in the city again.

The citizens of Waterford never forgot the reputation and prestige Penrose glass had given the city and there were many attempts to restore the industry. The opportunity finally arose after World War II when refugee German, Czech and Italian glass cutters and artisans were enticed to Waterford to found a crystal factory. It began in Ballytruckle on a three acre lease. The first General Manager was the Czech immigrant Karel (Charles) Bacik and the chief designer was the Slovak Miroslav Havel. The two men (who both died recently) would devote the rest of their lives to Waterford and its crystal. In January 1948 a £15,000 development was mooted for the fast developing factory. Bacik and Havel trained up locals and by 1950 the factory settled on a new site at Johnstown with room for expansion. The plant employed 100 people and grew rapidly. It quickly reclaimed pride of place as Ireland’s foremost glassware company and was the great success of post-war Waterford industry. In the late 1960s production began at a 40 acre site in Kilbarry. The factory expanded three times and employed 2,000 people. In 1971 a second factory was built in Dungarvan. At the time, it was one of the largest handcraft industries in the world and its glass was unique in using the very highest lead content(thirty percent).

In 1986 Waterford Crystal took over the Wedgwood pottery group just as the winds of change were set to blow through the company. The late 1980s and 90s saw a slow but sure throttling of plant capacity and a steady stream of redundancies. In 2005, they closed the Dungarvan plant to consolidate its workforce in Waterford. Today much of the glass is produced more cheaply off-shore, ironically including the Czech Republic and Slovakia where many of the original designers hailed from. These shifts sharply reduced overhead costs but the company's crippling debts continued to mount. The falling dollar of much of the last decade badly hurt the company in its key US export market and its share price has been worthless for many months. Although the dollar has now bounced back, a combination of slow sales and the global credit crunch have put its financial future at risk and there have been two redundancy batches already this year. Unless the new mystery backers come to the party, Waterford Crystal could be set for another century of hibernation.

The story of New Geneva Barracks

Despite their close geographical proximity, the south eastern Irish counties of Wexford and Waterford have not always shared a close heritage. The two are separated by the broad expanse of Waterford Harbour and there are no bridges between them. Only in recent times have the two been linked up with the opening of the car ferry between Passage East in Waterford and Ballyhack in Wexford. But when Wexford rose in rebellion against the English in 1798, the county across the harbour remained quiet. Waterford’s only real link to the rebellion is a building just outside Passage with the unusual name of New Geneva Barracks.

In the late 18th century, Ireland was in a rare period of prosperity as Britain temporarily relaxed customs duties. In 1783, the new Irish parliament in Dublin was determined to fund a colony from Geneva who wanted to settle in Ireland. They were Protestants who wanted to leave their homeland after an unsuccessful rebellion against their Catholic French rulers. The Irish parliament voted £50,000 pounds to buy land and build a town to house the immigrants. The sum was increased by £6,000 pounds and land set out in the barony of Gaultier (east Waterford county) in 1653 for the support of Duncannon Fort (across the river in Co Wexford). These tenanted lands near Passage East were owned by the Alcock family, one of whom was MP for Waterford city. The government bought out the land from the Alcocks for £12,400 and compensated the tenants. They then began building with the intention of accommodating 1,000 Genevans. The public reason for bringing them over was to build a body of skilled merchants to give impetus to trade and commerce in the city of Waterford and the nation as a whole.

But there were ulterior motives. Authorities secretly hoped the Swiss Protestant ethos might infect the local Catholic population. Earl Temple, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, wrote a letter to Grenville, the Chief Secretary, where he noted putting the Swiss in Waterford “might make an essential reform in the religion, industry and mores of the South who want it more”. This also meant setting up an educational establishment. The government wanted to establish a Genevan College but needed to keep it secret from the governors of Trinity College who had a monopoly on education.

But the Trinity governors never had to worry as the mission failed before it began. An advance party of Genevans arrived in Waterford determined to set up a silk industry. Work on the New Geneva site proceeded but concession talks between the Irish government and Genevan leaders broke down over persistent Swiss demands the government felt were unreasonable. The whole arrangement fell through, the Genevans returned home and the buildings were left derelict.

With the threat of an uprising in 1798, the Government took possession of New Geneva, raised the compound walls and provided accommodation for 1,500 soldiers. When fighting broke out in Wexford, Waterford remained peaceful. However the Government was uneasy if the United Irishmen had triumphed in New Ross, the nearby city and county of Waterford would have risen. The soldiers of New Geneva were suspicious and showed great cruelty towards locals. More than a century afterwards, the memory of the 1798 cruelties and outrages lingered among the people and New Geneva was to them a symbol of tyranny and oppression.

In Watty Cox’s Irish magazine for February 1816 there was a vivid account of the “blanketing” of a woman at Geneva Barracks in 1798. A Mrs O’Neill had travelled from Co Antrim to see her son imprisoned at the barracks. By bribing sentries she was permitted an interview but as soon as mother and son saluted each other, she was ordered into the presence of Colonel Scott and his wife. The couple subjected her to a rigorous examination and then handed her over to some highlanders for a “blanketing”. Blanketing was a common punishment whereby the soldiers would grab a blanket, strip the victim naked and hoist her in the air repeatedly. Mrs O’Neill suffered this indignity for more than 20 minutes. She implored soldiers to leave some clothes on but when Col Scott saw this departure from custom he was encouraged by his wife to cut off her clothes with his sword. The inhabitants of the area could see her naked body repeatedly rising and falling above the walls of the barracks. Afterwards the woman was taken to a neighbouring village where she died the next day. The fate of her son was not recorded.

Today all that remains of Geneva Barracks is a dilapidated farmhouse and the remains of watch towers erected in 1798. In the 19th century the lands passed to Lord Waterford who sold them to a local merchant. This man named Galwey dismantled the barracks and moved the stonework to augment his premises in Dungarvan. A marker now commemorates the Geneva site with a prisoner's description of the barracks as “the filthiest, most damp and loathsome prison, devoid of any comfort”. It is also remembered in James McBurney’s The Croppy Boy (which featured in James Joyce’s Ulysses) the last verse of which reads:
At Geneva Barracks that young man died
And at Passage they have his body laid
Good people who live in peace and joy
Breathe a prayer and a tear for the Croppy Boy”.

Brief Encounters: Raymond Chandler and Waterford

Next year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the death of the great American crime writer Raymond Chandler, creator of the fictional detective Philip Marlowe. Anniversary books have started to emerge with the New York Times review last week of Judith Freeman’s “The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved” about his 30 year marriage to Cissy Chandler. The Irish city of Waterford should also have a part to play in any celebrations as his mother came from the city and both the mother and her only son spend many summers in the city at the turn of the 20th century.

In his book “Brief Encounters: Meetings with remarkable People”, Waterford-born author and radio documentary maker Bill Long (he also wrote a history of Irish lighthouses) wrote about his meetings with Chandler in London in the summer of 1958. The pair were neighbours; they met several times that summer and became friends largely due to the Waterford connection. On their first meeting, Chandler correctly picked Long’s Waterford brogue which pleased the American greatly as he deemed himself a “great judge of accents”.

Chandler’s mother Florence Thornton was from an old established Waterford Quaker legal family. The Thorntons had offices in Waterford, Cork and Dublin and Raymond inherited Thornton as his middle name. He told Long his mother was one of the Thorntons of Cathedral Square. According to Long he was grinning at the time “with the shadow of a cynical smile and the slightest edge of mockery in his tone”. Chandler enjoyed describing the family with mock pomposity: “I. Thornton and sons, solicitors and notaries public,” he intoned.

Chandler first went to Waterford with his mother after his alcoholic American father deserted the family when Ray was just seven. The Thornton family rallied round and they arranged for Florence and her son to leave America. After a short period in Waterford, they settled in London with a grandmother and aunt. For many of his pre-teen and teenage years, Chandler and his mother spent every summer in Waterford. “Uncle Ernest – my mother’s brother that is – was the head of the family then, and of the legal practice. Ruled both with an iron hand in an iron glove. A regular old tyrant was uncle Ernest! Upper middle class Protestants the Thorntons and god-awful snobs! Not just Uncle Ernest but the whole family were god-awful snobs. Full of bloody righteousness. Tension in the house all the time. And every goddamn thing had to be Protestant. The maids, the cook, even the man who worked in the garden.”

Despite the snobbery, Chandler was happy on his holidays. "I always had a good time in Waterford," he told Long. Chandler loved to reminisce about the upper-class Waterford families. There was the Dawneys, the Grubbs, the Carews and the Congreves, mostly Quaker or Protestants at whose homes he played tennis and croquet. Long noted Chandler’s childhood experiences in Waterford made an indelible impression. Summers with the Thorntons gave him an appreciation of social distinctions in a society which Long described as “neither urban nor rural but county”. Chandler admitted the Thornton snobbery had rubbed off on him. He hated to be called an Irish American because in his estimation that usually mean “Catholic and working class”. The Thorntons, he said, "saw to it that I grew up with a ferocious contempt for Catholics and to this day, I have a problem with that”. He continued, "the only Irish patriots with any brains came from the professional classes”. To Chandler, this meant being Protestant, but Long thought the real issue was not religion but class and education. Chandler thought it was more important where people came from rather than where they were going.

During his holidays, he enjoyed walking around the Mount Congreve estate a few miles outside Waterford on the banks of the River Suir. The Congreves were fellow upper-class Protestants and clients of the Thorntons. Chandler preferred some of the homelier aspects of the estate. “What I remember best,” said Chandler, “is the smell of the tobacco the old bothy-man smoked in his enormous bent-shank pipe. I remember resolving when I was ten or eleven at Mount Congreve to smoke a pipe when I grew up. And by God, I did and still do!”

The city also left an indelible imprint on the writer. He and Long swapped childhood memories of a long-gone bookshop in Cathedral Square. The shop was called Stickyback Power’s. Power is a common Waterford name but neither Chandler nor Long could remember why this Power gained his unusual nickname. Chandler loved the bookshop and told Long about the germ of an idea to set a Philip Marlowe novel using Waterford and the bookshop as locales. The storyline had Marlowe on holidays in Ireland and in a pub on the quays in Waterford. There he witnesses a sailors’ brawl. Later he hears one of the sailors has been murdered in the brawl and his body has been found slumped in the corner of a bookshop. Marlowe agrees to the captain of the ship’s request to investigate the murder which leads him into the low life of the city and he discovers a vicious prostitution racket.

Having given Long an outline of the plot, he asked him whether there was ever much prostitution along the quays. Long said Chandler wasn’t really interested in the answer and the project never came to fruition. Chandler’s health was poor in 1958 and his workrate was low. Long never met him again after that summer and he found out that Chandler died a year later of pneumonia at his villa in La Jolla, California. Chandler never returned to the city of his childhood but never forgot it. “You know of all the places – and I mean all the places – I’ve lived in,” he told Long, “Waterford is the place, that in the mind, draws me back all the time.”

Waterford days: Once upon a time in the South-East

Despite atrocious weather, the people of Waterford celebrated the August bank holiday weekend with the annual Spraoi festival which culminated last night with the parade which this year had a wild west theme. The persistent rain did not affect the party atmosphere which was heightened by Waterford’s win in the all-Ireland hurling quarter final over its old rivals Cork in Croke Park yesterday with the parade delayed by a half hour to allow the many people making their way back from Dublin cross the bridge into town in time for the start.

Spraoi (pronounced "spree") is an Irish word meaning a celebration or party. The three day Spraoi is Waterford’s largest festival and has been an annual August event since 1993 featuring music, street theatre and performance. The highlight is the Spraoi Parade, which can attract an audience of 50,000 people and involves several hundred costumed performers with giant props and floats, pyrotechnical wizardry, lights and special effects. Each year the theme is different and last night’s wild west theme featured a noisy and colourful convoy of stagecoaches, wagons, trains, and movable saloons.

Waterford is one of Ireland’s oldest and best preserved Hiberno-Norse towns. The name comes from “Vedrarfjord” meaning windy fjord and the town is served by a magnificent harbour. Three major Irish rivers, the Barrow, the Suir and the Nore all drain into Waterford Harbour. Though the Desii people from Co Meath are supposed to have inhabited Waterford around the 2nd century, the first recorded settlement on the south bank of the Suir was founded by Viking raiders in the ninth century. The Danes led by King Sitric founded the first longphort (shore fortress) around 853AD. By the late Viking age, the town was densely populated, well defended, Christianised and prosperous. More by neglect than by design, many of Waterford Viking and middle age walls are still extant.

The most famous building in Waterford is Reginald’s Tower. The tower is the oldest civic urban structure in Ireland and has played an important role in Irish history. The present structure dates from the 12th century and the earliest building on the site is a Viking fortification built on this site during the 10th century. The tower formed the apex of the triangular city settlement and was a port for Viking longboats. The tower gets its name from the Hiberno-Norse ruler of the city Ragnall MacGillemaire who was held prisoner there by the new Anglo-Norman invaders in the 12th century. It was here where Strongbow, the Anglo-Norman invasion force leader, married the daughter of Dermot McMurrough, King of Leinster. Their dynastic alliance would fatally intertwine British and Irish history and leave consequences still felt today.

Strongbow was the first in a line of British invaders who would turn Reginald’s Tower into a royal castle. King Henry II arrived in 1171 with an army of 500 knights and 4,000 men-at-arms. King John visited Waterford in 1210 and ordered new coins to be struck. Richard II visited the tower in 1394 and again in 1399. Returning to England from his second visit he was captured by the future Henry VI and forced to abdicate.

In 1487 the city refused to obey the direction of the Earl of Kildare to recognise Lambert Simnel as king and then eight years later defenders in Reginald's Tower successfully turned away the siege forces of Perkin Warbeck, the Yorkish pretender to the throne of Henry VII. These acts of loyalty to the English crown earned the city its motto "Urbs Intacta Manet Waterfordia" - "Waterford remains the unconquered city".

However Waterford was eventually conquered in the 17th century. The majority Catholic city had supported the confederate and Royalist cause in the Civil War. The Parliamentarian New Model Army arrived to besiege Waterford in October 1649. Cromwell had already gained a fearsome reputation in Ireland for his bloody sacking of the towns of Drogheda and Wexford. But Waterford initially withstood his siege as Cromwell’s army had to retire to winter quarters, where many of his men died of typhoid and dysentery. In 1650, parliamentary army leader Henry Ireton arrived to restore the siege and got his artillery within range of the city walls. The Mayor of Waterford pleaded with Royalist general Thomas Preston to surrender the city which he eventually did in August 1650.

Despite the ever present threat of wars and plague, Waterford was now a prosperous seafaring and trading town, third only in importance to Dublin and Cork. Trading with Newfoundland brought much wealth into the city. Much of Waterford’s finest architecture dates from the 18th century including the Catholic and Protestant cathedrals designed by locally born John Roberts. Roberts left an astonishing stamp on the city of his birth. He was born in 1712 the son of a local builder. Though he may have learned some basic skills from his father, not much is known about his formal education. It is likely he went to London to be partially trained as an architect.

In 1746 Roberts returned home where he was requested by Bishop Richard Chenevix to complete the new Bishop's Palace. This was his first major work in the city and led to further commissions in Waterford. In 1785 he built the residence of William Morris, now the Harbour Commissioners' headquarters and the Chamber of Commerce. In 1787 he was commissioned to build a new Leper Hospital on John's Hill. Roberts also built the Assembly Rooms on the Mall in 1788, which is now the Theatre Royal and City Hall.

The other major influence of the 18th century was the birth of the Waterford crystal industry. In 1783, Quaker brothers George and William Penrose founded the Penrose Glass and began to make crystal which they claimed would be "as fine a quality as any in Europe ... in the most elegant style." The brothers were able to live up to this extravagant claim. They used old secrets of mingling minerals and glass to create a crystal of beautiful and mysterious qualities. Their reputation quickly spread. King George III ordered a set of Waterford Crystal sent to his residence at a fashionable resort, where "it has been much admired" by court society. However in 1851, the then owner, George Gatchell, was forced to close the Waterford factory, largely because of crippling British excise taxes.

The tradition lay dormant until after the second world war when a new Waterford Crystal industry emerged led by a Czech immigrant businessman. Charles Bacik escaped the Communists to re-establish a glass works in the city. Bacik hired a fellow Czech the 25 year old Miroslav Havel who had been trained in glass-making at the prestigious Academy of Art and Industrial Design in Prague. After Bacik sold his interest to a group of Irish entrepreneurs, Havel stayed on to guide the rise of Waterford Crystal by adapting antique Waterford designs to modern production processes. He developed the beautiful suites of cut crystal glasses that created a brand identity now known to millions of consumers throughout the world.

Despite the world renowned crystal, Modern day Waterford has declined somewhat since its glory days as a medieval port. Once second in importance only to Dublin, it has since been overtaken by Cork, Limerick and Galway. Today the city’s population is over 50,000 and is the second fastest growing city in Ireland. Waterford has a renewed optimism with the long desired second crossing over the Suir due for completion in 2009/2010 set to give the city the much-needed bypass of through traffic from Rosslare to Cork and will add to the attractiveness of the old heart of the Viking town.