Looking through a box of old papers I’d kept (most of it rubbish), I came across a copy of a programme for Rostrevor and Warrenpoint Agricultural Show in 1944.
Such a document. A record of an event that it’s hard to believe really did take place.
Three hundred and perhaps more entries (I could be short a couple of pages) showcasing the great and the good of the area.
Everyone has their shoulder to the wheel – from those ‘threading on the heels of the aristocracy’ to those with no care for the aristocracy. Where was Estyn Evans when we needed him. Or ‘Einstein Evans’ as my boss used to call him.
Estyn Evans was a Queen’s University professor who wrote the highly regarded book ‘Mourne Country,’ a geographer and anthropologist much given to stopping his car and, flanked by his students, running across two or three fields to interview a rustic he had spotted mowing and tying corn. Would that he had recorded Rostrevor Show!
At present we do have a thriving vintage tractor group, and in normal times a charity Thrashing Day out in Killowen.
There’s a Literary Society; The Bell Ringers; An Cuan; a group of young American evangelists; the Men’s Shed; and many more groups. It wouldn’t be easy to draw them all together for an agricultural show.
Yet, in 1944, that’s what they did. They came together and exhibited in classes from ‘Horse Harnessed in Iron Shod Cart’ to ‘Bunch of Wildflowers’.
I particularly like Class 46 – ‘Three Pancakes’. That had six entrants in a highly competitive field.
In looking through the programme I knew, or knew of, almost everyone. In Class 6: ‘Goats’, Peter Morgan exhibited ‘Knight of Avalon’. I knew Peter in the 1950s. Fiercely independent. A house in need of ‘a bit of tightening up’; three acres of banks, a couple of goats, free range hens and an Irish terrier dog. ‘The Champion,’ as he was known, ‘held court’ in the greatest ceili house in the district, even to neighbours gathering outside on a good Sunday.
He had downsized to one room and was sitting in his kitchen, stuffed paper draught-proofing his window and a none too secure latch on his door when I asked, with all the innocence of my eight years: ‘Are you not afraid of being robbed, Peter’.
‘Do you see man,’ he quipped, ‘it would take two people to rob me – one to leave it and one to take it away’.
Looking through the programme I’m reminded of a man I met in a ready-mix concrete yard in Newry. He told me he had been in the American military police guarding (in their meetings) high ranking army personnel as they planned an involvement in Vietnam. He felt they had little idea of where they were going or what they would do when they got there, and the introduction and frequent use of the words logistics and scenario prompted him to come home.
Well, the organisers of ‘Rostrevor Show’ must have fully understood ‘logistics and scenario’.
Capt AC Nugent and Joe McQuade both had a cow in ‘Cattle Section Class 2’; James Gray and Johnny Parr competed. The Grays were international pony breeders, the Parrs had won their pony (The Rambler) in a raffle.
My granny’s bother Joe ‘Flaxi’ had a pen of three Blackface ewes; Miss Leaper exhibited in the apples and home-made jam section. I (for a summer) assisted the head gardener in Miss Leaper’s, a three-acre garden beside Ross’s Monument. There’s four detached town houses in it now.
JP Walls was the Hon Show Secretary. A publican and auctioneer, he too exhibited a pot of home-made jam.
My Uncle Joe ‘Flaxi’ drank a ‘good sup’ in Walls’s. I can’t see Miss Leaper crossing the door.
All the variety of the show – horses, cattle, sheep and goats, vegetables, fruit, flowers, home baking, butter, eggs, honey, knitting, potatoes.
Then there was Class 16 – Six boiled potatoes in their jackets; Class 48 was ‘Six Hen Eggs; and Class 49 Six Duck Eggs; there was no category for hens or ducks. I can only think it would have been difficult to get little baskets to transport free range fowl.
And no mention of donkeys either. Was this because the two donkeys in the locality (at the time) had absolutely no kudos, unlike the dozen or more donkeys gracing the homes of my neighbours now.
Joe Cooper, of Aughavilly Farm, was the Branch Secretary and only he and his wife Nora could have made it so inclusive.
Joe was hugely charismatic; Nora wrote poems and songs sighting her neighbours.
When Henry and John Fearon (Cob and Pony class) bought the first tractor in Drumreagh/Knockbarragh, she wrote ‘Fearon’s Tractor’: “Whoa back howl-aft said Henry; Naw drive her on said John: She’ll need all the power she has; to Plough the Rocks a Bawn; The Champions Buck he leapt the sheugh; and landed in Drumreagh; When he heard the noise of Fearon’s tractor upon the Yeltie’s Brae.
Joe Cooper lived to nearly 100. He was as popular as ever (long retired) in a seafront house in Warrenpoint.
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