'Hiring Fairs and Market Places' by May Blair, published by Appletree Press

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extracted from the Appletree Press title Hiring Fairs and Market Places by May Blair.

COUNTY FERMANAGH

There would have been five or six men working out in our yard on a fair day; throwing on a bag of meal – and a bag of meal was two hundredweight at that time. It took two to throw that on. There would have been one or two horses out there too, tied to a post in the yard; maybe belonged to a customer. We didn’t stable horses but the horse was happy enough to stand there if we threw him a han’ful of hay now and again.
It was all counter trade at that time. Tea was weighed. Sugar was weighed. Sugar came in two hundredweight bags – 224lb. A lot of it came in carts. Tea came in chests which varied in weight and varied in the different types and qualities of tea you bought. Tea retailed at as little as one and sixpence a pound. You’d all that to weigh up and you tied it with string, and you had to be competent enough to be able to put a knot on your twine and only cut one end. In those days waste was one of the things that would not be tolerated. One thing we used in those days was snuff. Snuff was a standard order on those coming into the shop. There was practically no tinned stuff – maybe a few tins of pears at Christmas; and Christmas time was only Christmas day.
At the May Fair you could have bought straw for thatch and scollops for pegging it down; cabbage plants too and you would hear cart loads of young pigs squealing. At that time they were taken off the sow at eight weeks and sold for fattening. They squealed (or grunted) and darted into a corner if anybody put their hand into the cart to move them about a bit to get a better look. Farmers always lift a pig by the ear and the tail to judge the weight of it. That makes it squeal too. This all took place on the main street.
Now let’s get back into the shop again; and along with all the other things, we sold boots and shoes. Wellingtons in those days weren’t heard tell of. The best boot that you could sell a customer cost around twelve shillings or twelve and sixpence. And that was a full kip [leather made from the skin of young cattle] leather boot with a tip on the heel and a toe-plate on the toe and three row of hobnails round the sole of it. That sole would be half an inch thick and the good boot was what was known as ‘pegged and sewn and screwed’. Then there was what was known as a whole-back and a split-back. The whole-back was made with the one piece of leather and you could have bought that with or without a toe-cap. The split-back was made with two pieces. Those were made across the water. There was a boot known as a ‘Hold-fast’ and there was another one called ‘Times-test’. That was the brand name and they were about the best boot you could buy. And you got replicas of that heavy boot for boys going to school. They cost around five shillings. Ladies’ boots were lighter of course and had a long leg. Farmers bought a lighter boot for church or going to fairs.
You sold bread which came in from Enniskillen – and American bacon. It was known as American clear-backs. That came to the shop in a wooden box made of inch timber, wired, because there was no lifting gear as nowadays. That was tipped off on the side-path and was eventually turned over and, with some help, got into the store. It was packed in salt and every morning and especially on a fair morning it was the job of one of the assistants to go out with a big scrubber and brush the salt off. Then it was brought in and put on a special counter. You took your knife which was kept sharp and cut it in two and set one piece on top of the other with the cut sides next your customers. There was no such thing as a bacon slicer. A speciality at that time was home-grown beans and American bacon. Sometimes if a farmer hadn’t a pig ready for the salt at home he would have bought a lump of that to tide him over.
In all villages you got these travelling salesmen. There was a character that sold ladieswear – all types of ladieswear. And a well-dressed fella in those days often ended up with a navy-blue suit bought on hiring day. And the character that would be fittin’ him out would say, ‘Jimmy, get that jacket on ye now. There’s one that’ll fit ye.’ And he’d get a hold of the back of the jacket in his hand and say, ‘Button it up on ye boy. Button it up on ye.’ And of course the lad would button it up and it would be a lovely fit. He wouldn’t be aware that the salesman was holding about nine inches at the back of it. But everybody seemed to be happy.
Then you had the character which sold rope; sold harness. He was called Devine and he always wore a white shirt and a hard hat. He took off his jacket of a warm day but he never took off the hard hat, and the sweat would be rollin’ off him. He told stories in the middle of all the sales talk. One of his stories was: ‘I was in a house the other night and I asked the woman, ‘Will ye make me a drop o’ tay?’ And she says, ‘I will if ye houl the chile for me.’ An’ I was houlin’ the chile on me knee an’ a man come in an’ ’e says, ‘Yer doin’ well the night, Paddy.’
‘Aye,’ says I, ‘I’m houlin’ me own.’ An’ that’s when the trouble started!
A lot of hired people tended to attend the same fairs, stay in the same district. If they moved, it would have been across to Scotland. A big lot of Irish people went over there for digging the potatoes, saved up the money, came back and spent the winter months at home. There was the ceilidhes and the Mummers’ dances, and the card playing and the concerts and the show people which travelled all over the country. One of the greatest things that we had then, everybody was happy. We have a wonderful world now but people are not happy. It was a similar story in Belleek and Garrison, where fairs were held on the seventeenth and twenty-sixth of the month respectively. They died out in both places in 1960 and were replaced by marts in 1961. Belleek’s fairs date back to Plantation times. Three were held there throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Belleek of that time was a centre of trade with goods such as iron, slates, timber and coal arriving in carts from Ballyshannon en route for Enniskillen and beyond. Some flax, corn and occasionally cattle were carried in the opposite direction. There was also a big trade in turf. Long ago these were transported via the lough in cots and barges. Barges were reckoned to be safer on the lower lough. In the second half of the nineteenth century James Caldwell Bloomfield introduced steam transport. He also started a pottery at Belleek, first making earthenware for everyday use but later making the fine Parian china we know today.

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