A Glimpse Of A Bygone
image credit to internet Town Hall c1950 Looking North
Conversation with Willy John Carlin about Strabane Co Tyrone
Was there street lighting in Strabane in your day?
Yes, but it was very poor. The street lighting was by gas then. The old lamp lighter used to come along with a pole, which had a hook on the end, and he used to turn on the gas lights in the evenings and light them. It was all over the town and it had its good points too.
Gas was a part of the thirties. Then, in the war years (1939-1945) all the after dark lighting had to be diminished and this was known here as the “blackout”. The lights were fitted with a black hood which meant that you could only see in the immediate area of the street light.
Even bicycles had to have a shade fitted over their lamps which directed the light straight down in front of you.
In the house you had to stop all light from showing from the outside with blackout blinds. If a chink of light was seen coming from your house you were heavily fined. When I say heavily fined you could have been fined five shillings, or maybe ten shillings which was a lot then.
One thing that was very prevalent in the war years was smuggling. People bought clothes or foodstuff in Lifford, and while their main quest was to get back home again safely with their purchases there were certain things that couldn’t be obtained in lifford, but even though we were at war and under rationing, we could get them in Strabane.
Tea, for example, was reasonably to get here, (in Strabane) but you could hardly buy tea in Lifford at all. Tea, bread and things like that were smuggled over to Lifford from here. Although the Irish government were regarded as being neutral there was an embargo on quite a lot of stuff to them. They had just came out of a civil war in the twenties and although they were still a very underdeveloped country, they had a system called “Free Beef” where people regarded as being poor were supplied with free beef.
Smuggling was a very lucrative pastime, but quite often it was also essential. If you needed a pair of shoes, or anything else, you had to have coupons.
The coupons came in a book that were dated, maybe, from the week starting January the first and the covered everything. You had to have them and it was very, very, and seldom that they weren’t used because there was a big demand and always so little food.
Items that we take so much for granted today, such as butter and bacon were scarce. As I told you earlier, I worked in a butcher’s shop and the butcher had to become an expert in matters relating to the wartime. Records had to be kept for everything sold in the food line.
The old Town hall, prior to the war years, would have been primarily, a place of entertainment and was where the urban Council met, but the top floor was taken over as the Food Administration Department. A man called john Hackett was the manager there. And had a full staff of civil servants who looked after the administrative side of the coupons. They issued the ration books. I have one somewhere about the house yet, and in it there was a section for meat, a section for clothing, a section for shoes. Even cigarettes were rationed. Everything had a section and all the coupons were contained in the one ration book. Rationing continued until about 1948.
During the war Strabane was basically a garrison town and at that time the railways ran twenty-four hours a day. At that time Strabane had a population of around five thousand whereas today it has a population of around fourteen thousand (late 90s).
This conversation with Willy John Carlin was first published in 2000 in ‘Reflections’ – Bygone Age – by Strabane and District Writers
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