A Day in the life of an Irish Shoemaker

Céad Míle Fáilte, and welcome to your Letter from Ireland for this week. Late April is proving to be a glorious time here in County Cork, with the countryside doing its very best to impress. The ditches are showing the first of the whitethorn blossom, the ploughed fields pushing up their first growth, and the evenings are providing enough light to stay outdoors longer. There’s a real sense of the year gathering itself and of the land getting down to serious business. I hope wherever you are, this season is treating you kindly.

I’m settled down with a cup of Barry’s tea as I write, and you’re very welcome to join me with a cup of whatever you fancy. This week’s letter comes with a particular personal pleasure attached, because it was inspired by a discovery made right here at home. As many of you will know, the 1926 Irish Census was released just days ago – and Carina, my other half, has been doing what I suspect many of you have been doing: searching for her own family. She found all of them, and what she found set me thinking about a world that is gone, but not entirely forgotten.

For example, when Carina pulled up the census return for her Moynihan ancestors, there was Denis Moynihan, listed as a shoemaker. He was the head of household with 20 acres – probably fully owned by the family at this stage. There was his wife, Katie, and the children still at home – Timmy, Ellen, with the others now scattered to America. It was a single page of a government form, filled in with a careful hand. But it got me thinking about what Denis Moynihan’s day was actually like? 

A Day in the Life of a Shoemaker.

Denis would likely have been up early, because a man who farmed and worked a trade had two days to get through before the sun went down. On some mornings the land might come first, but on others, the cobbler’s bench called.

His workshop was most likely just a corner of the kitchen, or a small room off it, as long as the light came in at the right angle and his tools were always to hand. The shoe shaped last, the awl, the curved needle, the waxed thread, the small hammer, and the scraps of leather sorted by use and weight.

On an April morning, there might be several pairs of boots laid out before him. Spring was hard on footwear in rural Ireland. The ground still soft from winter, but as farm work picked up again, leather wore quickly and needed attention. There might be a farmer’s boot with the sole pulling away, or a child’s school bag with broken stitching, or perhaps a good pair of Sunday boots needing careful repair. He just sat down, and got on with it.

The First Visitor of the day

A shoemaker who works from home is, in a sense, always open for business. The door of the Moynihan house would have seen a steady trickle through the morning – not just customers, but neighbours, and the two were often one and the same.

Old Jimmy from back the road might arrive first, carrying his boots wrapped in a bit of sacking. He’d set them down on the table without ceremony, and Denis would turn them over in his hands, assessing the damage without much said. A price would be agreed with a nod. Then Jimmy would sit for a while, and Katie would put the kettle on. The conversation would range across the affairs of the parish and the state – the readiness of the land to take seed, the weather to come, someone’s new calf, someone else’s bad luck with a horse, and the latest going ons far to the north in Dublin.

That is the thing about any trademan’s workshop in rural Ireland: it was as much a place of talk as of work. Denis’s hands would keep moving – stitching, tapping, trimming – while the conversation flowed around him. He was a tradesman, yes, but he was also a kind of anchor point in the community. People brought him their broken things and, sometimes, their worries too.

Ellen, a daughter still at home and well into her twenties now, moved between the kitchen and the rest of the house, to help her mother, with the household chores. She was a steady presence, the kind that holds a household together without fuss. Timmy was already out on the land by the time the first customer arrived, doing whatever April demanded of a twenty-acre farm: turning ground, mending ditches, watching the sky for a turn in the weather.

In the Afternoon.

After the dinner, dinner in rural Ireland in 1926 being the middle of the day – Denis would return to the bench. The afternoon light was better on that side of the house, and his more delicate work waited for it. New stitching on a good boot requires patience and a steady hand. His work was the opposite of fashion, every repair was a small act in a world where nothing could be wasted. By this time, he knew the feet of his neighbours – which man walked heavy on his right heel and which woman had a bunion that needed accommodating.

Outside, the demands of farming continued. The two lives, tradesman and farmer, ran side by side, each filling the gaps left by the other. When the bench was quiet, there was always the land. When the land slowed down, there was always work waiting on the bench.

A Letter Arrives.

It was in the evening, when the day’s work was coming to an end, that the letter arrived. It had come from their daughter Mary in Manchester, New Hampshire. She was in service there, keeping house for a family who had more rooms than she had ever known growing up in rural Ireland. Jerry and John, the two older boys, were also in Manchester, doing whatever work they could find in that mill town that had drawn so many Irish before them.

Each of Mary’s letters was an event. They were read aloud at the kitchen table, re-read, passed around, and thought about for days. She wrote about her work, about the family she served, about the cold winters that made Irish winters seem mild by comparison. She asked about the farm, about Ellen, and whether Timmy’s knee had healed. She sent a little money when she could.

Denis would have listened, while Katie read the letter, with a particular quietness. Three of their children were on the other side of an ocean, living lives that were both familiar and unimaginable. Today we think of the emigrant’s letter as one of the great themes of Irish family history, and for the Moynihans in 1926, it was simply the monthly reality.

The End of a working Day.

Before the lamp is turned down, Denis would have done what craftsmen do at the end of a working day. He looked at what had been finished, set it aside, and looked at what still waited. There was a boot almost done, another pair collected in the afternoon, left at the door without much warning. A length of leather soaking in water, ready to be worked in the morning.

He lined up the next day’s work in his mind, the way a farmer checks the sky before going to bed. April on a farm tends to spring surprises, so it paid to be ready with the next job just in case he was pulled out to help on the land. Outside, the last of the light would have been fading over the fields that Timmy would work again tomorrow. Inside, Ellen cleared the table and Katie banked the fire. Denis Moynihan, shoemaker and farmer, husband and father, ended another day in the only place he had ever known. The 1926 census caught him on one ordinary night, in the middle of all of that.

Your Own Discovery.

When Carina found Denis in that census return, it listed names, ages, occupations, and acreages – a collection of facts on a government form. But behind it was the smell of leather and wax, the sound of a hammer on a last, the weight of a letter from far away, the quiet at the end of a long April day. That is what the census gives us, when we are willing to look just behind the page.

If you have been searching the 1926 census this last week, and I know many of you have, I would love to hear what you found. Who did you discover? What occupation was listed? How does it help you imagine the world your Irish ancestor was living in?

Even if your own people had left Ireland long before 1926, the world Denis and his family lived in would have been instantly familiar to them.

Let me know in the comments below.

Slán for this week,

Mike.