The Personals Page 8

  So how much would this cost me if I wanted an early Christmas present for my wife? ‘World War One. German. I would say you’d be looking at €200 to €250,’ he replied. I think I’ll just stick to vouchers for bath products from Lush, I tell him.

  Given this man’s passion, I was half-expecting him to tell me that the item had pride of place in his living room, in a purpose-built cabinet maybe, just under the Sacred Heart and above the photo of Jack Charlton. He had remained tight-lipped about his name and address, and didn’t want to go into any details that might identify him. I assumed this was because he had a huge collection of valuable items and was worried about break-ins.

  The truth was that his wife didn’t know he had the items. ‘Everything ends up in the shed,’ he explained. ‘Since I was married, I couldn’t keep this kind of stuff in my bedroom any more as the wife wanted nothing to do with it. She doesn’t want it in the house. So anything I buy or sell along these lines goes into the shed and she usually doesn’t see any of it.’

  I’ve established that this man isn’t a neo-Nazi or far right type, unlike many I’ve met over the years. The thrill for him is simply a link to history that he can own and share. Except in his case he mostly shares it with himself in his garden shed, away from the disapproving eyes of his nearest and dearest. Now he’s married, like a lot of us, his life has to change somewhat. For some, that means cutting down on golfing days away or weekends on the beer. It might mean adding a few extra centimetres to your waist or wearing matching pyjama sets. For him, being married means off loading the Nazi items in the shed. There’s naught as funny as folk, as the saying goes.

  ‘Grow Wheat – The Crop That Pays’

  Vintage Second World War propaganda poster. €240. DoneDeal, July 2018

  Today, Wexford’s Main Street is unrecognisable when compared to the time O’Connor’s shop was a stable presence there, from the early part of the twentieth century until it closed in the 1970s. The family still owns the building where the shop was, and during its heyday it sold everything from hardware to groceries. These days, as a sign of changing consumer trends, it’s a mobile phone accessories store.

  Some people say if you want to see how much society has evolved over the past century, you need look no further than our main streets. Cafes are replacing bars, flat whites are the new half pints, while ‘convenience’ and ‘express’ are the buzzwords for shops. Online shopping will change the streets even further in the coming decades, as more and more of us decide it’s not worth the hassle or time to leave the house to shop.

  The daughter of the owner of O’Connor’s is Helen Duggan, and she lives in the family homestead of Carcur House in Wexford. It’s a beautiful old Georgian property with a rich history, and is appropriately filled with antique furniture and naval artefacts brought back from trips abroad by several generations of sailors in the family.

  The propaganda poster advertised was such an unusual item that I had to go and meet Helen. On the face of it, it’s a simple enough poster, which at one time hung in the shop window of P. J. O’Connor and Sons in Wexford town. The ad originally said it was a First World War poster dated 1917, but further investigation found that it was issued and hung during the middle years of the Second World War.

  Helen leads me to the sunroom, where she has an assortment of items laid out on the table, from ration books to old shop advertisements and ledgers. We have tea and home-made lemon cake, and she begins to tell me a bit about herself and her family. ‘I was born and reared here and very much involved in local history. The house is several centuries old, and it has character. As they say, houses like this own you, you don’t own them,’ says Helen, pouring the freshly-made tea.

  I say I imagine that when you go up into the attic of an old house like this, it’s like entering Aladdin’s Cave. ‘Don’t go there,’ she says, ‘I’m a third-generation hoarder. I’ve been systematically working through each room and trying to catalogue everything. My grandfather started a business and before that my family were all seafarers, and a lot of the men were lost at sea. So my grandfather wasn’t allowed to go to sea, which he was very disappointed about, so then he started a hardware business.’ Dotted around the house are shells that her great-grandfather brought back from overseas, as well as prints of the ships the family worked on over the years.

  In the middle of the table was the poster, with the words ‘Grow Wheat – The Crop that Pays’ written large on it. It was probably about A3 size, with colours as vibrant as if it had come off the printing press yesterday, not eight decades previously as was the case. ‘This is something we found out in the coach house in a pile of rubble and dust,’ Helen tells me. ‘It’s a poster which was to encourage the growing of wheat during the Emergency, as it was called. It hung on the front window of the commercial premises on Main Street and it’s signed by a man called W. Till. Seemingly he was asked by the government to produce a poster for this. He was one of the well-known artists behind these at the time. Bar one I saw in Irish online, it is fairly rare to see these. A lot of them were just thrown away.’

  Looking more closely at the poster, I can’t help but notice a significant hole in the middle fold about the size of a €2 coin, with accompanying frayed edges. Maybe an overenthusiastic shop assistant had tugged it off the window? ‘No, unfortunately the result of a lovely little mouse, we think,’ Helen says. ‘It’s a good job he got full and didn’t keep going.’

  Now comes the Antiques Roadshow moment, when I pause before asking if she has any idea what it is currently worth. ‘Well, had it been intact I am advised it is worth €2,500. Because of the damage by that little mouse, it is somewhere in the hundreds now. Because we have done up the coach house, we’re not too worried because if it doesn’t sell, we’ll just keep it there.’

  The ad had been up a few weeks when we met, but so far, the interest hasn’t been huge. ‘It’s a very specialised area,’ she says. ‘There’s one man interested and he has a few thousand old ones, so we’ve been talking and we’ll see where it goes.’

  O’Connor’s shop was on Main Street from the late 1920s. Although it’s rented out, the family try to preserve the shop front as it should be, in an effort to stay loyal to the past. Talking to Helen it’s clear that the link with history and the commercial life that once existed is becoming more difficult to assert. And while Main Street has always evolved, it does seem that there’s been a more dramatic and significant shift in the last few years than in the previous decades.

  Also in the collection of items related to the shop that Helen discovered in the coach house were ration books, petrol coupons and old credit ledgers. They provide a fascinating insight into the days of credit, a time when some farmers paid their accounts once a year at harvest time. It also details those customers who never settled, who still have amounts outstanding decades later. Shops like O’Connor’s were so embedded in their communities, I’d imagine it was difficult to call in the bailiffs when someone couldn’t or wouldn’t pay. Helen remembers calling at some houses looking for payment, but it was a pointless exercise. This was the late seventies and many simply didn’t have the money and so their outstanding amounts remain frozen in time.

  Since the coach house has been cleared, Helen says her husband allows her two sections to clutter to her heart’s content. We take a walk outside and into the beautiful original coach house, just metres from the back door. Helen shows me some great finds, not least of which is a collection of chimney lamps, as well as lots of boating items and antique furniture.

  The family tells a story that one night more than a century ago there was a party in the house. The owners had a tip-off that there would be a police raid later that night. Family members dropped a cache of pistols and swords into a well. Some time later, a group slipped in while the party was in full swing and took many of the items from the well, except for one French bayonet, which the family retains and displays proudly.

 
While the coach house has now been cleared of decades worth of gathered items, and many of them will be put up online for sale, given Helen’s passion for collecting, I doubt the space will remain decluttered for long. She waves me off, telling me to ignore the large panels of ornate conservatory glass leaning against the side of her house. ‘They’re beautiful,’ I say, as I pause to lift some of the panels and look at the detail. ‘Yes, they are,’ she says, ‘We believe they came from a house with links to the Duke of Wellington. The whole conservatory is there. Someday I’ll assemble it. I’d like nothing better than to put it back like it once was and restore it to what it looked like in its heyday – give it a new lease of life.’

  Zen and the Art of Phone Box Maintenance

  For sale: Second World War German military helmet in great condition. Complete with lining and strap. Belonged to Nazi firefighter. €90. DoneDeal, August 2018

  The taxi drops me off halfway up Collins Avenue in Dublin, where I’m met at the door by fifty-something Paul Murphy who, it turns out, is a somewhat unlikely collector of a wide range of unusual items.

  In his sitting room and hallway are about a dozen grandfather clocks at various stages of restoration, while an oversized vintage squash racket and a small model of an old phone box sit on a kitchen shelf. Paul describes himself as a collector and part-time seller and he can trace his collecting roots back to childhood, when he was fascinated by stamps and built up a sizeable collection.

  He began putting ads online about 12 years ago, he tells me, when his passion was ignited by old clocks. It started casually enough; he became interested after buying one or two randomly at car boot sales and restoring them. He’d bring them back to life and put them on the mantelpiece and over time he ended up with too many. And like any collector who has too many things, he inevitably became a part-time dealer.

  As I’ve been finding out from the collectors I meet through the small ads, the pathways to building up collections are not exactly casual. And so it was with Paul. He became focused on collecting certain types of items at a time in his life when his mental health was suffering. Restoring old pieces of furniture or items of historical significance became vital therapy for him, and allowed him to work through issues in a structured way. It began with an old phone box which he bought and put in the front garden.

  ‘I love the old Irish phone boxes and you don’t see them on the ads that often, but a few years ago one came up on DoneDeal,’ he explains. ‘We were in west Cork for the weekend. I had a very big job in security but I suffered from depression and anxiety at the time so I had taken a break from the job and I was out of work. So anyway, I saw this old phone box. It was in bits, but myself and the owner did a deal, and I went and collected it on the Tuesday morning after our weekend away. It was great therapy. I couldn’t get it into the back garden; because it is solid concrete it weighs about two tonnes, so I put it out the front. I owe that first phone box a hell of a lot.’

  Paul was born in 1964 and as a teenager in the late 1970s and 1980s, he was intimately familiar with the inside of phone boxes. He felt huge nostalgia towards the phone box, and he set about restoring it to its original condition, working on it in his front garden daily for about two months. ‘Every day I was there working on it, at least four or five people would stop and talk to me about their memories; what went on in them, and their recollections of the glass being replaced and how they fiddled the phones and stuck paper up the coin return,’ he says.

  The work became daily therapy for Paul and was a way of keeping his mind and body engaged in a task. It also helped to keep at bay the isolation and social withdrawal that often comes with a period of poor mental health. ‘My wife saw the value in it from day one,’ he says. ‘That’s why there was never any hassle having it out the front. I used to have the door of the phone box in the kitchen and other bits of it all over the sitting room. My wife saw it as a huge positive because it prevented me from sitting inside watching TV all day long and staying in my head.’

  It’s difficult for Paul to pinpoint exactly where his depression came from or what the trigger was. ‘It’s hard to know,’ he says. ‘I do think my excessive drinking was as a result of self-medicating with alcohol for depression. But then alcohol of course is a depressant, so it is a vicious circle. I went off drink around this time, and the energy I used to put into drinking now goes into restoration and into antiques.’

  I asked Paul to describe depression to someone who may have no idea what it is. ‘It’s just the weight of the world on you when it shouldn’t be and things get blown up out of proportion,’ he says. ‘The flipside is when you’re doing something like restoring a phone box; it gives a lot back and you can see the benefit.’

  Paul says it’s not an exaggeration to claim that replying to the phone box ad on DoneDeal probably saved his life, in terms of helping him work through his mental health issues, keeping the depression at bay and preventing it from escalating. In the years since, he’s been buying and selling things on DoneDeal and various other sites on a weekly basis. He recently got rid of a lot of items he had gathered over the years and made a few quid in the process. That decluttering exercise only means one thing – now he can start cluttering and collecting all over again.

  Which brings us to his current ad, for a German Second World War firefighter’s helmet, which along with a few other items was found on a weekend break in Berlin with his wife. I’m jealous. When my wife and I went to Berlin one November a few years ago all we came back with were head colds and we spent our weekend drifting from coffee shop to coffee shop, trying to keep frostbite at bay. Paul picked up a holster belonging to a German soldier, an oversized squash racket and some German bar signs. Thinking of the baggage charges, I sincerely hope he didn’t travel Ryanair.

  ‘The holster is for a Walther PPK 7.65,’ he tells me, handing me a small leather pouch. ‘It is German and has the stamp saying 1941 on it and the eagle crest. That’s a nice little piece. The helmet I got in Berlin a few weeks ago too. We went over with just two carry-on cases in luggage and then we bought two huge suitcases over there and paid the charges coming back. This helmet has the year 1939 stamped on it and the regiment on it too, so I need to look into that a bit more and find out more about it.’

  Like many I’ve met who are enthused by military items, Paul is drawn to military memorabilia because of the stories behind them, both personal and political. ‘The war is so emotive,’ he says, ‘You look at these items, and I think of the soldier in 1939 that had it on him, with stuff flying everywhere. That was a German soldier out there conquering Poland or doing God knows what kind of evil – it beggars belief to be so close to history, to have it in your hand.’

  No one has answered his ad so far, but he expects a lot of interest given the historical heritage. I have a nose around the other pieces littering his kitchen and sitting room floor. It’s such an eclectic range of items, and the collection is led by curiosity rather than having any overarching theme. For example, Paul shows me a pile of small pieces of parquet flooring that look slightly charred, neatly stacked in mounds lining the hallway. You have to step round them to access the kitchen. There are about 20 pieces stacked against the wall, and some are slotted together like jigsaw pieces, with others on their own waiting for a mate. ‘This is my next project,’ he tells me. ‘It’s a floor I bought from an old school in England, and I’m going to put it down in the sitting room. Each little piece has to be treated and then fitted. It will take months to clean, assemble and lay the floor but in the end it will be worth it.’

  This means hard physical work ahead, but more importantly for Paul, these will be months when his mind is kept busy. Thankfully, since he stopped drinking alcohol and began restoring more items, the temptation to get drunk has left him. People find zen through all sorts of things – for some it’s restoring an old car, for others it’s ruining a good walk on a golf course. Paul gets it through the classifieds and they gi
ve him more than months of counselling or medication could. They give him a purpose and a wide social network to engage with, meaning he remains connected and valued. Having fully restored three phone boxes and a huge amount of collected material, he hasn’t had an episode of depression in years. Life is good. ‘And all this because I answered an ad online,’ he says.

  Engineering a Step Back in Time

  First World War relics from Verdun, France, 1917. Original consists of 2 French Grenadier uniform buttons, one shaped bullet and an 1870 French Third Republic medal. €40. DoneDeal, October 2018

  The odds that Michael Daly would become an engineering and technical graphics teacher were fairly slim. Pretty much all his family, including his father, left school early and took the boat to England after the Second World War. There was little work in Ireland and a lot of rebuilding to be done on the other side of the Irish Sea.

  Michael went down a different path and was always single-minded in his choices. For example, after his Inter Cert he wanted to drop woodwork and study history, which at that time wasn’t available in his school. His principal forbade it, but Michael did it anyway, finding a history teacher nearby and spending his Saturday mornings going through the curriculum. In the end he got good marks in both subjects and went on to train as a teacher, becoming the first in his family to go to university. He is still teaching today, not far from his home in Ardagh. We meet in a hotel in Newcastle West after his working day and he brings with him two boxes of items he thinks will interest me, all with historical or cultural significance.