End of the counter culture

IT was a time of huge change.

The shop counter and the list of items to be collected were gone. Instead, in came the checkout till and the idea of serving yourself as you walked around the shop.

And it’s an era that film-maker Laura McGann has captured in the short documentary The End of the Counter. The film will be shown for the first time at next week’s Corona Cork Film Festival and has been a real labour of love for Laura.

The idea came from Super 8 footage captured by her grandfather Mattie Melia in the early 1960s.

“We always used to watch the footage at Christmas time and it would be all the communions, weddings and Christmas mornings — all that kind of thing,” says Laura. “And there was footage of things going on in Newbridge — fairs and parades.”

Laura’s grandfather was involved in bringing the Mace supermarket brand to Ireland.

“I knew he started the whole thing in Ireland in the 1960s but I never really understood exactly what he had done. When he died three years ago, I went back to look at the footage and I saw all these shops in the films.

“Basically in England a lot of the multiples — the bigger shops — were cropping up around the place and they were putting the smaller local family-run shops out of business. The key thing about Mattie was that he was all about the family and he wanted to save family businesses.”

Mattie had been working in the grocery shop owned by Christy Moore’s mother in Newbridge, Co Kildare, when the idea of bringing Mace to Ireland arose.

“Mace was a voluntary group and the whole ethos behind it was we’re stronger in numbers, we’re stronger in a group,” says Laura. “If we all group together and we all buy in bulk, we’ll be able to do more.

“Mattie knew that the shops needed to be more efficient — you needed people to want to go in there because all of these new flashier places were cropping up with big signs and advertising.

“He’d go into the grocer’s shop and explain all this to them. Some did change over and it was quite a big change because the grocery store hadn’t changed in over a hundred years.”

Mattie’s footage shows several new shops being opened, including the then Burrell shop in Athy, Co Kildare. This was opened by Terry Wogan and later became Perry’s supermarket. The shop, in the town’s Duke Street, remained in business for 40 years until it closed down in July this year. The staff transferred to the family’s other shop in the town.

The opening of a new supermarket created huge excitement in a town or village.

“The footage shows corner shops being renovated and new shelving going in,” says Laura. “They’d paint the windows white so no one in the town would see what was going on. On the day it was re-opening, you’d see maybe 100 or 150 people. All the women would be down in their headscarves and wearing their best Sunday clothes.”

The documentary, which is funded by the Irish Film Board, combines this early footage with interviews with people who remember that time.

“It was very interesting talking to customers about their memories because they’d never come across anything like this before. They used to go into the corner shop and have to give a list to the shopkeeper. Now for the first time, they could come in and pick things up for themselves.

“This process was so new that they really had to be shown how to do it — pick up the basket, move around the aisles picking up the goods and then bring it to the checkout. It sounds so simple now but it was completely new then.

“I’ve spoken to a lot of women who have really clear memories of the first time they experienced this and just how overwhelmed they were at the time because there was so much variety.”

While the Mace supermarkets weren’t like the huge supermarkets we now have dominating our towns and cities, they were a change from the traditional corner shop.

“It was the start of a lot of change in the social life of the town. The shopkeeper was the news of the world — if somebody had died, if somebody had been born, he or she knew about it.

“You could go in there and spend a good half-hour chatting. The new shops kind of changed that a bit but it was a necessary thing. It had to change because it was either that or these shops were going to go out of business.”

Mattie worked in retail until he retired. Ever the adaptor, he was going to enrol in computer classes but sadly suffered a stroke shortly after retiring and lived with the after-effects for the next 12 years.

“It was sad that he had a stroke just after he retired because he worked so hard and helped so many people during his working life. He didn’t really get to relax and enjoy his retirement.”

But he left a tremendous gift behind in the fascinating Super 8 footage he took and his granddaughter Laura has honoured that in The End of the Counter.

* The End of the Counter will be shown Saturday, Nov 17, at 3.30pm in the Cork Opera House, as part of the Reality Bites premieres (www.theendofthecounter.com).