Michael Moynihan: From explosives to fishing - TW Murray and Co, almost 200 years of trading
TW Murray and Co, Patrick St, Cork; the business is almost 200 years old. Picture: Larry Cummins
If you live in Cork you’ve walked past it countless times.
It’s almost two centuries old and used to sell explosives, but TW Murray and Co on Patrick St is now a dark grotto bursting with delights particular to country pursuits. Fishing rods, hooks, maggots, hurleys, worms, waders, flies, caps — the list of attractions goes on and on.
I dropped in recently to chat with owner John O’Connell.
On one level it was to chase up a story about Murray’s honouring a gift voucher that was 18 years old, but the conversation became more and more illuminating the longer it went on. Not always a guarantee when yours truly is half the company: all down to John’s good cheer and energy.
The O’Keeffe family owned the shop at 87 Patrick Street when John’s father, George O’Connell, came in as manager early in the 1900s: by 1938 he had taken over the shop.
One March morning in 1958 John, then working in the South Mall, got a phone call: his father had died unexpectedly in the North Infirmary.
After the funeral he thought about the shop. He was working as a chartered accountant, but ... “One of the lads, Bob Draper, was working in the shop for 50 years at that stage,” says John now. “I was thinking of all of their jobs, so I said I’d carry it on.
“I got more and more interested so I did both, accountancy and the shop, for 20 years.” For much of that time the latter focused on explosives. Seriously.
“Absolutely, the core business was explosives.
“I often had to go out to where we stored them in Ballincollig with four garda detectives sitting in the car following us.
“You get a terrible headache from gelignite, by the way. It’s just a soft material, the detonators are the dangerous part if they drop or whatever, but the smell from gelignite? The head would be lifted off you.”
There wouldn’t be explosives in the shop, though? “There were. We were allowed to have small quantities for people who were digging wells.
“Every Thursday morning there might be a queue of 30 fellas looking for four or five pounds of explosive and four or five detonators — for wells.
“Bigger quantities might be taken by the likes of Ellis’s or the council, but the business died out when the Troubles were going on — you needed more gardaí involved in overseeing it — and the advent of better digging machinery for the wells was another factor.”
Most people would associate the shop with fishing; unsurprisingly, John is a strong advocate of the pastime: “It’s great to see four or five young fellas come in, with their packs of sandwiches, and they’re getting a few bits before heading off out fishing for the day.
“It’s a great hobby for people, and it’s great to give kids an interest — something that’s going to give them an interest in nature and the environment that’ll last them all their lives.
“On that basis I got involved in the rod licence campaign years ago, because I always thought it was unfair that young fellas like that might be done out of what’s a simple, enjoyable pastime.” Fishing is “fairly constant” in popularity, even in the city.
“In the last ten years it died out a bit but now it’s coming back, particularly since the lockdown.
“People are staying around, they need a hobby, there’s built-in social distancing.
“The availability of fish is crucial, obviously. For instance, a couple of years we got hardly any mackerel, and that makes a difference, but the mackerel are back again this year.
“So even though you’re in the middle of the city you’re very attuned to the environment.
“The cleanliness of the river is a big factor. I can remember as a child leaning on the weir out in Iniscarra and seeing the salmon in shoals, bumper to bumper — now people are excited to catch one, though this has been a good year, in fairness.”
Six decades gives someone fair authority to pronounce on the health of the city centre. He says it’s certainly quieter than it was.
“The footfall is as nothing compared to even a couple of years ago. Now it has died out.
“Any city must have a main street, a centre that you’re drawn to. Forget the fact that we’re here ourselves — you must have a centre.
“When I was a child a neighbour had a car and we were brought in to see the centre of the city. That was a treat, but it was a treat because the centre of the city was the attraction.
“That has all changed. I think one of the biggest losses to Patrick Street has been the family businesses — Dowden’s, Lester’s, Fitzgerald’s, the Cudmores. All of those have gone.
“We wouldn’t be here still only for the loyalty of the customers. My daughters love coming in because they always say the customers are very nice.
“You have to serve people personally, you have to be interested in them and what they want because it’s pretty specialised — they’re very interested in what they’re getting and they know what they want.
“And that decency about the customers was one of the things that struck me the first day I came in — it was one of the things that suggested to me that this was something worth keeping on.”
John namechecks son George and David O’Mahony as those keeping the show on the road through the difficulties of the lockdown.
And that voucher? He’s surprised there was a fuss about it: “It always annoyed me if a restaurant or whatever wouldn’t honour a voucher because it was a week out of date or whatever. We only treated the person who brought it in the way we’d like to be treated ourselves in the same situation.”
Apart from simply enjoying the chat, there were some salient lessons from our conversation.
One was the necessity to adapt. Murray’s focused on explosives until circumstances changed, and then it turned to fishing — very successfully. But it shows that to last two centuries an establishment must be willing to change as the times change.
Another was the relationship of the environment to the city. A more surprising lesson, maybe, but it shows the interconnectedness of the city and the river, for instance — there are obvious dividends for Murray’s from a cleaner river, but those dividends are very much in line with our current thinking on sustainability and the green agenda.
John’s point about family businesses being missed on Patrick Street was another key takeaway.
The multitude of British chain stores on our streets provide welcome employment, but at the most basic level those stores can’t have the same feeling about their employees as a business owner who’s born and raised in the same place.
However kindhearted a HR director in the London head office may be, he or she is surely not going to think — as John O’Connell did on that March morning back in 1958 — about people who’ve given 50years to the business.
It was a rewarding visit all round. As visits to Murray’s tend to be.
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