Michael Moynihan: Rediscovering the thoughts and dreams of sixth class pupils 

Two mothers, whose sons have both died, have CDs with their sons’ voices on them as 11 or 12-year-olds, which is nice but is also very sad

Pupils from the class of 1995/1996 looking through memorabilia from a time capsule which was opened at North Monastery Primary School, Cork.

Looking back now, the motivation was simple. Herman Kemp got wind of a national campaign aimed at schools creating time capsules and thought it might suit the sixth class he was teaching in the North Monastery CBS primary school.

This was back in 1995.

“It wasn’t something we did regularly, this campaign was called 2020 Vision and I thought it might be interesting for the class. I applied for it and was supposed to be sent down a little cylinder to be buried.” No cylinder arrived, so he improvised. At home an empty tea chest was taking up room, so he pressed it into service.

“I brought it in and got the kids into little groups to work on projects, and I also recorded them on audio tape, getting them to tell me what they’d like to be when they grew up, that sort of thing.

“One lad wanted to be a detective in the Special Branch, which seemed a fairly unlikely career prospect at the time, for instance, but another one was thinking ahead because he had his sights on becoming a ‘computer expert’. I gathered the projects together and put them in the tea chest.”

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A time capsule from 1995-1996 being opened by the former sixth class pupils from the time and family members and Herman Kemp, (sixth from right) who was the sixth class teacher then, at North Monastery Primary School, Cork.

First stored in the games room, the chest-capsule seemed unlikely to survive the attention of a couple of generations of energetic kids, so it ended up returning chez Kemp, where it spend a quarter of a century hiding in the attic.

Twenty-five years later covid stalked the land when it was due to be opened, so the unveiling had to be put off by a couple of years. Hence the crowd milling around in the hall of the North Monastery last week: a cohort of men in their late thirties, many with children of their own, rediscovering their thoughts and dreams from sixth class. Another world? Another century, certainly.

It was clearly a moving experience for some of the former classmates so I asked their former teacher, now retired, if it was emotional for him.

“I was 39, 40, when we put this away, and now they’re all that age, that’s something I just noticed.

“I knew when we were putting stuff in the capsule that we made a tape of all of them speaking on an old-fashioned audio tape, so before we opened it fully I stuck my hand in and got the tape, and then I went into town and got that audio transferred onto a CD made for each of them.

That’s emotional. I was speaking to two mothers just now whose sons were in the class but who have both died since. So they have CDs with their sons’ voices on them as eleven or twelve-year-olds, which is nice for them to have but is also very sad, obviously.

One of the audio contributions their teacher wanted for the recording was a song (“After forcing one of my own favourites, Joni Mitchell, on them for years I thought one of hers might be in with a shout, but no chance”). Blur and Oasis were the Montagues and Capulets of the day but Kemp was surprised by their eventual choice.

Patrick O'Driscoll with his daughter, Kate, looking through the memorabilia.

“In the end, they decided as a class to sing a hymn that they were learning for their confirmation, which is obviously a big event when you’re in sixth class. I suppose it shows the innocence — they were still just kids, after all.”

'It's great to come back'

From the windows of the school hall where we were chatting you can see how much has changed in Cork — the view from the Mon has always been one of the best in the city, but it’s very different to the school Herman Kemp arrived in almost fifty years ago.

“It’s great to come back. A few of us — Brendan Walsh, John Daly, myself — we all started work here on the same day and we never moved out of the school.

“Others came later but there were more experienced teachers here already. Mick Begley, Donal Hurley and Mick Lynch were here a while by then and they set the standard for us — a very high standard.

A time capsule from 1995-1996 by sixth class pupils at North Monastery Primary School, Cork, which was opened in the school.

“Mick Begley said to us one time that principals might come and go, but he stressed: ‘These fellas might breeze in and breeze out, but ye are the Mon.’

“That stuck with me always, and it was something we followed. In other schools, if a teacher came in for maternity cover or something they might ask in the staff room where they could sit or something, but that never happened here. There were no cliques, and that helped the school.”

A career on Cork's northside

True confession time: when Herman Kemp landed into the North Monastery all those years ago your columnist was in his first class.

We became aware that he wasn’t from Cork, which was odd. We were used to teachers from Kerry, for instance, who were about as rare in Cork as Jewish doctors in New York, but someone from Clare?

Yet he never taught anywhere else, spending his entire career teaching on Cork’s northside. Hence an obvious question from a columnist writing about Cork: why did he stay?

“The key thing was honesty, really. If you were genuinely interested and you were honest, people responded — the kids especially, and their families.

“I learned an awful lot from the children I taught here over the years. Starting off it was a case of the three Rs — reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic.

“But I learned an awful lot more about education in the broadest sense from teaching here.

“I’d always wanted to be a teacher, and the holidays were an element of that in all honesty, but I had always pictured myself as the master in some country school somewhere. When I came here, to a very big school in an urban area, I was very much the odd man out in more ways than one.

Gary Coughlan with a sketch of his hand which was among the memorabilia from a time capsule from 1995-1996.

“I was from Clare, and while hurling and football were huge here I’d played soccer all my life — with Kilrush AFC — and I must have been the only Stoke City fan within one hundred miles.

“But typical of the Mon, and typical of the northside of Cork, you were brought into the middle of everything. You were enveloped in things.

“In the school, if you had an interest in anything it was taken on board and it became successful very quickly. Chess, table tennis, athletics, basketball, hurling, and football — that was the way here, people got interested in something, they pursued it, and they were successful at it.

“That was very much a Cork thing. And very much a northside thing.”

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Is he a poster boy for integration, then? The question was lighthearted but the answer was sincere.

“I came here as an outsider in more ways than one, but I haven’t felt like an outsider for a long, long time.

“The school was part of that and the people were part of that in equal measure.”

Then he went back to chat to his old class. Another generation of Corkmen he put on the right road early on.