Stories from the cutting room floor as Cork's Baldy Barber sells up after 58 years
Michael O'Brien having his hair cut for a family wedding by barber Mick Moriarty (The Baldy Barber) at his salon on Great William O'Brien Street, Cork Picture: David Creedon
GOING for a snip, on Blackpool’s Great William O’Brien Street, is the former premises of Cork’s Baldy Barber, Mick Moriarty, who is bowing out after 58 years in the business.
The three storey 153 sq m (1647 sq ft) city centre building, on the market for €285,000, includes the ground floor barber shop and overhead accommodation, which has not been lived in for a number of years and requires an extreme makeover.
The ground floor commercial element includes two rooms with basins and chairs for hairdressing/ barbers, as well as a WC.
Mick, (76), Cork’s longest serving and best known barber, has been in the business since the age of 17 and is selling with a heavy heart, but the long and the short of it is that business has dipped and he doesn’t want to hike prices given the cost of living crisis.
He’s snipped, clipped and shaved at the Blackpool premises since 1971, when he took over the running of the shop from his father, Peter. Peter had opened a barber shop on Merchant’s Quay in 1937 and often hitched a lorry ride into town from his home in Ballincollig.
“He was up over the Lee Garage on Merchant’s Quay and the quay had lots of businesses at the time – Queens Hotel, five pubs, Kilgrews (bikes and prams), Crowley’s music store,” Mick says.
In 1957, the family moved into No 6a Great William O’Brien Street in Blackpool, which his father bought for IR£800 and where 10 of them, including granny, lived above the shop.
Mick recalls his father opened his second barber shop on the ground floor in 1960 (it had been a paint show, and before that, a pawn shop) and the family had two barber shops for about 20 years.
“He was a great man to open early. I remember he would go to 6.30am Mass in St Mary’s (Pope’s Quay). It was a Mass for workers, and it was done and dusted in 15 minutes, and he’d have the shop opened for 6.55am,” Mick says.Â
His father passed away in 1978 and in 1981, Mick decided to open a hair salon for women. While unisex salons were a thing at the time – they’d been promoted by hairdresser to the stars, Vidal Sassoon - he canvassed customers and locals and the result was “definitely in favour of two separate salons”.
He opened a hairdressers next door to the Blackpool barber shop in 1982 and the new business was given a two-page spread in the Evening Echo, in which every business and club from the neighbourhood and beyond wished him well. Mick said in the article that “even now, in 1982 most men and women feel uncomfortable in the same salon” and he said Vidal Sasson had changed his mind too about the wisdom of the unisex salon.
Mick, a fourth generation barber, closed the ladies’ salon in 1984, around the time he was hit with a IR£23,875.62 tax bill.
“I was charging 80p per haircut for men and IR£2.50 for a wash, cut and blowdry for women and I didn’t realise there was VAT of 23% on a haircut. I had to borrow IR£25,000 to pay it off,” he says.
While he hates the “undercut” and thinks some of today’s male hairstyles are “shocking”, “as if someone “actually put a bowl on their head”, he recalls some of the favourites back in the day were the Elvis/Rob Orbison look, and that brill cream was big.
He’s an advocate of “keeping the hair trimmed on top or else you will go very light” and he believes in the power of bay rum as “food for the hair, and great for cleaning the scalp”.
To this day he retains a bottle of bay rum that a seafaring man gave to his father, while extolling its powers for haircare.
He says while he still has a good hardcore customer base, he has seen Blackpool “decimated” over the years, with the loss of the post office, banks and credit union.
“We’d a great community here, myself and my father put a lot into it, but people want to go to shopping centres now and I suppose you can’t blame them,” he says.
While he’d love to continue in the trade and would turn the upstairs accommodation into “two beautiful apartments if I won Lotto”, he is hoping that the next owner will continue the barber/hairdressing business.
Selling the premises is Kate Kearney of DNG Kevin Condon and she’s expecting investor interest, with the potential to create two overhead apartments.
“I presume it will be an investor, given the shortage of rentals,” Ms Kearney said.
katekearney@dngkevincondon.ie Tel: 0872978075.
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