Listowel Connection

This blog is a personal take on Listowel, Co. Kerry. I am writing for anyone anywhere with a Listowel connection but especially for sons and daughters of Listowel who find themselves far from home. Contact me at listowelconnection@gmail.com

Tag: Maurice Hannon

Listowel Soldier who fell at Passchendaele, West Limerick Singing Club

By

On October 6, 2014

In Uncategorized

Congratulations


Photo of Christy and Sheila Walsh on their wedding day from 



https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Listowel-Arms-Hotel/142707065775292

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Listowel Tidy Towns Award Ceremony

Photos and an account of the awards

HERE

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A Soldier of WW1 with a Listowel connection

The following story and photographs were sent to me by Mark Hewitt whose wife, Siobhán is a Listowel Hannon. Mark and Siobhán are frequent visitors to Listowel. The Maurice of the story was Siobhán’s grandad’s brother.

Maurice Hannon was born in Listowel on 1894 and was killed in action in Belgium in 1917.

Part of the current commemorations of the war includes the planting of 888,246 ceramic poppies in the moat of the Tower of London, one for each British soldier lost in the war.  Work on planting these started last month and will continue until November, when it will eventually fill the whole moat with a sea of red, representing the blood of the fallen.

Each night a Roll Call of names of 180 fallen soldiers is read out in a ceremony ending with a bugler playing the Last Post.  The public have been invited to submit names to be read out, and I have done this with Maurice Hannon.  His name is to be amongst those read out on Sunday 7 September at 7.25pm.

During the First World War Maurice decided to join the 2nd Battalion, Royal Munster Fusiliers (RMF) and by 1917 found himself at the Second Battle of Passchendaele.  From the War Diaries made by each Battalion at the time, now made available at the National Archives, I have put together the following account of the battle.  I have also seen the maps used by the troops at the time, and all the farms and cottages mentioned in the War Diaries are still there.

Two Battalions attacked the enemy lines at 6am on Saturday 10 November 1917, one of which was the RMFs.  The ground was a quagmire full of water-logged shell-holes after four months of battle. It was to be the last British effort of the Passchendaele campaign.  Weighed down with equipment, they waded waist deep through mud and water, initially taking all objectives within 45 minutes.

They advanced a further 400 yards, without orders, half way up a ridge. Here they were caught by the German attack, with the British counter barrage falling on them as well as the enemy.  They withdrew to a farm where, being pressed by the enemy, they threw balls of mud at the Germans who, thinking they were grenades, fell back momentarily. This farm fell at 8.30am with the RMFs ending up back where they started.

At 9.30am they attacked again and captured another farm.  By this time their ranks numbered 7 officers and 240 men, having started the day with 20 officers and 630 men.  Private Maurice Hannon was one of these casualties.

He is one of many war dead with no known grave.  His name, though, is recorded on the memorial wall at the huge Tyne Cot Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery in Belgium.  This wall alone has the names of nearly 34,000 soldiers killed in the area towards the end of the war but have no known graves.

The Battle of Passchendaele officially ended that day.  Estimates at the total numbers of casualties vary.  It is said the Allies had lost almost 275,000 men, killed and wounded in the four months of the campaign.  The Germans lost 260,000.  42,000 of the Allied dead were never recovered from the battlefield. The Great War lasted for another year and a day.

On 9 April 1918, five months after the Battle of Passchendaele ended, the Germans launched the Lys Offensive and in three days recaptured all the ground they had lost in the battle.

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Some good old ones… photos by J.F. Nolan, Moyvane

Up for the match in the 1940’s

Moyvane cups at their social in 1979

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Abair Amhrán



Michael Collins took some great photos at The Garry McMahon 6th Annual Singing Weekend Launch Night, held in The Ramble Inn bar Abbeyfeale. The Singing weekend takes place on the 17th, 18th and 19th of October, 2014.


More photos and information about the club 

HERE




Xistance Mural, Friday Market and a few Listowel changes

By

On September 5, 2014

In Uncategorized

Listowel Tidy Town Committee and Existance Youth Café have done a great job on the mural on the wall on the lane beside St. Patrick’s Hall

Great work; Well done all involved.

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At the Friday Market



Pat and Maurice Hannon and some of their girls

These musicians were contributing to the buzz in the Square on Market Day

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The Cinema


Listowel Fitness Centre


St. Patrick’s Day 2013 and Peat Briquettes and new genealogy website

By

On March 29, 2013

In Uncategorized

The very last of my St. Patrick’s day photos……….. for now.

Martin Stack
Liz Healy
Judges
Maurice Hannon AKA St. Patrick
Matt Mooney
Liam Brennan AKA St. Patrick
St. Patrick’s sandals….and it was skinning cold!

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Briquettes

There is much talk of winter fuel and fuel shortages during this cold snap. Bord na Mona has had one of its worst peat harvests on record and is currently witnessing unprecedented demand for briquettes.

Did you know that peat briquettes as fuel are an Irish thing?

Here is a sequence of archive photos from  Bord na Mona Heartland  from the briquette factory in Croghan.

Croghan Briquette factory opened in 1961, 62 years ago. It closed around 1999. This shows a delivery of peat to the factory.

After the briquettes were made they were extruded on runners to help them cool down before baling. The runners extended for 75 meters into the baling house. When baled the core temperature of the briquettes was 78 degrees C.

Eventually the briquettes were loaded for transport.  At this time some 22 million bales were produced each year between Lullymore, Derrinlough and Croghan.

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Jimmy Deenihan T.D.

Minister for Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht

 launched the new Genealogy Website

at Royal Irish Academy, Dawson Street, Dublin 2

on Tuesday 26 March 2013 

www.irishgenealogy.ie is a new Irish Genealogy search portal

This portal will make it possible for users to search records from a number of genealogy records sites including:

·         Census 1901/19011 records, Irish Census of populations for all counties of Ireland.

·         Griffiths Valuations, the first full scale valuation of 19th Century property in Ireland, published 1847 to 1864.

·         Tithe Applotment records, Compiled 1823-1837,

·         Soldiers wills,

·         Military Archives,

·         National Library of Ireland,

·         Ellis Island records, passenger lists and other records of U.S. immigration through Ellis Island, New York.

·         Ireland-Australia transportation database,

·         Women in 20th Century Ireland 1922-1966, a database of almost 20,000 entries on a set of records relating to central government.


Let it snow…. 1943 /45 photos, St. Michael’s young scientists

By

On January 14, 2013

In Uncategorized

Snow is forecast for parts of Ireland this week. Surely better than what they are experiencing in Australia. How will our young people who have emigrated from our temperate climate tolerate this?

From The Sydney Morning Herald

Red alert for freak weather

Date: January 11, 2013

Peter Hannam

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It is the heatwave that laps east and
west and seems hard to dislodge. Even tropical cyclone Narelle, wandering off
the north-west coast of Western Australia, has so far failed to budge the giant
heat cell over the continent.

“The system is holding its
shape,” said the manager of climate monitoring at the weather bureau, Karl
Braganza. “You are still getting the hot core over the inland.”

But the core is stretching eastward again, sending the mercury higher for
populated regions ranging from Victoria to Queensland. Brisbane had its hottest
night in seven years, with the temperature dropping to 25.8 degrees but the
city “was very humid so it felt more than that”, said Weatherzone
meteorologist Melissa MacKellar.

Sea breezes are forecast to keep the temperatures in Sydney around the harbour
to peaks of 30 and 34 degrees on Friday and Saturday, according to the latest
forecasts. But move only about 25 kilometres west to Bankstown, and days of 41
and 39 await.

Melbourne can expect 37 on Friday before a cool change arrives and keeps
temperatures down for a week. Most other parts of Australia won’t get much
relief.

“Our models are showing the high
pressure system dominating weather over southern and south-eastern regions of
Australia for the next week,” said Ms MacKellar.

The first eight days of 2013 made it
into the top 20 hottest days for Australia in more than a century in terms of
the average maximum temperature. The mean temperatures – averaging maximums and
minimums – smashed the previous record on Monday and then again on Tuesday.

The mean of 32.32 degrees on Tuesday
was almost half a degree higher than the record that had stood for more than 40
years until this week.

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This is a long story but an interesting one. Once upon a time in the 20th century Listowel had many photographers. One of these, when he was folding up his business, gave a box of “contact sheets” to Bryan MacMahon. Contact sheets were pages of tiny little previews of the actual pictures. Bryan kept these safely all his life and, no doubt, he knew the people in the photographs. 

Maurice MacMahon, when he was dealing with his father’s papers found only one of these sheets left. We will presume that Bryan had given the others to someone and not got them back. Anyway Maurice realized that these photos would be of enormous interest to Listowel people but he had no names for any of the people who were the subjects of the photos. 

Then followed the long story, involving Jimmy Deenihan, James Kenny, John Lynch, Dylan Boyer and ended with me. Everyone told me that the best person for recognizing people in photos is Margaret Dillon and they were right. Margaret has been assiduous in her tracking down of these people and now there are another cohort of people involved in identifying these Listowel people from the 1940s. Margaret has established that many of the people in the pictures were employees of McKenna’s and the photographs were taken beside Walshe’s drapery shop which later became part of McKenna’s.

Here is the first tranche of these photos with the information that Margaret has managed to glean about them.

The man on the left is John Michael Murphy who still lives in Church St. Margaret called to him to see if he could identify his companion. He couldn’t but thinks that he may have come from Ballylongford.

This stylish lady is the late Tess Murphy of Greenville. In one of these ironic twists she is actually Margaret’s god mother. She passed away a few years ago.

This man about town is Jack Ashe, uncle of Mary and Haulie who still live in Listowel. Jack lived at Convent Cross with his sister, Nora who ran a sweet shop.

(more to follow)

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I kid you not!!!!!!!!

Yes, it is what you think it is… the latest gadget to keep your toddler happy while he sits on the throne. Words fail me!

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From last week’s Kerryman…young scientists in 1983

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Did you watch this fellow and his road trip from Listowel to Tralee?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=recuQLATiGo

It has been pointed out to me that while the clip was published on Nov 6 2012, the video must have been taken much earlier because there are no roadworks and the road is in the old layout. Well spotted!

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