15. Dermot 1945‒62

previous years for we deem it our duty to spend any available money on amenities to the staff and amenities to the public. It is not our intention to increase dividends to our Shareholders, who are now receiving the same dividend as they received during the pre-war years.’ Dermot made it clear that Findlater shares were not for quick-buck merchants: ‘Speculative investors hoping for a quick return on their outlay need not consider the purchase of shares of this company, for although the cash sum involved in paying an increased dividend is small, your directors feel that the dividend now paid is an adequate return on the money originally invested, and anything available must be used to stop the constantly rising cost of living figure.’ The great and the good agreed. His attitude, commented The Irish Times, was not merely sound from his own business point of view, but ‘is one which must be regarded as essential on a national scale.’ However, repeated over very many companies, this practice eventually led to the loss of shareholders’ loyalty that made the aggressive takeover boom of the 1960s and 1970s possible.

The style of the firm in those days is well expressed by J. P. Donleavy in The Ginger Man¹² when his character Dangerfield was living in Howth:

‘If we had something to eat we’d be able to use it. They’ve got one of those big shops down there in the town, why don’t you pop down with that English accent of yours and get some credit. As much as I like your company, Dangerfield, I’d prefer it on a full stomach.’ . . .

The counter was covered with rich sides of bacon and wicker baskets of bright eggs. Assistants, white aproned, behind the long counter. Bananas, green from the Canary Isles, blooming from the ceiling. Dangerfield stopping in front of a gray-haired assistant who leans forward eagerly.

‘Good day, sir. Can I be of any help?’
Dangerfield hesitating with pursed lips.
‘Good day, yes. I would like to open up an account with you.’
‘Very good, sir. Will you please come this way.’
The assistant opening a large ledger across the counter. Asking Dangerfield’s name and address.
‘Shall I bill you monthly or quarterly, sir?’
‘I think quarterly.’
‘Would you like to take anything with you today, sir?’
Dangerfield caressing his teeth together, his eyes darting among the shelves.
‘Do you have any Cork Gin?’
‘Certainly, sir. Large or small size?’
‘I think the large.’
‘And anything else, sir?’
‘Do you have any Haig and Haig?’

Assistant calling to the end of the shop. A small boy goes behind the scenes and comes out with a bottle. Dangerfield points to a ham.

‘And how many pounds, sir?’
‘I’ll take it all. And two pounds of cheese and a chicken.’

Assistant, all smiles and remarks. O, it’s the weather. Shocking fog. No day for them ones at sea or the others either. And clapping his hands to the little boy.

‘Come here and carry the parcels for the gentleman. And a very good day to you, sir.’^*

Dermot regularly took the opportunity presented by his chairman’s speech at the AGM to give his views on national and international political matters. He clearly enjoyed his role as a gadfly. The annual reports show an impressive range of interests, revealing a lively, inquisitive and not easily daunted mind. One year he recommends that the government build up poteen as a national drink equivalent to schnapps or vodka; then he proposes that the government abolish altogether the duty on good wine, on the grounds that it is good for the digestion. Addressing the Commercial Travellers Association, he notes that putting cats’ eyes in the middle of the road encourages motorists to drive dangerously in the middle; he complains about the nationalisation of the railways, the flight of country workers to the towns (especially Dublin) and the cost of the civil service.

His interventions were popular with the press, who were no doubt delighted to have something more substantial to report than the normal bland chairman’s remarks. Sir Basil Goulding, chairman of Goulding Fertilisers and a director of the Bank of Ireland, achieved the same popularity with his idiosyncratic speeches in later decades.¹³ In 1948, Dermot signalled that he had moved from being a supporter of protectionism to free trade. ‘I am glad to see that they [the government] believe in freer trading between this country and others, for until free trade comes back there will be people starving in one country and food being destroyed in another.’ This was not the common view and he came under a stinging attack from Kevin McCourt, then Secretary of the Federation of Irish

^*Bad debts, of which we can assume this is one, were recorded in a special black book in head office. On reading The Ginger Man in the mid-1960s I was unable to trace a record of this particular debt. Mr Donleavy confirmed to my brother John that the event had taken place and that the person concerned was Gaynor Stephen Crist. In all probability the manager, Mr Rowland, would have borne the debt, it not having been authorised by head office.

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Michael O’Flanagan explaining the finer points of a hen turkey to me at a Poultry Show in 1956. Michael was one of Findlater’s characters. He fought in the Four Courts area in 1916 and was imprisoned in England. He later joined the civil service. Every Christmas he took a week off to pluck and dress up to 1,000 turkeys. The only time I met Dev was at Michael’s funeral in Cabra, in 1965 (Picture: Independent Newspapers).

Manufacturers Ltd: ‘In the face of the flood of manufactured goods which has swamped this market in the last twelve months . . . Mr Findlater has arrogated to himself the function of declaiming against a policy . . . without study of the facts.’ McCourt declared that the total bans on imported goods in Argentina, Denmark, Dutch East Indies, Egypt, France, Holland, Iceland, Norway and Palestine; the rigid import restrictions in British East Africa, Burma, Cyprus, Hong Kong, India, Iraq, Malta, Mexico, New Zealand and Sweden, and the tariff walls on an average much higher than those in Ireland rendered it impossible to compete with home-manufactured goods in the United States, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Newfoundland and South Africa.¹⁴ In the long run of course, Dermot was right, for the tariff walls behind which Irish manufacturers worked did nothing for their long-term efficiency, as the national performance during the 1950s amply demonstrated.

Dermot’s views on the development of the business were clear: ‘We have had applications from residents in various districts asking us to open shops in their districts and we feel that we must give the Findlater Service to such areas as Glasnevin, Crumlin, Donnycarney, Inchicore, Mount Merrion, Clontarf, and Donnybrook.’ At the same meeting he reported some of the problems stemming from the firm’s long presence in its older branches:

It is to be expected that after 125 years of trading floors will get dry rot, etc.; joists which were adequate to hold up floors when trams passed by our premises four times each hour are now of inadequate depth to withstand the strain when heavy C.I.E.

DERMOT 1945–62

buses dash past our premises at the rate of from five to ten every five minutes. When we have to replace these joists, which necessitates taking down the floors and ceilings, the Valuation Office steps in and increases the valuation of our property, thereby increasing the annual fixed payment made in respect of rates by our company. If we, as others do, continued to trade in dangerous buildings, in infected premises, in unhygienic conditions, we would not have our rates adjusted.

Conditions in some of the shops were far from what would be required today. A small entry in the board minutes of 1951 conveys this: ‘A discussion took place regarding the installation of a wash-hand basin in the gents’ cloak-room in Ranelagh branch as recommended in the new Shops Hygiene Act. Estimates for a hand-basin in Ranelagh considered high due to the fact that there is no water supply in this branch, but only in the yard common to three premises at the rear of same.’¹⁵

1948 was an Olympic year, the first since the war, and Dr Alf Delaney was selected to represent Ireland in the sailing events which took place in Torbay, England. Dr Delaney recalled to me:

Myself and my crew were in a Swallow class, chartered to the Irish Yachting Federation by the late George O’Brien Kennedy, a distinguished Irish yacht designer. We were advised to bring ‘Our Welcome’ as there was still food rationing in England. We sought advice from your branch in Wicklow street, where we were customers. We lived in Clontarf and they delivered all our household requirements, what a wonderful service we got in those days. I was a good hockey playing friend of your father’s, playing together in Three Rock Rovers. Anyhow I am sure that he was consulted on what we should bring with us to England. We were foot passengers on the ‘Munster’ to Liverpool and made the rest of our journey by rail, laden down with the following: 2lbs Butter; 2lbs Sugar; 3 dozen Eggs; 1 Tin Marmalade; 5lb Caerphilly Cheese; 2 Boxes Three County Cheese; 1 Tin Jam; 1lb Gold Grain Biscuits; 1 Tin Oval Thin Captain; 500 Cigarettes; 5lbs Chocolates; 3 Bottles Spirits; 5 Tins Meat and 5 Tins Milk. And the total cost came to £10 13s 0d. In addition to all this we set off with 2 dozen bottles Whiskey, compliments of ‘Jem’ Sullivan who was a reserve crew. ‘Jem’ was a wine merchant with Turbett’s, better known in that trade as Desmond. Alas the British customs would have none of it, they considered one case sufficient, and consigned the other back to Dublin! Remember whiskey in those days was packed in heavy wooden crates, none of your easy to carry six bottle cardboard boxes of to-day. As for the sailing, well, let’s say: ‘we have sailed better, having had no previous experience of the type of yacht sailed!’

As we have seen Dermot was very much a skilled grocer, responsible in the old way for buying goods in bulk and in season, perhaps from distant parts, storing them and making them available to the local purchasers. Dermot’s brother-in-law Edmund Mitchell was responsible for the wine buying pre-war, and there was none to be purchased during the Emergency. The skills of understanding and relating year after year to many different commodity markets, from eggs and turkeys to exotic spices and sugar had by now largely been taken over by producers and manufacturers. There was very little understanding of the skills and complexities of the grocers’ craft, and a considerable amount of prejudice, as cousin Brian Inglis noted in his book Downstart, which was published after my father’s death: ‘I did not realise it until after the war, but the reason I had not met my cousin Dermot Findlater was that he owned and ran the chain of grocery shops which spread out of Dublin in the 1930s. Grandmother was proud of her husband’s Findlater connection [Findlater’s Mountjoy Brewery], and the branch of the family in the wine business was socially acceptable, as part of The Trade. Besides, theirs was basically a wholesale business. Retail was a different matter—and as for groceries! ¹⁷ Brian was obviously unaware that the same branch of the family managed the two businesses and that his parents were great friends with Dermot’s two sisters. This snobbery ran through various strata of mid-20th-century society; for example, solicitors were not popular with the

DERMOT 1945–62

land-owning classes; they were generally seen as those who had aided and profited from their ruin. Elizabeth Bowen’s grandmother noted: ‘She would receive barristers, not solicitors . . . she would countenance wine merchants . . . but not brewers. The Church, the Army . . . the Navy were the only professions she regarded as normal’.¹⁸

In another publication,West Briton, Inglis expanded on this attitude: ‘Grandfather had been a brewer; but a man in The Trade [brewing] was not regarded as being in trade. Nor was a distiller. A wholesaler too might be acceptable.’ ¹⁹ Of his maternal grandfather, John Redmond Blood, he wrote: ‘His father had taken him from school at the age of sixteen to put him into the family business. But there was a significant difference: the business was the Findlater’s Mountjoy Brewery, owned by Jack’s mother’s family. “I do not know why it should be a crack thing to be a brewer,’ ‘Herbert Pocket remarked to Pip in Great Expectations,’ ‘but it is indisputable that while you cannot possibly be genteel and bake, you can be as genteel as never was and brew.”’²⁰

The stigma of being in trade was not confined to grocers. Beatrice, Lady Glenavy, who was born an Elvery of Spanish stock, owners of the sports goods shop in Dublin, recalled that

when her parents moved to Carrickmines, in the heart of Dublin’s equivalent of a stockbroker belt, she could not make friends there. ‘We are not allowed to play with you,’ a girl at Sunday School told her, ‘because your father has a shop.’ . . . when young Gordon Campbell, [later Lord Glenavy] proposed to her . . . ‘When his family heard of our plans that bogy of my father’s shop made one faint effort to put in an appearance, but quickly faded away.’²¹

Distant cousin George Bernard Shaw had his own line on the matter:

It was simply the rule in Dublin that though business had to be admitted as gentlemanly, it must be wholesale business. Keeping a shop was unpardonable. Lucy was troubled all her life by the guilty secret that our father’s mill at Dolphin’s Barn had a little village shop attached to it. I rebelled contemptuously against this convention: it amazed me to see my father’s tailor, who was rich, deferring to my father, who, as the opulent tailor had the best reason to know, was poor. All this has died of its own absurdity; but it was the laws of the Medes and Persians in my father’s time. Such exclusiveness could have hardly been possible, or even intelligible, in Australia, except among the aboriginal blacks.²²

It was even worse in Brian’s version of events when, in 1917, Findlaters opened a branch shop in his beloved Malahide: ‘This was another embarrassment to grandmother. She felt bound to patronise it, as the owners were cousins. This was not something to be proud of, certainly not something to boast about; but grandfather, she felt, would like her to shop there, because his mother had been a Findlater. On the other hand, he would not have wanted her to leave Hogan’s. She compromised by dividing her shopping between them . . .’²³

Of course there was a solution and it was this that made his Inglis grandfather socially acceptable. ‘ . . . Malcolm had been ‘in trade’. Worse, it was the coal

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trade, which had an unenviable reputation. Everybody assumed that the coal merchants lavishly watered the “slack” that accompanied the coal, and was used in households to keep the fires in overnight.’²⁴ Malcolm had been a partner in the coal importers Thomas Heiton and Co., which had become very profitable on the surging increase of coal usage in the late 19th century. When the company incorporated in 1896 he became Chairman, as well as holding several directorships and being President of the Dublin Chamber of Commerce.

The social distinction between retail and wholesale had a long history. In Princes and Pirates, the history of the Dublin Chamber of Commerce, Louis Cullen describes an attempt by the Chamber to segregate the activities (note that the wine trade is treated as an exception):

Only those manufacturers who engaged in foreign trade by importing on their own account were the social equal of merchants, and they achieved this by being accepted as merchants in their own right rather than by their importance as manufacturers.²⁵

The Council represented wholesale merchants, and it was anxious that it should not be infiltrated by less prestigious trades. At a meeting on 13 January 1784 a resolution from a committee on membership included the proposal that ‘every person who sells or disposes of any goods or merchandise save and except wines in any other than the package said goods or merchandise is imported in ought to be deemed and considered a retailer’. However, at the meeting the clause ‘save and except wines’ was deleted. The original proposal from the Committee avoided discrimination against the specialist wine merchants who did a retail trade as well as import wines. The resolution as amended in the course of the meeting was itself rejected.²⁶ . . .

The wine trade was the most conservative of the major branches of the city’s trade. Customers then were mainly among the landed classes.²⁷

Eventually however, the distinction was lost, as wholesalers and retailers were overtaken by manufacturers:

The essence of the mid-19th century changes was the eclipse of the merchant. As communications improved, both wholesalers and manufacturers could dispense with the services of the merchant as an intermediary. Typically he had handled both exports and imports. . . . If merchant houses survived, it was by conversion into a wholesale house in a single commodity. Moreover, both wholesaler and merchant were now frequently overshadowed by manufacturers in wealth and prestige. The Guinness's progressed to the peerage and to London social life in conservative political circles. No wholesaler rivalled the Jamesons, the distillers, in prestige by the end of the century. As trade and wealth grew, retailers too emerged from obscurity often to play a prominent role in local business life. Retail trade thus lost its stigma among businessmen; wholesalers like the Findlaters through their wholesale interest in tea and spirits eventually opened a chain of retail shops . . . .²⁸

DERMOT 1945–62

The Meath Hospital saga

According to Tony Farmar, the author of the history of Craig Gardner and Co., the 1950s were not a comfortable time for those who were not part of the mainstream:

The most vigorous entity in Ireland was the Catholic Church, led by the redoubtable Archbishop John Charles McQuaid . . . In 1951 the government accepted the views of the bishops on the Mother-and-Child Scheme, and throughout the decade the faithful generally were made vigorously aware of the hierarchy’s views on various other matters. The number of books banned by the Censorship Board soared to an average of 600 a year between 1950 and 1955. Dance-halls were forbidden to stay open after midnight, it was declared to be a mortal sin to marry a Protestant or attend Trinity without the Archbishop’s permission, and plans for an agricultural university (or indeed almost any other state initiative) were denounced as creeping Socialism.²⁹

But as R. B. McDowell points out in Crisis & Decline: ‘the success of Protestants in professional and business life—a number of well-known Protestant firms continued to flourish—demonstrates that the majority in the Irish Free State set a high value on tolerance or refused to allow denominationalism to affect to their own detriment their behaviour in practical life.’³⁰

But let’s look at the statistics. Protestants (Church of Ireland, Presbyterians, Methodists and a tiny number of Baptists) represented 10 per cent of the population of the twenty-six counties in 1911. Of the 1.1 million in Ireland, 311,000 were in the twenty-six counties. By 1926 the number had fallen to just over 7 per cent and by 1981 the members of the three major denominations—Church of Ireland, Presbyterian and Methodist—numbered only 115,000, forming 3.47 per cent of the population (Roman Catholics amounting to 95 per cent). Dean Griffin, in Mark of Protest, writes: ‘Mixed marriage has been the scourge of the Protestant community, particularly in the Republic. In spite of certain amendments to the Ne Temere decree, Roman Catholic teaching still insists that the Roman Catholic partner shall do all in his power to have any children of the mixed marriage brought up in the Roman Catholic faith.’³¹

During the 1940s and 1950s the Knights of Columbanus^* ran a series of vigorous assaults on Protestant institutions in the state, as described by Emily O’Reilly in her book Masterminds of the Right: ‘They moved to tighten their grip in every area of Irish public life, gaining representation on various state boards and committees, including the Irish Red Cross, the Royal Hospital for Incurables and the Meath Hospital.’³²

Dermot was one of the nineteen members of the Joint Committee of the Meath Hospital during the Knights’ attack on the institution in 1950. The hospital had a staunch Protestant reputation, and there was a widespread belief that

^*An order founded in Belfast in 1915 with the aims: ‘to fight discrimination against Catholics in all walks of life; to create “leaders of opinion” and to organise Catholic gentlemen with a view to such leadership.’ Evelyn Bolster The Knights of Columbanus Dublin: Gill and Macmillan 1979.

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The 1957 AGM. Back row: Frank A. Lowe and Harry Thompson. Front row: Mervyn Bell representing the secretaries J.A. Kinnear & Co., my mother Dorothea, Dermot, my aunt Doris and John A. McGrail. (Picture: Lensmen)

it was impossible for graduates of the National University of Ireland to get appointments to the medical staff. This was in fact true, because the enabling Act of 1810 which detailed the institutions from which medical staff could be recruited had not been amended to include the NUI, which was only founded in the early 20th century.

After careful examination of the procedural rules of the hospital, a small group of the Knights organised a coup, with the object of changing the hospital’s orientation. The hospital was run by a committee that was elected annually by the votes of life and annual governors. To become an annual governor you simply had to subscribe two guineas a year. A few days before the 1950 AGM thirty-nine would-be governors had paid their subscriptions in cash, which was handed to the secretary-manager by a Roman Catholic chaplain to the hospital. The committee was completely taken by surprise. Instead of the few regular, mainly female, attenders at the hospital AGM, the room was packed with middle-aged men who voted out the Protestant members of the committee, seven lay and three medical, and voted in their own representatives.

Public opinion was stunned at the audacity and success of the plan. De Valera, then leader of the opposition, described it in the Dáil as a ‘coup’ and Dr Noel Browne as an ‘ambush’. Five of the old committee initiated legal proceedings but the President of the High Court dismissed the action, while heavily criticising the coup, and expressed sympathy with the plaintiffs. Dermot had to share the substantial cost of the proceedings, totalling £3,000 [€103,000] with Major Kirkwood (Jameson’s distillery), Henry Guinness (Guinness and Mahon bankers), W. Boydell, A. F. Buckley and the Medical Board of the hospital. It hurt. He requested the board of Findlaters of which he was chairman, to help him meet the cost. They declined. However, I think Dermot was subsequently

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granted a bonus that went some way to redressing the issue! The hospital issue was finally resolved when, on the instigation of W. T. Cosgrave, a former member of the joint committee and an ex-taoiseach, the Meath Hospital Bill was enacted and regulated the method of appointing members of the medical staff.

Under the new Act the committee was reconstituted with representatives of Dublin Corporation, Dublin County Council, the medical board, the governors and two co-opted members. The restriction on the appointment of medical staff was removed. Dermot declined to let his name go forward for re-election.³³

Some argue that the Knights were simply a mirror image of the Masonic order, seeking similar advantage for their ‘own kind’. I cannot answer that as I am not a Mason, but I have no evidence to suggest that they exercised any serious influence in the commercial and social affairs of the city. I was only once approached on the question of the Masons. Shortly after I joined the firm in 1956 and while doing manual work in the grocery lofts, the house phone buzzed and ‘Master Alex’ was instructed to report to the chairman’s office. ‘Alex, you know Mr Lowe?’ Frank Lowe was a director of Findlaters, chairman of the Irish Times and Hely’s of Dame Street and deputy grand master of the Masonic Order (and incidentally a member of the board that refused to help with Dermot’s costs for the legal case). Distinguished-looking, with white hair, he was always impeccably dressed, with a gold watch chain to his waistcoat and a white handkerchief in his top-pocket. He was not excessively tall, probably five foot five or six. I dutifully greeted Mr Lowe. ‘Alex, Frank would like to know whether you would like your name go forward for the Masons?’ (or whatever words were appropriate for such a question).

My reply was immediate and spontaneous: ‘No, thank you, Daddy.’ To which he concluded my audience: ‘That’s all, Alex, you may now return to your work.’ The subject was never raised again, not at home that night, nor at any time during my life. My father was a Mason (although I can never recall him attending) as were his father and grandfather.

Royal Hospital for Incurables, Donnybrook

The Hospital first opened its doors in 1743 when Jonathan Swift was still Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin. The hospital pre-dated its London namesake by more than one hundred years. It took in patients from all parts of Ireland without any payment whatsoever, an incurable malady coupled with poverty being the only test, and it was absolutely unsectarian.³⁴

The Findlater involvement started in 1860 when, as we have seen, Alexander (the founder of the firm) became a governor. Alexander’s nephew Billy, later Sir William, followed his uncle and served on the board for thirty-one years. He, in turn, was followed by his cousin Willie, my grandfather. In 1937 Willie resigned and Dermot was co-opted as the fourth, or maybe fifth, member of the family to serve on the board. There are other families that have contributed in a similar manner to the hospital, most notably the Fry family, three of whom have chaired the board of management in the past hundred years.

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Léoville–Lascases label 1947

which were to guide the hospital’s policy in the years ahead. In 1949 Dermot set about doing himself what the special committee had recommended in 1941: he approached the leading business houses in the country for support for the hospital. This drive brought in over £2,960 [€103,000], one of the largest sums ever collected by an individual for the hospital. Unfortunately, this sum gave only temporary respite to the perilous financial position of the hospital and David Mitchell took over the difficult task.

Before departing the subject of hospitals and medical people I must tell a little story of Dermot’s kindness to a friend in distress and his use of influence. It is recorded by Eric Fenelon, consultant surgeon to the Adelaide Hospital.

I did quite a considerable amount of general surgery and quite a lot of Orthopaedic surgery with my old friend and colleague, the late Col Somerville-Large. In 1950 Col became ill, developing unfortunately lymphoma. As this involved a mediastinal problem which at first looked like a mediastinal abscess, and as chest surgery was in its infancy in Dublin, we decided to seek the best available advice in London and got him admitted to the King Edward VII Hospital for Officers and arranged urgently to transfer him there. The weather was appalling and Aer Lingus decided that there would be no planes flying to London. However, due to the good offices of an old friend, Dermot Findlater, we managed to arrange this urgently. Dermot contacted a pilot and Aer Lingus agreed that the plane would be allowed to fly if the pilot agreed to do so, which he willingly did, and Col was transferred for further investigation and treatment in London. Unfortunately, the condition on his return became progressive and he died in 1951 at the early age of 48 years. Indeed a sad loss of a magnificent Orthopaedic surgeon, perfect gentleman, and a very good friend. Col had a holiday home upon an Island in Sneem Bay in Kerry and was most generous with his hospitality in inviting many of his friends to join him on the island.³⁵

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Findlater brand Sherries and Ports 1930s to the early 1960s, when fortified wines were in the ascendancy.

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Wars are good for business

It is an uncomfortable fact that wars are good for business. When I joined the firm, I was told that profits had been good during and after the Emergency—up to 1952. In fact net profits were a mere 1.5 per cent of turnover in those years— and were to go down over the next decade to the impossibly slim 0.5 per cent. As we have seen, Dermot embarked on an extensive programme of investment in shop renovations. These costs were offset against revenue in the accounts. Normally ‘repairs & renewals’ would have amounted to between ½ and 1 per cent of turnover, but in two of the years in question they rose to over 4 per cent. Adjusting for these figures the profits were very respectable from 1940 to 1952, peaking at £50,000 in 1950 [€1.59m].

The low level of net profitability, combined with heavy investment in refurbishments and the build-up of new stocks began to put serious pressure on the company’s bank account. It was in credit during the Emergency and remained more or less debt free until the end of 1949 (the credit balance having peaked at around £50,000 at the beginning of 1946). Now funds were need to restock and develop the company; there was some discussion about asking the Irish Assurance Company for extra capital in order to open new shops and generally develop the business. However, at a meeting of the directors on 28 September 1949, it was agreed to finance the proposed new branches at Mount Merrion and Walkinstown with the assistance of our bankers.

I have no doubt that there would have been a conversation between Dermot and Frank Klinger. Frank Klinger, who was senior partner in Stokes Bros and Pim, now KPMG, the firm’s auditors, was on the board of the Royal Bank (chairman from 1952) and was a trustee to the Findlater debenture holders. Overdraft was the normal means of bank advances. The bank asked in a gentlemanly manner how much we would like, little anticipating that they would be tied in for the next twenty years. Once committed there was no looking back. At first it was unsecured at £25,000 [€875,000]. Then £50,000 [€1.59m] in 1951. At £100,000 [€2.70m] (at 5½ per cent) in 1955 it was secured with a second debenture.

Overdraft facilities were also needed to fund stocks and debtors as our wholesale wine and spirit business regained national distribution, on a bigger scale than pre-Emergency. As soon as wines became available after the war in Europe, Dermot set about replenishing the extensive cellars under our O’Connell Street premises. It took time. From Bordeaux and Burgundy we had to wait two years for the outstanding 1945 vintage to be ready for shipment and the relaxation of import controls. Wine imports then were almost entirely in cask. On arrival the wine had to be rested, bottled and matured before being offered for sale. The great 1945s were first listed in 1949. We also obtained a few Bordeaux wines which had been bottled in the Châteaux during the war, but the volumes were insignificant: Haut Brion 1944, Gruaud Larose 1944, Talbot 1943, Lagrange 1943, Lafite 1940 and d’Armailhac 1943. Champagne seems to have been available in all wartime vintages.

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DERMOT 1945–62

Chablis label for the Gresham Hotel.

Leoville–Barton label for the City of Dublin Steam Packet Co.

In a letter to me Dr Garret FitzGerald recalls purchasing the wines from this epoch:

I remember doing a tour of all the Dublin wine merchants in 1953—there was only about half-a-dozen of them then—with a view to comparing prices. I recall that the second best value was Findlaters. They were about one shilling dearer than Thompson D’Olier—since unhappily defunct—but cheaper than Mitchells and significantly cheaper than Morgans who advertised quite a lot, which pushed up their prices. The dearest wine in Dublin at that time was a 1950 Château Yquem which was two guineas and the most expensive clarets—1945 and 1947 Château Lafite and Latour—were twenty-eight shillings. Some of the finer German wines were up to thirty-seven shillings each. The cost of living has risen sixteen-fold since then which means that in present day terms the finest clarets were available for £22.50. That was really good value!

In 1949 we again began to publish wine lists (there were none from 1940 to 1948), and the number of lines listed reflected Dermot’s keen interest in growing that sector of the business; the count rose from 187 in the late 1930s to 240 in 1950 and 518 in 1960. It is difficult to justify this in the economic and social climate. The stock valuation rose from £103,000 in 1940 to £144,000 in 1950 and to £280,000 in 1960. This latter figure is equivalent to over £4m in 2000 values. To put these figures in perspective, modern day Findlaters operate a very successful wholesale wine business in a much expanded market on a stock level of £1.8m (September 2000 figure).

In those days the wine merchant shipped his Bordeaux, Burgundy and port in cask, bottled them in his cellars, laid them carefully on their sides into bins or racks holding up to 240 bottles and marked the topside of the punt of the bottle with whitewash to denote that the sediment would settle on the lower side.

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This was important when the bottles were handled for sale or in a restaurant. In the case of vintage port the neck of the bottle was dipped in wax to form a wax seal over the cork. The shipper or producer of the port, and the vintage year, were marked on the corks as labels would not survive for a number of years in cellar conditions.^* When all this was done and the wine matured, it was sold on credit to the hotel, gentleman’s club or consumer.

The important wine customers at that time were the four leading hotels—the Russell, Hibernian, Shelbourne and Gresham, Jammets restaurant, the Dún Laoghaire yacht clubs, the Common Room in Trinity College Dublin and the city’s gentlemen’s clubs. Most notable for us was the Royal Irish Yacht Club. Reserves were agreed at a gentlemanly meeting over a glass of sherry in our chairman’s office and bins marked accordingly. Findlaters only requested payment after the matured stock had been transferred to the club. In the cellars, in my early days in the firm, were large stocks of Léoville Barton 1955 and 1957 marked forbiddingly: ‘Reserve RIYC, don’t touch’ and woe and betide a cellarman or apprentice who did. It was a great deal for the club.

In June 1950 the board decided that the time was now right to capitalise on the goodwill that had accrued to the firm by keeping many a country publican in supplies of spirits during the Emergency. Mattie McElroy, then manager of the Sandymount branch and formerly in the O’Connell Street wine department, was charged with the responsibility and appointed senior traveller. We were to be major players again in the wine and spirit business.

Spirits, whiskey in particular, and fortified wines (sherry and port), were the bedrock of the wholesaler’s business in those days. The distilleries distilled the spirit and sold it in casks, perhaps 20 per cent over proof, to the merchant, who matured, blended, bottled and marketed it, often under his individual label such as Findlaters’ Jameson Eight-year-old, Mitchell’s Green Spot and Gilbey’s Red Breast. Unlike a modern supermarket, what the customer saw on the shelves of a Findlater branch was only a fraction of the activity. However, from a financial point of view the commitment was considerable, tying money up for seven years or more in stock.

Dermot’s judgement was to lay in healthy stocks. It was as good a home for Findlaters’ capital as any, so it was said. The retailing revolution was not yet a speck on the horizon and the importance of fast stock turns a thing of the future. He was of the generation for whom cash management was not such a priority; they were bulk buyers, in sacks, boxes and barrels, a few months’ supply bought in season at the right price. However the ratio of stock to sales was not too bad at 6½ weeks. The explanation may be that spirits were matured under bond and thus the valuation excluded duty and the company had a big turnover in per-

^* In those days we fined (clarified) ruby and tawny ports and heavy red wines with fresh blood from the abattoir and light red wines with whites of fresh eggs thoroughly beaten. The blood albumen acted as a collagen taking all solids and impurities to the base of the cask. White wines were fined with isinglass, a kind of gelatin obtained from fish, especially sturgeon. It was also used to make jellies and for fining real ale. Today bentonite is used for the same purposes.

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ishable foodstuffs bought weekly.^*

When it came to bottlings of all commodities, we had the edge. Every wholesaler and most publicans and grocers bottled beer, sherry, port and spirits and the resulting quality variation around the country was enormous. Even today tastings suggest that as much as one bottle of wine in twenty is rejected because of faults caused by bad bottling. From the 1880s we exhorted customers to ask for ‘Findlater’s Bottlings’ and featured the exhortation in our advertising and embossed the bottles ‘Findlater’s Bottling.’ Good bottling and a reputation for a fine claret, Burgundy and port went hand in hand. The merchant’s name on the label and capsule were signs to the purchaser of the quality that he might expect. Show a merchant ‘Old Bottled Vintage Port’ and he would readily pay a premium for the bottle from a good house and discount the less reputable.

That was the cream of the trade. At the other end competition was intense. Decisions were usually based entirely on price. Beaujolais, Chablis, Liebfraumilch, Powers Gold Label and Guinness were all price-sensitive. There was not a chance of any wholesaler becoming rich. And we in Findlaters fought it out with the other wholesalers for our share of the pub market. The wholesalers from time to time tried to curtail their price-cutting of spirits, but the very next day were again at each other’s throats. The total wine market in those days, 1950, was only 248,000 cases in comparison to 4 million in 2000. Fortified wines (ports and sherries) represented something like a third of all wine imports at this time, as against less than 2.5 per cent today.

While I make much of Dermot’s prowess in buying wine there were intermediaries between himself and the negoçiant. These were men of stature in the trade. They proferred samples and quotations and travelled the country once or twice a year with the principal whose name was on the label, calling on the merchants and booking orders. The merchant then shipped, bottled, matured, listed and sold. Good lunches and dinners were part of the ritual. This suited Findlaters fine with the directors’ dining-room on the top floor. Eddie Doyle, who was a pure agent, carrying no stock, represented Jean Lawton of Lalande & Cie in Bordeaux, Patriache in Burgundy and Charles Heidsieck in Champagne. The characters were undoubtedly the duo in Lett brothers, Brian Hood and Tommy Hamilton. They represented Williams & Humbert sherries (big in those days), Calvet Bordeaux, Taylor’s port and Deinhard Rhine and Moselle wines. Doyen of the agents was Turbetts, in business since 1770 and with an enviable porfolio of agencies including Barton in Bordeaux and Bouchard Père et Fils in Burgundy. Alex Turbett and Desmond Sullivan were very helpful to young men like myself entering the trade. They would organise prolonged visits to the vineyards and cellars abroad and educate us in the finer points of the product. This was also true of Paddy Keown of Begges of Bachelors Walk and John de M.

^* The balance-sheet figures for 1950 were stocks £144,031, sales £1,166,251. The business methods in 1900 were fascinatingly different with stock at £69,603 supporting sales of £133,949, suggesting that over six months’ stock was on hand at any one time. In 2000 values the 1900 stock is worth over £5m as against the 1950 figure at £3m.

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Turton of Jas McCullagh Son and Co. Finally, we had a very close working relationship with David Hunter who doubled as a wine agent with several agencies that we supported, and also looked after all our tea tasting and our blending and packing factory in Rathmines.

A good agency, then as now, is worth its weight in gold. In the 1950s the most sought after was that of Harveys of Bristol. Harveys were developing Bristol Cream into the biggest selling premium sherry brand in the world when sherry was a universally popular drink. In early days it was on quota due to the shortage of mature sherry stocks. Harveys were traditional wine merchants with ancient cellars in Denmark Street, Bristol, and a wine

Matthew McElroy of Raheny who joined the company in 1928. O’Connell Street Wine Manager 1932–1942; Manager Sandymount branch 1942–1950; Senior Wine representative 1950–1962; Co–opted to the Board of Directors 1960; Director in charge of wines and spirits 1962–69.

list more extensive than the best elsewhere. But they were at the forefront of modern management and were employing young Oxbridge graduates, using advanced warehousing techniques in a purpose-built facility, and marketing skills which were totally new to the traditional wine trade. They were then the biggest independent wine shipper in the UK and quoted on the stock exchange. Dermot got on very well with their managing director, George McWatters.

Dermot won the Harvey agency by a short head. He had been warned that their chairman, Jack Harvey, was a devil for blind tastings during the boardroom lunch. A call of nature mid-morning brought Dermot past the laboratory-cumtasting- room, a room then new to the trade and a gem for the inquisitive. A friendly chat ensued. A coup d’oeil memorised the decanted bottles in the corner! The accuracy and fluency of his assessments of the test wines would have left the present day Masters of Wine^* speechless! The chairman marvelled. The managing director had the agent he desired. Father summed up the lesson to me later–‘Always do your homework’. The association with Harveys flourished for twelve years. Their sherries were in every worthwhile outlet in the country. It was a happy partnership, and there were even discussions of a closer association.

By the mid-1950s Dermot had cellars overflowing with good wine, a bond with an excess of maturing whiskey and the best sherry agency in town. This had required considerable capital, both in stocks and debtors. Margins were tight

^* Master of Wine is the highest qualification in the wine industry. There are at present 231 certified Masters of Wine in the world. Out of 58 international candidates who took the four days of exams in 2000, only four passed. We are an industry of high standards!

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DERMOT 1945–62

and competition tough. There were at least a dozen wholesalers all fighting for a share of the market and price was the biggest weapon. Strategic positioning of premium brands was way in the future. However, Dermot had a good sales team. Mattie McElroy had been joined by Aidan Kelly, fresh out of Blackrock College, son of C. E. K., cartoonist and proprietor of Dublin Opinion. Aidan developed into a first class wineman. He had a fine nose, good palate, excellent judgment and expressed himself well. There were six in that sales team and they fulfilled their task with distinction.

Aidan Kelly recalls his early days in Findlaters:

Jokes, practical or otherwise, were de rigueur—if unobserved by the manager or charge-hand. John’s enemy number one was up on this bridge that linked the two grocery lofts where the dry groceries and sacks were stored. He called to John below: ‘Hey, John, what are you doing for Christmas?’ John looked up and said he didn’t know, whereupon he was asked: ‘Would you like to be a snowman?’ Forthwith a bag of white flour was emptied over the rail. John stood in the yard, immaculate in white, with only a pair of eyes looking out under dusty lashes. Not for the first time John presented himself at the General Manager’s office to give voice to what he thought of this world and some of its occupants, while his colleagues and adversaries fell about themselves in laughter.

As all this investment was being laid down, Findlaters continued the expensive tradition of service. The Findlater branch shops were giving a daily service to a large clientèle in and around Dublin, as (the late) Pauline Russell wrote:

Findlaters of Howth was a friendly store. Spacious, clean, and the atmosphere of the old grocery emporium. The bacon counter, the smell of coffee beans and the friendly assistants. Also the feeling that the customer was always important. The service from Findlaters was ‘different’. Most of the orders came from ‘the knights of the road’. Three times a week a representative called to the house.

A friendly face on a Monday, Wednesday and Friday with all the good offers from the store. Over the years they not only knew my order, but my growing family, and should I forget an essential item from my order they diplomatically reminded me of my omission! Then the delivery arrived that afternoon and any complaints were received kindly and immediately rectified.

Of course, it all came back to the staff. Mr Rowland, the man at the helm. Jackie Graham and Christy O’Rourke on the road. Every house on the Peninsula was glad when they called. Not only did they take my grocery order—they fixed the fuse or mended the child’s toy and, over a cup of coffee, gave the offers of the week. I even got Waterford cut glasses when I bought enough Findlater’s Alfino Sherry!

And, who could forget the van driver, Dick Bennett. He took the flak when something had been forgotten and returned with the missing item with a smile. Also, in an emergency he would pick up the prescription from the Chemist, move a motor mower or hoover from house to home, or give a message to a friend or relation on the delivery route.

At home we learnt at an early age the meaning of the Findlater service. It was

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A sucessful and long-running promotion for Alfino sherry.

not unusual for Dermot to be called out on Christmas Day. The usual complaint was ‘my turkey has gone off ’. Not unexpected if December had been a particularly humid month. Dermot often took an extra turkey home on Christmas Eve to cover this eventuality. We would drive to the customer’s house—near or far, it did not matter. He presented a lovely new turkey and retrieved the offending bird. He then showed me the cause of the offence, the giblets which we had left neatly wrapped for the customer, just inside the bird. Once removed the bird was fit

for the next in distress. We took a poor view of our competitors who did not automatically give the giblets to the customer. On another occasion he got a call from the nuns in Bray who had not received their ‘standing order’ for 6lbs of rashers, notwithstanding that it was Christmas Day! No trouble, we opened up head office, sliced the bacon and made the delivery.

And on yet another occasion he drove all the way to Kylemore Abbey in Connemara. As Feargal Quinn would say: ‘That was the Findlater standard of service involving enthusiasm, dedication, commitment and energy’.

Of course old-fashioned ways occasionally had their drawbacks. Irene Lawless of Kilsallaghan, Co. Dublin, remembers an incident from Findlaters of Malahide in the 1950s:

I remember on one occasion a few of us housewives were standing at the counter awaiting our turn when this ‘retired Army type’ man strode in the door. Ignoring the fact that several women were ahead of him he shouted to the Assistant: ‘Send up a small jar of Bovril, will you?’ and the Assistant answered: ‘Certainly, sir.’ At that time I was getting £2 a week housekeeping money and could manage all right, so a jar of Bovril must have been only a few pence. It speaks well for the firm that they would deliver so small an item. It also depicts the attitude of men of the time. Not only was it beneath his dignity to carry a small jar home in his pocket, but the fact that several women were ahead of him in the shop was completely ignored—a man should not be kept waiting and, sad to say, shop assistants always served the men first in those days, even when they gave the order across the heads of women already there.

As a postscript I can say that when I got my messages and went out the door that same man was standing outside talking to a friend and I heard him say that a terrible thing had happened to him that morning. He had put on his plus fours and a bee was trapped inside and he got stung somewhere unspecified. I could have said ‘Good for you, bee!’

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And of course as we have seen, Findlaters did charge just a little more, as Anne Cronin remembers:

I was a customer from about 1940 in Dorset Street branch to the time it closed. I telephoned in my order and it was delivered on Friday: meal for the chickens and my meat from Hearn’s next door was brought as well as anything I wanted. I could always leave it to the staff to send the best, even at Christmas time. Ham or turkey and all the other things. Mind you, people said they were always 2d dearer than everyone else, but when you got all your goods delivered on your kitchen table what could one say? It was the usual thing to have the kettle boiling for Findlater’s man about 1 o’clock every Friday and they sat out in the van and had their tea. Would that we had a service like that today!

Dermot continued to invest to improve quality. At the 1952 AGM he told shareholders: ‘We have secured the services of a very efficient and qualified man to act as head baker of our model bakery in Thomas Street. This man won more than one prize in the recent International baker congress held in the Mansion House’. And on packaging: ‘We have just received delivery of one of the most modern machines for weighing and packing flour untouched by hand, and very shortly will receive a similar machine for weighing and packing sugar. We have had similar machines for packing tea for many years. We are also in the course of installing a fully automatic unit for the bottling of beer, stout and lager and it is our belief that this unit, when in operation, will be the finest and most modern in this country.’

Operational systems were not neglected: ‘We have completely mechanised our accountancy system at Head Office, by the installation of Burroughes accounting machines and electric invoicing machines. It enables us to get out our statement of accounts and invoices more quickly, more accurately and more efficiently.’ (The famous old system of carrying cash by wires or tubes from the point of sale to a central cash desk was finally removed in 1960.)

And on kindly gestures to staff: ‘At our Dún Laoghaire Branch we now have a member of our staff who some few years ago was completely incapacitated by blindness [from the bombing of the North Strand] and is now, as a result of training given to him by the National Council for the Blind of Ireland, in charge of our tobacco and cigarette department.’

1952 was perhaps the nadir of the post-war economy. With the public finances in serious difficulties, Finance Minister Seán MacEntee was obliged to withdraw the food subsidies that had been established during the Emergency, which as The Irish Times put it ‘toughened the struggle for tens of thousands of citizens’. At the same time traders and the Revenue Commissioners found it increasingly difficult to collect debts, so credit was cut back, and garnishee orders became common. The budget of 1952 outraged Dermot, and many others besides: The headlines read: PUBLIC STAGGERED BY INCREASES; PENAL! CRAZY! THE FINAL BLOW! While higher taxes and duties had been expected, nobody seemed to have anticipated that they would have been so harsh. ‘A crazy budget,’ commented

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Dermot when an Irish Independent representative discussed with him the increased prices of tea, sugar, butter, bread and flour. ‘Customers having only the same amount of money to spend on these commodities would be able to buy less under the new prices, he said. The Minister had said that competitive selling of tea might mean increased sales. This was not so. What was wanted was competitive buying: they wanted to get back the experts to buy tea and not have semi- Government officials doing it.’³⁶

Dermot in the fifties

At the next AGM Dermot continued his remarks:

The budget of 1952 descended upon us and meted out tremendously harsh treatment, especially to the licensed portion of our business. The Minister concerned appeared to revel in the fact that he had reimposed the taxation mitigated by his predecessor in office. The trade in whiskey and beer dropped away, but the amount of capital needed to finance the reduced turnover actually increased. Cider was the only alcoholic beverage the duty on which remained unchanged in the Budget. The sales of it were almost doubled, showing that had whiskey and beer been left alone, a steady improvement in sales could have been expected, which would most likely have produced more revenue than the higher rates of duty did, and would have assisted the distilleries to increase their home trade and thus to encourage them to enlarge their production for export trade. A further result of the re-introduction of the penal taxation, as one might call it, was that more capital was required by wholesalers, because the banks were, at the same time, restricting credit.

The Government’s financial policy is resulting in the Minister for Finance taking more and more of a smaller cake. The conditions for prosperity require that more money be left to fructify in the pockets of the tax payers with the Government taking less and less of a larger cake. It has been urged by Ministers that plant and machinery should be maintained at the very highest level of efficiency and premises comply with certain set standards of hygiene. The Minister for Finance has again failed to concede to industry any concession by way of tax-free depreciation for plant and building. It should be possible to create out of profits, reserves sufficient to enable the replacement of plant and machinery by new or more efficient units.

This is the time the Mountjoy Brewery ceased operations and we can only assume they, and many others who fell by the wayside, had not the reserves to reinvest in plant and machinery. The Dublin distilleries and Cork breweries were surely also in this category.

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DERMOT 1945–62

The St Lawrence Hotel, Howth and public house with the shop (the tall building on the right in the background) and the filling station beyond.

Despite conditions that might have suggested a drawing-in of horns, Dermot continued to invest heavily in the company’s properties, among which was the St Lawrence Hotel, Howth. In January 1949 the board discussed the possibility of selling the hotel to raise money for retail expansion. We had owned the hotel since the turn of the century. It was on Bord Fáilte’s Grade A listing and the board had made a commitment in August 1950 to maintain it at that standard. Grade A then required the complete central heating of the hotel and a number of bedrooms with bathrooms attached. Between 1943 and 1950 £36,000 [almost £800,000] was invested in maintenance and improvements, a sizeable sum in those days. In 1954/55 another £8,000 [over €214,000] was spent on a modern lounge bar, one of the first of its kind—named the Alfino Rooms—which produced excellent returns immediately. An Irish Licensing World reporter noted that ‘furnishings, equipment and decor reflect unerring good taste and combine to create an atmosphere that is at once luxurious and intimate. Small wonders that the Alfino Room is already a favourite rendezvous of a large and discriminating clientèle’.³⁷

In 1961 a banqueting room was added to cater for dinners and wedding breakfasts. The hotel was overall profitable if read in conjunction with the investment in maintenance and improvements (£61,000 was expended between 1943 and 1968). The most profitable period was during the management of Una and Michael Lee, 1958 to 1963, and Oswell Johnson in the period before them.

In 1955 a profound change in trading conditions started a chain of events that eventually led to the demise of the old Findlater chain. This was the ending of retail price maintenance. RPM was the very commendable principle of selling goods at the prices recommended by the manufacturer. This meant that retailers competed on service and stock-holding rather than price. The ending heralded the start of price cutting. A commission was set up to explore the issue, but Dermot had gathered in advance that the government (including his old adver-

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                                              Staff party at Abilene in the 1950s

sary Seán Lemass) had made up its mind. In his evidence to the commission Dermot was expected to support the Retail Grocers Dairy and Allied Trades Association (RGDATA) line, in favour of the maintenance of RPM, which was in Findlaters’ own best interests. Instead, to the shock of all those present (including myself, then aged seventeen) he played for maximum effect and sided with the commission and the ending of RPM. The eventual change in pricing was gradual, a trickle rather than a tidal wave. RGDATA, on behalf of its members, protested vigorously whenever possible. But competition by price was gaining momentum and self-service aided the process. Dermot, at the time, was quoted: ‘Price cutting is merely a technique of selling and is suitable to certain classes of people. As long as only a few traders engaged in it, it will be profitable to them, but if everybody goes in for it they will wipe each other out.’

Bulmers and Tuborg

Following the establishment of Bulmers in Clonmel in 1936, Findlaters were their largest wholesale distributors and made good money. Cider was a cheap substitute for porter, and so very price sensitive. Two pence under the price of porter in the pubs and cider would sell coming up to pay day when pennies were scarce. If Findlaters added a penny the publicans would do likewise and sales would tumble. A falling-out between the cider company directors led to Findlaters ceasing to distribute for Bulmers.

The need to replace the cider volume was urgent and this led Dermot to Tuborg. He had anticipated the demand for a top class lager beer on the market and had initiated talks with the Danish Tuborg breweries while in Denmark on a hockey tour in 1947.

Continuous pasteurisation was the difficulty. Importation in bottles was out. Irish glass bottles were obligatory, on account of the weights and measure stamp embossed on the bottle, and had to be sent abroad for filling. Patz and ZHB

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DERMOT 1945–62

Micheál MacLiammóir, Cyril Cusack and young Master Alex, in 1956. Ivor Williams, bar manager, behind.

lagers were early on the market in the post-1945 era.^* In July 1950 the board agreed to invest £15,000 [€477,000] in bottling equipment in order to overcome the difficulties of importing in bottle and to centralise all branch

                                               Pre–war promotion of Bulmers Cider

^* Lager beer has been around for longer than one realises. We have in our memorabilia an old Findlater Pilsener lager beer label belonging to the Findlaters Mountjoy Brewery and also a letter of 1908 concerning our bottling of Allsopp’s Lager from Burton on Trent. In addition we were agents for Tuborg and Whitbread in the first decade of the 20th century. In 1937 Findlaters distributed Regal Lager, brewed in Enniscorthy.

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Willie Elsen, Robbie Cowep and John Bowles. Matador ZJ 187 loaded and ready to depart with a full load of Tuborg lager, 1955.

bottling into Findlater Place. In 1956 the new plant was said to have a capacity of 24,000 bottles a day and employment for 30 workers. Columnist Terry O’Sullivan reported on the lavish launch in his ‘Dubliner’s Diary’ of 15 June 1956:

Nothing in our experience prepared us for the gilt-edged opening by Findlaters of a new lager beer plant, a joint venture in which the brewers are the Tuborg Breweries in Copenhagen. In the first place, in the morning, the dispatch yard of Findlaters had been converted into a kind of open-air beer cellar, the kind of place you take for granted in Bavaria, with snow-white tables against white-washed walls, flowers all over the

place, and of course, lots of ice-cold Tuborg Lager. Having tasted the lager, looked at a film, and tasted some more lager, everybody went off out to the St Lawrence in Howth, there to nibble a bit of lunch. It was the best lunch I ever read, and out of the twenty-six different items, here is the overture and prologue. Real Turtle Soup, Iced Volga Caviar, Corners of Smoked Salmon, Dublin Bay Prawns, Slane Salmon Mayonnaise, Medallions of Ireland’s Eye Lobster, Boyne Trout in Aspic, Fillet Sole St Lawrence, Roll Mop Herrings and Silver Onions.

The expansive style was typical of the Dermot of the 1950s. He was a sound businessman and enthusiastic supporter of his

Our unique Guinness label. Note, that we, not the brewery, guarantee the excellence of the product.

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DERMOT 1945–62

John McGrail

products. He believed in his agencies and in the firm’s brands: Alfino Sherry, Finduro Port, Guinness with the XX (not the Harp) on the label, our eight-year-old Jameson—and many others. Out and about, he untiringly called for his brands, Harveys, Tuborg or his favourite, little known Unna, the golden Danish liqueur from Elsinore, the home of Hamlet. He was a natural at public relations before it became a profession. He drew together his two worlds—the theatre and the drinks business. He threw receptions for visiting artists, sometimes in the cellars,

sometimes in the cellars, sometimes at the St Lawrence and sometimes at Abilene, our home in Blackrock:José Greco and his Spanish dancers, the Royal Danish Ballet, the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company, the Carnival on Ice troupe, Leslie Henson the comedian, Cyril Cusack and Micheál MacLiammóir when they performed in Hamlet, Jimmy Ellis and Sam Thompson during the run of Over the Bridge, the Danish soccer team, the English hockey team, and Everton Football Club. He loved a party. If there was no party he made one: a staff party, a student party, or just entertaining company at an extended lunch in the directors’ dining room; and, not surprisingly, he loved his role as chairman of the judges of Miss Ireland which was arranged annually by Lorcan and Billy Bourke in the Four Provinces ballroom at the top of Harcourt Street.

An assessment of Dermot’s character by a handwriting expert is shrewd, and quite accurate.

A strong will enabled him to make and carry out plans without wavering and led to a courageous, even bold, attitude. His mind worked quickly. He was a forceful individual, primarily interested in obtaining results. The strong effort could hurt others, not deliberately, if he was not careful. The desire for results came first. Listening skills were reasonable but he would not always hear what was being said. He had the facility for presenting ideas well and this led to an influential and persuasive approach. There was a tendency to rationalise his actions; and he would disregard any difficulties in the way. This was fine if there was somebody to look after the problems.

That’s where his partner, John McGrail came in, for Dermot was essentially a pragmatist and a doer rather than a theoretician.

Dermot was obviously overworked during the war and was under a lot of board and family pressure to find a business partner. They realised that he could be extremely difficult to work with and were delighted that in John McGrail (or

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Lorries loading outside the despatch in Findlater Place. The livery was maroon with gold lettering. Most of the 21 branches had a van.

Jack, as he was called in the business) he had found a partner with whom he was compatible. McGrail had been manager of H. J.Heinz in Northern Ireland prewar, and then with the Ministry of Supplies during the war. His friendship with Dermot had grown through the theatre in Belfast and was to develop further when he joined the company in Dublin in 1948. On his part Dermot had tremendous regard for McGrail and decisions in relation to the firm and theatre were taken jointly. They were a good team. John McGrail took particular responsibility for the hotel in Howth, the beer bottling and much of the theatre work. He shared the personnel work with Dermot and was able to throw a new critical eye over the trading in the branches. I think it was also important to Dermot that he was a Catholic. Firms in those days were typecast by the religion of the founding family. This Dermot did not like. He would not tolerate anyone using his or her religion to gain employment or a supply contract. In fact he was paranoid about it. Findlaters as an employer with its large staff naturally reflected the nation’s religious ratios but Dermot wanted this to show through to the top. However, John McGrail was there on ability not as a token. The partnership worked well, but alas in the end it failed to meet the severe strategic challenges of the retail revolution.

Courtesy and helpfulness were imbued into the staff, as is illustrated by Ann Gaskins of Ballinasoe Farm, Roundwood, in Co. Wicklow:

I live here in the Wicklow mountains and my husband died at an early age, leaving me with farm and young son. This, at that time (1958), was a formidable job to try and do. I sowed about 10 acres of potatoes in those years and, not knowing where to turn, a thought struck me. Try Mr MacKenzie the Manager in Findlaters! So in I go and, true to form, not alone would he take one ton of potatoes per week, but he would send out his van with Mr Michael Traynor driving to collect the potatoes. He

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Traditional counter service. Dan Skehan attends to a celebrity at the dairy counter in O’Connell Street.

was a Bray man and an old family. These were the days of kindness in the full meaning of the word, and the Manager’s response to me helped me to keep the farm that I still own.

In 1959 Dermot showed a consciousness that the traditional Findlater service was under threat: ‘Whilst recognising that a large proportion of our customers require a credit and delivery service, the changing pattern of food distribution in other countries has compelled us to consider the desirability of converting one or two selected Branches to the Self Service or Supermarket method of trading.’ The cost of credit and delivery was also beginning to concern him: ‘The costly credit and delivery service we provide for our customers is becoming more and more difficult to maintain out of the relatively small profit yield on groceries and provisions.’ In 1960 he returned to the subject:

Last year I referred to the difficulty of maintaining our costly Credit and Delivery Service out of the relatively small profit yield on groceries and our efforts to continue this service without resorting to the practice that obtains elsewhere of making a specific charge for delivery. The wage increase mentioned above has aggravated this position and made the traditional Findlater standard of service well nigh uneconomic. Rising costs in every direction with the inevitable concomitant ‘dear money’ is another adverse factor in the economics of credit and delivery.

And on self-service he added:

The trend towards self-service in retail food distribution continues and plans for the conversion to self-service of some of our shops is under active consideration. The conversion of a large retail food shop from counter service to up-to-date self-service involves careful planning, specialised training of staff and substantial capital outlay if the best results are to be obtained. By the end of the present year, we hope to accom-

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Clear unambigious advertising of the fifties. Our name was then a household word. It was not until the mid–seventies, long after we had closed, that my mother was taken by surprise when asked to spell her name by a shop assistant. (This CIE bus was lovingly restored by Gary Manahan of Churchtown)

plish the conversion of one of our large shops, which will then serve as the prototype for further development.

Of course, we had been receiving advice about getting into supermarkets, especially from our American friends such as Harry McEvoy, American chief of Kelloggs in Manchester. Henry Haserot from Ohio, our Hawaiian pineapple supplier, raved about the out-of-town supermarkets with liberal car parking and John McGrail’s ex-colleagues in H. J. Heinz & Co. urged us to have a look. In America self-service had become widespread during the Depression in the 1930s, when vacant warehouses had been converted into supermarkets selling packaged groceries with the minimum of customer service. Since then they had grown in sophistication to become a highly efficient method of retailing. Supermarkets were cheap to develop in America because land prices were much lower than in Britain. The higher wages in America also meant that the less labour-intensive nature of self-service trading was attractive to food retailers in the United States. America’s affluence contrasted sharply with the straitened economy of post-war Britain. In 1950, 59 per cent of American households had one or more cars compared with 12 per cent in Britain.

The board minutes on 24 June 1959 record that two visiting consultants from the UK met the board and gave their views on the possibilities of converting our Dún Laoghaire branch, which was over 5,000 square feet, into a supermarket, with a separate wine shop. This would have been considered very large in those days. A sketch was submitted and it was explained that they would submit detailed recommendations, plans and specifications to us in writing.

Dún Laoghaire would have been a wonderful flagship and would have put our stamp at the head of the fledgling industry. We would have been ahead of our competitors. Alas, it was not to be. Dermot’s lack of enthusiasm for the new

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departure killed the project in 1960. He had already supervised the modernisation of the entire branch network in the previous two decades. Finances were tight. The overdraft in March 1960 was at £170,000 [€4m]. The beer bottling, hotel and wines and spirits had used up the capital. On the retail side price cutting was eating into margins. The retail revolution was at hand, but the company had committed all its available resources to the other sections of the business.

Feargal Quinn opened his first Superquinn in Dundalk in 1960, and in Finglas in 1965; Ben Dunne opened Dunnes Stores in Cornelscourt in 1966, and the Stillorgan Shopping Centre also opened in 1966. Ahead of these were individual traders who generated a lot of publicity but were not long-term players. H. Williams were the exception with self-service in their Henry Street branch in the late 1940s, not successful, and in the 1950s and 1960s with success, followed by a branch in Killester.

So great were the differences between the American situation and the British, that J. Edward Hammond, a leading retail commentator, stated in 1951 that it was ‘improbable that this class of emporium will ever be introduced into Great Britain.’³⁸ The revolution in England got under way in the early 1950s.

The self-service technique of selling was sweeping the world of retailing when it arrived in Ireland. Its main attraction to the customers was the freedom to make decisions without embarrassment and at a greatly reduced cost. Thus the customers could decide to buy the lower priced item or the unknown brand without disclosing this to a possibly ‘superior’ sales assistant—and thereby save a great deal of money at the same time. A number of factors came together. As Feargal Quinn put it:

The main factors influencing the growth of the supermarket idea have been the same in Ireland as elsewhere—growing affluence, the disappearance of domestic help, the rising costs of distribution through traditional wholesale and retail channels, the more widespread use of cars, the housewife’s anxiety to cut down the time spent on shopping for ordinary household requirements, widespread use of refrigerators permitting storage of perishable foods and so on.³⁹

However, self-service was more than just a change in selling technique. It was a wonderful new cash-producing business. It generated cash as never before: no more credit sales, no more counter service, no more deliveries. Simply put, the self-service proprietor bought and sold weekly on the old trade norm of two months’ supplier credit. A shop with weekly sales of £10,000 had £80,000 in the bank before the first week had to be paid for. Development costs could be funded out of cash flow. Suppliers were squeezed for longer credit, 90 days if the shop could get away with it. Suppliers were then asked to stack their own goods on to the supermarket shelves, which was fine in a big store, but not practical in counter service shops.

Another benefit to the supermarket proprietor was much lower wages costs and therefore the ability to undersell his competitors even further. As volumes rose suppliers were pushed for extra discounts. They needed their goods on dis-

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play. They had to agree. Then one proprietor learnt that banks would pay heavily for overnight money, often double the normal rate. Soon banks were competing for the large deposits. Eventually profitability was earned in the money markets and not on the groceries. Dunnes Stores had another trump card. They had draperies, traditionally with better margins than groceries. With their ownbrand (St Bernard) and bulk buys, they could easily undersell their competitors and still make a fair margin. (These new retailing techniques were of course miles from the kind of skills that Dermot had learnt in Liverpool and while running the business for the last thirty years. As celebrity restaurateur Peter Langan, who had served his apprenticeship in Findlaters in the 1950s put it: ‘It was a dying firm, living in yesterday’s world. Dermot Findlater was too old and his son Alex was too young. Theirs was a firm of great style, but also an endangered species. The days of the gentleman businessman catering to a class that no longer existed had gone forever.’⁴⁰)

In the meantime wine and spirit sales seemed to justify the big investment programme of the early 1950s, as Dermot told the 1959 AGM.

Our sales of both Jameson and Powers whiskey showed satisfactory increases over last year, whilst our sales of French, German, Spanish and Italian wines showed very large increases. This is undoubtedly due to the fact that we purchase only the finest qualities available and from companies whose integrity is well known to us since the turn of the century. The increase in our wine and spirit trade naturally results in greater activity in our bonded warehouse and makes increasing demands on space. Although it is, I think, the largest privately owned bond of any trader in Ireland, we must shortly introduce more efficient methods in the movement of goods and the use of space.

At the same AGM Dermot announced the introduction (relatively late, even for the conservative Dublin businesses of the day) of a non-contributory pension scheme for all managers and representatives under the age of fifty.

Between 1956 and 1964 £47,000 [over €1.1m] was ploughed into plant and machinery in beer bottling. Tuborg was launched in June 1956 and local agents appointed around the country. Volumes built up to a peak of 106,000 dozen in 1960 out of a total bottling of stout, ales and lager of 311,000 dozen. These included Smithwick’s Time Ale, Double Diamond, Phoenix Ale and Mackeson Stout. However, we had been beaten to the marketplace by Pat Loughrey of Bannow Bottlers, a subsidiary of Batchelors. They got on to the market first and with a lower strength Carlsberg at a more competitive price and distributed direct to the trader rather than through the traditional wholesaler. They took the lion’s share of the market. The Danish successes had not gone unnoticed in St James’s Gate. In 1960 Guinness launched Harp which quickly stunted Tuborg’s growth. Carlsberg were happy enjoying a smaller percentage share of a much larger market.

Our Guinness bottlings peaked at 145,000 dozen in 1961. We prided ourselves in the quality of our bottling and were proud of our unique Guinness label with the XX. We could not use their standard label which stated ‘who bottle no other

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                                                       Managers’ Conference 1962

stout or porter’ in view of our bottling of Mountjoy stout and later Mackeson. In July 1959 Guinness reported that our bottlings of their product were ‘second to none’. We liked to believe that this was because we had the advice of technicians from a variety of breweries.

In those days there were five competing contract bottlers. Amongst the large accounts worth chasing and capable of taking drops of 100 dozen or more were Dublin Airport (Johnny Oppermann), the Gresham Hotel (Toddy O’Sullivan), Butlin’s Holiday Camp in Mosney and the ballrooms such as the Metropole and the Shelbourne. But quoting could be perilous—as low as 5d to 1s 9d per dozen delivered on credit and, another hazard, there were always losses on the empties account-returnable bottles and cases. More went out than came back and resulted in unwelcome write-offs.

When the bottling was put under scrutiny by a firm of consultants in 1967 it was evident that a volume of 500,000 dozen was needed to produce the required profitability. As our volume was in decline it was decided to withdraw from the trade. It was a fight to realise the cost in our books of the remaining £19,644 valuation of plant and machinery and the £10,000 [€200,000] in bottles and cases, but we succeeded.

In 1960, for the first time in the company’s 136-year history, it was decided to employ the services of a chartered accountant. By today’s standards that may seem amazing, yet the company’s books were in pristine shape. Ledgers were beautifully and accurately written up, percentages calculated to two decimal places and branch weekly returns were on the boardroom table every Wednesday afternoon. The year-end accounts were audited, distributed and the AGM held within twelve weeks of the year-end. However, Alan Kirk, the new accountant, was not pleased with the high level of debt and the low level of profitability,

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notwithstanding the Royal Bank having pronounced themselves satisfied with the year’s results. Kirk identified that the major internal problems in the company were the costs associated with our O’Connell Street head office (Findlater’s Corner). What was needed was a detailed profit and loss for each department. In addition to the six retail departments, the company included extensive wine cellars, whiskey bonding and bottling, beer bottling, grocery warehousing and distribution to the branches and to institutions in the city and nation-wide. Stocks in September 1960 were £295,000 on sales of £1.55m giving a stock turn of 5.25 or a 10-week holding. As groceries and perishables turn relatively fast it was apparent that the cellar and bond were grossly overstocked. However, this was difficult to tackle as it was the chairman’s preserve! Debtor levels on the other hand were not as severe as the outside world would believe for a company wholesaling wines and spirits nation-wide, wholesaling beers in Dublin, selling groceries both wholesale and retail, and retailing for both cash and credit.

Year	1940	1945	1950	1955	1960	1965
Debtors (£)	32,770	26,647	56,341	89,201	114,231	105,218
% Turnover	6.5%	4.3%	4.8%	6.6%	7.5%	5.7%

In May 1960 Findlaters began grappling with the problem, as a letter to all county district retail customers conveys:⁴¹

Dear Madam, As from Monday next June 5th, our traveller will no longer call for your order which we would ask you to kindly send in to us by post or telephone. You can be assured that these orders will receive our most careful attention and they will of course be delivered to you weekly as heretofore. Yours very truly, Alex Findlater & Co. Ltd.

As is usual in such an old company, there was a reluctance to change from old familiar and tested ways. Board members argued that the problem was poor branch management. In August 1961 John McGrail, managing director, wrote to the chairman and directors on the subject of branches’ profitability.⁴²

From time to time views have been expressed at Board level that the inadequate net profits earned in our Retail business are largely due to the increased cost associated with Credit and Delivery. It has been suggested that the remedy is to stop Retail Credit and Delivery and impose a service charge in respect of each order. It has also been suggested that to get rid of our Retail Credit and Delivery Trade and to concentrate on Retail Cash Trade only would be the proper and progressive policy for this Company.

The attached exhibit showing the profitability of all our Branches, related to Capital Employed, for the year ended 28th February 1961, shows that Branches doing up to 80% Credit and Delivery Trade are producing net profits in excess of those expected on the Capital Employed. It can be concluded from the attached exhibit that our traditional type of Trade combining Credit and Delivery with Cash, can be extremely profitable if well directed and well managed.

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The knowledge, experience and background of this Company suggests that our main efforts at the present time should be directed to the promotion and improvement of our traditional type of Trade. The essential factor in the success of our Retail business is the level of sales and these seem to be more easily maintained in our traditional type of trade. In the few Branches where we have gone over to Cash only, we failed to produce the necessary profits due to not reaching the required level of sales. This would seem to indicate that much keener prices are necessary in shops that offer no service apart altogether from the attractiveness of the shop and the goods offered.

Findlaters’ business was based on a high level of service and the senior generation believed that it would endure. They were right, but in a different form. Ireland of the 1960s was not wildly buoyant and pennies counted. A new retail concept had arrived where wages and salaries as a percentage of turnover could be over 6 per cent lower than traditional methods. Findlaters, with counter service and deliveries, operated at around 10 per cent. The difference was a sizeable competitive advantage to the newcomers. The shopper was benefiting enough to harm Findlaters’ wafer-thin operating margin.

A few months after McGrail’s note to the board, he had the serious task of announcing Dermot’s death to the AGM.

The Company has suffered a grievous blow in the irreparable loss of Mr Dermot Findlater, who as Chairman and Managing Director controlled the Company’s affairs from 1941 until his death in April of this year. During those 21 years and indeed from the time that Mr Dermot joined the firm in 1927 the contribution he made to the progress and the development of the Company must surely be unparalleled in the field of individual endeavour. Most certainly his life long devotion to the interest of the Company cannot be computed mathematically or reduced to statistical form. It can best be appreciated perhaps by those who worked with him over the years sharing his efforts and profiting by his leadership and friendship.

Dermot died at the age of fifty-six in 1962. He was old beyond his age. He had packed a lot into life and had no outstanding ambitions. Undoubtedly the three decades managing Findlaters had taken a great toll on his health. He never got his personal finances in order following the war-time salary strictures and at the end the cupboard was pretty bare. John McGrail, who was a tremendous help to my mother at the time, wrote an appreciation of his colleague in The Irish Times. He summed up:

[Dermot’s] personal desires and aspirations were extremely simple, fashionable Continental holidays had little attraction for him—he was much more at home in the cottage in Connemara with his family and his boat. Mixing with the local people was one of his greatest delights. His sunny nature, the ready laugh and above all, his great kindliness endeared him to them all.

Abilene was for him the star attraction for he was a great home-loving family man, but even in the contentment of his home his boundless energy kept him ever active. An early morning swim at Seapoint, or Killiney—a little ploughing in the vegetable garden before his day’s work in the city, then home again and into the peace of his gar-

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O’Connell Street head office (Findlater’s Corner) in the late 1950s; note the cobble stones on the bottom left hand corner.

den. His passionate love of flowers was apparent to all who visited Abilene and he delighted in giving to his many friends the fruits of his labour. And so it was fitting on Tuesday last when he was laid to rest that All Saints Church was filled to capacity with hundreds of bouquets of the most exquisite flowers, a last tribute from his bereaved friends.^*

John McGrail (then fifty-seven) took over as chairman and managing director. Doris Findlater (sixty-seven), Dermot’s elder sister, remained deputy chairman and Harry Thompson (seventy), managing director of Mineral Water Distributors (C&C) and on the board since 1945, was the main non-executive director. Executive directors were Paddy Murphy, general manager, Mattie McElroy (in charge of wines) and myself (aged twenty-five), assistant managing director. The team was augmented by Alan Kirk, the accountant, and John Clancy, sales and marketing. There was a tough job ahead for the remainder of the decade.

^* Dermot particularly requested that Tennyson’s ‘Sunset and the evening star’, played at his father’s funeral, be played at his. He identified it to me by the lines ‘And may there be no moaning of the bar, When I put out to sea’ but substituting ‘at’ for ‘of ’ in the third line! The most beautiful rendering of this hymn I ever heard was at the funeral of President Childers, sung by the choir of St Patrick’s Cathedral.

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Notes and references

1. Irish Press 14 June 1946
2. The Irish Times 28 December 1946
3. Idem. 3 January 1947
4. Irish Independent 22 April 1946
5. Irish Press 14 December 1946
6. Idem. 25 February 1947
7. The Irish Times 19 March 1947
8. Irish Independent 10 May 1947
9. Evening Telegraph 28 October 1947
10. Board minutes 3 November 1947
11. The Irish Times 31 December 1947
12. J. P. Donleavy The Ginger Man pb London: Corgi pp 11, 12-13
13. Basil Goulding Alpha Basil 1976. An entertaining business alphabet.
14. See Kevin McCourt’s letter in the Irish Independent 8 January 1948
15. Board minutes 18 August 1951, 5 September 1951
16. The Irish Times 9 June 1949
17. Brian Inglis Downstart London: Chatto & Windus 1990 p 69
18. Peter Somerville-Large The Irish Country House London: Sinclair-Stevens 1995 p 3⁴³
19. Inglis West Briton London: Faber and Faber 1962 p 19
20. Inglis Downstart p 4
21. Ibid. p 68
22. Charles Macmahon Shaw, Bernard’s Brethren, with comments by author and playright GBS, London: Constable p 135. The reference to aborigines relates to an Australian cousin who had caused him to comment on the matter
23. Inglis, Downstart p 21
24. Ibid. p 4
25. L. M. Cullen Princes & Pirates, The Dublin Chamber of Commerce 1783-1983 Dublin: Dublin Chamber of Commerce 1983 p 24
26. Ibid. pp 49-50
27. Ibid. pp 23-4
28. Ibid. pp 73-4
29. Tony Farmar A History of Craig Gardner Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1988 pp 183-4
30. R. B. McDowell Crisis & Decline, The Fate of the Southern Unionists Dublin: Lilliput 1997 p 166
31. Victor Griffin Mark of Protest Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1993 pp 207-8
32. Emily O’Reilly Masterminds of the Right Dublin: Attic Press 1992 p 23
33. Peter Gatenby Dublin’s Meath Hospital, Dublin: Town House Chapter 13; Findlater family records.
34. The hospital’s story is told in great detail by Dr Helen Burke in The Royal Hospital Donnybrook–A Heritage of Caring 1943-1993Dublin: The Royal Hospital and the Social Science Research Centre, University College Dublin 1993
35. Eric Fenelon ‘Some random musings over nearly half a century’ in The Newsletter of the Association of Old Adelaide Students 1987 p 22
36. Irish Independent 3 April 1952
37. Irish Licensing World December 1954
38. Bridget Williams, The Best Butter in the World, A History of Sainsbury’s London: Ebury Press pp 125-6
39. Submission by Feargal Quinn of Superquinn Ltd to The Fair Trade Commission Report of Inquiry into Grocery Goods for Human Consumption 1972 p 158
40. Peter Langan A Life with Food London: Bloomsbury 1990 p 47
41. Minute book 31 May 1961
42. Minute book 9 August 1961