Patrick Comerford
My childhood memories are patchy and are not connected in any sort of ‘joined-up writing’. What I think are memories from infancy may, in fact, be founded on the few photographs I have from those early years, with either the photographs providing the memories or the memories being based on the images in those old photographs.
These few black-and-out photographs are over 70 years old, and most of them show me in the small garden in front of my grandmother’s farmhouse at Moonwee, near Cappoquin in west Waterford, or an unknown beach. In all these photographs I am with my foster-mother Peggy Kerr, the dogs that were family pets but that also worked on the farm, and the family car, an old black Morris Minor ZL 5776, made in 1949.
I thought of that old Morris Minor and wondered about those photographs and memories during my visit to Dublin last week as I stood outside the former Brittain Motors assembly plant on Lower Rathmines Road, beside Portobello Bridge. I was in Dublin for the launch of Salvador Ryan’s new book, Childhood and the Irish in the Royal Irish Academy the previous night. My two chapters in this book are about the Portobello and ‘Little Jerusalem’ area, so I should have expected memories of the area would come rushing back into my my mind the next monrning.
Brittain Motors or GA Brittain Ltd was a car assembly plant and not just a dealership. There, during my childhood, popular models from the UK were assembled, including the Morris Minor and the Mini. It was the first company outside Britain to assemble the Morris Minor, receiving the first ‘completely knocked down’ (CKD) export kits, and production continued until 1971.
The Irish-assembled cars sometimes used a different paint palette than their UK counterparts, and the locally popular colours included dark brown.
These cars were built at the Morris Minor and Mini plant in Oxford, and then taken to production locations across Europe, including Slovenia, Italy, Malta, Portugal, Spain, Belgium and the Netherlands, as well as the assembly site at Portobello in Dublin. In addition, there was a service facility in Ringsend, close to what is now the Aviva Stadium.
When the Mini was launched in 1959, it was an overnight success in Ireland. But before the car could be sold in the Republic, all the component parts had to be packed in wooden crates in the UK, shipped to the Port of Dublin, and then assembled by the Brittain Group in Dublin.
I remember watching the assembled cars being lined up on Rathmines Road as I walked to parent’s home in Harold’s Cross from school, enthralled not only by their appearance but by the Brittain Motors building, with its ‘In’ and ‘Out’ lettering over the entrance and exit gates, bookending a splendid decorated stucco house.
I was young and naïve and at the age of eight or nine, in 1960 or 1961, all I hoped and wished Santa would leave for me under the tree for Christmas was a model yellow Mini. That Christmas night, I crept downstairs in the middle of the night to find it and to play with it in the silence between Christmas Eve and Christmas morning. But from his bedroom above, my father could see the light I had switched on, casting its beams on the front garden. In his characteristic anger, he rushed down, promptly confiscated it, never to be seen again.
But the petty, almost vindictive, attitudes of an adult parent to a playful young boy failed to dull my fascination with the Morris assembly plant at Brittain’s premises on Lower Rathmines Road until I was sent away to boarding school in the mid-1960s.
Soon after, the Brittain Group and their rivals Lincoln and Nolan Ltd – who also assembled the Mini at New Wapping Street in East Wall – amalgamated in 1967 or 1968 and became the BLN Motor Company, moving to the Naas Road on the west side of Dublin. The company was then bought by the Smith Group which assembled Renault cars in Wexford. Following the BLN merger, the Mini assembly franchise went to Reg Armstrong Motors in Ringsend.
As I stood last week looking at the former Brittain works on Lower Rathmines Road, near Portobello Bridge, those memories from 60 years or more ago came back as though it had all been only last year.
The 1930 parts of the Brittain site was designed by the Dublin-based architect Arnold Francis Hendy (1894-1958) of Kaye-Parry & Ross and were built by H&J Martin, founded in 1840, whose great buildings include the Grand Opera House, Belfast (1895), he Slieve Donard Hotel (1898), and Belfast City Hall in 1898.
Hendy was born in Plymouth and after World War I in Palestine and France with the Devonshire Regiment, he moved to Dublin and trained as an architect with WH Byrne & Son. As a student of the RIAI, he won the Downes Bronze Medal in 1920-1921 and the Institute Prize in 1921-1922. He joined Kaye-Parry & Ross in 1924 and soon became a partner.
After George Murray Ross died in 1927 and William Kaye-Parry died in 1932, Hendy carried on the practice under the same name until he died in 1958. His works include the Church of Our Lady of the Wayside, Kilternan (1929), the Pembroke Library (1929), Ballsbridge, No 35-36 Westmoreland Street (1935), on the corner with Fleet Street, for the Pearl Assurance Co (1935), Archer’s Garage (1948) on Fenian Street, the Top Hat ballroom (1953) in Dun Laoghaire, and a number of housing estates in Dublin.
Hendy died in 1958 and his firm continued as Kaye-Parry, Ross & Hendy until ca 1965, and then as Kaye-Parry & Partners until the early 1970s.
The central, decorated stucco house between Hendy’s ‘In’ and ‘Out’ wings of the former Brittain premises retains its charm and Victorian details. But so far I have been unable to find out who was its original architect.
The building is a fine, late 19th century, two storey over basement, five-bay building, with many remaining architectural features, both externally and internally. It appears to have been originally built as office accommodation for the adjoining works, which were originally a building contractors before becoming Brittain Motors.
Faded lettering on a decorative shield above the door indicates the house was once known as Grand Canal House. In the post-Brittain years, it became the offices of Liam Carroll (1950-2021) Zoe Developments, one of the biggest builders of residential properties in the 1990s, and was known as La Touche House, an acknowledgement that the real, official name of Portobello Bridge nearby is La Touche Bridge, built in 1791.
Before he went bankrupt, Carroll was described by Kathy Sherridan in The Irish Times as ‘a billionaire developer who flies Ryanair and writes his own cheques’. He was regarded as ‘a maverick, a reclusive puzzle wrapped in an enigma’.
There were proposals in 2017 to turn Grand Canal House into an eight-bedroom annexe for the nearby Portobello Hotel, on the other side of the bridge on Richmond Street. It now seems to be used for sheltered housing, while other parts of the Brittain site include a café, solicitor’s offices, apartments and what appears to be sheltered housing.
Sadly, the ‘Out’ lettering is now missing from Hendy’s paired ‘In’ and ‘Out’ windows.
The fall of Liam Carroll and the sale of his property portfolios by NAMA are among the many fading memories of the ‘Celtic Tiger’. My memories of the Brittain assembly site and that dinky Mini Minor or Austin 7 one of Christmas in the early 1960s could easily have become another offering for Salvador Ryain’s Childhood and the Irish. Meanwhile, I’d still like to find out more about the architect and the history of the former Grand Canal House, at the centre of the former Brittain site on Lower Rathmines Road.
