As the village grew, industry declined

THE village of Donemana is a lot bigger now than when Billy and Raymond were boys. Certainly the amount of domestic housing has grown substantially in the last 50-plus years.
But according to Billy, the village is far less industrious than it was when he was a slip of a lad.
"I remember as a lad, I lived a couple of miles out of the village, so I came in to Donemana to serve my time as a mechanic with a man called James L Cochrane, and in those days cars and that were scarce on account of the war and that, only a few people had cars, but everybody had bicycles - in the war everyone had bicycles.
"So I was a trained mechanic but I worked on bicycles, laidies' wans, big wheeled things that were big high bikes with a circular frame, Daisy Bell bikes - all sorts of bicycles, and then they got into the triangular frame later on. They were smaller bikes with the cords on the back mudguards for to keep the long skirts from getting into the spokes. There were these cords that ran down the back and they were attached onto the axle and that kept the long skirts and the nylons from getting into the spokes."
I draw an inadvertent gale of laughter and raised eyebrows from Billy when I innocently ask if girls didn't just hitch their skirts up.
"Oh you couldn't show a leg!" he says.
"You couldn't?" I ask.
"Oh naw, naw," he laughs.
"I think from your laugh there might have been one or two who did."
His laugh gets louder: "Most of the ladies were very modest. It was very much an art this cycling business. I knew a lady who would have cycled on a wet day and would have had an umbrella up. She was a Mrs Chambers from Liscloon. She used to come to church on her bicycle and on a wet day she would have steered with one hand and held her umbrella with the other."

Shops and pubs
There were several shops back in those golden days. Starting at the bottom of the street, he rhymes them off: "If you start at the foot of the street there was Mrs McCormick, who had a grocer shop and a pub and a hotel, all in the one complex, but if you are down there now it is known as Annie's bar, and it is just a whole block.
"On the other side of the road, which is now the Village Inn, it was Willie Harvey's; you went on down then to the place where it's now the Baptist Church and you had Lowry's and he had a shop and a pub, and on the corner where the Mace is now you had Robert Pearson's, that's where he was there, and he had a fish and chip shop there as well."
"Then you went up the street and you have a big red building there which is vacant in the middle of the town and it was Hamilton's, that was a grocer's and hardware; then you went up to where Raymond Elliott's is and you had an old lady there called Mrs Walker, Rebecca, she was known as Granny Walker and she had a pub and a shop.
Apron
"I remember she wore a black apron and a black cardigan or shawl and a black hat and she was very very strict. She would have left you outside on the doorstop come hell or high water at nine o'clock, for that was closing time. They all closed at that time, although an odd man would have walked in, but the police would have come in and chased them out.
"Across from there, across from Amity House across here at the rise there you would find Devine's in those days it would have been Paddy Ward's, PJ Ward's. There were five pubs in the town: Ward's, Granny Walker's, Harvey's, McGarvey's and Lowry's, and then there was a pub out the road - Cochrane of Benone, he had a pub too, and he had a wee shop too," he recalls.
In the village there were other trades apart from the publicans.
"There was Cochrane's garage and there was another wee man, a fella called Jimmy Murray, he had a garage and there was a saddler's that was Fred McGirr. Now that was in later years. Before that it was a man Sam Cummings, and then there was John Arthur Ward in the blacksmith's forge, and he was the smithy."
Asked if he recalled much about the smithy, Billy's eyes light up at the memories.
"Oh I remember them well.There were even one out beside me where I lived, a smithy, a man by the name of Sam Robinson and before that there were the Browns, but I just remember them and no more."
Noted for their ability to tell tall tales, the blacksmiths regularly terrified their hired hands - ususally young boys from the district, who frequently had to make their way home in the pitch black of night - occasionally helped along with a strategically-rattled length of chain, sudden rattles and unexplained 'bangs' - to the great amusement of the adults who were responsible for infecting their impressionable young minds with spooky stories in the first place.
Well, what else were folk to do when the pub emptied at nine and there were no dance halls open?



Drink and the long arm of the law

ASKED if he remembered the old B Huts and Nissan-style huts that the garrisoned forces would have used in the war years as they were billeted around the village in preparation for fighting on the front, Billy McClintock recalled how a 'B' Hut was erected down at Tullyard (Duncastle Road).
"There was a shooting range down there and there was a flat field and there was a steep bank that they used as a shooting range, and if you look you can still see the bare space on the bottom of the banking where the targets were, it's on your left-hand-side as you go down to Derry," he says.
Known as much for the flow of alcohol as for their association with 'the Boys who fear no noise', the Huts gained a certain amount of notoriety
Chuckling, Billy confides: "Oh what! There was one in Newbuildings as well, and there was another one at Kildoag and there was one at Tullintrain and they were you see because there were Platoons all over the place.
"There was Army personnel stationed in Donemana, there was. It was in 19 and 41, I don't know when they came first whether it was 1940 or in 41, but they must only have been there in the summer time because they were under canvas, and they were English - they were the Royal Artillery. I don't know how long they were stationed there for, I think it was six months or so, but they were billeted on a field belonging to the Craigs out the Strabane Road on the left-hand-side. It was RJ Craig, JP, who owned the land and that field's still known as the soldiers' field."
As a man Billy remembers the JP as a high-up member of the Presbyterian Church, who possessed a rather intimidating air of authority.
"His grandson, Lesley, is still living up there in the Big House yet. He's a nice enough fella, but in the old days all those auld fellas were a bit grumpy. I wouldn't have run up the road away from him, but he would not have been sociable with me for he would have had his own circle in society. When he would have come the length of me he would have grunted at me, de ye know?"
Perhaps being a JP in those days was a bigger thing than it is now.
"They had powers in those days when they could have sent you to jail and there were people...there was another man R J Allen, Robert Allen, JP, and he would have sent you to special courts in the barracks - any of these wandering people, like what they'd call 'tramps' in the old days, and if he has committed some offence and been arrested he would go before the JP and he would have been sent down to Derry jail for a month."
The conversation reverts to talk of the Army lads again, and Billy recalls how they were a familiar sight in the village and the girls round about were quite taken with them.
"They would have mixed in village life and the girls was always falling over themselves about them. It might have been the uniform because they certainly never had any money. Now the Yanks, the Yanks had plenty of money - they were up about Strabane, up about Ardmore, they were in all these big villas and these big estates.
"The girls were all after them for the boxes of chocolates, the cigarettes and the nylon stockings - they had lots of everything," he laughs.

In those days all you could do was dance

"I didn't really go to the dances, but I remember they danced in the Parochial Hall," muses Billy McClintock as he reflects on the social scene that used to spice up the wee small hours in Donemana many moons ago.
"They were very strict in there, for you didn't get dancing close. His Reverence, Fr Gormley, was there with his Blackthorn to keep them apart. Now, whether or not he actually used the Blackthorn to keep them apart or not I cannot say, but he made sure he kept them apart - that was the rumour anyway," he said.
"Well, they were all strict you know. In the old days they were all strict because they had an idea or were trying to make the people believe that they fell from Heaven commissioned by God. The dances were near the only form of entertainment, you know, and people had no money and I suppose they went to a dance for a couple of shillings or half a crown or something like that.
"Dances were organised by the Roman Catholic Church to raise money for church funds, and in the city you danced in the Orange Halls, so they would have been organised by the Loyal Brethren and probably some of the Protestant Churches like the Church of Ireland. The Presbyterians didn't believe in that, they werenay keen on it. It was a moral thing, and they didn't approve of it," he says emphatically.
If you were bored of the usual haunts in the village you could have gone to Jim Logue's, Tullantrain, or Barron just up the road.
"There was an Orange hall in Barron and they had dances there," he says.
But the man for chat about the old ballrooms of romance is Raymond Forbes, one-time drummer with the Coronation Dance Band. The mainstay of the band was the Forbes family, with Mr Forbes Snr, his son David and the three Forbes girls - Florence, Edna and Iris - out front with Raymond on the drums...but that's a story for next week!