Here we have my marriage to Mairin, the birth of Una and Fergus (Aileen came in the early 60s), also my sister's move from Ballinaclough in to Nenagh town where Dermot became the rector of the combined parishes; I treat also JJ's move from Mount Merrion to Grattan Lodge in Laois.

After my first spell in Paris with the Ecole Polytechnique in the autumn of 1951 I came home for Christmas, and married Mairin in the first week of 1952. Mairin's mother, although originally Catholic, had fallen out with the Church, as had Mairin and the rest of her family (Sean, Paddy and Stephen, elder brothers). We got married in the Church of Ireland church, Nenagh, my brother-in-law Dermot Carmody officiating. It was a quiet event, no fuss, no big deal.

We went back to Paris and lived initially in a 'chambre de bonne' in a house in Bois Colombes, until we found a more convenient flatlet in St Mandé, above a lady hairdresser's shop, near the Porte de Vincennes. Our social contacts included Brian Farrington, then teaching in the British Institute, and Cecil Jenkins; these were the Irish emigré network; also Peter and Jean Wexler who were friends of Brian, and members of the British Communist Party; Peter was interested in the linguistics of industrial technological jargons, a reflection of Marxist concern with the productive process. Brendan Behan occurred in our flat, on one of his Paris forays, I think via Cecil Jenkins. We also interacted with Mark Mortimer, who was a colleague of Brian; he had been our French teacher in St Columba's College.

We observed the French political scene from the fringe; it was a period of Left militancy, mostly anti-war, with the Korean war going on, and the Vietnam war still in its French phase; there was political resistance to it among the French military, Henri Martin being a key martyred figure. There were students from 'Indochine' (as it was called then) in the left-wing student movement, and I have a hazy recollection of encountering in that context one Ieng Sary, who later turned out to be associated with the Pol Pot period in Cambodia. It is necessary to ask the question: was there perhaps an influence, rooted in doctrinaire Stalinist rigidity, from the French CP on the Pol Pot ideologues?

In the spring of 1952, having set up in our flat, we took our bikes on the train to Avignon and did a tour of youth hostels in Provence. Leaving still-wintry Paris and encountering the spring in Avignon was magical. We soaked up the atmosphere of Roman Aix and mediaeval Les Baux, and swam in the calanques at la Ciotat east of Marseilles. The youth hostels were at that time a strong area of Communist Party influence, the 'pere-aubes' usually being stalwarts with resistance backgrounds, exuding principles of friendly democratic management of the hostelling community. (There was, and perhaps still is, a rival Catholique youth hostelling network, French society being organisationally divided into discrete post-revolutionary factions, not unlike the Irish Civil War parties. This extends to the Trade Unions. This is also food for reflection: why are these divisions so persistent? Is it basically a matter of rival top-down bureaucracies?)

Returning to Paris we faced up to the need to make some money; we were living very precariously on my modest student stipend. Things improved however; I got some technical translation: brochures about electronic equipment needing to be exported to anglophone markets; Cecil picked up this for me; he although a French scholar had no idea how to handle technical jargon, and I had been soaking it up in the Ecole Polytechnique. Wexler knew about railways, but that was no good for radio transmitters.

Then the possibility emerged of getting 'frais de mission' for spells of work at the Pic du Midi. The result was that when we went home for the summer holidays, we were able to invest in a motor-bike, which in September 1952 I brought back to Paris, on my own, Mairin travelling separately. This opened up wider horizons for us, and we enjoyed ourselves with it in the spring of 1953, in Dordogne, Cote D'Azur and the Alps, visiting again Les Baux, though this time the earlier magic seemed to have vanished; first impressions of a new place are often best and, by definition, unrepeatable. We decided to go back from the Cote d'Azur via the Alps, and we headed for Grenoble by mountainy roads, not realising the extreme local changes in climate; we got very cold and wet, and our stay in Grenoble was miserable. The next day we tried to make the total trip to Paris from Grenoble; the bike, a 2-stroke, was coked up, and we had to stop en route to de-coke it. It poured with rain. We swore never again; it took days to recover.

The winter of 1952-3 had been difficult for us; I had a long spell at the Pic, and during this Mairin went to work in Manchester. She returned and joined me in Bagneres de Bigorre when I came down from the Pic, and we set off on the bike for the spring 1953 trip mentioned above.

Back in Paris the possibility arose of getting Mairin trained in ionographic microscopy ('scanning') and this enhanced our economic condition, and also built a firm basis for our later return to Ireland with O Ceallaigh. By the time of the Bagneres de Bigorre Cosmic Ray Conference, she had established herself as skilled in the art, and we constituted a couple worthy of being head-hunted by O Ceallaigh to help him set up his meson physics group in the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies. (I have gone into this in the 1950s academic publications module).

After the Bagneres conference we set off on the bike to the 'Theoretical Physics Summer School' at Les Houches, in the valley above Chamonix in the Alps. We travelled the N88 from Toulouse to Lyon through Dordogne, relishing excellent food; trout from the river was beautifully served at a modest wayside inn. We found a modest hotel in Lyon where we stayed the night; the food however was appalling, and we were woken up at an ungodly hour by the rattle of tanks in the street; it was July 14.

(I have had subsequent bad experience of Lyon people in French camp-sites, perhaps coincidentally, but vehicle registration 69 has regularly spelled trouble with camp-site neighbours. There may be a chance association with the symbols 69 having in France an obscene connotation!)

At Les Houches we occupied a chalet with a Belgian couple called Stroot; spouses picnicked and rambled while those committed to physics absorbed quantum electrodynamics from Bryce de Witt, and solid-state physics from Shockley of transistor fame; he was just about then engaged in inventing it. Peierls gave us a window into current nuclear physics thinking. Shockley drove a Jaguar at breakneck speed around the Alpine hairpins; he had a young woman in tow who he said was his daughter, though we doubted it. The Mayor of Les Houches gave us a big dinner, with speeches. I remember being impressed with the fact that Les Houches had a Mayor; it was a village with perhaps 1000 people, mostly scattered around the valley. There was a lesson here worth trying to transfer to local government in Ireland; here I was unknowingly following in the steps of my father.

While we were there the French postal system was on strike, so we had no communication with our families back in Ireland. This coincided with my father's Berkeley conference, where he gave the keynote address, so I failed to pick up the significance of this at the time, to my eternal regret.

We returned to Paris at the end of August; remembering our earlier disastrous trip from Grenoble, we took it easy, and overnighted at Dole, in a small hotel, where they served an evening meal of such quality that the memory lingered for years. We learned a lesson which persists in value to this day: if you want good food in France at a modest price, keep out of the main urban centres.

Mairin made her own way home, and I brought the bike back, overnighting in the small town in southern England where it had been manufactured. We had trouble with the hydraulic damper fitted to the telescopic fork, and they undertook to fix it, which they did, at marginal cost; they admitted to a fault in the design. In this context I had a glimpse of a way of life which is apparently gone for good: British motor cycle engineering as a craft culture, not yet then recognised as an endangered species.

Back in Ireland we began our work in the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies, in #5 Merrion Square, living initially in an unfurnished top flat in Vernon Grove Rathgar, for which we took a 2-year lease; we bought some furniture in auction rooms. The landlord who lived below was Tom Shellard, who was Guinness staff, a bibliophile. It was not a very good arrangement; we had to come up through the house, and interaction with the Shellard children was sometimes problematic.

RJ in Sandymount; the move to Rathmines

In the summer of 1958 we decided to look for a house to buy, and we went all over Dublin on our bicycles, looking at 'for sale' notices, and assessing their neighbourhoods. I had become an 'Assistant Professor' in DIAS, at a salary of £1200 annually, and it seemed feasible. At that time however the building societies would only give a mortgage on a new house, and this was a constraint; new houses were always in impossible places.

Thanks to JJ however who acted as guarantor, we raised an overdraft facility with the Bank, and with this in hand we widened our scope to include older houses nearer to the centre, and we came across 22 Belgrave Road Rathmines, which was for sale at £1200, had been unoccupied for some time; it had been a nursing home, and then had been in tenements; it was in bad condition generally, though the roof was serviceable; it was in walking distance of excellent shops. There was dry rot in the basement. The house was of 1858 vintage, with the plumbing added perhaps in the 1880s; the wiring was original Rathmines power station from the 1900s. We got rid of the dry rot professionally, and had a good state-of-the-art re-wiring job done, with lots of power points; we did a partial re-plumbing, and the whole thing cost us a total of £1800. We had no money left for re-decorating, though we did an upgrade of the back room on the hall floor into a kitchen-dining-room, an advanced concept for the time, when the norm was to have a poky kitchen separately in the 'return', a residue of the culture where it used to make work for servants.

We made the basement into a self-contained 'garden flat' unit and we let it, initially to Yasuchi Takahashi, a Japanese theoretical physicist who was working with Schroedinger in the School of Theoretical Physics of DIAS, in #64 Merrion Square. This was a happy arrangement while it lasted. We planted fruit trees in the back garden, and were adopted by a cat, who condescended to live with us, as part of the ecological control system over the numerous rodents with which this old-established neighbourhood was infested. Fergus was born in Belgrave Road in 1959; we seemed to be all set for the long haul; there was the beginnings of an economic revival with the Whitaker economic reforms, and the abandonment of the extreme protectionism of the de Valera epoch. There was the beginnings of a developing cultural life; I was a member of the Culwick Choral Society and enjoyed the practices and the concerts; Mairin was re-discovering her abilities as a traditional singer, in an environment which the Irish Workers League, to its credit, played a pioneering role, rediscovering the ballad culture later popularised by Ewan McColl and Luke Kelly. We tried to expand the scope of our political work with support for the Plough, a labour-left paper, and got talking socially to some of the 1950s republicans who were beginning to feel their way into the political process, including Sean Cronin and Charlie Murphy.

Unfortunately the DIAS contract came to an end, and O Ceallaigh did not renew it. I have yet to discover why this happened; it could have been political pressure, but I have seen no evidence of this, except circumstantially, in that Japanese like Kuni Imaeda, whose scientific work was marginal and obscure, stayed on indefinitely, while I got marching orders, although we had been pushing at the frontiers quite successfully; by this time however I was in somewhat of a cul-de-sac experimentally. My preferred hypothesis is that O Ceallaigh gave me the push for my own good, realising that I was primarily a technologist rather than a scientist, having served my time in the underlying technology of scientific experimentation.

I made a few enquiries; I talked to Leo the pioneering computer firm, and to one or two scientific instrumentation firms in England, and I looked at medical physics, but none was suitably located; if we were going to England I wanted to be in reach of where the Irish situation was focusing political effort: the Connolly Association in London, where Desmond Greaves was beginning to come up with the 'civil rights' approach to the Northern question. Just like my father, I was obsessed with the negative effects of Partition, which had produced the Catholic-hegemonist environment in the 'republic' within which critical thought was decidedly unwelcome, and the obverse Protestant-hegemonic northern scene. It had to be London.

Then by chance the managing director of Guinness Dublin made some public statement about science in industry, and I wrote to him, looking for a job. He invited me to lunch with himself and the Head Brewer. I was offered a job with a new Production Research Department then being set up, in Park Royal. In Guinness the science was in Dublin, and was dominated by brewing chemistry and yeast biology, but technological development was in Park Royal, presumably so as to be accessible by suppliers; this made sense given the backward technological infrastructure in Ireland. So in the autumn of 1960 I set off to London, initially on my own, to find a place where we could live; we decided we would hang on to Belgrave Road, and find a tenant for it.

Initially I stayed in a vegetarian guest-house in London where Tony Coughlan lived; he fixed me up with the contact. Brian Farrington was returning to France in his 2CV, and we chugged down the A5 from Holyhead at a leisurely pace, heavily burdened with my stuff; he dropped me off in Tony's place in Notting Hill. From this I went to work in Park Royal by a rather complicated bus-route. I borrowed Desmond Greaves's bike and went flat-hunting; I put out enquiries also on the Connolly Association network, and on the Communist Party network. The latter came up trumps with Bardy Tyrrell's place in Hammersmith; she was an upper-crust curmudgeon who was a Party supporter. So Mairin, Una and Fergus were able to come over in or about November 1960, and our period in London began.

What this shows is the key importance of the contact-network among emigrants; it explains why the Irish abroad concentrate in certain well-defined places.

The Carmodys in Nenagh

After the Carmodys moved to the old rectory at Summerhill in Nenagh town, they used to participate in a choir which gave concerts of classical music in Killaloe Cathedral: this was an example of the strength of the Protestant cultural tradition of choral music. Dermot eventually became the conductor. On occasion I accompanied them, being supportive of the bass line, in works like Mendelssohn's Elijah. I had been a stalwart in the St Columba's College choir under Joe Groocock, and then in the later 1940s of the Trinity Choral Society, also under Groocock.

The two boys, Pat and David, for a while went to school in Roscrea, but in the end Maureen worked some sort of a deal with the medical mafia and got them into a rather superior school at Epsom in England, of which I remember being critical at the time. Local schools however were very rough and ready, with the Christian Brothers dominating the scene, and affordable boarding schools under Protestant management in Ireland were of poor quality. The Epsom deal seemed to be the best available. David was in Epsom when we were in London in the 60s, and we went to seem him occasionally. Claire went to Alexandra ('clergy daughters') which was not too bad.

The lack of a quality lay-managed interdenominational school system is the key factor which has undermined Protestant demographic statistics in the 'republic', and for this we have to blame educational policies which fortified Church control under the British in the 19th century.

JJ in the 1950s

The move to Grattan Lodge took place in 1953. The house had been built in 1882 by Sir Henry Grattan-Bellew and had remained in the family until 1947. JJ's motivation was triggered by his being sidelined in TCD by the McConnell reforms; he was however active in the campaign that the Colleges should have a role in the projected Agricultural Institute, and in this context he was supportive of the Kells Ingram Farm, which was quite a large-scale commercial-type mixed-farming enterprise. He was keen to get hands-on experience with a small-farm situation, and to see how the economics of market-gardening would work out, if combined with keeping a few cows. He had written in the SSISI in support of the Richards Orpen 'Economic Farm Cluster' concept, and embedded it in his 'Irish Agriculture in Transition'. He felt that he could perhaps explore one particular aspect of the 'cluster' jig-saw.

JJ at Grattan Lodge, where he began to develop the livestock and market gardening combination.

JJ was motivated to go to that particular place, I suspect, because my cousin Alan, the eldest son of his elder brother James, had set up some years earlier at Kildangan, which was nearby. Alan had made some money in the transport business in Africa before the war. He sold up in 1940 and volunteered for service in the British Army. After the war he invested his money in a farm at Riverstown, near Kildangan, Co Kildare, which he developed productively as best he could. Despite his best efforts, he never succeeded in making it pay, and he sold up towards the end of the decade, going into the motor repair business in Blackrock, Co Dublin.

JJ and my mother stayed at Grattan Lodge until 1959, initially without mains electricity; there was a generator but inadequate battery storage. Mairin and I went down to see them occasionally; we sensed a degree of loneliness and isolation; the house was cold, and the evenings were long. They took in lodgers, in a sequence of unsatisfactory arrangements, aimed at my mother having company during JJ's absences. Occasionally JJ's colleagues from TCD came down for weekends.

The move to Bayly Farm, near Nenagh, took place in 1959. Alan had sold up and left Kildangan. The idea behind this move was to be nearer to my sister and her family; JJ used to go up to Dublin by train to TCD for a couple of days in the mid-week. There was a live-in housekeeper, Margaret Egan, who had worked for my mother before, in Blackrock, and then later for my sister. Bayly Farm was rented; JJ worked the garden, but had by this time abandoned his programme of agricultural experimentation, having more or less proved his point. The Agricultural Institute by this time was in process of being set up, though without the structure and relationship with the Colleges for which JJ had hoped and worked.

Some navigational notes:

Copyright Dr Roy Johnston 2003