Offaly man retires after more than half century on the retail shop floor

LOOKING at Jim Kinahan on the shopfloor of the Expert store in Tullamore last week, no one would ever guess he grew up in a house without a fridge or a washing machine.

Yet his first job back in December 1968 was with Kilroy's, a retailer which made its name selling electrical appliances of all kinds, and much more.

Tullamore business legend Dermot Kilroy was running the operation at High Street, Tullamore back then and Jim got a post there even though his previous work experience amounted to weeding and thinning turnips in his native Tubber area.

“They used to call it heavy hardware, all the fridges and washing machines. Because I was a big strong lad, I suppose they put me into that,” he said.

Jim turned 71 in March and last Thursday, June 29, he finally pulled down the curtain on a career in retail that spanned more than half a century.

After national school he attended Moate Vocational School, “Moate Tech”, as it was called and at a time when most lads left school at 14 and “headed for England or stayed at home”, he remained in school and completed three years secondary.

There wasn't even a Leaving Certificate on offer in the school at the time but after the summer of 1968 he started in Kilroy's as the busy Christmas period approached.

“At that time they did toys. And things like milking machines and chainsaws,” Jim recalled. “Back then I didn't now a fridge from a washing machine because we didn't have one at home.”

Also, it was an era where many houses had cement floors and the advent of floor covering was a massive shift for many homes.

As they did with so many other products, Kilroy's responded to the emerging trend for roll-out floor covering and had a steady stream of customers.

The heavy rolls would be standing in a corner of the store, four or six feet high and people would arrive with an idea of the area they wished to cover. But they would not have measured up their rooms as is done today.

“People would come in with bits of wool and thread and binding twine with knots on it because they weren't able to measure themselves. They would hold it out and say 'That's the length and that the width'.

“I had to go and get a tape then and measure it. That's the way it was. It's unbelievable. It was only in the sixties that people were beginning to get education and the vocational schools were part of that.”

For businessmen like Dermot Kilroy, running an enterprise was much different too. Availability of credit was always a challenge.

The retailer decided it was time to order in some fridges and he bought GEC models from Martin Naughton at a factory in Dunleer. Naughton was the man who went on to develop Glen Dimplex, a leading company in the electrical trade internationally.

“Kilroy would say you could ring him three times and day and get three different prices,” noted Jim.

Jim remembers when an initial order was made by Dermot Kilroy, who had a house at Lough Ennell.

“Oul Kilroy came down and said he was going to buy 15 of these fridges and he was going to mortgage the house out at the lake against it. I was only 16 or 17 and I was saying it'd be shocking if Mr Kilroy lost the house because the fridges didn't sell.”

The salesmen like Jim had to be told about the fridges with their ice boxes and different compartments for various foods. They retailed for about £19 when a weekly wage may have been only £4.

“Within two weeks we had them all sold.”

The next order was for 30 fridges at £28 each and they also sold. Kilroy's delivered to customers within a 40-mile radius, with different days allocated for the deliveries to different areas.

Another key distinction from electrical retailing in the 21st century was the absence of a plug on newly purchased appliances.

“You had to put a plug on it. The appliances came in with no plug on them until the '80s. I'd be in Kilroy's at 9 o'clock on a Saturday night and a fellow would come in and buy a bar fire and you'd be trying to put a plug on it and six other customers there waiting.”

Much of the white goods destined for the Kilroy's shopfloor were shipped to Tullamore by rail and Dick Forrestal from Clontarf Road operated a horse and four-wheeled dray until a fleet of Ford 3000 tractors with trailers started moving the loads.

Jim often used to thumb from his home to Tullamore unless a lift had been arranged but when he was 20 he decided to buy his first car.

He was told by the “girl in PMPA” to come back when he was 21 and the quote for insurance would be better. “£1,500 for the insurance and £600 for the car.”

Jim worked in Kilroy's stores in Nenagh, Mullingar and Athlone as well as Tullamore and took charge of the electrical department in Mullingar from about 1972 to 1976.

However, he did leave Kilroy's on one occasion, taking a job in Ballina in the early 1970s because it offered a better wage.

“Kilroy rang me and said he wanted to talk to me so I came back. I left at about £4 pound 50 or £5 a week and I came back at £13 pound a week.”

He stayed in Kilroy's after that and played his part in the modernisation of Ireland. Remember, when he started working in the stores first, there weren't even many telephones.

“I was nearly afraid of the phone when I went in first,” he said. Indeed, there were so few that neighbouring numbers were in sequence – the Ulster Bank on High Street was Tullamore 74 and Kilroy's on the same street was 75.

Kilroy's was a one-stop shop for so much – white goods, furniture, floor coverings, televisions (the TV rental business was massive) and much more.

“From the time we joined the EEC it was growing but there was still a recession every six or seven years,” Jim observed.

There were the oil shocks of the 1970s and the recession of the 1980s though he thinks that latter decade was the one where Kilroy's “really took off”.

Growth continued into the 1990s before recession struck again. “But the one of 2008 was the worst ever.”

Derry Kilroy left the business in 2007 and at the same time retailers around the country realised they could not remain fully independent.

Hence the moves began to form what became the Expert group under Ciaran O'Reilly. He rang Jim to say he had heard Kilroy's was closing and enquired about the possibility of it continuing under the Expert banner.

A site was identified in Cloncollig but before it was ready Expert continued on High Street for about two years.

Expert then relocated to its current premises and went well before “sailing close to the wind” again when the last recession hit.

Jim himself switched to a three-day week when he was 66 and by then the store he worked in bore little resemblance to the Kilroy's of old. Laptops, for instance, were one product unheard of until recent times.

Jim speaks about when the microwave oven was introduced. “It took them a while to take off,” he said.

Some people associated them with pubs, because some licensed premises started using them to heat burgers as “pub grub” in Ireland improved.

The early domestic models were expensive and required specific promotions. Claffey's, a fashion shop in Moate, provided an avenue towards marketing.

They had a show which attracted “hundreds of women” to the hotel in Moate and Kilroy's arranged a microwave demonstration and raffle, where one lucky winner would go home with a microwave.

Kilroy's also sold microwaves to their own staff at a special price and word of this gadget which could cook porridge “in three minutes” spread.

Jim also tells the story of how dishwashers were promoted. Resisted by many households lest people be accused of being lazy for not “washing a mug”, Kilroy's jumped at the opportunity to supply one Zanussi dishwasher to the garda station in Tullamore when it was undergoing a major refurbishment in the late '70s or early '80s.

“There was 39 guards in that barracks and by the end of that year every one of them had a dishwasher.”

At 6pm on Thursday evening Jim, a father of five, left Expert for good and was looking forward to retirement with his wife Mary.

But he won't be idle: “Mary is getting the pension this year. She works as a carer and now she'll be off when I'm off. And I'll do a bit of fishing and I keep a few calves.”