DD Motoring: The Rolls Royce of trollies

Only the bravest boys in our estate chanced carrying the red hot poker with its handle wrapped in a towel, in case it would burn the hand off them.

Heated through the front door of a Stanley Range then transferred out the back to the waiting gang gathered in a makeshift assembly plant.

The poker was used as an improvised drill to burn a hole through the homemade chassis to connect the front wheels and steering to the trolley.

We weren’t allowed to play with these boys “too rough” my father decided.

We had to settle for a viewpoint through a hole in our hedge as the gang brought their company trolley to life.

D.I.Y.

Then one Saturday morning my father started to build a trolley of our own out in our shed.

With the excitement of it all coming together, the thought never crossed my mind to ask where he found the wheels.

Wheels for a trolley in Wolfe Tone Place were like Hens Teeth. Daddy made our trolley out of oak.

The oak was old cross-arms that once carried power lines for the ESB and had been replaced with galvanised steel ones.

Some of the Old cross-arms were rotten with years of Donegal weather. The best of them were reused to build our first trolley.

Some even had pre-drilled holes which were handy for attaching the steering and front set of wheels.

It’s a far cry from what these wheels were originally made for. Chrome wheels and spokes with white solid rubber tyres, a design that was much the same for over a hundred years.

William Wilson often was recognised as the maker of the Rolls Royce of prams when he invented the Silver Cross Pram.

The wheels for our homemade trollies where best secured from a Silver Cross Pram and the older they were the better.

Better because the wheels were bigger and better because the older prams had two different sizes of wheels on them.

It was as if William Wilson had designed his wheels to give a trolley the perfect pitch lowered to the front.

Then years after my father made our trolley I was with him on runs to Sligo.

He would always pull in just above Grange Village along the road where we would share a flask of tea and sandwiches where he would always recall the happiest of times heading out the old road that run parallel with the new one with me in the pram as a newborn baby.

The pram was bought new but not for me. It was bought for my two older brothers, twins Patrick and Eamon who lived for only two weeks sadly never getting as far as their brand new pram and passed away on the 14th of December in 1962.

My memories of this time was only of the stories that my father recalled when he lived in Grange village in Co. Sligo. He and my mother heading off for long walks in the evenings with me wrapped up in the pram.

My earliest memories of this pram was not in it, but running alongside like a bodyguard to keep up with the stride of my mother when we were heading down the hill from Glencar to go shopping, which always ended up with a visit to my grandfathers “Pop’s” home at the foot of the town.

The pram always sat in “Pop’s” hall where we played while my mother did her visiting.

On a wet day, you could see the sawdust still stuck to the sides of the white tyres carried from the floor of Doherty’s butchers.

I always thought I would be asked to go and look for Packie Gibbons finger, our butcher which I was waiting to see landing in the sawdust as he wrapped the meat at lightning pace in brown paper and then cut the cord by wrapping it around his finger and giving it a quick sharp pull.

Road trips

We could go from Phill Bonner’s to Roddy Molloy’s house in Wolfe Tone if you got a clean run down the hill and around the green.

One on of these such spins a run had to be quickly aborted when a car started to make its way out of the estate.

With the full brakes on that is town feet on the ground trying to slow things down wasn’t working, there was no option but to head for the hedge which I didn’t know had a concrete post in the middle of it.

One thing was for certain. A trolly made from wood even oak with the very best of Silver Cross wheels is no match to a concrete pillar made from Fanad Gravel, or neither was my chin which still has a scar to this day from my big off.

Our trolly started life as a Silver Cross Pram when my father was based in Manorhamilton Co. Leitrim, then preparing for the arrival of twins Eamon and Patrick McDaid.

Their life was short on this earth and the pram was there as a reminder of the void when they departed so young.

Two years after that in1964, a move to County Sligo and a different village, Grange, I arrived and made the pram my home and then in a different County, Donegal and, a different home, Letterkenny, my three younger brothers Nelius, Cathal and Peadar made our cross pram their home on their arrival.

When our trolley rolled off the production line in Wolfe Tone Place our old pram wheels passed through its journey of our family again.

My father watched on as we made out journey through our childhood on our own power.

Festival Races

We never progressed out of our estate for any of the big races but many of the older boys did to take part in the annual Soapbox Derby, which was one of the highlights of the Letterkenny International Folk Festivals.

As Morris Dances did battle by knocking sticks together, we watched the battles where the Silver Cross Pram wheels carried some wonderful trollies designs. Some even had concrete blocks tied to the front of them to help with the steering heading around Larkin’s corner at the foot of the Main Street.

Happy Motoring Folks.

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