“We used to walk a total of 14 miles to the dancehall and back, in a group of girls.”
“I met a girl at a dance in Limerick, and she missed the bus home so I had to walk her home to Shanagolden and then walk back home to Foynes. I arrived home at 9am in the morning and my mother was hanging washing out on the line.”
“You’d go on your bike in your dress, and come home on your bike.”
Town Hall Studio in Galway is hosting an event held by Luail, Ireland’s National Dance Company. It has eight full-time dancers, and to mark its recent show Dancehall it has been holding a number of ancillary “dancehall memory-gathering” events around the country. On this night, some 40 members of the public have come from around the west and northwest to share their memories.
RM Block
Edwina Guckian, Luail’s dance deputy, is leading the conversations. She begins with a spirited Irish dance routine of her own, which has feet tapping. “How would the evening at the dancehall begin?” she asks. “How much was it to get in?”
[ Dancehall review: Luail’s dancers let loose as the music pulses through themOpens in new window ]
“Two and six, depending on the band,” one woman says.
“Sixty pence,” says Geraldine Burns, from Limerick, of her local dancehall. “My parents both worked there on the opening night. There was a mineral bar, and afterwards my mother got the job of making the sandwiches. Bovril would be sold too on the night. Can you just imagine the smell of it? There would be ham and cheese sandwiches, and probably about 20 sliced pans would be used. There wouldn’t be much butter on the bread, because my mother used to say [the men’s] throttles will be well-oiled before they arrive, so no point in wasting the butter.”
Burns has memories her mother passed on to her. “There was a mineral bar, and the man would be asking the woman what she would like to drink. She’d usually order a packet of 20 Major cigarettes instead of a mineral. Limerick women were notorious for that.”
Geraldine Burns indicates to the man sitting beside her, and says, “We met at that dancehall, myself and William. He asked me to dance, and we’re married 42 years now.” There is a round of applause from the group, while William Burns makes a show of pulling his jacket over his head, while laughing.
Once you paid the entrance fee, you left your coat at the cloakroom, in exchange for a cloakroom ticket, the vendor keeping its twin ticket.
“You’d put your ticket in your shoe to keep it safe,” one woman says from the audience, and there is a murmur of recognition. “Then you’d go looking for it at the end of the evening, to get your coat back, and it’d be in bits from the dancing and the sweating.”
By the 1980s some dance venues were required to serve food in order to qualify for a licence to remain open longer into the night. The food was usually included in the price of the ticket. Sandwiches were off the menu by then, and chicken curry was on, and chicken in other variations.
“I remember eating a lot of chicken in a basket,” says one woman. “I wouldn’t eat it now.”
Frank Murray from Carrigallen, Co Leitrim, has a story from 1958, when a new dancehall opened there. Before opening it was blessed by Bishop Quinn of Kilgore. “Up to 700 were present,” Murray says. “Bishop Quinn remarked in his speech that the hall measured 75ft by 25ft and cost over £5,000 to build.”
The band playing for the opening night was Norman Metcalfe and his orchestra, with an entrance fee of five shillings. A curate was on site all night to “supervise the dancing” – a phrase that would not be out of place in a William Trevor story.
As for the much-repeated observation that women were usually on one side of the dancehall and men on the other, Murray explains why that tradition arose.
“The sides chosen were determined by the toilets, always ladies in rows across the doors for the ladies’ toilets.” There was not much nicety, according to Murray, in the way ladies in this dancehall were approached for a dance. A man would just catch a woman by the hand, “and if he missed, he caught her somewhere else”.
The 1960s to the 1980s was the era of dancehalls and showbands. The audience chants out names of the bands they recall. The Mighty Avons. Dickie Rock. Joe Dolan. Brendan Boyer. Larry Cunningham. Eileen Reid. Philomena Begley. One former showband member was in the audience. “We were a band called The Millionaires,” Jimmy Higgins says, who played the trumpet. There were six others in his band, and they regularly played to 600 people at a time as they toured around the country.
Dances started relatively late in those days. “They wouldn’t start until about 9.30pm, 10pm,” says Veronica McKeon. “They’d finish about 2am. Unless it was ladies’ choice, which was one set of the night, a woman never asked a man to dance. After you danced with someone, you’d go back to where the other women were. For ladies’ choice, all the men came over to the ladies’ side, and you’d ask someone you’d have spotted already.”
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What did women wear to the dances? “Skirts and dresses,” is the chorus. “Women usually made their own.”
“My sister sent a dress from America, and shoes,” says Attracta O’Connor from Salthill. “It had a narrow waist and sequins.”
“We made our own dresses for the dances in Dublin,” says Bridie Mulligan. “We bought the material in Hickeys and we would wait for new material to come in. Long dresses were in at the time – it was the ’70s – so we would get the sewing machine out. In those times, girls used suspenders to hold up their stockings.”
Mulligan recalls going to dances in temporary marquees, where wooden floors would be put down. “But there was no such things as toilets in a marquee. The boys could go off outside. Girls weren’t so lucky.”
One woman recalls practising her jiving skills on the evenings before dances. “If someone walked up to you and asked you to jive and you couldn’t, they might move on to someone else,” she says.
Guckian asks if people had dance cards, to laughter from the audience. No, is the emphatic response. The world of rural Irish dancehalls was far from the world of aristocratic balls at British mansions in a long-gone era.
At the end of the evening, Luail’s public engagement manager, Niamh Mongey, invites everyone to gather for refreshments, as they would have in the dancehall days. People continue to chatter as cakes are sliced up, and teas and coffees poured from flasks. Times have changed: there is no sign of any Bovril.
