Sixty-five years on the last

Ask anybody in Kilcullen who Hugh Peacocke is, and the basic answer is 'The Shoemaker'. But the man who has just completed 65 years of mending and making shoes is an awful lot more.

He's been a champion boxer. Billiards player. Accomplished golfer. Award winning Bridge player.

Bionic man, even?

Yep, that last too. There aren't many people who can claim to having had five hips replaced, and two shoulder joints.

And at 79 Hugh can still be seen every day walking a regular circuit around Kilcullen. Also, he doesn't miss when he aims a hammer at a nail picked into a shoe's leather sole.

This year the Peacocke sign on Kilcullen's Main Street represents 50 years of Hugh's shoe repair business. Between himself and his son Ger they have 98 years of making and repairing shoes.

The shoe business is a major essay in itself, from the time Hugh's widowed mother got him and his twin brother Will jobs in the local National Slipper Company in Naas at the age of 14.

"Our father died when we were ten, and though I'd already got a scholarship to go on further in my education, times were tough and we both had to go to work," Hugh recalls. "The company then moved to Dun Laoghaire because they couldn't get enough workers in Naas."

Hugh and a number of other Naas employees moved with the business, and he became a foreman in the company at the age of 18.

While in Dun Laoghaire he became interested in boxing, and joined the Corinthians Boxing Club. The card with his club membership contributions is a valued item in his scrapbook of the boxing days.

It was boxing that brought him to live in Kilcullen. In tandem with his courtship of his wife Sheila, whom he met when he moved back from Dublin to work with the famous Tuttys shoemakers in his native Naas.

"Sheila was working in the office in Tuttys, and lived in Kennycourt on the Dunlavin Road out of Kilcullen. When we got married we went to live in Ballymore first, and I got involved in training at the local Boxing Club. But I was asked to come to Kilcullen to spar with Colm McCoy, then probably the best boxer in Ireland and who went on to box in the Olympics."

The deal brought the Peacocke family to live on Hillside in Kilcullen, from which home Hugh began his own business in shoe repairs on a part-time basis. Some time later, while paying billiards with Kilcullen acquaintances, the possibility of his setting up a proper shoe repair shop was mooted.

The current Peacockes business premises was bought for £75, beaten down from an initial £80. Hugh wasn't going into a sure-fire proposition though, as there were already three well-established shoe repair operations in the town.

"But I put them all out of business," he recalls. "I gave my customers a one-day service, which wasn't usual. It meant that I worked all hours, but people got their repaired shoes back the following day."

Hugh was kept very busy in shoe repairs, but he had been trained in Tuttys as a maker of shoes and he wanted to do more of that. "I brought in somebody I had worked with in Tuttys, and gave him the repair work. That left me able to do more making."

His shoe and boot making expertise quickly became famous not just in Kilcullen, but across the country. His customers included the late Charles Haughey, then Taoiseach; and a bunch of aristocrats who included the Lords Waterford, Hemphill, and Killanin. There were also many locals who appreciated Hugh's real leather work of those day.

Like most people who work for themselves, Hugh Peacocke didn't take the luxury of retiring at 65. Not that he might have wanted to anyway ... which is maybe why he has reached the age he has, and is still able to hammer a nail unerringly to where it should be in the leather sole of a premium quality shoe.

Brian Byrne.