An enduring icon a century old
The grey horse in the window of Berney Brothers Saddlery was first installed a century ago, and has since become one of the enduring images for all who passed regularly through the village grown bigger.
The actual business is some 134 years old, founded in 1880 by Peter Berney and has been developed over five generations of the family to being one of the best known saddle and equestrian tack makers in these islands, with a global reach of customers who value the quality, innovation, and technical excellence of the products.
Happy birthday to the horse, and congratulations to all who have worked with the Berney family over those generations of equestrian excellence.
ADDENDUM: As a consequence of postingn the above, Charlie Talbot sent me this article which he wrote for The Bridge in 1997. It puts the whole Berneys enterprise into much greater perspective, and I thank him for the contribution.
Celebrating Craftsmanship
The third of a series of articles by Charlie Talbot about local shops with bigger-than-local success looks at Berneys, Saddlers.
When you look around Berneys for a while and speak to the staff, you become more and more aware that tradition is everything in this business. It’s not just in the appearance of the shop and workshops - it’s in the age and very pace of the place. An atmosphere of calm settles about the visitor, and you slip, almost unaware, into another world and time. The calm can be deceptive: Berneys is a business which holds its own in a keenly competitive international market, where the customers are discerning and professionalism is essential to survival. Success in that kind of environment goes only to those who are alert, efficient and productive.
This village shop with a global market is the descendant of a saddlery business set up in 1824 by Jim and Tom Berney’s great-grandfather, Peter. A harness maker, he came to Kilcullen from County Wicklow, and established his own business in Orfords’ premises on Main Street, where Celia O’Hora now keeps a clothing store. Setting up shop in horse country was obviously the right decision, but no business flourishes just because it’s near a market. There are at least two other requirements for success - good service and hard work. Peter Berney, and in time his son Thomas, worked hard at giving good service, and the evidence of it is still to be seen in the company’s customer records for the early years of the last century. A huge ledger gives details of orders filled for saddles, bridles, rollers, and just about every gadget that makes up harness, to horse owners and trainers in Ireland and England. The ledger is a very interesting journey into local history, as well-known names head up many of the pages; and a hundred years ago, people who could afford to buy almost anywhere they liked chose Berneys. More remarkable is the fact that some customers, even then, were making that choice from England, where they had the pick of the world’s saddlery establishments to choose from. A look back over the company’s Irish market shows several names that made international racing history, - Hubert Hartigan, J.J. Parkinson, Philly Behan and P.J. Prendergast Snr., to name but a few.
Berneys moved to their present home on Hillside about 1910, and it was around that time that they acquired the town’s best-known trade landmark - the white horse which has been in their shop window for ninety years. The horse came from Boxs’ Saddlers in Dublin, via Harristown Railway Station, and was brought to Kilcullen by Frank Kelly, father of Kitty Kelly of Mile Mill. (Frank made the journey to and from Harristown with a horse-drawn bogey, which had creels fitted for the occasion. Having made his contribution to local history, he went, on some years afterwards, to make another - this time on a much larger stage. He fought in the Battle of the Somme, and was killed in its closing stages on 23rd October 1916.)
The business has continued to grow over the years, and today Berneys export their saddles and harnesses to Britain, Germany, America, Canada, Switzerland, Japan, China, France, Denmark, Holland, Australia, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia and Dubai. While exports account for only 25% of the business, they speak volumes about the craftsmanship in this company where high standards are the norm. Britain still enjoys world-leader position in the competitive market for quality saddles, and yet Berneys’ level of trade there is undiminished. In Saudi Arabia and Dubai, where the horse is truly king, Berneys saddles are chosen by customers who are as discerning as you will find anywhere. Sales are almost exclusively repeat orders for existing customers or new orders based on recommendations from them. In other words, people have who have had experience of Berneys’ craftsmanship and excellence keep coming back for more, and they tell their friends about it too.
Back from the market place to the calm order of the workshops at Hillside. Here, the eleven staff, with 259 years of experience between them, work as a team to produce quality products and to ensure that the customer gets the best every time. This experience is backed up by the firm’s tradition of quality going back to Peter Berney’s time in the 1820s and the skills which he and his son and grandson handed on to Jim and Tom and the other nine people who work with them. The workshops currently produce 1,500 saddles and sets of harness a year. It may not seem like a high volume business, but it’s work that has to be done carefully, and Berneys still do most of their saddle making (90%) by hand. However, they’re not afraid to put machinery to use where it works well, and most of the harness-making is now done by machine; although the human input still matters, and quality is the ultimate determinant of how a job is processed.
Making saddles calls for a keen eye, a strong steady hand, good judgement, attention to detail and a surprising level of self-discipline. As with many crafts, the master is really master when he works with, not against, his material. Patience and understanding bring out the best in man, implement and leather. The work sets its own pace, and the finished product reflects the craftsman’s refusal to give it less than it needs. And yet there is no idleness: this is and has to be an efficient business. So, work must go on as quickly as possible, but quality demands that it not be rushed or skimped or taken by cheap short-cuts.
The craftsmen in Berneys spend five years learning their trade. Even after qualification the full development of knowledge and skill is the achievement of a lifetime. Jim and his brother Tom are joint proprietors and have 102 years of experience between them. The other staff include Jim Kelly, Ger and Benny Clifford, Noel O’Connell, Marie Thomas Vincent and Mary Berney and Shane Mulryan: - their combined skills and talents are an essential part of the business that has made Kilcullen the home of saddlery in Ireland.
Berney’s started out as a horse-based business, and it’s still very much in that mode today; but now you can buy some very functional and attractive clothing there. The firm started a logical diversification into outdoor wear about twenty years ago. The horse is still supreme however, and you can buy leather polish, hunting and dressage clothing, boots, polo sticks and just about every kind of horse-related item in the shop. Even so about 80% of what Berney’s sell is made up in their own workshop. The economics of this end of the business are very interesting. Saddlery leather is not produced in Ireland, so it has to be imported from England. Bits, rings, buckles, saddle trees and all the metal parts of harness also have to be bought in from England. All these materials are transformed into world-class saddlery and exported back to England and to other countries where they hold their own in the market place. There is a balancing act to be performed - the importing aspect being at a disadvantage because of the currency exchange rates. However, the relative strengths of English and Irish currencies make the sales aspect worthwhile - at least in England.
The people in Berneys need to know more than just their saddles and harness. They have to understand horses - their different sizes, temperaments and work. They can make a three-pound race saddle, a seven-pound training saddle, a twelve-pound dressage saddle, a bridle for a horse that turns to the right or the left, breaking rollers or any of thirty-four different types of ankle boots, all depending on what you want. When you see a horse out training on the Curragh, the chances are that it’s under a saddle from Berneys. Some racing saddles weigh only a pound or a pound-and-a-half, and these are usually made elsewhere of synthetic materials designed for lightness. Berneys make only leather saddles, which have durability, quality and comfort built into them. Their world-wide reputation is proof that they do it with skill, precision, consistency and a style that is all their own. This is indeed a business of which Kilcullen can be justly proud.
In writing this short series of articles, I was struck by the people who work in the three local businesses, (Nolans, Peacockes and Berneys), which have become successful enterprises that capture markets far beyond the local community and find customers at international level. Their skill is well-known to us all: indeed sometimes we may be so close to it and so used to it that we can overlook the scale of their achievement. And yet no matter which of them you meet or talk to, they are very much part of their local community, with no overblown notions about who they are or how big an impression their work makes in the outside world. We are fortunate to have them in our community, and we can all learn a lot from their unassuming manner. We are doubly fortunate, because their expert knowledge and masterful preservation of their long-established trades, with their centuries of tradition, is a living manifestation of our heritage. And you can experience it all in a small Irish town. All you have to do is look around, and you can see it every day — CT.
