Looking Back: The Saddler

For our times past perusal this morning, above is a photo I took in the very early 1980s of Tom Berney putting the finishing touches to a saddle, writes Brian Byrne. The picture was for a series of articles I wrote in the Sunday Journal  newspaper, under the general title of Down Your Way.

I would visit a town for a day and come away with at least a page of stories, and probably a colour centre spread feature as well. Obviously, I couldn't leave my own home town out of the series ...

The one below I took around the same time, when David and Sally Shaw-Smith were filming in Berneys Saddlers for one of their memorable and much-accoladed crafts documentaries under the title of Hands.

In all they made 37 of those documentaries for RTÉ during the 1970s and 1980s and captured traditional rural and urban life in Ireland.

The series featured more than 40 different traditional Irish crafts, from the weaving of crios woollen belts, the creation of harps and drystone walls, to the making of pampootie shoes.

The Berneys one was simply titled The Saddler. It can be bought today as a CD from the Hands educational and archival website here.

Sally Shaw-Smith was the sound engineer and editor. She also provided all the illustrations for Traditional Crafts of Ireland, the book that accompanies the Hands series.

David Shaw-Smith joined the recently formed RTÉ Irish state broadcasting organisation in the early 1960s. He went on to work for the renowned wildlife filmmaker Gerrit Van Gelderen before becoming an independent filmmaker in the early 1970s.

Their life’s work is now housed in the RTÉ film archives in Dublin.

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