Jim Berney — memories of 'The Brad'

Jim working the vintage Pearson stitching machine.

The recent passing of Jim Berney was yet another of those end-of-era moments in the long history of the community of Kilcullen, writes Brian Byrne. A much loved member of the Berney family which still runs the internationally famous Berney Bros saddlery set up by Jim's great-grandfather Peter in 1880, his own life represents a timeline of the development of modern Kilcullen through crucial decades.

As a young man just out of school Jim left Ireland in the mid-1950s, and for a time he was part of a crew building a bridge in the Yukon Territory. From there he wrote to his friend Donal St Leger, then another Kilcullen emigrant in New York, that "they pay you $50 an hour if you go high enough." Donal wrote back that the doorstep outside his house was high enough for him. 

While in Calgary in Alberta, Jim first came across an industrial stitching machine called the Pearson No 6, which can sew leather up to half an inch thick. The machines were made in the very early 1900s, and when Jim came back in 1959 to work in the family business, he bought a secondhand one. Over succeeding years he bought nine of them in all. Still operating one of the rare machines a decade ago (top picture), he noted that four of them were in daily use, with the others still available for spare parts.

With Pat Lynch at the demolishing of Brennan's loft.

Jim was always interested in boxing, and as a youngster he and the late Pat Lynch were among a group of local lads, including Ger Coleman and Myles Fenelon, who trained in Frank Snell's back yard. The club grew and developed in various premises, including Dan Brennan's loft on Hillside, demolished in 2006. Other bases were a house back down on the other side of the hill, subsequently Alice Coleman's boarding house, and from the late 1940s through to the 1960s in the loft behind what is today The Hideout. 

Trainers whom Jim remembered included a Corporal Guilfoyle from the Curragh military camp, when his fellow boxers were among others Fr Ned Connors, Jack Brennan, Paddy Aspell, Dick Jeffers and Paddy Bathe. When the club moved to Byrne's loft, Captain Cyril Russell was the trainer. Jim was also one of the trustees of the JFK Hall built by the boxing club in the 1960s, along with the late Paddy Aspell and the recently deceased Pat Lynch. The club moved into a brand-new space at Kilcullen Community Centre in 2011 — in 1979, Jim Berney had been among the trustees of the Ball Alley, with Thomas Berney Snr, Pat Lynch, Andrew Maloney, and Tommy Wallace, who donated £10,000 from the sale of the former alley site towards the cost of the Centre.

As Dan Donnelly at the re-enactment of the Donnelly-Cooper fight.

For the two An Tostal re-enactments of the 1815 Donnelly and Cooper fight held at Donnelly's Hollow in the early 1950s, run to raise funds for the Boxing Club, Jim played the part of Dan Donnelly. In 2009, he was one of those interviewed in a TG4 documentary about Donnelly, recalling his involvement in the pageants.

Jim and his brother Bernard, on the TG4 programme.

In the 1981 'Hands' programme.

In 1981, Jim and his brother Tom and their father Tom featured in the Hands series of TV programmes made by David Shaw-Smith about craft businesses in Ireland. In 2006 the Berney Bros story was explored in an RTE TV Nationwide programme devoted to the Irish bloodstock industry. 

In 2010, as part of a wider contribution to Heritage Week in the Town Hall, Jim told the story from the harness-making beginnings that turned into saddle making, with the family name becoming the most respected in their craft in this country today.

A revisit of the original Hands programme was made in 2013 as part of a series In Good Hands, this time with Tom and Jim and their sons Thomas and Jamie. By that time, the business had produced more than 40,000 hand-made saddles, many of them for customers in Britain, Germany, America, Canada, Switzerland, Japan, China, France, Denmark, Holland, Australia, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia and Dubai.

Eamon Heavey, Louise Conway, Tom Berney, Jim Berney, Paschal Behan, and Thomas Berney, after being presented with Arts Council awards in 2012.

Though spending most of his working life at a very worn bench in the saddlery, Jim was also very much out front when it came to meeting customers, building a very strong and personal relationship with people in Ireland's horse industry. At the annual RDS Dublin Horse Show, where the business had exhibited since 1951, he had never missed a year at the event when the Diary caught up with him there in 2006. At the age of 74 he was selling as energetically as any of the younger members of staff, always skilfully converting even the simplest enquiry into a deal.

Jim was known to sing a song with little persuasion, and his favourite party piece was My Mammy, one of entertainer Al Jolson's best known songs. During the 1970s he performed When I'm Sixty-Four in a Kilcullen Capers sketch with Vivian Clarke, Anthony Meaney and Kevin Keogh, and he was also among a group who helped entertain at visits to St Vincent's Hospital in Athy organised by the late Josie Connolly. He was a singer and supporter too at the pre-Christmas Miscellany on Sunday fundraisers organised at the Bermingham home in Mooretown (below).

A man of deep faith, Jim was always quietly involved in parish matters, and was instrumental in having the inaugural €5,000 prize for the Parish Lotto Draw in 2012 sponsored by Berney Bros. The Lotto has since become a mainstay contributor to parish funds.

Jim with Liam McDonnell at the launch of the Parish Lotto in 2012.

End of an era, yes. End of important memories of Kilcullen before it became a village grown bigger? Definitely no. They live on in the recollections of those who knew him and the family that loved him.

Rest in peace.

Early days: Tom Berney Jr, Bernard Berney, and Jim Berney with the oil can, and Jimmy Hogan who worked as a gardener at Sunnyside, the Berney home.

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