Brendan Clifford retires after 51 years with Berney Bros
Today is rather special in Berney Bros Saddlery, when Brendan Clifford retires after 51 years as a leather craftsman with the business, writes Brian Byrne. It's also another milestone in his family's involvement with the 145-year-old saddlery.
Brendan recalls that there were already long-standing connections when he went straight into the workshop after leaving school in the early 1970s. "My mother's father and uncle worked here with the old boss, Thomas's grandfather," he told the Diary yesterday. "My brother Dec worked here, and my cousins Liam and Ger. People sometimes laughed and asked, Is it Berney Saddlers or Clifford Saddlers?"
In his half-century with the firm, Brendan has recollections of many of the biggest names in the Irish racing industry coming through the workshop to discuss their needs, especially those from the 1970s. "There was TP Burns, Con Collins, Francis Flood, Mick Connolly and Mick O'Toole. Paddy Mullins, too, and John Oxx and his father. They'd all be coming through to talk to Jim Berney out the back, where he had a workshop doing blankets and collars."
Brendan wouldn't have considered how long he might be with the Kilcullen shop when he started, but now he says the years have just flown by. "That happens when you're doing something you like, and with people you like. All the lads here have been brilliant, and I couldn't have worked for better bosses, Jim and Tom, and now the younger lads."
Brendan has been easing his way into retirement, working three days a week for a while. He hasn't given much thought to how he'll spend his new spare time, but he and his wife Bernie like walking, and they do a lot of that in the Killarney area.
Where, no doubt, if they encounter somebody on horseback, by force of habit, Brendan looks to see the quality of the saddle and whether it is one of the tens of thousands that have come out of the famous Kilcullen workshop, that he has had a hand in making.
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