Summer nights in the Palais of dreams
Fr Jason Murphy brings us another gem with a walk down memory lane in his latest column Let the Busy World be Hushed...
She sits with her husband John, bathing in the sunshine, on a bench outside of her home, o’er looking the fields below, on the hill that is called Dernaglush. As friendly and warm as ever you’ll meet, this lady with the big brown eyes and smiling face was the one who first greeted revellers that entered into the Palais Ballroom, from behind the hatch, in the summers of long ago.
Now as she and her husband John, a man born and bred in Liverpool, enjoy the summer sunshine in the twilight of their years, she can return in the blink of an eye to those balmy summer nights near 60 years ago as the band tuned up and the doors of Palais dancehall flung open on Belturbet’s Holborn Hill.
It had long stood, since the 1940s, as the Erne Cinema but, in 1963, two returned emigrants, Tom and Charlie Corrigan transformed a space where folk were conveyed from the drudge of the working week to a Palais of Dreams.
The brothers removed the rows of cinema seats and inserted ceiling chandeliers and spinning glitter balls to reflect the shimmering light and the piece de resistance, a Canadian maple floor that was the envy of every parish hall, fitted at a phenomenal cost of £10,000. It opened on an October night sixty years ago to the sounds of the Mighty Avons, a group of young men from Redhills and Ballyhaise who had been transported from the toil of rural life by a tornado of stardom to lives of notoriety in every dancehall the country o’er.
The buses carrying the excited faces from all over Cavan and Fermanagh parked up on the Fair Green as the lines of excited young wans click clacked down the street to be first to get powdering their noses. Earlier they prayed as they dipped their fingers into the holy water font on leaving the house that this might be the night they would meet their Robert Redford. The young fellas diverted down the town into the Yukon Bar, The Boxers and Widow McCartin’s to ply themselves full of dutch courage in the hope that they too might convince someone, as they crossed the floor, they were as good if not better to any lad on the Big Screen.
Tom, one of the Corrigan brothers, opened a chip shop in McGovern’s shop and petrol station opposite to feed the hungry crowds at the end of the night as Val Reilly peeled the endless buckets of potatoes in a room within. Tom had taken the boat to England to work in Smith’s Clock factory in Cricklewood in north London but, at night, without pay, worked in an Italian chippie to learn the art of making fish and chips as he watched the Irish emigrants pile in to buy chips after a night of dancing in the Galteemore, hoping that one day, he might imitate a similar model at home in Belturbet.
The smiling face of Eileen Corrigan, his cousin, greeting all the excited young wans beneath their coiffed beehives, and took their five shillings through the hatch and wished them the best of luck as they entered in; while Rose Brady took their coats in exchange for a shilling at the cloak room.
The young ladies in an array of shift dresses aclad stood nervously over to the left of the hall beside the mineral bar as Eileen’s brother Eoin from behind the counter, sold only the likes of club oranges and red lemonades, God be good to the days! As they watched Frank Rice bring the remainder of the band’s equipment from the van to the stage, the butterflies in their stomachs started to stir, as the questions they had asked all week raced through their minds; would the lad with the Beatles’ fringe be here tonight? Would yon lad with the big feet and the big farm of land that my mother told me to make a beeline for, ask me out? Will I be left standing as a wall flower at the end of the night as the stick of red lipstick, in desperation, appeared from the handbag again?
As the guitars were tuned up and the cymbals got a lash, the young lads started to stream down the steps under the watchful eye of Charlie Corrigan - all of six feet four. They took their positions along the wall and, for any lad who was shy or who didn’t take a drink, it was an odious distance across the floor, wondering will she say ‘yes’ or will it be another night with yer wan from Ballinamore who’s thinking about joining the nuns.
From the far side of the hall it appeared that the women had it handy, just standing there looking pretty, albeit for ‘Ladies’ choice’. But when Mickey Mackey spread the talcum and the band started up there was no time for thinking as there ensued a stampede and, as in a scrum, the men charged across the floor, certain lads easily taking their pick as others were left with wans too snooty to even take their hand, waiting for an auld lad in his thirties with acres of broad meadows, late in from the baling, to finally come along. The only comeback for the rejected was to hit her with the refrain ‘at home you should be… practising your knitting!’
Big Tom and Mainliners, Joe Dolan and the Drifters, Dickie Rock and Brendan Boyer all played the Palais Ballroom and Eileen, through the hatch, met with them all. There were Gene and Gents, Clipper Carlton and their very own Ian Corrigan and the Casino.
On the night of the Factory Dance, the last Friday in July, the excitement in mirrors across the town was fever pitch as the Irish Shoes Supplies closed for their fortnight’s summer holiday and staff in their hundreds piled in through the doors to dance the night long to the sounds of the Melody Aces. It was one of the most looked forward to nights of the year as both managers and factory workers from shoe puffs, uppers, soles and heels all danced shoulder to shoulder.
It was the place where countless couples met, beneath its simmering chandeliers and, some now fifty years and more a-wed, they try to recapture those nights, on dancefloors round and about. In those days before there was ever tell of Tinder and other anonymous dating Apps it was there you had to take the hand of the one you fancied and bring her across the boards and there in ritual of dancing a love was ignited and a life began, to be lived in the ordinariness of everyday, forever and a year.
So now as she sits and reminisces, the last of the staff of that halcyon place, she recalls a time much simpler when couples danced and met twixt the haze of talcum powder those sixty years ago in that Palace of beginnings, where whole lives were intertwined, in the infamous Palais Ballroom those summer nights of long ago.
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