TradeNames: When Gleesons opened in Booterstown, Co Dublin, you could get 16 pints of porter for an old £1. Now Frank Gleeson has created a business he can pass on to his 22 grandchildren. Rose Doyle reports.

Pubs in the capital's suburbs come, and change hands, and go on to be something else, character changed.

Not so with Gleesons of Booterstown Avenue. Gleesons has been Gleesons, identity intact in a frenziedly changing city for more than half a century, all the time growing, keeping pace and making its own, necessary, changes to business. Gleesons has to be one of the longest standing individually held licences in the city.

It all began with Frank Gleeson who, in l954, bought the grocery shop with licence which would become today's well-known and popular hostelry.

He tells the story of the last half century without adornment, wondering all the time why anyone would be interested, more used to getting on with life than talking about it.

"My father had a pub in Parnell Street which he sold in l920 to buy a farm in Newcastle, Co Dublin," he begins, with the real beginning, the reason owning a pub was in his blood.

"It wasn't a good economic time for farming, unfortunately, and with a family coming along my mother, out of desperation, started a shop in Celbridge two years before I was born.

"There were six of us, I was the youngest, born in 1926. She sold groceries and sweets and made a great success of the business. My brother Paddy ran it until three years ago."

Frank Gleeson went to Synge Street CBS after national school in Celbridge, travelling to the city by bus. "I used get off in Dame Street, get a tram in South Great George's Street which would take me up Camden Street and so to Synge Street. The tram ticket cost 1d." Schooldays over, he went on to serve his time in the pub trade.

"I'd a feeling, which I got from my father, that I'd like the business. I began in a pub in Donnybrook called Lloyds, later Kielys. There were no lounge bars at the time, no women in the pubs, except maybe for certain areas in the inner city. Those were different times. It was the 1940s, the floors were timber and scattered sawdust. Money was short too. I was apprenticed for four years and a junior for two years after that.

"There was a lot to the job at that time. The whiskey was in bonding and was 100 per cent proof and you had to reduce it to 24.8 strength of this. Then you had to bottle all the Guinness and bottle the beer too. The pint, at that time, was the mainstay of the pub business."

In that other world, a pint of plain porter was 11d, a pint of Guinness between 1/3d and 1/6d. You could enjoy 16 pints of the black stuff for the 240 pennies in the old £1. Whiskey (usually Paddy) cost 1/6d per measure - and the trams went through Donnybrook village.

Frank Gleeson worked in Donnybrook until 1954 when he bought "a small grocery shop with licence owned by a lovely lady called Mrs Murphy. Booterstown Avenue was the outer suburbs then, a village with land around. I'd a wonderful bank manager, a man named Ingoldsby in the Bank of Ireland, who used invite me to tea and who was completely and absolutely behind me. I bought this place for £6,250, a fortune at the time."

The packed auction was held in Jurys, then on Dame Street. Frank Gleeson attended with his friend and solicitor, Harry Woodcock who, putting space between himself and the Bank of Ireland's man, went £1,250 beyond their £5,000 limit. When Ingoldsby remonstrated, worrying that he might get the sack, Woodcock with foresight told him that he would thank him in a couple of years. And so it happened.

"I came in here on Wednesday, December 2nd, l954," Frank Gleeson remembers. "Myles Colgan, a lifelong friend, gave me a hand. We packed the grocery shelves with brandies and whiskeys, all bought on credit, and put lights shining on them and opened for business.

The first customer was a woman looking for a loaf of bread and a pint of paraffin oil. Myles said we weren't selling those things anymore and she asked us where did we think we were, Grafton Street?

In l955 Frank Gleeson married Nora and in l957 borrowed £4,500 and took a leap into the future by adding a lounge to his bar premises. It took courage; times were hard and a hooting mail boat was leaving Dún Laoghaire daily with an emigrating population. Frank Gleeson's decision "to work pretty hard at not taking that boat" paid off.

The lounge opened without fanfare with Frank and Nora, Frank's mother and publican friend Larry Murphy in attendance. "The first customers were a couple, a man and woman. Larry said to me 'you're all right, the man's taken off his hat'. He was right. The lounge took off from the start with people coming from Booterstown, Blackrock and Mount Merrion."

Frank Gleeson, in time, bought an adjoining couple of houses as well as an area for today's car park. He and Nora reared their three sons and five daughters in the 14 rooms over the business and all of them, today, live within a 20-minute radius of the business. Frank happily accounts for them all.

"Frank, my eldest, is a chartered accountant. The other two boys, Ciaran and John, are running the business - which is theirs now. My eldest daughter, Mary, manages the food end of things, Geraldine is a national school teacher, Eileen was personal adviser to President McAleese during her first seven years in office, Kate runs her own boutique, Diffusion in Clontarf, and Joan is in banking."

It was Nora Gleeson who decided, in l963, that Gleesons should serve hot food at lunchtime, the first pub in the south suburbs to do so. "At the time all you'd get would be a sandwich in Mooneys," says Frank and then, proudly: "Nora took full charge of it, the foundations of today's food business were solidly laid by Nora Gleeson. She still takes an interest. In time my daughter Mary took over the management of the food side of things."

Early menu favourites in Gleesons were roast beef, chicken and ham with fresh veg. The average main meal price was 7/6d and diners came from offices in Leeson Street and Blackrock, with great numbers of "advertising people coming out from Dublin for working lunches.

"Lounge bars changed the whole pub culture and food brought in even more people".

Five years ago The Willow night-time restaurant opened in Gleesons. The menu, with items such as fillets of hake with couscous and lemon butter, choices unthought of in l963. Gleesons employs two chefs, one for lunchtimes and one for evening meals.

Frank Gleeson says the cigarette smoking ban has "had a big effect on the trade" and thinks designated smoking areas would have "made a difference. People finish their meal now and leave to have a cigarette or cheroot at home later with a bottle of wine. That's a big swing away from the pubs. The swing is very much in favour of home drinking.

Also, the wine culture has grown vastly in Ireland. Food is a very important part of the business today and The Willow is very popular on Saturday nights."

He rubbishes the notion that there were ever "good old days. Standards of living now are higher, even the man doing the most menial of jobs has money in his pocket. It's a better country now. There was a lot of poverty in the early years."

He pays tribute to Gerry Ryan and Dave Kearney, Gleeson management staff members of 30 years' standing, "invaluable and very experienced" he says.

He grins when he says he and Nora have 22 grandchildren, says the Gleesons' place in Booterstown is assured for another generation.