THE TIMES WE LIVED IN:IT WAS a pearl among pharmacies. It had been on the go since 1897. But in the summer of 1975, JJ Graham's on Westmoreland Street closed its doors for the last time. "And now even Graham's is gone," reads the somewhat exasperated headline on an elegiac story by Elgy Gillespie.
Gillespie writes that the first sale in the pharmacy’s prescription book was for a pomade for a client on Fitzwilliam Square, cost one shilling (which is akin to Creme de la Mer skin-care prices nowadays). Almond hand cream was made out of whole unpeeled almonds. Graham’s also made its own toothpaste – from soap powder, camphor and precipitated chalk – while its famously foul-tasting hangover cure is revealed as “a compound of bromivalarium and Alka Seltzer”.
The photo shows the pharmacy’s dispensing staff in its final days of operation. Standing behind the counter are JJ Connaughton and Edward Ryan; in the front row, from left to right, are EM Flynn, the owner JJ Walsh, Anne Kehoe and Elizabeth Egan.
They smile obligingly for the photographer, though JJ Walsh, in particular, has a slightly distracted air; hardly surprising, as the building had been owned by two generations of Walsh’s before himself.
Edward Ryan had worked in the shop for 41 years. Arriving there at the age of 18 as an apprentice, he was excused the usual £50 training fee because he had already served one year in his father’s country chemist shop. He must surely have been impressed by the art nouveau interior of his new workplace, with its mahogany shelving and elaborate upper tier, all gilt, curlicues, cockle-shells and Corinthian pillars.
In her article Gillespie mourns the loss of the “long drawers for quills, and the long shelves of belljars . . . Oh, those bottles, those endless rows inscribed from LIG: ARS all the way to PHD IODI – where will they go now?” she asks. Not into the glossy new EBS building which replaced the pharmacy, that’s for sure. The EBS, of course, has now moved out. Such is the prescription for life in a city centre.
Arminta Wallace
Published on June 10th, 1975 Photograph by Tommy Collins irishtimes.com/archive
