Harry Cleeve:HARRY CLEEVE, who has died just a week after his 103rd birthday, was from Limerick where the Cleeves had founded the huge condensed milk factory and also manufactured a toffee sweet that bore the family name.
His grandfather, Thomas Cleeve, had come from Canada to work for an uncle who supplied agricultural machinery, a business he inherited and expanded with the help of his brothers, one of whom was the grandfather of the writer Brian Cleeve. At an agricultural show in Clonmel, Thomas Cleeve saw a Danish firm demonstrating a machine for separating cream from milk and realising its potential, he and two partners acquired a separator and set up a factory to produced condensed milk.
By the end of the 19th century, the company employed 2,000 people in the Lansdowne factory and had 3,000 farmers supplying the milk. In another factory in Limerick, they made their Cleeve’s toffees.
In 1919, the short-lived Limerick Soviet brought the workers out on strike though business was swiftly resumed. (The soviet, or self-governing committee inspired by events in Russia, lasted from April 15th to 27th, and was the only occasion that organised labour challenged Sinn Féin and the IRA for the leadership of the increasingly powerful nationalist movement.)
Though short-lived, the Limerick Soviet was the beginning of the end for the company as considerable damage was caused to its premises by both the IRA and the Black and Tans. The workers were on strike for more wages and the price of milk had fallen dramatically. By 1923, the directors decided that they could not continue and the company went into liquidation.
Aged nine, Harry Cleeve, Sir Thomas’s grandson, was sent to a preparatory school in England and continued his education at Harrow School, for which a relation paid as by this time the firm had been taken over and money was short.
After school, he went into an accountant’s office in London, which he hated and came back to Ireland after a year to tell his horrified family that he was going to join the Sudanese Army. They persuaded him against this so he tried his hand at selling fire escapes.
He sold one to the Protestant bishop of Killaloe, who insisted on a demonstration and then had himself – he was a portly man – lowered by the rope pulleys from a second-floor window of the palace.
Eventually a cold store in Clonmel near the old bridge was acquired and given to Harry who bought butter in the spring and summer stored it and sold it at a profit in the autumn and winter. The ice for the store was made with a compressor run by the waterpower from two waterwheels on the river Suir.
In 1933, he married Olive Penniman, who came from Penniman’s Point on Long Island, New York. They met when she came to Ireland to hunt.
After the outbreak of the second World War, he volunteered and was commissioned into the Royal Irish Fusiliers. He was stationed in Hertfordshire, England, for most of the war and had various staff appointments including at MI5 (Britain’s internal security service), when he went to Bari from where he was to be parachuted into Austria behind enemy lines. This never happened, however, and instead he was transferred to Versailles.
After the war, he was sent to Tromsø, north of the Arctic Circle in Norway, where the allies were sending back the Russian prisoners of war who had been captured by Germany and who were on the point of starvation. They also had to demobilise and repatriate the German army. There were very few allied soldiers so that 1 per cent of the Germans had to be armed so that they could protect themselves from angry Norwegians. However, the British were able to have the butter and champagne that they commandeered from the German officers’ stores.
After being released from army service, he returned to Clonmel. The cold storage unit was no longer paying; butter was rationed and the unit was too small to be viable as a public cold store so it was sold to Clonmel Foods.
He and his wife moved to Kilkenny in 1978 where they lived in the Old Rectory in Gowran. His wife died in 1993 and he continued to live on by himself. After having held a license for 80 years, he had to stop driving because his eyesight was affected by macular degeneration.
His most remarkable attribute was his memory which remained perfect until the day he died. He would remember staying at Parknasilla as a small boy when another guest was George Bernard Shaw who worked in a tent by the shore and on a blowy day, Harry pulled out the pegs so the tent collapsed on the great writer.
He could recall the people he met, the details of their lives and who was related to whom. His standards were high: his silver and glass shone and his sheets were ironed – this he did for some years himself – and he was always punctual and expected the same from others. If bidden to lunch, there was a queue of cars outside his gate waiting for the exact moment the guests had been told to arrive.
He is survived by his son John and his daughters Mariquita and Thalia.
Henry John Cleeve: born March 24th, 1908; died April 2nd, 2011