THE WEE STORES in Pembroke Lane, Dublin, were once an integral part of life in this part of Dublin 4, and are still remembered with great affection.
The shop was typical of countless small grocery shops up and down the country that survived until supermarkets began to develop. The name of the shop was a tribute to its status as probably the smallest shop in Dublin and it may also have been derived from the background of the Harrisons, Mary Catherine and John, who ran the shop for many years. Mary Catherine was Co Monaghan born and reared, while her husband had gone to school in Castlewellan, Co Down.
Originally, the Wee Stores had been a coachhouse, built about 1850 at the back of a house on Pembroke Road, but the era of horse-drawn travel eventually faded. The first car mechanics and chauffeurs had started living in these lanes about 1910. This particular building was converted into a shop around 1920. During the 1930s, it was run by a Miss Hanley, then in 1941, the Harrisons took over.
John Harrison had already plenty of experience in running shops in North King Street and on the quays near the Four Courts; eventually, he concentrated entirely on the Wee Stores. It stocked everything in the line of groceries; biscuits were then sold from tins and one whole wall was devoted to tins of biscuits, from which customers bought bags of biscuits by the quarter or the half pound. Fresh tomatoes came from the greenhouse of a man who lived nearby in Waterloo Road, while a dairy further down Pembroke Lane supplied fresh butter and cream. Ice cream was another popular line in the Wee Stores, as were sweets, minerals, potatoes, coal and briquettes. Sugar came in hundredweight sacks from which 1lb bags had to be filled.
One of the Harrisons’ children, Anthony, remembers that his father used to drive a van which he used to collect goods from wholesalers all over the city. Some items like bread were delivered. In the early days of the Wee Stores, horse-drawn vans from the bakeries, like Johnston, Mooney O’Brien, then in Ballsbridge, and the old Kennedys in Parnell Street, used to delivery bread daily. One customer of the shop, who lived round the corner in Wellington Road, used to come armed with a metal bucket and a shovel every morning to scoop up the natural fertiliser for his garden.
Later, in what was an early incarnation of the green movement, the bakeries switched to using battery-driven vans for their deliveries.
The Emergency period of the second World War was a fruitful time for the shop and Anthony Harrison remembers on one occasion his father getting delivery of a big box of cigarettes from the US, which despite requiring coupons, were all gone within a week. Pipe-cleaners sold well, much in demand by women for when they were doing their hair. Other times of the year created other demands, like the big red candlesticks the shop used to sell coming up to Christmas.
The shop was open all hours, from seven in the morning until eleven or later at night, seven days a week, even opening for a few hours on Christmas morning. St Stephen’ s Day was a rare occasion; the shop usually stayed closed. Sunday mornings were very busy, with queues forming down the lane after Masses at the nearby St Mary’ s in Haddington Road.
Pembroke and the other lanes in the area were much more rural and they were filled with birdsong then, before the lanes were so extensively developed. Pembroke Lane once had a piggery, as did Heytesbury Lane, but both are long gone, as are the orchards that once blossomed in the lanes.
In the 1940s and 1950s, this part of Dublin had a vibrant artistic community and many artists and writers were regulars in the shop, the likes of Brendan Behan and Paddy Kavanagh, although the two arch enemies didn’t come in at the same time. Sometimes, when Kavanagh was going through a hard phase, John Harrison would give food as a present to the poet. Those were the days when a shop like the Wee Stores would happily sell a customer a single cigarette, because money was so scarce.
Many visual artists were also regular patrons, the likes of the late Cecil King and the late Richard Kingston, as well as Pauline Bewick and Michael Kane – both happily still with us. Musicians, too, often came in, like Barney McKenna of The Dubliners. The Wee Stores was almost as much of an artistic mecca as Parson’s Bookshop, just up the road on Baggot Street Bridge.
The much-loved George Otto Simms, later a Church of Ireland Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland, used to come to the shop when he was curate at St Bartholomew’s in Clyde Road. The Wee Stores even got the odd aristo, like a Lady Nelson whom Anthony Harrison recalls dropping in.
Anthony remembers that the people who ran the grocery shops in Upper Baggot Street all got on together, in Findlaters, the Monument Creameries, Leverett and Frye and Liptons. When supermarkets started to arrive in the 1960s, the patterns and pace of shopping began to change, drastically. Another impediment for small shops was the introduction of turnover tax in 1962, which helped make them less competitive.
As for the Wee Stores, it kept going until the early 1990s. Anthony’ s mother had died in 1991, four years after the passing of his father. In recent years, the premises has been home to such shops as a branch of Sheridan’s Cheesemongers and most recently, until earlier this year, a French-run boutique that specialised in jewellery and other crafts. Now Anthony is hoping that a coffee shop will open in the premises in the coming weeks.
The Wee Stores may be long gone, as conclusively as the trams that once trundled along Waterloo Road, and the thriving artists’ colony that once lived, worked and drank, often with abandon, in this area, but they are fondly remembered as a symbol of a vanished
and a quieter, simpler way of life.