Coats in church

Take a pew

Sir,– Further to recent correspondence (Letters, December 7th and 8th), my German Catholic father told me that one of his earliest memories from the early 1950s on first visiting Dingle, Co Kerry (my mother’s birthplace) was of elderly men in big, heavy coats standing at the back of the church, jangling coins in their pockets, eager for the service to end, so that they could get to the pub. – Yours, etc,

THEO SCHULTE,

Cambridge,

England.

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Sir, – In the days when there was no room in the pews to take one’s coat off in church, much less leave it by one’s side, leaving one’s coat on offered the most secure odds of going home with the same coat one had arrived in.

I suggest going early to a small church and choosing a seat near a radiator. Otherwise, offer it up, as my dear Mam was often prompted to say. – Yours, etc,

MICHELE SAVAGE,

Dublin 12.