Michael and Agnes, and 60 years of diamond memories

Michael Hogan has never sat down to list out the number of jobs he has worked at in his life – but put it this way: if you ever wanted your hair cut, a bus driven, a cake baked or a pint pulled, then you’d never have been stuck once the Mullingar man was near to hand.

Michael and wife Agnes have a significant milestone this year: their diamond wedding anniversary. There should have been a party; there should have been music and storytelling, new clothes, cameras flashing, all in the presence of their children Eamon, Nigel and Philip (all Mullingar), Paul (Wicklow); Leoila (Balbriggan) and Rachel (Liverpool) and their families.

But Covid has robbed them of all that, and they will spend the day quietly at home, hoping that when life returns to normal, they will get to celebrate spending six decades together.

It hasn’t, however, robbed Michael of his wealth of memories and stories, nor of his talent as a raconteur, and he paints an exciting picture of 1960s Birmingham, where the two met and spent their early married life.

“We got married on February 4, 1961, in Small Heath in Birmingham,” says Michael, who is a native of Churchtown, Ballynacargy.

He and Agnes (née Finnegan), met while working on the buses in Birmingham, and within a short time, Michael – to borrow from the famed song – “lost his heart to the Galway girl”.

Michael was just 18 years of age when he emigrated: “I went over to Oxford first in 1957 – and imagine: I never saw Dublin until the day I left Ireland.

“I was 18 on January 18 and I left Ireland on February 11.

“I left because there was very little around; there were no jobs.

“My mother brought me to Dublin, I got on the boat for Liverpool; then you had to get off the boat and get a ‘ferry across the Mersey’ – I remember that – and then catch a train to Oxford, to my uncle.

“I was with him for a while and then I got a job with a big farm in Oxford.”

On the promise of building work, he went to Birmingham, but the job fell through and so Michael turned his attention to other potential openings and got employment with Birmingham City Transport, and, of course, ended up meeting Agnes,

It was an exciting time to be young and in England: “You could go from one job to another, You could pack in a job on a Friday if you didn’t like it, and walk into another one on Monday morning.

“The opportunities were there, but the money was not great. Big money was £20.

“Birmingham was full of Irish. The biggest majority of the people working on the buses were Irish. They were from all over Ireland.”

Eager for a new opportunity, Michael joined a bakery, and it was while working in that field that he and Agnes got married.

Around 60 guests attended the wedding, which was held at the Holy Family Church in Small Heath.

“We got married on a Saturday and were back to work on a Monday.”

They decided to put off their honeymoon until later in the year, but as it happened, Agnes became pregnant straight away and the eldest of their family of four boys and two girls was born in November.

At that stage, even though both he and Agnes were working, buying a house wasn’t remotely on the cards:

“You wouldn’t even dream of buying a house: you rented,” he recalls.

As a country man, Michael was thrilled when through a Fr O’Mahoney from Cork he was offered a job with a house in Solihull, a very posh part of Warwickshire.

The job was as caretaker in the Catholic ‘Bishop Glancy School’ (now St Peter’s) and the bungalow that came with the position was located in the expansive school grounds.

“We had the whole run of the place and it was out in the country,” says Michael, pointing out that this gave great freedom to the six young Hogan children.

“The kids had an absolute ball,” he says.

While working in the school, Michael saw an opening for provision of bar services to private functions, and in 1979 when he was offered the chance to take over a pub, he and Agnes mused over the offer but opted to move back to Ireland, to the delight of their children.

The couple opened Hogan’s Coffee Shop where Tesco is, later setting up in the Town Mall (now part of Mullingar Credit Union), where they remained until their retirement.

Michael laughs when asked how many jobs he has worked at: “I’ve worked at everything,” he says before pointing out that like so many of his generation, he was 12 when he left school; he did not go to secondary school, and never sat an exam.

What did he spend most of that time between 12 and 18 doing? “Acting the eejit!” he laughs.

But the time wasn’t entirely wasted, and the first income stream he found for himself was cutting hair: “On a Saturday night, down at Burns’s lock beside the canal, I had my scissors and hair cutters and I used to wait for the boys to come in from the pub, and I used to get half a crown a head and I could be cutting hair till 2 in the morning on a Saturday.”

Sadly, for the couple, Agnes has been diagnosed with dementia, and for the last three years, Michael has been her carer.

Michael remarks that their 60 years of married life “have flown by”.

“Time flies by. You are rearing a family; you have all the worries; we were always on the road – you just didn’t have time to think about it!”