Uncle Sidney wrote:<br>Mr.Joyce, (his daughters still live in Mill Street), who rowed with my dad and Uncle Peter, told me that his father saw William Geraghty on the Salmon Weir bridge. William Geraghty had come down from Roscommon and was looking for a job. Was he looking at the piers of the Clifden railway viaduct which he had constructed? He and his father and brothers had completed work on a hotel in Roscommon, which is still in business. The time?, before the beginning of the century.<p>Mr. Joyce said that his father knew that grandfather was a mason, by his boots, and that he told him to walk down to Newtownsmyth and that James Perry to whom he should say that Joyce sent him, would give him a job.<p>At the time James Perry was operating or about to operate the direct current electrical transmission system to light some of the streets of Galway. James Perry's daughter, Alice Jacqueline Perry, one of four girls and one boy, in the family, became the first woman civil engineer to graduate on the islands of Britain and Ireland.<p>In the installation of the electrical system he was helped by his brother John Perry, F.R.S., who also developed the gyroscope which was later used to direct submarines and steel clad ships which would misdirect the magnetic compass. <p>I mention all this to show that grandad was employed by well educated and enlightened people.<p>In his youth he did drink, but not when his family had grown, and two stories that I heard from my mother, who no doubt heard them from my father were, one, that on an occasion he threw his pay packet into the Middle River-a magnificent gesture to demonstrate his utter contempt for "filthy lucre"(I have to use the cliché) and another episode was his giving a lecture to the students (possibly on 'jib' night) on astronomy. No doubt they cheered him to the rafters. Our paternal grandmother was mortified.<p>His first accomodation in Galway was in Whitehall, now the entry from St. Augustine street to SuperValu. I overheard my father tell my mother how he could remember walking to Newcastle, to the new house, while carrying a cat and how heavy the cat became as the journey went on.<p>He seemed to have been a very skilled mason. One job I know of that he did for my maternal grandmother, Mrs.Kearney of Lackagh, was the installation of a range in her kitchen at Lackagh. The skill involved at the time could, I suppose, be compared today with the installation of a home computer for a customer. My maternal grandmother was a shrewd woman and saw the advantage of locating the technique in her part of the county. She had placed an intelligent fellow to assist grandfather. But grandfather grew suspicious and remarked on the sharpness of his assistant. Grandmother Kearney took the assistant aside and told him to start making mistakes, that Grandfather was on to him. Grandmother Kearney also made the observation, that grandfather Geraghty must have a very good wife; he was executing the installation of the range in a white shirt.<p>James Perry was county surveyor for West Galway and grandfather continued employment with James Perry. One of his assignments was the construction of the bridge across the Ferry between the upper and lower Mask. It is a concrete bridge and was likely to have been one of the early reinforced concrete bridges to have been built in the West of Ireland. On that point I mention a story told to us as students by Professor Rishworth. He said that on the construction of a reinforced concrete floor in Dublin that the Irish Institute of Civil Engineers was invited to inspect it. After a dinner provided by the builder they proceeded to the upper floor where the concrete floor lay awaiting their inspection. They congregated around the door, smoking cigars, no doubt provided by the builder, and there they stayed, outside, around the door, admiring the floor within. None of them had the audacity to go in and step on the floor. They weren't out from their homes and families to take uneccessary chances.<p>While working on the bridge he developed pneumonia and was nursed back to health in my paternal grandmother's cottage near the Ferry.<br>The sad thing is that cottage is now knocked and the land sold to someone else.<p>They had ten children, seven boys and three girls. Their names for the record: Catherine, Margaret, Paddy, Willy, Nicholas, George, Jim, John, Pete and Eileen.<p>He had bought two labourers' cottages at Newcastle and with a grant from the Government he converted them into one building. Uncle Pete told me that he and John were digging a septic tank on his instructions. Grandfather would leave the house at four in the morning to walk to the site of the Currach More bridge which he was building at the time. He would try to arouse his sons before leaving the house but to no avail. He would then bang out the door with the passing shot; "Now you can stay there 'till you rot!' On his return from the Currach More bridge, a nine mile round trip, he encountered Pete and John still scrabbling with the clearing of the pit. His comment was;" the two of you are still there and you will have me going to my grave with a chain of debt around my neck!". I checked the story with John. John held that they were digging through granite. Pete's story was that they had been talking about the previous night's dance at the Temperance boat club (it was situated where I now live) instead of getting on with the work.<br>The story goes that the sons bought him a pony and trap to assist him with his trips to the site of the Currach Mór bridge, and that that is what killed him. He caught a cold in his back. John told me that Jack Prendergast worked as a young engineer on the bridge, probably in the early twenties. Prendergast showed him a letter from the Galway County Council terminating his services. Prendergast went on to build the Asyuit dam on the Nile.<br>Grandfather William Geraghty died in the late twenties, it may have been from cancer.<p>I also learned that, no doubt as a younger man, he worked on the construction of the piers for the Clifden railway viaduct across the Corrib. The difficulties encountered on the sinking of the cassions for the piers of the bridge are given in Maurice Semple's Reflections on the Corrib. <p>Indeed most ómós should be given to my paternal grandmother, Margaret Somerville, Geraghty. She reared her own ten children. When Granduncle George's first wife died, Miss Harford from Uitenhage, South Africa, leaving him with three children, Jack, Eamon and Sister Phillipa, she took them in because George's new wife, a former Miss McDermott, would not have them in the house.<br>Even though her language was Irish, grandfather would not let her speak the tongue. Yet he was given to literacy. I remember Jim having a beautiful collection of books, belonging to grandfather, mainly to do with building and what happened to them I just have no idea. Jim could be secretive.<p>I can remember hearing from my mother that my father had asked grandfather why all of them didn't go into the construction business. Grandfather's terse reply was not to put all of one's eggs in one basket. <p>If I can think of anything more I can send you a supplement. I have a copy of the account by Great Uncle George of his escape with Joe McGrath from his prison on the Usk-shades of King Arthur-, which I now enclose.<p>Bye for now, Sid Geraghty.<br>
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