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Savage's (Main Street) in Swords closing down after 150 years.
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16-08-2011 12:32pm#1
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Corsendonk wrote: »Must be a Swords thing! Anyone outside lumps them all together.:D
Yeah, well, get outta this thread! :pac:Frank Spencer wrote: »Well Corsendonk and I thought it was JC's!
Well the supermarket has hardly been around for 150 years. :rolleyes: :pac:
It would be interesting to find out the history of the shop. I know they kept pigs and stuff in the castle years ago.0 -
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Savages in Swords were the first shop in Ireland to sell Tayto crisps, and therefore the first shop in the world to sell Cheese & Onion Crisps.
No way! :eek:I remember stopping in everyday on the way home from school to spend my 10p. Sad to see it go, although in reality it's been gone since Centra took it over. Wonder what it'll be now? The Main St. has really gone to the dogs to be honest - last thing we need is another bookies or fast-food joint.
Yes.
There seems to be businesses going into Taylors now though. 0 -
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yeah
Joe "Spud" Murphy.
Very good obituary from the Telegraph on Spud and his famous Crisp. Perhaps someone from Donabate might know if he lived in the area. So if Savages where the first to sell Cheese and Onion crisps it would have been circa 1954. Anyone remember buying crisps then?
Telegraph 2001JOE "SPUD" MURPHY, the Irish entrepreneur who has died aged 78, earned a small place in social history by producing the world's first cheese and onion flavoured crisp.
It was because Murphy, an inveterate crisp-eater, found the products on offer to be so insipid - the only "flavour" available was salt, which had to be sprinkled from a little bag sold inside the packet - that he launched his own crisp company in the Republic of Ireland in 1954. The company was Tayto, today one of the best-known Irish brand names. He started the business on O'Rahilly's Parade in Dublin with one van and eight employees, some of whom were to work for him for more than 30 years.
One of those early employees was Seamus Burke, who was charged with perfecting the revolutionary new flavour. Burke, working on what was essentially nothing more sophisticated than a kitchen table, experimented until he came up with a cheese and onion flavour that his boss judged to be acceptable.
The problem then for Murphy was how to get his new product on to the market. He solved this by approaching the Findlater family, which owned 21 up-market grocery and wine stores in the Republic of Ireland. They agreed not only to carry the new crisps in their stores, but also to sell them to other outlets through their corps of commercial travellers.
It was the beginning of a story that would see Murphy become one of the best-known - and best-heeled - businessmen in the country.
Joseph Murphy was born on May 15 1923 in Dublin, where his father owned a small building business and his mother a wallpaper and paint shop. He was educated by the Christian Brothers, the Roman Catholic religious order, at their school on Synge Street, Dublin.
Leaving school at 16, Murphy went to work behind the counter at the Dublin branch of James J Fox & Co, the cigar and cigarette sellers of St James's, London. Ambition soon got the better of him, whereupon the young thruster decided to rent a small office off Grafton St, one of the Irish capital's smartest addresses. From here he began to exploit his talent for identifying a gap in the market and promptly filling it.
These were the austere years of the Second World War and, having noted that Ribena was not available in Ireland, Murphy began to import it. He repeated this success by bringing in ball-point pens, then a novelty. A scheme to import cheap cigarettes from Rhodesia to provide for the tobacco-starved Irish people was scuppered when the war ended.
The invention of the cheese and onion crisp in the late 1950s, however, was the coup of his career; the new flavour became a success both at home and abroad, and within two years the business had moved to larger premises. In 1960 it expanded yet again.
As the driving force behind Tayto, Murphy's genius was for marketing. He was, for example, one of the first businessmen to sponsor a programme on Radio Eireann: Cruising With Tayto was a half-hour talk show during which the only advertisements were for his own products.
He also took an early opportunity to rent space for a neon sign on one of the premier street locations in Dublin; as a result, the Tayto sign became one of the Irish capital's best-known advertising symbols in the 1960s and 1970s.
Even his children were recruited for the marketing drive, arriving at school with supplies of rulers and ball-point pens bearing the Tayto logo; these they would distribute among their fellow pupils.
At Hallowe'en, the Murphys' splendid Georgian home in Dublin would be a magnet for local children, who knew that their "loot bags" would be crammed with packets of Tayto crisps.
By the 1960s Murphy was a rich man, frequently hailed by the then Taoiseach, Sean Lemass, as the very acme of Irish entrepreneurial spirit. He was also a man who enjoyed the trappings of success. For the rest of his life he drove a Rolls Royce (always replaced biennially), and was so generous with his tips that the doormen at hotels in Dublin and London would vie with one another for the privilege of parking his car.
The assistants in smart clothes shops also learned to dance attendance. When Murphy was confronted by a shelf of cashmere sweaters in various ocolours, rather than waste time on choosing his favourite he would simply buy the entire range; shirts (of which he owned hundreds at any one time) he considered to have lost their "feel" after half a dozen launderings, and they were duly replaced.
In 1964 Beatrice Foods, of Chicago, had bought a majority stake in Tayto, which continued to grow - by the early Seventies it employed some 300 people. In 1972, with Murphy still at the helm, Tayto bought the King crisps company and in 1981 the Smith's Food Group factory in Terenure. By now Tayto had become the first company in Ireland to make and market so-called "extruded snacks".
In 1983 Murphy sold his stake in Tayto and retired to Spain. For the remaining 18 years of his life he was based at his home at Marbella, where he indulged his passion for golf. He played five days a week and, while he never succeeded in bringing his handicap below 24, his enthusiasm remained undimmed: nothing brought him more pleasure than acquiring, and trying out, the latest titanium or graphite golf clubs
Original 1954 Packaging
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ah right - Am I right in thinking that JC started off managing the main street shop? and then moved?
I think so, yeah.Frank Spencer wrote: »That damn roll-eyes smilie strikes again! Should be banned I tell's ya!
Sorry! I did put a pacman after it.The Scientician wrote: »I don't think Centra ever took it over. Do you mean when it became a Londis?
Centra took over from Clarke's.0 -
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