The life of county Carlow’s oldest citizen, Bill Burgess passed away at Glendale Nursing Home in Tullow on
Monday September 17th 2007. On his mantelpiece stands the Centenarians Coin awarded to him
by President McAleese on 23 June 2002,
surmounted by the five coins presented on each subsequent birthday.
At the age of 105, Bill Burgess ranked as the second oldest man in Ireland.
Within weeks of Bill’s death, the oldest man passed on. Bill would have smiled to have been the
oldest man in Ireland. As it was, he was the oldest farmer.
‘He was very proud of the five medals and the letters each year from President McAleese. He had
the medals up on the mantelpiece,
and was very proud of being one of the oldest around’ said his son Edwin.
Bill was born in June 1902, a month after the Boer War finally ended. He was 10 years old when
the Titanic sank, 15 when his brother Rupert was killed in action in Belgium, 27 when Wall Street crashed, 37 when Hitler invaded Poland, 61 when JFK was shot, 77 when the Pope visited Ireland, 87 when the Berlin Wall came down and
99 when the Twin Towers collapsed. His grandfather came to Tobinstown as a tenant farmer in 1852 and built the granite farmstead. Bill Burgess was born and
lived his life in Tobinstown, Tullow in Co Carlow. Son of William and Lucy Burgess, Bill was born on June 23rd 1902, the
eighth of ten children. He worked all his life on the family farm and thoroughly enjoyed the agricultural way of life. ‘I was
the fifth boy’ says Bill. ‘We were boy, girl, 2 boys , girl, boy, me, and 3 girls. If that sounds like a handful,’ he says with a
contagious grin, ‘then the neighbourhood must have been pure chaos. There were thirty-three children, between three houses— we were ten, the Ryans had eleven and the Fishers were twelve.’ The Burgess children all went to the Disraeli School in Rathvilly.
In March 1909, Bill’s father passed away with acute peritonitis. ‘The night he died, we were called over to his bedroom to say goodbye. I was six and my younger sister was a year and a half. I remember her crawling up and putting her hands around to say goodbye to him.’ Bill went on to outlive his baby sister, Phyllis Ashmore, by ten years. In June 1917, Bill’s elder brother Rupert was killed fighting for the Australian army at Messines Ridge in Flanders. And then, in 1919, came the Spanish Flu. A horrendous epidemic that annihilated more than 20 million people. Bill had been sent to school in Dublin the previous September, ‘very much against my will’. He attended Morgan’s when Mr Comisky was the headmaster. ‘It was the end of October when the schoolmaster came up to me. He was a savage man. He should have been locked up in Mountjoy. He told me a wire has come and asks: ‘Have you a sister, Vivian?” I said “No, I have a brother Vivian’. Vivian was two years older than me, as hardy a young fellow as you’d meet. ‘Well’ he says, ‘He’s dead.’ Just like that. If he had hit me between the two eyes he couldn’t have done more.’ Bill joined up with two of his sisters living in Dublin and went home immediately. ‘A man met us with a pony and trap,’ he recalls. ‘My brother was dead. Another brother and three of my sisters were down with the flu. There was no antibiotic and no whiskey either. There was nothing to be had. No up-to-date medicines. No pick-me-ups. Nothing. Dr Kidd in Tullow recommended we get some whiskey or poitin but even that was hard to find.’
Fortunately, the family recovered strength. Bill took over and remained with the farm for the next 80 years. By the mid-1920s, Bill was fast establishing himself as one of the most proficient jockeys in Ireland. ‘I rode different places for no advantage to myself, only disadvantage. I got no money. You could call it sport if you like – risking your neck on every fence! But you do things at twenty you won’t do at thirty, much less forty'. He points to a photograph from 1935 of a stocky lad seemingly flying through the air. ‘That was taken at the last doublebank at Coolattin. I was fired head-over-heels over it. The horse was Brown Jack and he ended up dead on one side and I landed on the other with a dislocated ankle. I hopped up as best I could. I got up on another horse and I won the next race.’ He once rode five winners at Shillelagh in the same day, surely a record and a measure of the man. On another occasion, he was invited to Kilmallock to participate in a race. ‘I got my breakfast here at eight o’clock in the morning and I went the hundred miles with my brother -in-law, Jim Ashmore, (who had married Phyllis Burgess, mother of Norma Cook, and grandmother of Zena and Nadia (Cook) who played great hockey for King’s Hospital in the 80’s.) That was a long journey. We walked the course and I rode the race and I won a prize for the owner of £25. Afterwards, he gave me great praise and asked would I like a drink? I wasn’t a drinker anytime so I said I’d have a grapefruit. It cost the sum of four-pence in the ordinary way. And that’s all the thanks I got. I nearly gave up riding after that.’
When he wasn’t riding horses, Bill was running the family farm, harvesting wheat and supplying milk to the Lucan Dairies in Dublin. A keen horseman in his younger years, Bill loved horse riding and actively took part in Point to Point race meetings and hunts in the locality from the 1920’s up to the 1940’s. A heavy workload and many to support left little time for socialising.
A chance trip to buy a cow from a local farmer in the 1950’s led to Bill meeting a lady who caught his eye, Dolly Smythe from the nearby townsland of Coolmanagh. Their relationship developed and in 1957 the couple married. Sadly their married life was all too short and Dolly passed away on Oct 9, 1960 while in her mid 30’s. In 1957 he married, two and a half years later, ‘I was back in church again to bury her.’ He was left with a small boy, Edwin.
Up until the end, Bill lived with his son Edwin and daughter-in-law Norah and their family in Tobinstown. A very independent man, Bill remained incredibly fit and physically well and in fact up until 2002 he was still well able to chop sticks out on the farm. He also continued to drive a car well up into his 90’s. However in more recent times, his failing eyesight held him back from doing the things he once did. Bill farmed all his life attending the weekly mart in Tullow. In fact, every single Friday from the time the mart opened up until Bill was in his 90’s, he never missed a single Friday. As old age took its toll, his visits to Tullow Livestock Sales over the last 12 years became less frequent. Yet even until his 104th year, he still managed the odd Friday meeting up with local farming families he knew all his life.
Right up until his death, Bill still had his cup of hot water and a bowl of porridge every morning. He gave up smoking 70 years ago at the age of 35 and never drank his whole lifetime. Bill was an old-school gentleman. He stood up when someone entered a room. He insisted on walking them to the door when they left. He believed that life is a precarious affair and every moment of happiness must be appreciated.
‘Isn’t it a funny thing,’ he remarked, ‘that of all the men and women who ever walked this earth, not one of them ever knew what happens afterwards?’ He claimed in his last years, with the twinkle in his eye ‘I have no enemies …. because they’re all dead!’‘I have no control over it,’ he said of his longevity. ‘But when I’ve gone? Well as the man used to say when we’d meet on a bank in a chase, ‘Cheerio til the other side!’’‘He just got on with it.
Bill is survived by his son Edwin, daughter-in-law Norah, grandchildren
Neil and Fiona, nieces, nephews, relatives and friends.
Compiled from ‘Vanishing Ireland’ by James Fennell and Turtle Bunbury with additional information from newspapers, Norma Cook, Edwin Burgess and the KHPPU Newsletter.
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