Man about town

Launch on Saturday, 3pm, at Cavan Townhall.

The front door is held ajar.

“Sorry I can’t help you,” hollers a familiar voice. “You must have the wrong house! We stopped doing B&B years ago.”

Gradually the blue eyes with a mischievous twinkle and head topped with snow-white hair edge around the door.

Mel, the natural born entertainer and raconteur is in his usual great form. The following few hours are lively, brimming with stories, recollections, re-enactments and renditions of songs. He has seemingly boundless energy. It took a global pandemic to put the brakes on long enough for him to finally pen his memoir: ‘Mel’s Your Man’, which will launch this Saturday as part of the Cavan Calling festival.

His son Philip - a centrifugal force around which the Cavan arts scene merrily swirled for a decade before he relocated to Connemara and successfully turned his hand to making movies - was enlisted to edit the book.

For people from Cavan Town the memoir will bring to mind many familiar characters from over the latter half of the 20th Century through the eyes of a man with an insatiable appetite for both his community and the arts - as a musician, actor on stage or screen, cartoon artist (his sketches have appeared in this paper on numerous occasions), dancer with Cumann na Rince where he ‘won’ an All Ireland medal (by default), or organiser in chief behind variety productions and charitable events. It’s easy to see why he’s a past winner of The Anglo-Celt/Rehab Person of the Year.

“It’s not what I did myself, it’s the wonderful people that I met up with,” he says of his memoir.

Where he encountered these wonderful people includes St Felim’s National School, the Scouts, the local music scene, Cavan’s drama troupe, through his varied work places including Jackson’s Garage, before setting up his own business to provide for his then girlfriend and love of his life, Rosaleen.

Despite being the very personification of a Cavan man, Mel was actually born in Edgeworthstown, and hence he was named after the Longford saint and Cathedral.

“My mother called me Mel, my father told her Paddy was better. And my mother told him, ‘Aw sure every Tom, Dick and Harry is called Paddy’.”

With 10 children in tow, his parents upped and moved to St Brigid’s Terrace when he was just six weeks old as his father had got a job in McDonnell’s Bakery in Cavan Town.

“I was in the Boy Scouts for 30 years and then went on the committee,” Mel proudly says. “Actually the Boy Scouts made me.”

Chief amongst those to shape Mel was Scoutmaster John Donohoe. “A wonderful man - very quiet, very patient and he did an awful lot for all the young lads in the scouts.”

In addition to teaching them how to pitch a tent, cook, tie knots and first aid, Donohoe introduced them to the stage.

“He got us to put on novelty acts - sketches: that’s what got me on the stage.

“During that period when I was in the scouts, the Townhall used to put on an annual concert. I remember a nice lad - we did a duet and I have a photo of that - the two of us in 1949.”

He takes into a number made famous by Judy Garland and Gene Kelly: ‘When you wore a tulip and I wore a big red rose’.

“I know every word of it yet. We had great fun, great laughs.”

He insists he never suffered from nerves, even in his youth.

“I was at home on the stage.”

With the passing of years Mel moved onto the Scout committee and he recalls they had acquired a drumlin of debt.

“We owed money for insurance and we owed money for the rental of the hall,” he says.

John Donohoe sounds like an amazing person - he taught all the boy scouts how to play harmonica and even got them to cut a record in a Dublin studio. He saw the boys’ musical ability as a potential money spinner.

“He came up to me and said, ‘Mel, we’re going to have a band - a marching band. We have enough accordionists but we have no drummer - will you drum?’

“Says I, ‘I’ll have to learn’.”

It was Mel’s can-do spirit that made him a go-to person when a task needed done, hence the name of the book.

Unfazed by the challenge, Mel took up the snare and the marching band started gathering collections.

“We used to go to Virginia, Ballyjamesduff, all these places and play around the town to collect and raise money.”

However, as much as they raised, it wasn’t making much of a dent in their debt pile.

“A miracle happened,” he says. The miracle came in the figure of Fr Turlough O’Reilly who arrived onto the scene around 1952. A teacher in St Patrick’s College he had a creative streak and ambition to match.

“Aw, wonderful man. A character. He was magic!”

“He made up songs. At 2 o’clock at night he’d wake up with a line in his head and jump out of the bed and write the idea down in case he’d forget it the next day - he was that type of fellow.”

Fr Turlough also wrote scripts for sketches and encouraged the boys to embellish them.

“We put them on as pantomimes in the Townhall for a week and the money started coming in and the debt was coming down - and we cleared the debt.”

Emboldened by this success Fr Turlough came up with an idea to raise money for a much needed new scout hall that was so ambitious it bordered on ridiculous: “‘We’ll make a film!’

“And he started to sit down to write a film and that was ‘Mulligan’s Millions’. And he gave me the star part of Mulligan. Oh it was very funny. It took two years to make it because with winter we couldn’t make films outside.”

Seemingly the towering obstacles to making a film in the 1950s - such as getting a camera - didn’t daunt Fr Turlough?

“Nothing was impossible to him.”

Mel recalls one slapstick scene where he as Mulligan accidentally drops his pipe into a barrel.

“I reached down to try to get it and I fell into the barrel. I couldn’t get out and I started shaking the barrel - next thing the barrel turned over and rolled down the hill.

“I was in the barrel for a couple of yards and then it stopped. Then he gave the [now empty] barrel a roll and picked up filming it again - it rolled down the hill and into a cock of hay, and who was in the hay only a tramp.”

The ‘tramp’ was played by Mel’s life-long friend John O’Connor; another amazing man who overcame his alcohol addiction and inspired countless others to turn their lives around.

The movie was shown in Townhall in front of “a great crowd” who “paid a few bob” for admission. The miracle was complete and they financed a new hall.

Despite suffering bouts of ill health throughout his life, there’s generally a happy ending to Mel’s anecdotes, like his old pal John Reilly from the Butlersbridge Road with whom he formed an accordion and drum duet. Recalling their days as single lads Mel drew a sketch of tall John, a medium sized buddy and himself only 5ft 4 walking up the town on a Saturday night. A trio of women see the comical men and says: ‘I’m taking the small fella anyway’.

Her pal asks why?

‘Aw I’m trying to give them up.’