Adventures of Alfie Geraghty, Whitfield Court

Alfred Anthony Geraghty – known to all as Alfie – will be remembered by many in this neck of the woods, having grown up literally right alongside the big house at Whitfield Court.

Born on January 16th 1938, Alfie lived in the caretakers’ quarters attached to the Dawnay residence with his parents, brothers, and sisters. Lady Susan owned the estate at the time and after she died in 1947 the manor was left her niece and daughter-in-law Katharine (who married Susan’s army officer son David). With two teenage girls, their twin sons Peter and Hugh were six years older than Alfie growing up.

Ned (Edward) Geraghty, Alfie’s father, looked after the horses in Dawnays. “When the old Major-General and Lady Katie would come in after being off hunting, the horses would be all cut with wire and covered in mud,” remembers Michael O’Keeffe, Lisnakill, who used to call into Geraghtys with Bobby Phelan for Alfie’s brother Noel on the way to the pub. “This would be at all hours of a winter’s evening and Ned would be going mad. He’d have to wash and clean them all. He told old Dawnay it was a tractor he should have after the hounds!”

Though he was a Protestant, Ned’s wife was a Catholic. Nora Lyons, Lisnakill, would have known Mrs Geraghty well from working over in Dawnays as a housekeeper for many years. Alfie went to primary school in Butlerstown during and after WWII. He was known as “The Phantom” from a young age and it stuck. People said Alfie would flit between places and could appear anywhere – just like the original adventure comic-strip superhero of his childhood.

That was a happy time. When Alfie and Noel were young they made a boat out of cardboard and went into the sea in Woodstown trying to sail to Wexford. Needless to say, the boat sank and the brothers were rescued by passers-by!

“I remember one day in the mid-fifties coming home that road from the church and seeing Alfie, who was about seventeen at the time, going by on a bicycle with SEVEN up on it spinning along the road by Kilronan over to the Shangan Cross,” recalls Mick O’Keeffe again. “How he kept them up on it I don’t know. Alfie was riding it himself and he’d a fella sitting on the bar and a fella on the handlebars and a fella standing either side of the front wheel up on the axle facing him, each holding onto the other fella, and there was a fella on the carrier and another fella standing on the back axel, and another hanging on somewhere else.”

Always mad about the horses, having ridden with members of the Dawnay family at Whitfield during his youth, Alfie regularly went to the races in Tramore and local point-to-point meetings with the likes of fellow chipboard staffers Joe Crowley and Willie Cullen. In early 1965, the factory’s newspaper notices told how Alfie had “a slight mishap” while out hunting with the hounds, falling while clearing a ditch and breaking a finger.

It wasn’t his only scrape. Alfie was also called “the speed king” because of how fast he drove through the lanes and byways around Kilmeaden. As with his motorcycling phase (he narrowly evaded a truck down near the Glen one time, jumping off while the bike carried on into the lorry), he had a few close escapes while flitting about, and ’62 was a particularly unlucky year.

One night in May, in a bizarre accident on the main road at Dooneen, a commercial traveller crashed into the back of his stopped car, which neighbour Kevin Power was about to get out of. (The Dun Laoghaire van driver, who had continued on, claimed he was suffering the effects of carbon monoxide poisoning from a leaky exhaust pipe rather than alcohol, despite admitting he’d had a feed of drink in New Ross and Waterford immediately beforehand. The court heard Alfie and Sergeant J. Nolan found him staggering beside the van smelling of liquor a short time later.)

Then, that August, while returning home from Tramore, a horse he came upon suddenly on a bend reared up and jumped on the front of Alfie’s car, smashing the windscreen. It left him in Ardkeen hospital with head injuries, including a broken jaw, and he had to have several false teeth fitted. To add to his woes, in November, on his way back from Waterford with a couple of passengers, Alfie sustained further facial wounds when his car skidded on a wet patch of sand and struck a fence at Mullins’s Cross, Kilmeaden.

In the mid-sixties Alfie moved to the West Midlands of England with his wife-to-be, Anne Tierney from Waterford. They married in St John Vianney Church in Coventry in 1967 and started a family there. Alfie came home for the occasional holiday in the years that followed and loved catching up with old pals in The Sweep for a pint and a laugh.

His many friends back home were shocked and saddened to hear he had died suddenly after suffering a massive heart attack in September 1987, aged 49. Until that day he proudly wore a pendant around his neck which his father had given him before he passed away – it was awarded to Ned’s brother, A.J. or Arthur Garaty, after a 10-round bare-knuckle boxing match in Simonstown, South Africa, in 1905.

Alfie lived his own life to the full: even if must have felt like a white-knuckle ride at times. And so, to finish, a funny story that goes back to that nickname. Two of Tom Power’s sisters in Adamstown, Kilmeaden – aunts of Kevin and Maura – never married and built what became Peg Kelly’s bungalow on their land. They left it to Maura who then sold it to Peg (Power the Castle) and her husband Tom when she came back from a lifetime nursing in England.

“At that time you’d get mushrooms out in the fields in the morning, but no matter what time the two sisters went out, Alfie would have them picked,” says Michael – a story his brother Billy vouches for. “You couldn’t get a mushroom in the fields around there. He’d be up with the sun and they’d be gone – ‘Is it any wonder they call him ‘The Phantom!”’ the sisters would say.”