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A life in stone, part II

A life in stone, part II

(For part one, please go here)

My father worked in the yard, in a draughty courrugated iron shed (terribly hard to heat in winter, even the powerful space heaters he had couldn’t help much). There was a lot of chiselling and grinding and polishing, hard work involving a lot of water and noise and grit. This work had changed even in his lifetime. In the back yard there was a big block of marble which he said was his fathers’. In those days, you really did start from the block of marble. Today, he told me, you couldn’t pay someone to do this kind of work, it would just take too long.

It was his job to cut and polish the kerbs, chisel the incriptions on the uheadstones, transport all the pieces to the cemetery and assemble it. To load and unload his lorry he had just a small yellow folding hydralic crane and a few planks and rollers. There was a lot of pushing and shoving, multiple opportunies to crush a finger or two. Of course, some headstones were more challenging than others. The tall celtic crosses in particular with their heavy plinths and marble crosses were very heavy. Kerbs in particular seem to be an Irish or British concern: the gravestones are never a simple monument but have long stone bars on each of the four sides. Depending on your budget, you could have simple limestone kerbs, or, if you had the money, some nice black granite. The black granite, he told me, came from South Africa, and remember this was the 1980s, which certainly created some contradictions when you consider it was used for some of the more controversial monuments you could find in a northern Irish cemetary.

Most of his monuments were supplied by Feely Stone, just over the border in Athlone, in the “prarie” part of Ireland which no tourists go. Often the big lorries from Feely stone would arrive in our yard, inching slowly through the front gate with only few a millimeters clearance either side, heavily laden with headstones, gravel, kerbs. It would take the good part of a day to unload. Once, the driver was an Italian from Carrera: when I lived in Italy, I once drove through Carrera myself. They have been extracting marble for centuries, from Roman times I think. Michelangelo himself lived there for a while near the quarries to be sure to find exactly the right piece of stone. Driving slowly along the road, I saw monuments and sculptures were lined along both sides. I thought of my father, who had never been to Italy, and never visited Carrera.

I remember one trip to Feely with my mother, after we moved to Stewartstown, to pick up a statue of the Virgin Mary. Well, a man explained to me when we visited, today there is now a new cheap way to make a statues, you just needed marble dust and resin and you can bond everything together in a mold. No need to sit with a chisel for hours in the cold. The talismanic properties our resin-bonded Virgin Mary were minimal, however: on the way back from Feely stone, our car broke down and some students working nearby in the country on an EU-funded project drove us to a nearby garage where the car was repaired.

I went with my father a few times to the cemetary, I helped him out as best I could. He drove with his monuments all over Tyrone, up into the mountains near Gortin even. The days would be long, in the summer he would return to the house often well after seven. He was not a tall man, but he was very solidly built with big hands and strong arms. He almost never used gloves and his hands were thickly callused. At the end of those long days in the cemetary I was completely exhausted, I had never worked like that before or since.  I appreciated what real work was: I can’t imagine what this must have been like for my father: even then, he was no longer a young man.

Well, we moved from the Burn road to Stewarstown, where we built our new house and my father had a new shed. It was not much warmer than the one he had had in Cookstown. Our house was built on land that our Uncle peter had bought twenty years previously with the project of starting a pig farm. That project didn’t work out, and a few years later, Peter left for America, never to return. He gave the land to my mother, his sister, for us to build our house on. I remember visiting the site with my parents just before the construction started: there was just an enormous sea of mud with the outhouse for the pigs in the middle. I felt that if I stepped on the wrong piece of ground I would sink to my neck in mud and drown. There were some problems with drainage, obviously.

Along the way, there were a few technical innovations in the stone-masons’ trade: sandblasting meant that one could put a paper mask over a headstone, cut the inscription on the paper with a stanley knife to expose the stone, and then blast it away with special sand forced on the stone by a powerful air compressor. My father even had a portable version to take to the cemetary: the gain in time was considerable.

He and his assistant Ronnie would cut the paper by hand. But he was an enthusiastic subscriber to “Stone” magazine, a black-and-white trade journal from America which was filled with the latest technical innovations. Apparently the Americans were using Apple II computers to cut stencils and my father talked jokingly about buying one to stay abreast of the latest technological developments. You can imagine how much I thought this was a good idea: this was around 1981 and I had just gotten a ZX81 and was spending a lot of time in our front room on the black-and-white TV writing programs in BASIC and playing games which usually involved being attacked by different letters of the alphabet. (The pope’s visit to Ireland saved me from spending as much time in front room: we bought a second portable TV so that my grandmother, who was bedridden, could follow his Jean-Paul on live TV. This second TV was soon used as a monitor.) I would have loved to have a *real* computer, as I am sure we wouldn’t be spending all the time printing stencils with it. But, alas, an Apple II and a stencil-printing machine were well out of the budget of McCracken Monumental Memorials.

A life in stone, part I: Burn Road

A life in stone, part I: Burn Road

After all that happened over the past few months, I was thinking once again about my father’s profession, and his father’s profession, and our early life with him in Cookstown. I already wrote a little about this, but talking about it to friends I realised that there was a fair amount of things that I remembered that I had never written about. So here is the first installment: my life in Burn road, circa 1970. 
For the first eleven years of my life, we lived in Cookstown, on the Burn road at house number 16. The Burn road is just off Cookstown’s long main street: it is an interesting mixture of terraced residential housing, parking, the town hall. I suppose that yes, at some point there was a small river there, but I never saw any trace of it. Beyond our house, at the end of the street, there was a clothing factory, and we would hear the factory sirens in the morning and evening. The factory is derelict today. 
The house we lived in is still there, but the yard and workshop where my father and his father worked are gone, converted into a supermarket parking lot. I have a photograph of Henry Joy McCracken I, standing in his suit and tie and hat in the back yard of this house at Burn road, under rays of improbable northern-Irish sunshine. It must have been 1950, 1960. He was dead already a decade or two by the time I was born. Next to our house and the yard there was a garage: it is still there today, but it is no longer a garage. For a while after we left, if you looked carefully on the wall of our house, you could see the faint outlines of the sign that had been painted on the wall in red and black letters,  “McCRACKEN”, it read, “Monumental sculptor”. That is gone too, painted over. For the first few years of my life, I slept with my sister in an L-shaped room on the first floor. We had our beds in opposite sides of the room, and we couldn’t see each other, but we could talk, which was reassuring when you were four years old and a bit frightened, as I was. 
We left Burn Road the year of Britain’s military adventure in the south atlantic, to make way for the parking lot: I remember vaguely packing boxes whilst listening to voices transmitted from the other side of the word describing aircraft carriers and remote windswept islands. I suppose, like in “Emperor of ice cream”, we all secretly wished that the other side would win. 
Beyond the yard there was the garden, which was wild and overgrown. I had a lot of fun hiding in the hedges (where I would invariably get badly scratched by brambles and thorns) or climbing the trees. I remember one time climbing high in the trees with a old radio, just to see if I could pick up some stations that were inaccessible at ground level. Alas, I don’t remember there being any. 
In one part of the hedge there was a kind of secret natural corridor, with trees at one end, and I found it fantastically exciting. On the other side of the garden, if you were brave enough, the hedge led through a thick grove with some weird plants (thinking back on it now they seem to have been some kind of Northern Irish bamboo), and, into the neighbours’ garden. Reflecting on it now, I can see why John Wyndham’s killer plant epic “The day of the triffids” had such resonance with me. At the very top of the garden was a steep bank of earth which led to the back of the houses on the street parallel to Burn road. There was the ruins of an old van, hanging upside-down in the bushes at the end of garden. One of my friends assured me that I would get gangrene and have to have my arm amputated if I even touched any of the rusted metal (his father was a doctor, so I knew he must be right). Between the garden and the house was the yard where my father worked. 
So, in the next installement: how to make a cheap Virgin Mary. 
Henry Joy McCracken: 1925-2014

Henry Joy McCracken: 1925-2014

Three weeks ago, after a long illness, my father, Henry Joy McCracken, died.  Here are a few words for him: 

What was the kind of him? He was always an old man to me. He disliked photographs. But there was one photograph in the family album I remember, two men under the burning sun: one of whom was my father. He seemed impossibly handsome and confident, smiling broadly at the camera. This was his great voyage, India. It was harder to travel then than today: a voyage was a sacrifice.  He made himself an indentured man. He left for five years, came back in one: his father died, his plans were changed for him, he returned home. He never told me to come home, never told me that I should stay in Ireland, always said that I should leave, that it was essential to leave. He was proud of what Sinead and myself had done, of how we had left.

What was the kind of him? He was rigorous in his work, exacting. He took pride in the sharp edges and vertical plumb-lines. We left Cookstown to a new house for us he paid for himself with long hours hefting stone and granite under Tyrone’s low clouds. With him, I learned what real work was, passing many hours in damp graveyards.  At lunch, we would eat sausage rolls from thermoses my mother had packed for us, sitting high in the lorry cabin as the rain rumbled on the roof. In his work, he was a man of habit: coffee, lunch times were regulated. Later, when we moved out to the country, I would wait uncertainly for the sound of the lorry in the driveway at the end of a sumer day: I would have to help unloading the lorry.  Wheelbarrows, picks, buckets, trowels. One day I asked him: “but why doesn’t Sinead ever help?” His response, “Sinead’s a wee girl” didn’t explain anything to me.

What was the kind of him? Taciturn, quiet, but within him were bright fragments of words, there until the end, even when his illness had robbed all  things around him of their meaning. Those shards of verse remained. “The moving finger writes” and having writ, it did move on. By the time I had left Ireland, I had heard these words so many times that I knew them too.  “Can storied urn”, he said as the warm rain rolled across the fields, “back to its mansion”, as we hefted granite and limestone, “call the fleeting breath?”, stone and dust and gravel and concrete, “can honour’s voice”  he murmured, “provoke the silent dust?” And there there were songs, too. “I’ll take you home again Kathleen” he would sing as we shifted gravel and white chips.  Much later, “How can you get them back on the farm once they’ve seen Paris?” he would ask me, rhetorically, citing an old post-war song. Indeed.

What was the kind of him? The hard edges in him were dulled by illness and time. The last people that met him found him a soft-spoken charming man who liked a drink and liked, at times, to reminisce about his voyage, or the town that he lived in. Near the end, I would say to him, as he lay on his bed almost immobile, ‘It’s Henry Joy’ and his eyebrows would raise and that deep soft voice would repeat “Ah, Henry Joy” and for and instant there would be a tiny, tiny glimmer.

What was the kind of him? That was the kind of him.

The IAP at 75: The early history of our Institute

The IAP at 75: The early history of our Institute

A grainy black-and-white photograph. A line of men stare into the camera. In the background, bare trees are outlined against the cold winter sky. The ground is thick with dead winter leaves. Four of the men are in suits and hats; three are labourers. One heavy-set man with a pencil moustache leans nonchalantly against a tree, another is there with his hands in his pockets. Behind them, a small truck is parked at an awkward angle. On the far left, one of the well-dressed men holds a pick in his hand. This man is Henri Mineur, who would in the following year become the first director of the IAP. The date is the 6 of January 1938: the date on which construction of the IAP started. Last Friday, we celebrated the institute’s 75th anniversary with a series of talks and presentations, and in addition a short film made by my friend Mr. Jean Mouette.

PremierCoupDePiocheIAP 1938
Henri Mineur starts construction work  for the IAP

The IAP was created out of an urgent need for new structures to carry out scientific research. In the early part of the 20th century, astronomy was undergoing a radical transformation. With the arrival of new instrumentation and new telescopes it became possible for the first time to apply our knowledge of physics to understand astrophysical processes and observation: the science of “astrophysics” came into being. For centuries, astronomy had been concerned with the positions and movements of stars and other objects, but with the arrival of richly quantitative measurements such as spectroscopy, which can provide detailed information concerning the chemical make-up of very distant objects, it became clear that a new approach was possible. However, it was not clear where this kind of new astronomy could be done in France – certainly not at the Universities which were orientated uniquely towards teaching, and saw no place for research. The observatories, steeped in centuries of positional astronomy (and still labouring to accomplish immense tasks like the “Carte Du Ciel”) were not quite ready for the transition.

One man, Jean Perrin, saw the need for a new national institution to carry out astrophysical research – an institution which would not be part of any existing structures but would be independent. A left-leaning government had just arrived in Paris, le “Front populaire”, and they fully supported Perrin’s idea. Jean Zay, a minister at the time, signed a decree on the 30th of October 1936 which led to the creation of the Observatoire de Haute Provence (the OHP, in some ways the “observing station” of the IAP), and the IAP itself, initally designated as a centre of research which would analyse data arriving from OHP and devise new instruments for the telescopes. The IAP would be constructed on a patch of ground in the Jardin de L’Observatoire, which the government had requisitioned for this purpose (leading to tensions between the Observatoire and the IAP which persisted for decades). The front populaire was uniquely disposed to these ideas. In fact, Perrin’s visits to the minister Jean Zay’s office invariably resulted in him receiving all the funds he requested.

Construction of the IAP started soon afterwards, and the building’s skeleton was in place by 1940: the interior, however was unfinished, and with the arrival of the Vichy regime and the German occupation, the construction was halted. Nevertheless, as Daniel Chalonge tells us after the war, building work was carried on in secret. Certainly other concerns occupied the scientists. Some left, others remained. Neither Perrin or Zey would survive the war: Perrin left for New York, where he died in 1942. Jean Zey was arrested by the Vichy government and later assassinated. In Paris, two astronomers, Holweck and Solomon, were arrested and executed by the Nazis. Henri Mineur himself was briefly imprisoned, before being released: he spent the remainder of the war in the resistance. Even astronomers long-dead suffered: the statue of Arago on the place Ile-de-Seine, in front of the site of the observatory, was melted down for bullets and shells. But finally, in 1944, some staff moved to the IAP. The building would not be completed until 1952 (and in the 1980s a third floor would be added to create the building as we know it today).

From almost the beginning, both theoretical and observational subjects were investigated at the IAP: spectrophotometric observations of the sun, stellar atmospheres, and every aspect of physical processes in an astrophysical context. We heard how Evry Schatzmann, aided by a large number of students, investigated almost every kind of astrophysical phenomena, and contributed greatly to the international reputation of our institute (but it made life difficult for the students: as they were all working on different topics, none could help each other). At the same time, machine shops and mirror polishing facilities, together with facilities for numerical calculations has ensured that new observations from OHP and elsewhere could be fully exploited. Today at IAP there are no longer any machine shops, but the importance of computing in astrophysics at the IAP has only grown in the intervening years.