Kirk's shop

This is the earliest picture I have of my dad, Frank Kirk, the shy looking boy on the left. I don’t know who the other kid is.

I’m guessing that this was taken on the day of his first Holy Communion, the suit and tie wouldn’t have been his normal outfit. Frankie would be seven in this picture, which makes it 1928. 

The boys are sitting on a bench outside what would soon be known as ‘Kirk’s shop’ in Main Street, Newtownstewart. The shop had been owned & run by Lizzie McGlinchey who died on 14 May 1928. Beneficiaries in her will were her sisters, Agnes Kearney and Bella Kirk. 

The shop then passed on to Bella’s eldest son, John James Kirk. It looks like this photo was taken not long after Lizzie’s death, with ‘J.J. Kirk Proprietor’ added under the ‘McGlinchey’ sign. 

As far as I’m aware, Lizzie always kept shop in the same place but this piece from Barney McCool in the Tyrone Constitution (7 November 1980) suggests otherwise: 

There were a few small shops beside there which have also been incorporated into Hood’s buildings.  Do any of you remember Lizzie McGlinchey’s wee shop or Maggie Mullan’s with its wee bell which jingled every time the door opened?  What memories in a sound!  You could have got brandy balls there – four for a penny, and conversation lozenges as well and washed them down with a tuppeny bottle of lemonade. (‘70 Years ago’) 

I think Barney got that wrong and Lizzie always traded from the same location, on the other side of the road, just across from the Bank. 

My dad worked in the shop from an early age and took over when John James died on 1 March 1955.  

In the early ‘60s Frank bought the house next door and incorporated the living room into the shop as a toy showroom. The shop was a typical village store, one of two newsagents in Newtownstewart. Frankie sold groceries, stationery, greetings cards, sweets, cigarettes, records (for a brief time), fresh fish every now & then, stamps, books, toys, ornaments, cutlery, ice cream – anything and everything. The shop also took in parcels from Ulsterbus – the most interesting for me were cardboard boxes with a couple of ferrets inside and big reels of film for the Gorey Cinema. 

For a while dad had a café in the back of the shop, though that must have closed in the mid-sixties, my memories of it are sketchy. Up until the end we still had a Coca Cola fridge, big globe light shades, a ham slicer and all the shelves were there that had been lined with bottles of soft drink when the café was a going concern. 

Apart from the toy showroom, the shop wouldn’t have changed much from John James’ day, until the early ‘70s when my dad did a little DIY and changed things around a bit, most notably getting rid of a small office that John James had where he could keep an eye on all that was going on. Frank had an architect draw up plans for a bigger refurbishment but that was not to be. My father died on 27 September 1976. 

We sold the shop to the Gallaghers who subsequently sold to Pat McNamee. Pat still runs the shop, it’s now a Centra store, unrecognisable from the days when the shop was Frankie Kirk’s.