Sean McManus was a south Fermanagh man who fetched up in Dún Laoghaire in 1928 and put his name over the elegantly ageless premises at 92 Lower George's Street some 30 years later. He'd become more than a son of the borough by then, his pawnbroker shop a thriving business and benign necessity for the times that were in it, writes Rose Doyle

It remained all of those things, and more, until 1980 when different times and a brutal tragedy forced a business change.

The elegant face of things remained the same, and will too despite more changes on the way. There's nothing much different inside either; gas lamps and shining wood in the shop, shining silver and beautiful jewellery on show, worn stairs climbing to rambling floors and a warren of old rooms behind. For now. The heart and soul of the business has survived too.

Once and briefly endangered it had a stubborn, hard-working family ethos to fall back on and these days, in the safe, hard-working hands of Sean (John) McManus's offspring the business is as integral to Dún Laoghaire, and the family, as ever it was.

Don, Aileen and Stephanie McManus, with their partners in life and an overall staff of 13 people, run a successfully diversified business with elan and a personal touch that has more than good business instinct about it. They love what they do and it shows. Their story, and word of new life on the way for the venerable, 150-year-old building, is told mostly by Don. His style is droll, with flashes of fire.

"Grandfather Francis McManus was a school teacher in south Fermanagh who came a cropper with the oath of allegiance to the queen and whose children had to be distributed and my father went to Newry to apprentice in uncle Patrick McManus's pawnbroker's shop. He was in his teens when he became an assistant manager and only 20, in 1928, when the uncle sent him down to Dún Laoghaire to manage the pawnbrokers he'd opened in these premises in l927."

Fifty years later, in 1978 at Garvey's - his grandfather's old school - the schoolmaster was shot dead in front of his pupils by the IRA. A few short years later, in Dún Laoghaire, the McManus family would make a more intimate acquaintance with violence.

"Paddy fell into the bottle," Don McManus goes on, without missing a beat, "but used come down from Newry to see how the business was going. My father was a diligent man and lived in a little box section downstairs. He had a staff of about 10, including a cook. On Christmas Eve, as a treat, they finished work at 9pm and the cook would make them rashers and sausages. A dog's life, my father said. The pawn queues used stretch down George's Street on Monday mornings. All decent people."

"The staff who were here stayed a long, long time," his busy sister, Aileen adds in passing.

John McManus, in time, moved to digs in the house of a Miss Bourke in Mulgrave Street and, in 1947, when he was 37 years old, married Frances Dillon. They set up home and reared their family on Corrig Avenue, Dún Laoghaire.

Don and Aileen well recall their father's memories, war year stories of the people of Dún Laoghaire being allowed chop wood on Killiney Hill for firewood and of a strike lasting for nearly the whole of 1943.

"Wages were appalling," Don says. "Pawnbrokers' assistants worked for nothing. Daddy had no choice, the uncle understood and took no umbrage. The strike went on as long as it did because the bosses knew there were thousands of pawned bikes which, at auction, would shoot from 1/- to £1 the longer they were held, they being the primary mode of transport during the war."

The 120 strikers went back to work with a 10 per cent increase, a maximum top up of 8/= per week. The flat rate for a manager went up to £5, an apprentice moved from 10/= per month to 35/=, a senior assistant from £2.5.0 per week to £2.10.0. A senior got 5/6 extra, a total of £3.10.6 per week.

John McManus remained in pawnbroking through the 1970s, growing the antique jewellery side of things all the time. "He had a great eye," his son says, "he loved buying expeditions to auction rooms and time with his mates in the business, people like Pat Carthy, Rupert Coffey, Jack Weafer. We never sold new things, always second-hand gold and second-hand diamonds. He'd come home in the evenings with pockets full of gold and silver. I suppose that's how the business, and a feel for it, was fed to us down the years."

"Daddy was a divil," Aileen says, "he played hard and worked hard, really lived life. Eighty Craven A a day got a hold of him in the end and he died at 79." When Don McManus finished school at 17 his father asked him if he'd like to try the business. He recalls the buzz of his London buying trips during the 1970s, of late boats from Dún Laoghaire and early trains arriving at Angel underground for Camden Passage at four in the mornings. He still does it but these days, thanks to Ryanair, he flies. Things were doing nicely, he says, "until the misadventure".

In 1981 half a dozen masked and armed men burst into the family home. Aileen, her father and mother were held downstairs, Don upstairs with a shotgun in his mouth and rope around his neck. They cleaned out the shop, and they cleaned out the shop and its safes. They left absolutely nothing and were never caught.

"We had a dilemma. We were insolvent," Don says. "We had to let all the staff go. Aileen, Stephanie and I started again."

He tells of what he admits were "nightmare times for the family, no counselling, a hell on earth for years", of the loss of the family house, everything.

And of the goodness of the people of Dún Laoghaire and the resurrection of the business. "A lot of people in the trade were good to us," he says, "gave us goods on sale or return basis, gave us credit. I went back to the auction rooms, to the wholesalers and importers and bought anything second-hand I could. We held onto the premises and we weathered the storm, the three of us. We swore we'd never get caught again, that we'd remain part of the business community.

"We diversified and opened Celtic Frames, manufacturing silver frames - Aileen does sales and her husband Ian Kirker looks after the factory, all here on the premises. We also opened a wholesaler and supply solid items to the trade. We've a good name for exclusive diamond rings now. Now, it's easy."

Now he's vice-president of Dún Laoghaire Business Association and on the board of the Dún Laoghaire Harbour Company. "It's a way of giving something back," he says. "Dún Laoghaire's people have been good to me."

Now, and since l982, he's married to Maura (nee MacKeogh)who works in the business with him. They've two children and Maura's mother is a part of things too.

"Modern business safety standards have caught up with the building, and rightly so," Don says, "it has to be renovated and rebuilt and we'll be moving out, temporarily. Business won't stop and the front will be maintained exactly as it is."

We tour the building, briefly, and find, scribbled on the side of a fourth floor skylight in John McManus's hand, praise for his striking workers of l943. Pat Carty's name is there, and Jimmy Coyne's, "all sound and good men" he wrote.

We come across the hundreds of hooks which held bikes too and, in a ledger, the 1941 realities of a boy's pants pawned for 4/6, his socks for 9d and a pair of braces for 1/3d. In a corner, languishing but unbowed, are the three golden balls of the trade.

"We've been united as a family in bad times," Don says, "and now we're united in the good." There's a lot of tradition to hang on to, and a lot of hope for the future.