Trade Names:A Dublin family, in the French polishing business for over 100 years, has also developed a significant sideline in sanding, writes Rose Doyle
In Chancery Street, Dublin 1, in the latter years of the 19th century, Patrick and Mary Kidd (née Bolger) lived and worked and reared six children. Patrick Kidd was an ironmonger and Mary Kidd worked as a French polisher, bringing the skills of that trade, a tradition in her own family, to the Kidd clan. This would have consequences.
Patrick died, too young, from a "lung-related disease", as did many working in the toxic iron works of the time. With several of their offspring still to be reared Mary trained and passed on the trade of French polishing to her only daughter and first-born child, Eileen, forever known as Nellie.
Thus was a French polishing dynasty born.
EV Kidd Ltd, based in Finglas Business Park, is pre-eminent among the country's wood finishing companies. They've polished up Farmleigh House and the Dáil chambers, the Royal Hospital and Árus an Uachtaráin. With a fourth generation now coming on board they're seriously getting into their stride.
Gerard Kidd, managing director, says this generation is "much better at the business end than we were. The future for EV Kidd's very bright."
Vincent Kidd, father of managing director Gerard, was fifth of the six children born to Patrick and Mary Kidd of Chancery Street and came to French polishing, quite literally, by accident. "At a boy scouts' meeting in the church hall the priest sent him to get something," Gerard explains. "The gate was locked so he climbed over the railings to get out. A spike went through his thigh. It was bandaged up and he went home but gangrene set in and he lost the leg three days later.
"Artificial legs weren't big at the time. He had to do something his limited movement could deal with, so his sister Nellie taught him all she knew about French polishing. He'd no intention of doing it before that. In time he got an artificial leg, a very awkward thing that used break all the time with him climbing up ladders and roofs. Growing up we were told he lost the leg fighting in the second World War, fighting on the front, in the Korean war, the Vietnam war - every war ever fought. He was a gas man."
Gerard Kidd is a gas man himself, telling the story with many an energetic digression.
Nellie Kidd married, became Nellie Kelly and rented a small shop in North King Street where she and Vincent French polished all manner of furniture. Another sibling, Joe, worked as a carpenter in the shop. (Another brother Patrick died of TB when he was 21 and Peter, another, invented a plastic raincoat and died aged 40). Nellie called the shop Nellie Kelly's. In 1955 Vincent Kidd married Alice Downes, one of a family of nine.
"When he was first married my father worked on a re-vamping of the QE2," Gerard says. "But he hated England and missed home so he came back and decided to make a go of it with Nellie. The shop's name became EV Kidd (Eileen, Vincent) and today's name was born."
Vincent and Alice Kidd had nine children: Lila, Marie, Gerard, Emmet, Declan, Vincent Jnr, Dermot, Fiona and Louise. Gerard was born on Charleville Avenue, North Strand, and a few years later his father, in the mid 1960s, bought a house on Marquerite Road, Glasnevin, paying £4,500 at auction, then a record price for the northside.
"They needed the bigger house for all of us and a garage and garden to expand the business. My father set up in the garage with his younger brother, Joe, but the French polishing business went very slack in the 1960s. Everything was psychedelic colours, cellulose came in and everyone was spraying everything. Then Joe got talking to a guy who needed the floors in Boland's Flour Mills sanded. Joe bought a machine and we did the job and that's how floor sanding came to be part of the business. I'm sanding floors myself since I was 14. We all worked during school holidays; no masks then but all that's changed now."
The business was run from the Marguerite Road garage and end-of-garden workshop until 1990 with Alice Kidd administrating things "on a typewriter that had no letter J".
"We did everything - spraying, French polishing, floor sanding. I did my Leaving Cert in 1977 and Emmet did his Inter Cert and we both joined the company that year. Two of us used to do wood floors that were a mix of cement and wood chippings, driving to gyms around the country in an old Wolsey with the machines in the back. The machines couldn't take up the sand from the gravel and the dust was unbelievable, and dangerous. We wore jump-suits and had to keep changing masks all the time. We were all brought up in the French polishing trade, though myself, Dermot and Vincent Jnr did more of the sanding end of things. Emmet, Fiona and Declan did French polishing."
Work was hard and times tough and then, in the early 1980s, "a lady from The Irish Times" changed everything. "She had us in to do the floors of her house, wrote an article saying how good we were and, wham, the business took off. That article kick-started things; we were into a whole new trend after it." The "lady" was journalist Ella Shanahan and the article was written 25 years ago.
In 1984 Declan Kidd joined the company. Vincent Jnr joined in 1985, Dermot in 1986, Fiona in 1988. Marie, who has eight children, joined up in 1994, the year Louise also joined. In 1986 they moved to 60 Glasnevin Hill. "My father started selling antiques out of the front of Glasnevin Hill; he'd loved antiques and now the business was being looked after by his sons. In 1990 we built a workshop at the back and base for the vans. We'd a staff of 14, including us five brothers and one sister. Bertie Ahern, as minister for finance, opened the new place. Times got hard again with the early 1990s currency crash. We went on a three-day week, lowered wages and used the front of the building as a coffee-shop. It ended up as a fully-fledged restaurant called Washerwoman's Hill run by Dermot and Louise. Dermot took it over in 2000 and it's doing really well. Louise works part-time there and here."
In 1990 Gerard married Sylvia Kavanagh from Ashford, Co Wicklow. They have three daughters; Sarah, Rebecca and Chloe.
"Then, about 1996, the boom and good times returned and we were flying, a huge amount of floor sanding work on hand."
Flying indeed. EV Kidd Ltd has polished and sanded such as Dublin's Mansion House, Farmleigh House in the Phoenix Park, the K Club, Dublin Castle, The Waterfront in Belfast along with a goodly percentage of the country's everyday floors.
"French polishing is our roots. We're currently restripping and French polishing the whole staircase in Kilkenny Castle by hand and doing the main entrance to the Department of Trade and Enterprise in Kildare Street."
Some of the Kidds have changed course. In 1986 Vincent Jnr and Fiona, with their families, bought the Royal Hotel in Valencia, Co Kerry, and are there, happily and thriving, still. Lila married and lives in Belfast. Emmet has his own French polishing/furniture repair company. Declan works with the family company, as does Marie. So, as floor sanders, do Emmet's son, Emmet James, and two of Marie's offspring, Gerard and Vincent Winston. Gerard Winston is learning to be a French polisher.
"When Vincent and Fiona moved off I though of flogging the whole thing, an idea that lasted all of three seconds," says Gerard. "We've a staff of 20, so EV Kidd looks after a lot of people. We're around over 100 years and still have a lot to offer with great openings now for conservation work. My mother's a director with me but I'll move over to let someone more competent run things when the time comes." He's hopeful and a little wistful: "Maybe one of my daughters will take over."
