The grocery shop is the index of society. A half an hour in a supermarket will tell you almost all you need to know about the community it serves. For the primary transactions in life occur with the purchase of food and domestic commodities. To know about the history of the Irish grocer is to have an astonishing insight into the rich and the poor of an entire society.
No family was at the heart of this vital process in Dublin so long as the Findlater family, and Alex Findlater's new history of the family and its role in the commerce of the city is without question the most important book about Dublin to have appeared this year, or indeed in recent years. For it is not just a history of a few shops and the things people bought, but it also a history of the people from which Alex comes, and which is now on the verge of extinction: the old Protestant, unionist community, which once filled Rathgar and Rathmines, Sandymount, Ailesbury Road, Blackrock and Dun Laoghaire, and which is now almost no more.
Surrender at GPO
As Alex's story tells us, it was certainly not any conscious wish of the founders of the new State that this should be so. Alex's great uncle, Harry de Courcy Wheeler, as a serving British army officer, in 1916 took the surrender of the garrison at the GPO.
He was the first stage en route to the firing squad and the quicklime grave. Yet he was not made unwelcome in the new State, for all understood he had been doing his duty, and he became a friend of de Valera and Sean T.O'Kelly, and as a patriotic Irishman was an ardent promoter of turf as fuel.
The Findlater family were unionist, and unashamedly so. And it is one of the great pities of the emerging Republic that unionist people did not declare their pride in their traditions; it might have made Northern unionists more mellow in their perceptions both their own minority, and in their relations with the majority community with whom they shared the island. It was not to be; and tragically so.
But perhaps southern Irish Protestants were scared to speak out; so, silently they watched their community haemhorrage. Alex reminds us of the statistics. In 1910, 10 per cent of the population of the present 26 counties were Protestant. Seventy years later the figure was 3.47 per cent. What is it now? Moreover, there was frequently an institutional aggressiveness about Irish Catholicism - as attested by the perfectly shocking coup by the Knights of Columbanus to seize control of the Meath Hospital - which can only have been unnerving for the Protestant minority.
That said, the reassuring truth about the Findlaters is that though no one doubted where the family sympathies lay, this seems to have had no repercussions on their businesses across Dublin. What did for the Findlater grocery chain wasn't sectarianism but their own failure to embrace the culture of the supermarket, as Feargal Quinn, also the scion of a grocery family, managed to do. But perhaps it is right that it was so; perhaps the name and the culture of Findlater were inherently personal and cross-counter, and I suspect that is how Feargal Quinn would like to run his business, even now.
Affable commerce
That appetite for affable commerce enabled Alex Findlater to transform the remnants of the old grocery chain into an extraordinarily successful wine business in Rathmines, and it was the enterprising Findlater eye for an opportunity which caused him to move that business to the old vaults in Harcourt Street. The development of those vaults beneath the closed-down railway station turned out to be one of the turning points in the history of Dublin. By setting down roots in the city centre, Alex showed that the future of the capital did not lie in the southern suburbs; and so it has proved.
Even as he built up his wine business, he was working on his history of the Findlater family and its role in Dublin, using the vast archives which the Findlater's instinctively assemble, just as bees cannot help making a hive. He was also aided by the reassuring longevity of so many of his family, which seems to carry them effortlessly from one archaeological epoch to the next. His aunt Sheila, 97, told him (over sherry, naturally) of her life within a once vital, intact and entire world which is now all but extinct: Lady Meath, Irish Girl Guides, Lady Baden Powell, Irish Countrywoman's Association, handicrafts, gardens, Friends of St Patrick's Cathedral.
Finest wines
For all the enchanting images those words convey, Findlaters were always people of commerce, and as a wine merchant, Alex established an agency with some of the finest wines from across the world: Penfolds, Royal Tokaji, Cloudy Bay, Veuve Cliquot, Krug, Ayala, Bouchard PΦre et Fils, Chateau Meaume, Louis Michael and many others.
The publication of his history of the Findlater family also marks his departure from the front rank of the company, though he will remain its ambassador at large. He has brought to the business of writing the family history the same charm, the same cleverness and the same attention to detail which made him the outstandingly successful and popular businessman that he is. It is not merely a hugely entertaining and ravishingly illustrated account of a commercial caste which is now all but gone - the pictures alone merit its purchase; but it is also a seriously important insight into a neglected part of Irish history over the 19th and 20th centuries.