Last Wednesday was the 60th anniversary of the marriage of Joan and myself, writes Garret FitzGerald
Nine months earlier, together with three fellow-graduates, I had started to work as an administrative officer in Aer Lingus, at a salary of £300 a year. I began my career sharing an office with colleagues on the top floor of 39 Upper O'Connell Street. It had a telephone and an electric heater - but no other furniture! We sat on the floor beside the telephone and right in front of the heater - for the first three months of that year were the coldest ever remembered in Ireland, with snow on the ground throughout almost all of that period.
My first duty was to assess the needs of the company's managers for various airline journals, which necessitated bearding them in their offices. I then spent a fortnight in the staff and services department, located over Bacon Shops in Grafton Street, next door to Bewleys.
There I was given the task of deciding how much leave the various grades of staff should be accorded. I made sure that I and my three colleagues would have three weeks, and when I discovered that the airline staff included a seamstress, (who I presumed had originally been employed to repair the canvas wings of aircraft that had been withdrawn from service some months earlier), I gave her three weeks leave also.
After these training exercises, I was allocated as an aide to the Aer Lingus assistant secretary - in whose office on a lower floor I was given a desk and a chair, which made life a good deal easier. I recall that one day he was asked to produce without delay a list of Irish saints' names to enable the fleet to be blessed - a duty which we performed by asking his wife and my fiancée to consult the lists of Irish saints at the back of their respective missals!
Meanwhile on February 9th Joan and I had celebrated my 21st birthday by purchasing three-shilling stall seats, (I still have the tickets, which in today's terms cost €5.70), for a symphony concert in the Capitol Cinema. On less auspicious occasions we contented ourselves with the two-shilling seats there!
In April the snows melted, but on April 9th, my father, Desmond FitzGerald, who had been ill with heart trouble during the preceding six months, died. He was only 59 years of age. Whilst his health may have suffered from his four prison experiences between 1915 and 1921, it was probably heavy smoking that led to such an early death.
The summer of 1947 was as hot as the winter had been cold: even in mid-October, when Joan and I were honeymooning in London, it was so warm that I could not wear a jacket in the street.
My starting salary had been slightly above the average industrial wage, but around the time we married it was raised to £450 a year - giving us an initial marital purchasing power equivalent to €17,500 today. On marriage Joan was, of course, required to give up her own job on the cash desk of the UCD Earlsfort Terrace cafeteria - but even if that had not been required, the curious social mores of that time would in any event have made it seem inappropriate for one's wife to continue to work after marriage.
After making allowance for the cost of an important dance in the RDS, I had built up savings of £193 by the month of August - just under €7,500 at today's purchasing power.
Together with anything I might save in September, that had to cover the furnishing of the three-room flat that we were to rent on the top floor of Joan's mother's house near the top of Booterstown Avenue, (seeking a mortgage to buy a dwelling was of course out of the question at that stage), as well as the cost of furnishing it, the wedding ceremony, and, finally, the London honeymoon.
In the event, that sum proved inadequate for all these purposes and I had to borrow £18 (€700 in today's money) from her during the honeymoon. As I was unable subsequently to repay this sum, Joan not unreasonably claimed the right to spend that amount out of our household income for her own purposes - although I had the feeling that she may eventually have exercised that right several times over!
Meanwhile on our return at the end of October I and my three colleagues were adjudged to be ready for serious work in various parts of the company. Most oddly - for I would have been a quite hopeless salesman - I was allocated to a new sales department. There I was largely left to myself - I suspect that my boss knew I would be no use as a salesman - so I spent my time reviewing the disastrous performance of the company during the winter of 1947/48. Without any research whatever, it had set about opening routes to here, there and everywhere, most of which lost money hand over fist.
Already, during my training period I had produced tentative route accounts - an innovation which had won no praise from the company secretary, who during that period had been my ultimate boss - and I had also presented to the more receptive traffic manager proposals for domestic air routes, which, however, were premature at that stage.
Now in my new department I kept a close eye on traffic flows - although of course this was not my job. I recall suggesting to my boss at the end of November that as during the first three weeks of a new Shannon-Paris air service no paying passengers had used the service, perhaps it should be discontinued - a suggestion which I have to say was acted on promptly. I also forecast - correctly as it turned out - that fewer than 10 per cent of the seats on a weekly 58-seat service to Rome would be filled in December and January, and that too was cancelled.
But the cancellation of the proposed transatlantic service which had been due to start in March 1948 was not a consequence of my forecast that barely 20 per cent of the seats would be filled and that it would lose £1 million (almost €40 million in today's money). That particular decision was wisely imposed on a deeply resentful airline by a coalition government elected in February 1948.
So much for how I spent the year 1947. It was a difficult year for the country and an expensive one for our national airline. For my part the year contained tragedy - my father's premature death - but it also marked the start in this week 60 years ago of a very happy and fulfilling marriage, and also the start of the first of a succession of careers in transport, academic life, consultancy, journalism and politics which I have greatly enjoyed during the ensuing 60 years.
And they're not over yet!