by Andrew Gill | Sep 6, 2021 | Gallery, Places, Sport, The Man on the Clapham Omnibus
In our archive we have many photographs of sports teams, some still active and famous, others less so. This one, taken in 1895, is from a large collection of rugby teams and demonstrates that the game was well organised by that time, with local and national leagues,... 
by Andrew Gill | Aug 29, 2021 | Gallery, Places, The Man on the Clapham Omnibus
Scraping a living from a small piece of land has always been hard and never more so than in rural Ireland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Ireland has had more than its fair share of life-threatening crises with chronic, grinding poverty; the potato famine;... 
by Andrew Gill | Aug 29, 2021 | Gallery, Places, Sport
Pheonix Park has been the home of Irish polo since 1873 and is still is. The sport originated some two thousand years ago in Iran and, in the UK, during the days of Empire, was a training game for Army Cavalry units. Known as the ‘Sport of Kings’, it has... 
by Andrew Gill | Aug 28, 2021 | Gallery, Places, Transport
The is the Guinness Brewery in Dublin in the early 1900s. The site was first leased by the Guinness family in 1759 for just £45 per year for 9,000, yes, 9,000 years. If ever a lessor got it wrong, this is it! The thousands of barrels in the yard are amazing but I like... 
by Andrew Gill | Aug 3, 2021 | Gallery, Places, The Man on the Clapham Omnibus
We use peat today as a fertiliser in our gardens but for centuries, in rural communities in Scotland and Ireland, peat was used as fuel for warmth and cooking. By its nature, it’s full of moisture and heavy and digging it out of the ground was back-breaking... 