In March 1985, Brian Scanlon’s father came home with a Panasonic video camera. Brian was fifteen. From the minute he had it in his hands, he says, he was filming everything.

People told him to get it out of their faces. Brian told them that in thirty or forty years they would appreciate it. Nearly forty years later, his footage of the 1985 Boyle Arts Festival is on YouTube, packed with faces the town has not seen since, and they do.

The camera still works, and Brian’s memory goes back well before 1985.

“To me, that’s memories, and it’s very precious memories.”

The pub was never my scene

Brian’s earliest clear memory of town is the hot summer of 1976, and his father bringing him into Flaherty’s music shop.

His father bought Scanlon’s at auction in November 1969, a month before Brian was born, and opened it in 1970. The family moved in over the pub in 1973 and stayed until 1984. Brian is honest about it. The pub was never his scene. He wanted to be upstairs.

The Scanlons were the second family in Boyle with a colour television. When it broke down the evening At the Earth’s Core was on, his father told him to watch it in the bar. Brian sat among the men with their pints, could not settle, and never finished the film.

“The pub was never my scene. I never liked the pub.”

I was able to fix things

Brian had glue ear as a child and needed surgery every couple of years to have grommets put in. At about eight, packing his bag for the hospital, his Philips transistor radio fell out, and the doctor looked down at it and said he would love to have it. He had a radio of his own, a small white pocket set, and asked if Brian would swap. Brian did, and spent hours with that little radio. When it broke, he opened it up and fixed it.

After that, word got around. People started sending him their radios. By twelve he had moved on to the family television, replacing the valves himself with parts his father bought in town. His father, a railway signalman who had started at fifteen as a boy porter, would warn him not to electrocute himself. Brian knew which parts were live.

He got one shock in all those years. His uncle George’s black and white set had tipped over and broken a valve. Brian replaced it, then put his hand in without unplugging it, and it threw him across the room. He says he looked back at the picture on the screen and thought that was an awful stupid thing to do.

Don’t you dare touch that clock

In the room over the pub there was a press, and in the press was a wind up alarm clock with a bell on top and numbers Brian had never seen before. They were Roman numerals. His father saw him looking at it and told him not to dare touch it.

Brian looked at the clock and decided it was done for. He threw it out the window, three storeys up. It missed the painter below, Jimmy McKiernan, by inches. The clock survived the fall without a scratch.

His explanation is simple. He was always looking for knowledge.

You’re now a proprietor of a pub

In the 1920s the building belonged to Frank Cunningham, a strict owner who made his workers whistle while they bottled so he would know they were not drinking. There was a pub at one end and a grocery at the other, and Brian still has the old pigeonholes in his shed. Carlo has also read of the inner sanctum, bank managers, solicitors and doctors who met in the back room every night.

Brian’s father had given up cigarettes to buy a car, and ran a hackney service from the 1950s. People waiting for him ended up in the family’s front room, drying out by the fire. A pub, he reasoned, would kill two birds with one stone.

He went to the auction, stood at the back by the door where nobody noticed him, and the hammer came down. Nobody knew who had bought the place. Brian’s mother found out when one of the drivers came in and told her she was now a proprietor of a pub.

She was a music teacher

Brian’s mother taught music. In the 1960s, before he was born, she taught students at a hall. She played the violin and the piano, and she sang. Brian has a CD of her singing and would love to get it online.

She named the pub’s music lounge the John McCormack Room, after the Irish tenor. Brian was too young to be let in, so he would lie upstairs with his ear to the floor and listen to her playing below. Boyle had more than thirty pubs then, and Brian remembers the town buzzing, busier than Carrick-on-Shannon.

You have to walk before you’ll be able to run

Brian started on his mother’s organ at thirteen. She showed him the basics, then caught him playing the black keys and asked him why. She told him he had to walk before he could run.

“I just wasn’t happy with just the plain white keys. I want to go into the black keys as well.”

He has never been able to read music, but he can play in any key, and at seventeen a band member heard him at a wedding and asked him to join. His mother would not allow it. In 1987 the organ was traded for a keyboard, and that year he recorded himself playing with his mother, the only video he has of the two of them together. It is on his YouTube channel.

His real love is the piano. In 1985 his aunt Phyllis was ill, and the family spent a lot of time in Dublin before she died. Brian always found an excuse to get into Walton’s music shop, where there was a baby grand priced at £6,000. One day he looked around, saw nobody, and played his heart out. When he finished there were about twenty people standing behind him. He had always been shy about playing in front of people. He still wants a baby grand. Asked where he would put it, Brian says he would make space.

A very bright blue colour

Carlo remembers being scared as a boy of Frankie Keaney, known around town as Forty Coats, who used to stand near the public toilets beside the Lourdes Café. Brian says he had no reason to be. Frankie was a gentleman who kept to himself, and a very gentle person.

Coming up to Christmas in 1982, Brian’s mother told the family Frankie had a new coat. They all laughed, and Brian looked out across the bridge to see him walking over in it. It was short, and a very bright blue. From then on, Brian says, he was Forty One Coats.

I was filming everything

A three hour tape cost £10, so some things were taped over. Brian is still kicking himself about the ladies’ football he filmed at the Pleasure Grounds.

Others were lost to damp. Patrick Quinn, who had wonderful footage of his own, gave Brian a load of old Philips V2000 tapes, all mouldy and completely gone. Some of Brian’s own have gone the same way, but around 2008 he moved a lot across to DVD, and he is glad now that he did.

He gave the 1985 Arts Festival footage on disc to P. Higgins, who put it up on his channel. Brian also has the 1985 St Patrick’s Day parade, which has never been online, and plenty more. He believes it belongs to the people of Boyle, and he would love to see anyone else’s old film of the town.

“It was rock solid. It never gave a trouble.”

It was rock solid

At first he swung the camera too fast and his family said it made them dizzy, until his brother Paul spotted a tripod in a Dublin shop window at the time of the Spring Show.

In 1987 he filmed Give Us a Clue at the Forest Park Hotel, a fundraiser hosted by Michael Gilmartin, with Monty doing the music afterwards. A friend of Brian’s, who has since died, helped him put it on his YouTube channel. The Panasonic camera, with its NV-180 recorder, still works.

Just unfortunate events

In 1977 the lights went out in the house the night DH Burke’s burned, and the same year St Joseph’s Church went on fire. Brian’s understanding is that a heater was left on in a confessional. Carlo mentions that James Camden, on his own episode, recalled talk around town of an arsonist, with Camden’s warehouse on Patrick Street burning too. Brian does not believe it. As far as he knows, they were unfortunate events and electrical faults.

Scanlon’s itself went on fire in June 1979. It was an electrical fault, and it was investigated. That fire finished the John McCormack Room, and it destroyed his mother’s piano.

Years later, in the early 2000s, he came within fifteen minutes of the robbery at the National Irish Bank. He had just lodged money and left when it happened. He thinks the robbers had guns. Nobody was hurt.

My faith is very important to me

Since 2014 Brian has been part of a prayer group at St Joseph’s Family Resource Centre, started by his friend Normie Levin. He says she knows her scripture better than he does.

He is sorry to see religion fading. When he was young, he says, you were proud to say you were Catholic, and now people feel they have to be mindful of other cultures and beliefs. He objects to the Angelus no longer showing the Virgin Mary and the child Jesus, which he says was the number one thing in his house growing up, and he still keeps a Sacred Heart picture. He is clear that he respects other people’s religions, and says he will not change his own for anybody.

He says his faith brought him through hard times, and that when you are at your lowest, you come face to face with what you believe.

It’s time to get out

When COVID arrived in March 2020, Brian thought it would last a couple of weeks. When he was told it could be ten years before things were back to normal, he decided it was time to get out, and he sold the family business. He has no regrets. He says he was never afraid of the virus himself, and that some of the restrictions were over the top, though he believes the town has not fully recovered.

He is no fan of the widened footpaths either. He would rather walk into town, but plenty of people cannot, including friends of his who need the car. He does not see why parking had to be taken away.

Long may it last

For all that, Brian is hopeful. He does not want Boyle to be a forgotten town. Carrick is doing well, and good luck to them, but Brian has lived in Boyle all his life and intends to stay. He thinks there are better times ahead, and that the people of the town will have to stand up for it.

His advice to young people growing up here is short. Don’t lose hope. There is a bright future there for them. He finishes by saying he has had wonderful times in Boyle, some sad ones too, and that the people are his inspiration.

“Long may it last.”

Brian still loves fixing TVs!

Brian still has the exact video camera he used from back in 1985 to record the Boyle Arts Festival footage that’s on YouTube!