Audio recording by Jim Lane about Jim Danny
Groups audience:
Jim Lane talks about Jim Danny (Ryan), of Boherard, and his skill in ironworking.
“It’s riveted because if you go back to those years John.
I think twas the 1940s he could have fabricated the gate and in the rural small places there was no welding. But they had a way of riveting these things. The gate to me is the very same riveting that is done on the fabrication up around the graveyard.
There’s steelworks around it, very artistic, the very same way the rivets are popped in. Seemingly they drive them in hot, and they tap both ends then.If you see the shipbuilding long ago, talking about doing that. The fabrication of bridges - the steel rivets, this is the very same type of thing that Jim Danny was doing those years back.
Q - so you think some of the grave memorials may have been made by the same man?
I am quite sure of it, though there is nothing there to identify (name?) but somebody did tell me that he was the same man that made, em, the wording is a bit worn on the headstone, so I cannot say for sure that twas Jim Danny’s, but if you ask me, I’d say yes! Yes!
Q - was he a blacksmith, was that what he was called?
I dunno was he a smith, he was an all round man, because the blacksmith mostly was to do with shoeing horses and that kind of thing. But he’d do a lot of steel fabrication. I think twas something that he adapted rather than learned from what I know about him. Than he was educated as a blacksmith. He was never known as Jim Danny the blacksmith, you understand, that didn’t go with his name, but he did do steel fabrication.
