The Gallaghers of Ballinrobe

The settle bed was a
common item in
Irish homes. It
could be extended
into a bed or pulled
up to provide extra
seating. Uncle Tom
once speculated
that the dark, damp
location where the
settle bed was kept
might have
contributed to
Uncle Michael
contracting TB.
by Louis Jacot. The watch would eventually pass to the
next oldest son, Uncle John, then Uncle Jim (who promptly
lost the gold chain on a trip to Dublin), Uncle Owen and
eventually to Uncle Jim’s son Pat.
The family has no known pictures of Michael.
However, Uncle Owen said he could remember two
occasions when his brother’s photo appeared in a
newspaper. The first incident occurred when a biplane
crash-landed in a field close to Ballinrobe. Michael was
among a group who went to assist the pilot. The local
newspaper published a photo of the group, Uncle Owen
recalled. The specific incident is unclear, but there would
have been at least a few planes down in the area at the time,
often flying from temporary aerodromes, or airports, set up
by the British military. There was one such facility near
Castlebar. The second published picture involved the
Ballinrobe horse races. There was a photo of the stands,
with Michael among the crowd. Uncle Owen said he
remembered looking at the picture and trying to identify
Michael. He specifically remembered Uncle Pete bragging
that he could identify any Gallagher anywhere. That day's
races would have been at a different location than the
modern Ballinrobe Race Course, which didn’t hold its first
race meeting at Rathcarreen until 1921.
In addition to the downed plane Uncle Owen
remembered Michael seeing, there was an incident
involving a pilot crash-landing in 1935 that made both local
and international headlines. This crash occurred in
Cloongowla, just northwest of town, where Felix Waitkus’
planned flight from New York to Lithuania came up a little
short. An account on the front page of The New York Times
reported: “Country folk raced to the field where the
American aviator landed. He stepped from the plane
uninjured and was taken to the thatched cottage of a
resident named Paddy Walsh. There the cottagers prepared
breakfast for him; following which he borrowed a bicycle
on which he rode to the town of Ballinrobe, a mile away, to
report his arrival to local police authorities.” (The incident
was the first of only two times in the twentieth century
Ballinrobe was mentioned in a news story in the New York
Times archive. The other was a visit by U.S. First Lady Pat
Nixon in 1970. Landlord-tenant farmer clashes made the
paper a few times in the late 1800s.)
Another memory of Uncle Michael comes from
his brother Tom. “Michael used to love sleeping in the
settle bed,” Uncle Tom recalled, referring to the Irish
version of a modern sofa bed. They were common in Irish
cottages in the 1800s. A settle bed was typically a large,
heavy piece of wooden furniture that would extend to form
a bed. In the Gallagher cottage, it sat in a nook in the wall
next to the fireplace. “At Christmas and other occasions
when they would have several guests,” Aunt Nora said,
“the settle bed would be folded back into a bench for more
room and extra seating.”
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