TRADE NAMES: Despite some knocks, Bridge Jewellers is going strong and growing its business, writes Rose Doyle

WHEN JIMMY Cullen was growing up in Dublin's Lad Lane the family had a goat. This goat was born of a long line of Lad Lane goats and was called Tennessee Williams.

"She was a star in her own right," Jimmy says. "She used travel by taxi to the Eblana Theatre to play in The Rose Tattoo in 1951. She was a milking goat too and, because the cream from goat's milk is good for skin disorders, we used give it to people for psoriasis."

His father, Francey Cullen, kept pigs too, and horses (20 of them at one stage) for drawing coal lorries and milk carts.

Jimmy Cullen's present life and business isn't all that distant from his earlier life. With his wife, Peggy, and their son, James, he runs Bridge Jewellers, niftily located on Shelbourne Road, just before you turn the corner onto the Balls Bridge.

"We do everything in house," James says. "We make and design our own styles and individual pieces as well as classic stuff. We do remounting too, and watch and jewellery repairs."

They're hugely popular in the neighbourhood, a part of the old and newer communities both, their only advertising the word-of-mouth kind.

They've no problem remembering either, stories and yarns tumbling one after the other until the problem becomes one of drawing a halt. What follows is, sadly, a much abbreviated version of the many-faceted Cullen tale.

Jimmy Cullen started his apprenticeship in the "jewellery trade on the day Nelson's Pillar blew up, March 8th, 1966". He was 15, needed a job and wanted one that would involve doing something with his hands.

"Making things appealed to me. My brothers, Francis and David, are the same; David does fancy plasterwork and Francis is a carpenter. I spent 11 years with Irish Diamond Jewellery."

Meanwhile, across the river in Dorset Street, there lived a young woman called Peggy Brady who worked in the clothing trade. In 1972 she went on holiday to Cattolica, Italy where, in a pub one night, she met a holidaying Jimmy Cullen. By 1975 they'd married and bought a house in Greenhills, Tallaght, for £7,000. "Everything's relative," Peggy says of the price.

Jimmy, a very short time after they married, was made redundant. "Lots of places were closing down," he says. "I looked for a job in various factories in Tallaght but there was a recession on, 110,000 people unemployed and interest rates at 16-17 per cent."

Needs must and, when he and colleague Noel Byrne decided to set up a business, Noel found them a workroom at 9 Ballsbridge Avenue to rent from Kathleen Brennan, "a lovely woman". In the event, when Noel moved on to something else, Jimmy set up on his own, with Peggy, in 1977.

"Without Noel we'd never have got the place," Jimmy says. "I had to register then with Ronald Le Bass, the original assay master. He gave me a maker's mark. Then I got my tools organised and a licence to trade in gold. I started making and repairing jewellery and Peggy would collect the parts we needed for the repairs."

Peggy says that "Jimmy used cycle from Greenhills Road with his tools in a straw bag. The women who worked in the Sweepstakes gave us our start. They came to us for everything: communion medals for their grandchildren, watches, presents, rings, everything. They were our wages and they still come in here."

As if on cue an elegant customer arrives from those days. Working in the Sweepstakes was "fun" she says, and she's been coming to Jimmy and Peggy Cullen for all her jewellery needs since those days.

The Cullens had children - Aimee, Sarah and James - and life began moving along nicely. But the jewellery business has in-built hazards and in January 1984 Jimmy Cullen, on his own at 9 Ballsbridge Avenue, was held up, beaten and robbed by seven balaclava-covered men. James jnr was 18 months old.

"It was terrible," Jimmy admits, "they jumped over the counter and knocked my teeth out. We got in one another's way while I was fighting them off, there were that many of us in the small space. I somehow got to the panic button and what saved my life was the fact that a Garda had been in a few days before and told me to make its sound louder. People came running from everywhere and the robbers ran. But we were wiped out. We owed more after that than we'd actually started out with."

Peggy agrees it was "a terrible time, terrible. But we had to get on with it. Our customer base actually grew from the raid. More people got to know us and passed on the word about our work; every adversity brought more custom, we've found."

Colonel, the guard dog they got following the robbery, was another positive, a much-loved Alsatian who would sit on the floor watching everyone come and go. The Cullens had to get on with things too when Hurricane Charlie caused the Dodder to overflow its banks and they were flooded.

They had to leave Ballsbridge Avenue when landlady Kathleen Brennan died. The search for a new premises was well underway when, coming out of the Shelbourne Road post office one day, Peggy saw a "To Let" sign on the premises opposite. "I raced round to Jimmy, said 'it's a gorgeous place' and we set about getting it." A network of connections went into place and, in August 1997, they moved into 57 Shelbourne Road.

"We've got the whole building, the workshops are upstairs," Peggy says. "We nearly live here now, we spend so much time here! We've lovely landlords and a long lease."

Things are going well with the business, albeit in a Ballsbridge which has changed over the years. "The Swastika Laundry's gone and the veterinary college has gone. The mood's changed; it's very, very businesslike now."

James Cullen, who's been making rings for his mother Peggy since he was five years old, joined the business last year after an intense, two-year training stint with the Crafts Council of Ireland in Kilkenny followed by a period with Paul Sheeran Jewellers.

"I was going to go travelling," he admits, "but my Dad got the upstairs part here and said he was going to do renovations and workshops and so I joined up."

Joined up, committed and loving what he does, he leads the way upstairs, to the bright showrooms where a workroom bench beside the window has places for four people as well as calf-skin pouches to collect gold dust and filings as they fall.

"We built in four places at the bench because we're hoping to expand. We can do everything from here," James affirms. "We don't have to send anything out. You need to build trust in the jewellery business; a customer who meets me knows I'm coming upstairs and will finish the job, that I won't be sending it anywhere else. Making our own styles and pieces is very important to us.

"The best designers are people from the street; they see something they like and come to get it made.

"We don't advertise, people hear about us by word of mouth. It's all very family and friends around here. The girls (his sisters) worked here when they were young but have their own careers now. They help out a lot, coming in at Christmas and such times."