Cornering the quality pen business

Trade Names  The Pen Corner has been an institution on College Green since the 1920s while all around has changed utterly, reports…

Trade Names  The Pen Corner has been an institution on College Green since the 1920s while all around has changed utterly, reports Rose Doyle.

For John FitzGerald the "nicest things" about his line of business are the personal contacts and customers who tell him things he doesn't know.

He meets quite a few of the latter: people who're particular about the kind of pen they use tend to be enthusiastically involved with life around them. A bit like John himself, the third generation Fitzgerald to run The Pen Corner, that quietly enduring, where-would-we-be-without-it landmark oasis on College Green.

Pens, people and planning exercise John FitzGerald's passions. Pens and people, because they're his business, planning because of what the lack of it has done to the medieval and commercial centre of city on The Pen Corner's doorstep.

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The shop hasn't changed much, he says, since his great aunt Florence FitzGerald set it up with her husband in 1927. Not physically anyway, though pens and pen technology have changed.

The building which houses The Pen Corner has been on College Green since the late 19th century. Originally owned by life insurance companies, it went into private ownership in 1986. The first retail tenants were the AA when it followed automobiles into Ireland in the early years of the 20th century. When it moved out John FitzGerald's Aunt Florrie and her husband moved in and set up The Pen Corner.

Florence FitzGerald and Paddy O'Brien met each other while working in Helys of Dame Street. Encouraged by a benign Mr Hely, who saw an opening in what he saw as the new technology of fountain pens, they started their own business. When Paddy O'Brien died in 1933 his wife carried on; she did so until she died in 1982.

Long before that, according to John, she'd achieved definite "grand dame" status. He remembers her as "very sociable. Her milieu was the world of Jammets and the old Brown Thomas. When her husband died his shares were dispersed to his family, who choose not to take an active part in things.

"Everyone knew my aunt as Florrie and she ran the business with the support of two people. One was her brother, George, who was my grandfather and an accountant and who gave her business advice. The other was a lady called Ms Dunlop, a really hard working woman and interesting character who managed the shop while my aunt, as director, ran things from her office."

He puts his mind to remembering how things were in her day. "This was a classic, old-style shop with a bell and a small door. All sorts of people bought their pens here. Lord Killanin was a regular and friend of my aunt. He brought Prince Rainier and Princess Grace shopping here in the 1950s. Oddly, it's not writers who're fussiest about pens - they'll use anything - actors are particular though and so, these days, are rock stars."

Like Kurt Cobain who dropped in, in the late 1980s, to buy odds and ends of stationary. John didn't know who he was until he signed his credit card.

Before all that, in the late 1920s, fountain pens were very much the new technology. "I suppose now we'd call them a lifestyle accessory," John grins. "In those days the shop only sold inks and fountain pens and some of the original and traditional suppliers are still going strong - companies like Parker, Watermans and Sheaffer. There are many more which have ceased to exist though - the likes of Swan, Conway-Stewart and Onato are all gone."

The war years offer interesting anecdotes. "Nibs were made of gold and there was an embargo on gold during the war," John produces a curled and tapering piece of glass, "so Mirano glass became a solution for a while." He shows how the glass nib was fitted, how the ink circled and flowed, then tells how his Aunt Florrie came up with a supply solution of her own just after the war. "Parker and the other companies in the UK were unable to supply gold nibs but gold was available in America. She went there on the Queen Mary and smuggled Sheaffer pens back under her skirts. Only 20 or 30 of them but they would have been a high value item. She was instrumental in setting up the distribution of Sheaffer pens in Ireland."

John FitzGerald's father, Maurice, came into the business in 1946, an almost unimaginable career change for a man who'd fought with the British 8th Army in north Africa, followed on to Monte Casino and took part in the liberation of Greece. He died, too young, in 1987.

Maurice FitzGerald was 24 when he came home from war. "He went on the road," John explains. "Aunty Florrie stayed in the shop while he imported pens and sold them around the country in the 1940s and 1950s. There wasn't a lot of business in those years and a lot of pen companies went to the wall. The biro came in then too, the first ever made of sterling silver and costing a week's wages. It meant we were selling new technology again!"

While Elizabeth FitzGerald, John's mother, gave up working with Max Factor to rear five children in Glasnevin, her husband Maurice introduced the country to Mont Blanc and Cross pens. Her sister-in-law, Florence, and Miss Dunlop continued to run the shop.

"Over the years Dad became more and more involved in the day-to-day running of the business," John explains. "When Florrie died it made sense to buy out the shareholders, so that's what he did and ran the business until he died, aged 67, in 1982." He allows himself a personally reflective moment. "It's odd," he admits, "being in the same geographical situation as my father, doing the same job and facing the same business situations."

He took over the shop some 16 years ago, after taking a degree in art history and archaeology in TCD. The 1980s were "bad times" and he didn't make any major changes to the company. "Businesses which survive as long as this are, to a certain extent, recession-proof," he says.

"Then, too, pens sell when people are flush with cash and signing off contracts. A pen is a high value token to give."

He is voluble, and clear, about the effects of the lowering of EU trade barriers, something of which he was originally in favour. "It used be I could phone a distributer in Stillorgan and an order would arrive next day. Now most come through the UK and returns and repairs have to go back there. It means too that we no longer employ as many people locally."

The Pen Corner employs three/four people these days. Service technician Pat Martin has been with the company about 35 years, Aileen Morin manages the shop and Grainne McHugh is a sales assistant. Part-time employees are taken on for seasonal work.

John Fitzgerald unequivocally laments changes to the city too. "The Central Bank happening was new vision, I suppose," he gives a dry laugh, "but the heart's been taken out of the working environment and the rest left to die. Temple Bar is worse than death! I don't even go any longer to its excellent art venues and don't quite see what their context is within the city."

As for pens and selling them: Cross, Parker, Watermans and Mont Blanc are still fine, solid brand names selling to a traditional customer base of professionals, doctors, legal and banking people. "Pens," John says, "tend to sell as prestige presents at one end of the market while at the other end there are those who just love using fountain pens. We sell roller ball pens too, propelling pencils, biros, a small range of briefcases, social stationary. But," he is adamant, "the core of the business is still pens."

The most expensive item they sell is a limited edition Mont Blanc costing €4,920. There are 888 of them in the world. The cheapest is a drawing pencil costing €1. The Pen Corner does not, John says, sell cheap biros. He himself varies between using "a nice Mont Blanc and an auld biro". His siblings, when they need pens, come to the shop.

"I would very much like," he says as I leave, "to thank all the customers who keep us in business - and who tell me things I don't know!"