With an accordion for every day of the week, plus one to spare, Ashley Wholihan is rarely seen without one of his prized instruments to hand. Just shy of his ninetieth year, with one foot in Glengarriff and the other in Kenya, and still regularly driving to sessions around West Cork and further afield, Mary O’Brien finds that the Bantry native, who was responsible for the establishment of Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann in Bantry in the 70s, is proof that music does indeed give “wings to the mind” and “flight to the imagination”.
Born in Bantry in 1936 and christened John Wholihan – because in those days priests shunned any name other than a saint’s – he has never been known as anything other than Ashley, the name favoured by his mother. The Wholihan household was steeped in Irish traditional music going back generations on both sides. One of four children, Ashley’s first instrument was a mouth organ, bought with five schillings savings. “I played the Jew’s Harp as well,” he adds “as that’s all we could afford.” The Jew’s Harp is a simple instrument consisting of a flexible metal reed attached to a frame. By the age of eight, Ashley had already mastered the accordion, self-taught, and was joining in at sessions in the local pub.
After finishing school, he trained as a mechanic under his father at Vickery’s Garage in Bantry before going on to work at the Whitegate refinery in East Cork. From there he got the opportunity to work abroad spending the next few years visiting places like Germany, Denmark, Mozambique, Libya, Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Cyprus.
He was building oil storage tanks for an American company in Cyprus during the 1950s, a time when the island was plagued with violence and unrest between the Turkish and Greek communities.
On a day when Greek Cypriots attacked the Turkish Cypriot quarter, Ashley was sitting with a friend on a balcony reading a newspaper, just up the street from the Turkish quarter.
“One of the Greek Cypriots had approached me the previous day looking for steel plates to attach to a JCB. He wanted to turn it into a tank and mount a machine gun on it! recalls Ashley. “I refused, giving the excuse that the steel belonged to the customer.
“The next morning, we saw a group brandishing guns, including the guy on the JCB, approach the Turkish quarter. My friend, who was a bit of a joker, stood up and shouted ‘come on the Turks’ and the next thing we knew they had turned the machine guns on us. Fortunately the bullets missed our heads and hit the wall of the veranda, breaking off a piece of concrete, which fell on my friend’s head.”
“People were always walking into bars there with guns and pointing them at us,” shrugs Ashley. “We got used to it.”
Ashley fell in love with Africa in Mozambique, spending much of his downtime on safari in the wild and beautiful Gorongosa National Park.
He remembers hiring a boat with a friend and travelling up the Limpopo river because they wanted to discover somewhere no other Irish person had ever stepped foot before. “After a few hours we stopped off at a little corral for a drink,” he says. “We were in the middle of nowhere but when the lady opened the coca-cola bottle for me with a Guinness bottle opener, I knew it was a lost cause,” he laughs. “I said to myself they were here before us.” Ashley brought the bottle opener home as a memento and still has it today.
In the mid-60s, Ashley met and married his sweetheart and fellow musician Catherine, a Castletownbere native. After they lived abroad for a few years, Ashley joined a company in Belgium that was building storage tanks on Whiddy Island, and the couple returned home to West Cork. They built a house in Castletownbere, where they raised their family, a daughter and a son; and Ashley spent the rest of his career working on Whiddy, taking part in the clean-up after the oil tanker ‘Betelgeuse’ exploded in Bantry Bay. In 1986, he was in charge of building a ferry servicing the old oil terminal, which was named the ‘Catherine W’ after his wife.
Outside of his work at the oil terminal, Ashley was responsible for the preservation and promotion of Irish traditional music through the Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann group, teaching the music collected by the legendary Francis O’Neill, to children all over West Cork from the 1970s onwards and inspiring the setup of many of the music sessions around Bantry and Beara still running today. “Many of my students are now playing and teaching music all over the world,” says Ashley proudly, recalling a photograph one student sent him showing her playing the accordion onstage at her own wedding in Australia.
Close to home, a highlight on the West Cork musical calendar was always ‘The Wran’ on December 26, where Ashley and his fellow musicians would call on houses in the Borlin Valley playing music and collecting money for a community project. The infamous ‘Wran’ balls always took place afterwards.
“There would have been set dancing in one room, people playing cards in another, old ladies chatting in another room and out in the barn there were barrels of porter and a drop of the queer stuff! It went on for days,” recalls Ashley nostalgically.
Before their children came along, Ashley and his wife Catherine, who played the fiddle, regularly attended sessions together. Little wonder their children were born musicians. “Séan’s a multi-instrumentalist. He had a tin whistle in his back pocket from the time he could walk and is a well-known banjo player all over Ireland and the UK today. Liz is a great singer,” says Ashley proudly.
Today Ashley has traded in teaching for consulting – he was involved in the recent celebrations commemorating John Philip Holland, the inventor and designer of the first submarines, with links to Bantry – but still spends at least half of every day playing and researching music or transcribing from his precious old 78 records. He has collected thousands of songs stored in old tomato boxes: ‘Palmer’s Gate’ the traditional Irish reel by Joe Liddy is a favourite.
A few years after his wife passed away in 2013, the pensioner, in his 70s, decided to sell the family home in Castletownbere and downsize to a mobile home in Glengarriff, so he could afford to build a house in Kenya looking across to Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, where he still spends a few months of every year.
He has friends there and grows vegetables in his greenhouse, handing out any surplus to passersby. “It’s a very poor region but I love the people and the heat doesn’t bother me,” he says. “It’s a very simple life.”
Back home in West Cork his Paolo Soprani button accordion is always beckoning however, so he’s never away from the session in Glengarriff for too long. (It takes place every Friday night in The Maple Leaf pub from 9pm. All welcome.) “I’ll hurry back,” he says with a smile.
