Mary Leland’s Dwyers of Cork is a lively, fascinating and comprehensive work, full of social, economic and historical insights, depicts the city of the merchant princes in its heyday.
From the outset, James Dwyer symbolised the emergence of powerful middle-class Catholic families in Cork and the gradual decline of the Protestant upper classes. Pre-eminent among the new breed of innovators and manufacturers, he was in fact a blow-in from Tipperary. In his day, however, he was to become one of the most prominent and influential of Cork’s citizens.
An entrepreneur long before the word was in vogue, he founded a family business that was to last for over 160 years. Between the 1820s and the 1980s, from their base in Washington Street, the Dwyers built up an empire that employed thousands of people in a manufacturing conglomerate that included such names as Sunbeam Wolsey, Seafield Gentex, Perdix Shirts and Knitwear, Templemichael Mills, the Lee Boot Factory and Hanover Shoes.