Cork woman recalls stories of babysitters, beers and broken knees as Choral Festival marks 70th anniversary

Irish Independent

30-04-2025

A 164-page programme is available on the website corkchoral.ie, which outlines the dozens of events, concerts, and competitions which are set to take place in venues all around the city.
However, it wasn't always like this.
Margot Nagle has been volunteering with the festival since 1962. The 83-year-old says it has taken some time for the event to become the polished international spectacle it is today.
'It's professional now,' Margot tells me, as the city prepares for its latest edition this coming weekend. 'The early days were very basic, sure, we were all learning, but they were good fun days too.
'I'm in the Ballincollig choir and we've been to festivals and they're good, but not a patch on our one down here. It's the friendships that you make there, but as well as that, it's the organisation, which really is top class.
'My father used to take me to the festival because he had a friend involved in it at the time, and I got absolutely hooked on it.' Ballincollig-native Nagle explains, on the eve of the festival. 'I joined a choir called 'The Cork City Choral Society' and we travelled abroad in '64, and because I had school French and German, I did the announcements on stage for the concerts that we used to give.'
'When we came back, Kevin Breen, who's Ger's father (current Chairman of the Festival's Board of Directors) rang me and said, 'we need you at the Choral festival.'
And despite starting off as a programme seller at the festival, word quite literally went around about Margot's polyglot abilities, which led to an abrupt and unexpected promotion.
'Kevin took the programmes out of my hand, gave them to someone else and said, 'I need Margot on stage'.
'That was the start of it!'
From programme seller to stage manager: Margot's 60-year journey
From on stage, Margot found her niche behind the curtain as the stage manager, organising choirs, trophies, helping the MC and putting out last-minute fires during the festival-highlight competitions, which took place at Cork's City Hall.
As you can imagine, things didn't always go to plan.
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'One year I fell going into the hall and had a bad pain in my knee, but I carried on anyway and got through the night. The next morning, I went to the hospital where they took a scan, only to tell me that I had broken my knee, and apparently, I was in shock, that's why I didn't feel the pain. I was just going mad as I was missing the rest of it!
'In those days, there were no mobile phones, no internet, and choirs used to practice in the Model School (now Cork District Court) across the way from City Hall. You'd be taking your life in your hands standing on the road and getting yourself and the choirs across and into the venue!
Choirs in the pub and babies backstage: Behind-the-scenes festival chaos
'One of the conductors refused to go on stage one year because the hem of her dress had come down, so I happened to have a pack of 'for-all-happenables' on the side of the stage, and there was a needle and thread! I told Dan Donovan, who was announcing on the night, to keep going on for another five minutes, while I tacked up the hem of her dress, before she finally went on!
'At one point, I was missing a male voice choir, only to finally find them in a pub. I quite literally walked them straight from the pub onto the stage! Another time I couldn't get a babysitter for my youngest baby, so I put him in a cot down the side of the stage for one of the programme sellers to mind him for the night!
'Later on, there would be a conductor who performed with her baby stuck on her back, so you could say I was ahead of my time on that one!'
As the old adage goes, the show had to go on, no matter whether they were missing talent, volunteers, or even the prizes themselves.
'Another year, the trophies didn't come back on time,' Margot recalls, 'so we had to borrow some school rugby cup trophies to have something on the night! The choirs were presented with them, and then they were given straight back to us off-stage to make sure they weren't missing for the following year's school rugby cup finals!'
Despite the chaos, Nagle says there's nowhere else she'd have rather been for the past 60 years, in the thick of a community which she says is full of friendly and helpful people. Trips around Europe and Ireland have ignited friendships that endure to this day, and get re-sparked every April, when choirs from all around descend on Cork.
However, this year will be bittersweet for Margot, who lost her husband Gus a few weeks ago following a long battle with Parkinson's Disease, but memories of years of him joining her volunteering for her passion will no doubt come flooding back this May Bank Holiday weekend.
'Choirs are very friendly with each other; they have a great affinity with one another. I'm just looking forward to meeting the friends that I've made over the years.
'One of the choirs is the Portadown Male Voice Choir who we made great friends with, and we visited them a few years ago for their 60th anniversary. A few of them rang me the other day because they had heard about Gus, and they wanted to sympathise.
'Gus used help out in the festival club afterwards. He couldn't help out in the last few years, but I used to come home and fill him in with what was happening.
'Gussy was tone deaf; he couldn't sing at all, but he still loved it!'