AS mentioned in last week’s Irish Post, one of Ireland’s finest heroes has died.
Thomas Caffrey, 92, was the country’s leading chocolatier, having created the delights of the Snowball, the Chocolate Mallow, the Tea Cake and Mint Crisp bars amongst many others.
Now I’m something of an inveterate buyer of chocolate — a chocoshopoholic in fact. Anything from a Crunchie to a bar of black chocolate (which I suspect may very well be narcotic) will do me.
In fact I once went to the doctor to find out if I had chocolate addiction syndrome, but it turned out I was just greedy.
The month of May also saw the death of a man whose creation is as ubiquitous as chocolate — and has a distant resonance with it.
John Shepherd-Barron, the man credited with being the inventor of the world’s first hole-in-the-wall cash dispenser, died in hospital in Inverness.
The Indian-born Scotsman was 84. In an interview with the BBC in 2007, Mr Shepherd-Barron said: “It struck me there must be a way I could get my own money, anywhere in the world or Britain. I hit upon the idea of a chocolate bar dispenser, but replacing chocolate with cash.”
His wife told him that people would only be able to remember four figures easily; he agreed with that, and so the ubiquitous quatro-pin number was born.
(I sometimes wonder if it might not have been better had Thomas Caffrey also come up with the idea of a pin number allowing you only to buy one confectional item per day. It seems to go against all the laws of physics, but a quarter-pound box of chocolate somehow manages to put on a stone of body weight.)
The world’s first ATM was officially opened by Reg Varney from On The Buses in Enfield in 1967.
Needless to say, it was vandalised. But whether this was mindless violence, an anticapitalist protest, or perhaps even Blakey, the depot inspector, objecting to the way he’s portrayed in On The Buses, has never been revealed.