In February 2023, North County Dublin man, Joe Curtis, remembers travelling with his grandfather to John Hamilton’s home in June 1948, to see the National Museum of Ireland film the process of sieve making:

Well, I was about seven or eight, I would be far happier going to the shop in Balrothery for a three pence bar of Cadbury’s Chocolate. I recall my grandfather, although he brought his bicycle with a cushion strapped to the crossbar, walked almost all the way.  The bog road seemed endless and the final bit was uphill which didn’t best please me.

Mr. Hamilton and his family sure made us welcome and I was waiting to be brought to a fancy workshop full of saws, chisels’, gouges etc. as my grandfather and his two sons were carpenters and had a fine old workshop full of old style tools. Instead, Mr. Hamilton had a hatchet, a dangerous looking knife and not much else. What he achieved with sure simple tools was extraordinary.

I got to sit on a white stone at the front door for a short time and we were told stories about fairies and the ‘old days’. We had to move back when the film was being made and stay very quiet.  We were told every sound would be heard if we made noise. When all that finished we set off for home; it was a bit over a mile but a marathon it was to me. My grandfather said we would name all the different bushes and weeds as we went and that did seem to make the journey shorter.”

The resulting photographs and film footage, as well as detailed correspondence between Lucas and Hamilton, and the dozens of related objects that Hamilton donated to the museum, have left us with a comprehensive record of wooden sieve making.

A.T. Lucas went on to release two articles on wooden sieve making. They maintained a good relationship and in a letter to the National Museum of Ireland, John Hamilton expressed relief that:

The filming turned out to be a good job and a good old Irish trade will not be extinct when I am gone."

John Hamilton passed away a short time later at his home in 1954.