Paul Malpas

After reading my blog yesterday, David Laws, once Chief Secretary to the Treasury, resigned immediately.  But like a hen with its head cut off running round the farmyard, David Laws is still sheep-shagging, he is still shagging us, the people, the flock, with unbelievable spin coming out of every coalition members voice box.

I have just been listening to Vince Cable, a politician I admired up until this morning, talking in the aftermath of the only thing that David Laws ever did right in his life.  Sky News asked him if he thought David Laws had to resign.  Our Vince, with a sideways look at someone off camera, presumably holding a Kaleshnikov said “No he didn’t, he did not do this for personal gain, he did it to retain his privacy.  It was a mistake and David knows it but he has done nothing wrong”.

Now if fiddling many thousands of pounds out of the public purse, a purse David was there to protect, is not wrong, let us all go and rob a bank or a post office.  I do not get this argument at all.  I have looked at his problem from all angles and I suppose he did have a problem packing good solid muck up his partner, James Lundie’s anal passage, which was always prone to leakage because his sphincter had been severely damaged by years of unnecessary activity, but how do the politicians expect us to believe that he did it to retain his privacy.  He did not have to claim the money in the first place, but as he did claim it, he could have given it back, saying he was well enough off not to need it.  To give it back when he was caught bang to rights means he was doing it for personal gain.  Greed had taken over.

The politicians still think we are sheep and they are still shagging us with lies and hypocrisy.  Cable went on to say “the people out there will understand the decency of the man and know that he did not do it for personal gain”.  Well if Vince Cable can come out with this clap-trap, just like Nick Clegg did last night, then I realize that this brave new world that Cameron promised us last week, is indeed the same old, same old.

Will someone out there please tell these political pricks, that we are not mindless morons who unbelievably use our phalli for what god made them for and not for shagging young boys and Downs Syndrome kids, but we are intelligent people who will hopefully at some stage bite back.   We can tell right from wrong.

Lastly I would like to apologise to my readers for the strong language used in this posting but I have found that politicians only respond, like the poor colonials of years ago, with something stiff and glistening up their khybers.

Paddy Ashdown, ex-leader of the Liberal Party and the only person  in the House of Commons who has ever been trained to kill, so he jokingly says of his pre-political days as a Captain in the Royal Marines; as Margaret Thatcher trained herself.  Paddy prised the parliamentary seat of Yeovil from Tory hands in 1983, a seat they had held since the constituency was formed in 1918.  In 1992 he was proud enough to regale us with the details of an affair he had with his secretary, Tricia Howard,  in1986.

So he would have been more than pleased with the news that his successor in the seat, Mr. David Laws, started an affair in 2001 that is still thriving to-day.  Parliamentary lobbyist Mr. James Lundie is the happy recipient of Mr. Laws’s amours and he also happens to be Mr. Laws’s landlord and Mr. Laws has been claiming up to £12,000 per year expenses for sharing the joys of Mr. Lundie’s sheets.  Now, it is alright giving your landlord one on a Friday night after a few pints, but to claim he is not your partner or spouse after nine years of jiggery pokery is rimming it a little, even if they say they have different bank accounts and social circles.  You see when you have a spouse or partner you cannot claim the payment of rent to that person as a parliamentary expense.  If you are lucky, you might get away with the odd bunch of red roses but not £12,000 per year.

Mr. Laws, for those who do not know, was highly thought of in the Liberal Party, despite his proclivities which seem highly prized in political circles, so come coalition with the Tories after the recent General Election, David (Laws) that is, was made the Chief Secretary to the Treasury and was given the task of immediately finding £6 billion in cuts in public spending.  He has already drawn up a list of new rules limiting the pay and expenses of hundreds and thousands of civil servants.  He has been a very busy man.  So busy that straight away after being found out by the Daily Telegraph’s intreprid reporters, he offered to set the ball rolling towards the £6 billion target by giving back £40,000 of his hard and pleasurably earned expenses.

Mr. Laws does not think he has broken any rules.  He does not think, by forgetting to tell the parliamentary stewards that Mr. Shagnasty Lundie was his lover and partner and spouse as well as his landlord,  he has done anything wrong.  Well what is he doing as Chief Secretary to the Treasury then.

A friend, in mitigation, has said that Mr. Laws is a man of great integrity, it has not been about profit but privacy.  Tell that to the poor buggers who every week get thrown into the slammer for stealing a loaf of bread.  What a great defence for any thief  “Sorry me lud, but this bird I was shagging wanted a few quid to buy some chips, I did not have it, so I stole a fiver out of the till, I did it first of all for privacy because I had no cash and secondly so I could have another go at her tonight”  “That is okay my private friend and man of great integrity.  Run along and do not do it again, this week at least” says the judge.

What is it about this British establishment that appears to allow them to do what they like when they like and lets them think that it does not matter.  Just keep the people down and treat them like sheep, for it could be said that sheep-shagging is not a crime, especially if done in private and that is what Mr Laws has been doing for years.  He has shagged us to the tune of £12,000 per year for the last  eight years.

Surely Mr. David Cameron you will have to use your muscle and get shut, we cannot have these Mandelson types clogging up the avenues along which you are giving power to the people.

As part of my retired life, I spend a lot of my time on research which turns into a wild goose chase, I run into a brick wall and cannot get any further, but I hope this particular recent subject will not.  I am already fond of this family and I do not properly know them yet.

This line of research concerns the Dignan family of Ballinagard House, which is  situated two kilometres south of Roscommon town on the Athleague or Galway road.  It was a large house of 12 rooms and was owned at the time ie the turn of the 20th Century by Charles Coleman Dignan, the Under Sheriff of Roscommon.  The Under Sheriff as far as I know is or was a court official, normally a solicitor, who carried out the wishes of the courts.  For example he might organize bailiffs to enter a property to seize goods etc, or he might be responsible for the serving of summonses.

Charles Coleman Dignan had lived in Roscommon all his life, born in 1858 and marrying his wife, a local woman, Angelina Victoria in early 1886.  He was 28, she was 21.  During their marriage Angelina had 10 pregnancies, one a still birth,  the other eight surviving well into adulthood.  They were:-

Maud M born in 1886

Joseph Patrick born in 1888.

Eveleen Victoria born in1891.

Alfred Charles born in 1892.

Albert Guy born in 1894.

Mabel B. born in1897.

Cecil Joseph born in 1899.

Hilda Angelina born in 1902.

Ethel W. born in 1906.

Ballinagard House was a fine stone built house with a slated roof, it had six outhouses consisting of a stable, a harness room. a coach house, a cowshed, a dairy and a hen house.  They had one live-in sevant, but there must have been others who lived in a cluster of dwellings round the big house like the King’s and the Igoe’s who classed themselves as agricultural labourers and Edward Flanagan who classed himself as a groom/domestic servant in the 1911 census.

The Dignan family, all practising Catholics, were doing well for themselves and were stalwarts of polite Roscommon society and it can be seen that like the majority of people in Ireland at this time, although born and bred in the country, in this case Roscommon, they would have considered themselves happy to be part of Queen Victoria’s Empire.  Look at the names they gave their children, except for Joseph Patrick, the rest of the names could be from anywhere in England.  Ireland to them was as much part of England as Lancashire or Warwickshire.

All the children as far as I know did their basic education at Roscommon National School before being finished off at a convent or Grammer School and this is where I come in.  Joseph Patrick, when he was 14 years and 10 months old, was sent to St. Bede’s College in Manchester for two further years of education, 1903-1905, Alfred Charles attended 1906-1909 and Albert Guy 1908-191911.   St. Bede’s was the school I went to 1957-1963.  We have all something in common, we have all knelt in the same little chapel, built in 1895, at the school, doing penance for our sins,  we have all walked its long dark corridors and we have all had the rudiments of Latin, Greek, Mathematics and English Literature chisled onto our brains, never to be forgotten.

Joseph Patrick left St. Bede’s in the summer of 1905 after presumably boarding at the school for two years, he became a clerk in the Bank of Ireland, where he was probably posted to some far flung branch.  He certainly was not working in Roscommon at the time of the Census in 1911.  At the moment I do not know where he spent the years 1905-1914, but in September 1914 he enlisted as a Private soldier in the 19th (Service) Battalion of the Manchester Regiment, which suggests to me that he was back working in Manchester at that time.  He put down his occupation as clerk, not bank clerk, which would have given him extra Kudos, but just plain clerk.  He might have had relations in the town whom he lived and worked with and who he might have lived with while at St. Bede’s.  All these questions I hope to answer shortly; I do seem to remember my mother speaking of a business family in North Manchester called Dignan, who were big in the Church and in Commerce.

Anyway after seven months training as a private soldier, without going overseas, he applied for and received his commission, as a 2nd Lieutenant in his local regiment, the Connaught Rangers, on 22 May 1915, in fact in the 4th battalion, which normally had a home at King House, the barracks in Boyle, Co Roscommon, where I was yesterday.  Myself and Joseph Patrick Dignan have a lot in common.

The sad part of this story is that from the 4th Battalion, which was a reserve Battalion suppling troops to the 1st, 5th and 6th Battalions of the Connaught Rangers in the field. he was attached to the 8th Battalion Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, who were stationed at Finner Camp in South Donegal.  In February 1916 they were posted to France, to the Loos sector where they had their first taste of the trenches at the end of that relentless and hopelessly inefficient Battle of Loos that had started the previous September.  From there they were  moved south to take part in the latter stages of the Somme offensive where they succeeded in capturing the heavily defended village of Ginchy in September 1916 before being moved up to the southern end of Ypres to Wyschaete where Joseph Patrick sadly met his end on 16th October aged 28, taking part in a night patrol.  He is buried in Kemmel Chateau Military Cemetery.

His two younger brothers, Alfred Charles and Albert Guy, were both commissioned and served with the South Irish Horse, a cavalry regiment, after enlisting in 1914.  Their young brother, Cecil Joseph, was stopped from going to St. Bede’s, like his brothers, because of the war but he once he became 18 in 1917 and he too was commissioned into the South Irish Horse in 1918.  The South Irish Horse had been turned into an infantry regiment in 1917 because of the need for foot soldiers and became the 7th (South Irish Horse) Battalion, Royal Irish Regiment, which was virtually wiped out on 21st March 1918 on that first day of the German Spring Offensive.  The South Irish Horse were stationed at Poziere, a few miles out of Albert on the Bapaume road as the Germans threw everything they had at the British army in a last ditch attempt at breaking the four year stalemate tjhat was the Western Front and  ending the war.  Despite early successes the Germans were halted and gradually forced back.  Lt. Albert Guy Dignan was 23  on that first day, his body was never found and he is remembered on the Poziere Memorial in the Poziere British Cemetery.

Charles Coleman Dignan, the Lieutenant Recruiting Officer for the town and district of Roscommon paid a heavy price for his duties to King and Country with the loss of his two sons.

If anybody reads this blog and can add to this story in any way please contact me through the comments section of the blog or e-mail me on malpas46@eircom.net.  In the months to come I hope to have a fuller version of this family’s story.

Thank you for reading this post and to Joseph Patrick and Albert Guy Rest in Peace.  They will never be forgotten.

Finally I would like to thank Oliver Fallon, Chairman and Chief Researcher of the Connaught Rangers for some of the military facts in this blog.

Yesterday I was writing about the winter of  1972 which set me thinking of other things that happened in that year.  During the summer of 1972 I went on my one and only package holiday, four of us and two kids went to Majorca.  These package holidays were only just starting up and myself and three members of the Conservative Club decided to try it out.  There was Trevor, a local builder, Judith, his wife, and their two kids and Cliff, a retired fish and chip shop owner, from Northmoor Road and myself, an unimaginable quartet.

We landed at Palma and we were bussed out to our hotel, the El Cid, in Can Pastilla, a few miles out of Palma.  To us men from Longsight, it was a remarkable, clean, luxury hotel, nothing at all like the smelly boarding houses in Blackpool that we were used to.  We were certainly not used to such splendour and service.  Majorca was still in its peasant stage and had not yet become the tourist Mecca it now is and I think it was better off for it.  We spent two days riding in the hills in the centre of the island in our sheepskin coats like a couple of bushrangers under the sweltering Spanish sun.

One night, after organizing a hotel babysitter, the four of us went to Palma for a night out and after a drink in a couple of bars, where we were eating slices of meat cut off hams hanging from the ceiling and having thought that we had mastered the language, we felt emboldened enough to enter a night-club which had some entertainment.  Entry was free and it shows our naivity, girls brought us unsolicited drinks and sat with us.  However after half an hour of this spoiling we asked for the bill.  It was astronomic; we refused to pay; the management was threatening us with all sorts of nonsense, the brave new sign language had gone out the window.  We said in a voice getting louder by the sentence that we would pay a fair price but they could not understand and their numbers were getting larger and more aggressive.

Trevor and myself had gallantly pushed old Cliff and Judith to a position of safety and facing up the management, we were discussing tactics out of the side of our mouths, knowing we were in for a fair hammering but wondering how many we could take out in the beginning so has to reduce the number of blows we would have to take later on.  After all they were only dagos but there was a lot of them.  When all of a sudden the police arrived, but there was still a language problem.  So like the police the world over when they do not understand the criminal, they arrested us and put us behind bars with a few unsavoury regulars.  We managed to persuade them in some very basic words that Judith and Cliff were innocent bystanders and they released them.  Judith was now frantic thinking of the kids in the hotel , so we bade our farewells and expected the worst.  After a few hours an interpreter arrived and brought order to chaos and after a little negotiation and a few more hours captivity, we settled for a fair price, the key went in the lock and we were on our much chastened way back to the El Cid.

The next couple of days we spent within spitting distance of the hotel, not daring to chance Palma again.  I was rooming with Cliff who snored so loud that the ships out on the Mediterranean thought he was a foghorn and were preparing to do battle with this unsuspected micro-fog.  I gained some relief by sleeping in the bath behind a locked door but the reverberations from the snores continued to echo round the empty tile-floored corridors of the hotel.

One afternoon, two or three days into the holiday I decided the best cushion against this nightly bedlam was alcohol, so for about nine hours that evening I proceeded to tie one on, but unfortunately this treatment only succeeded in wakening me in the early hours with a bilious problem.  So to Cliff’s glorious cacophony I grabbed a glass of water and threw in two Alka-Seltzers, drank the brew down and returned to bed and tried to sleep in the clamour and uproar that was our bedroom.

Imagine my horror the next morning when I discovered the tablets I had taken were Cliff’s Steradent tablets which he used for cleaning his false teeth, but notwithstanding the griping pains I suffered over the next 24 hours, this dosage certainly cleared out my insides.  It was like having an enema in reverse, but it worked.

Was I glad to be back in Manchester, even though I had no work to go back to and I never darkened the doorstep of the Balearics again.