Paul Malpas

Last Sunday, 13 November 2011, it was my distinct honour and privilege to compose the Roll of Honour to be read out by myself at the annual ceremony organised by the Connaught Rangers Association in King House in Boyle.  This annual ceremony remembers the dead of all conflicts but in particular, as the ceremony is in Boyle, Co. Roscommon, we remember the dead of the Connaught Rangers in the Great War, many of whom, in their time, would have walked through the portals of this splendid building when it was used as a British Army barracks for 130 years up to 1922.  In its latter years it was the home of the 4th Battalion, Connaught Rangers.  Reading out this list of dead soldiers was to be the proudest moment of my year.

The Roll of Honour is normally a list of 10 names picked at random.  This year because of my great interest in that horrible conflict people now call World War 1, I had a difficult job with so many names in mind to settle on 10 and in the end I detached myself from protocol, at least, by naming 11 plus two great friends of the Association who had died in the previous 12 months.

My problem was that for years I had been researching the lifes of these dead soldiers, for no other reason than to remember them and their sacrifice.  Each one of these men was etched on my mind, they were live and kicking human beings and I considered them friends.  I had at one time or another imagined walking down the street with them, having a pint with them, because for sure, some of them liked a drink.  A glance at their disciplinary record soon tells you that.

So there I was quandaryfied (made up if you query but understandable).  Which of these great men to choose was a problem but I ploughed on and here is my list, in no particular order except for the first man.

1.  Private Edward Lenihan No 6820 2nd Battalion, Irish Guards.  Edward came to England in 1896 along with his brother Michael, they were from a massively large family, some say 21 children, of Ballyduff in west Co Waterford, near the Cork boundary.  He married my great grandmother’s sister’s daughter, Mary Burke in 1904, so he would be some kind of a second cousin by marriage.  A tenuous link but the nearest I can get to a military tradition.  When he enlisted in February 1915 Eddie and Mary had had five children.

He was sent to France in August 1915 as part of the newly formed Guards Division to show the German Army what soldiering was all about at the forthcoming Battle of Loos.  This battle was to end the war they said, but they had not brought the British generals, French and Haig, into the equation.  These two men disliked each other so much and it showed with the British Army suffering 50,000 casualties to the German’s 25,000 in its three week duration.  The Guards Division were kept in reserve a long way back and were only rushed in, tired and under-prepared, after a long march to the front once the two generals had recovered from a spat.  They were too late, they were blown to pieces by a German counter movement and nothing was found of poor Eddie, nor his officer, Lt. John Kipling, Rudyard’s son.  Eddie at 35 was lost to his children and his wife Mary.  His name is remembered on the Loos Memorial at Dud Corner Cemetery on the Loos to Bethune Road.

2.  Private Terence Tighe Age 40 No 5036 1st Battalion Connaught Rangers came from Irish Town in Athlone.  He had originally enlisted in October 1894 and was a career soldier and probably spent most of those 20 years in India.  He certainly did not serve in the African War so at the moment is details are sketchy.  We know his brother William had been in the 2nd Battalion having enlisted in 1896 and served throughout the South African War and spent a long time in India, gaining a Delhi Durbah medal in 1912 but he had died of illness in Aldershot in May 1914, but Terence’s lost 20 years are a bit of a mystery waiting to be solved.  However we do know that he was on the boat to Boulogne with the 2nd Battalion as part of the British Expeditionary Force.  The 2nd Battalion were part of 5th Infantry Brigade of the 2nd Division commanded by Lt Gen Sir Archibald Murray and they were among the first of the British Expeditionary Force to land in France.  Along with them in that 5th Brigade were the 2nd Worcesters, the 2nd Highland Light Infantry and the 2nd Oxford and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry.

Although they did not take part inthe Battle of Mons, the first set piece of the war, they formed the vanguard of the BEF on its long and chaotic retreat down to the River Marne just east of Paris.  In their brave rearguard stance the 2nd Connaughts lost an awful lot of men and to make matters worse were strengthened with drafts and sent up to Ypres and ended up at Polygon Wood on the Menin Road, of all places to take part in the conflict known as 1st Ypres.  By the end of November 1914 they were in such a poor numerical position with no more drafts coming through it was decided to amalgamate the survivors into the 1st battalion who had also been badly knocked about.  The 2nd Battalion had lasted 14 weeks and a book could be written about their exploits in this time.  Terence survived all this mayhem and was on his second spell at Ypres now with the first Battalion.

On the 26 April 1915 the Connaughts had been in billets for a much needed rest and were being pushed up to the front to a hamlet called La Brique.  The German Army in the previous few days had broken through the French and Belgium lines north north east of the town of Ypres in the first gas attack of the war and taken among other strategic positions, an area of raised ground known as Pilkem Ridge from which they could shell the town at random only three miles away.  The Connaughts were going up to plug this breach along with other regiments and try and regain lost  ground.  This was the start of a battle which came to be known as 2nd Ypres.

On the long march from their billets they passed through the western and northern outskirts of Ypres, being shelled all the time, each company staying 200 metres back from the company in front.  They crossed the canal and were heading for La Brique about a mile away.  They engaged the German Army that afternoon and Terence was one of 54 Rangers who were killed that afternoon as they stormed Mauser Ridge.  Terence is remembered on the Menin Gate Memorial along with 197 other Connaught Rangers who have no known grave and who died in defence of the salient.

Some of Terence’s relatives had travelled up from Athlone to be with us on the day.

3.  Pilkem Ridge proved to be a thorn in the side of the Allied forces for over two years until July 1917 at the beginning of 3rd Ypres or Paschendaele.  The ridge was taken on 31st July 1917 by a massive force of Gen Gough’s Fifth Army amongst whom were the 17th (Service Battalion) of the King’s L:iverpool Regiment.  Unfortunately one of its officers, Lt Francis Robert Dimond age 21 of Tully House, Lenamore, Co. Longford was killed.  Francis was in his first year at Trinity College when war broke out and he joined the Officer Training Corps there and was commissioned in 1915.  He was wounded in May 1916 but returned to his unit the following December.  Francis is also remembered on the Menin Gate Memorial at Ypres and he also had relatives in attendance last Sunday.

4.  Private John Lovell age 29 No. 7483 of the 2nd Battalion Connaught Rangers  had done his time in the army and was on the Reserve List when war broke out, living in Dublin with his wife Mary at 3 Kelley’s Cottages, James Street, Dublin in the shadow of the Guinness Brewery.  He would have received his call up papers about 5th August and would have arrived at Aldershot on the 9th or 10th of August.  He was not in the Battalion that left for France on 13th but was probably in the first draft that was incorporated at the end of August a few days after the catastrophe at La Grand Fayt when 6 officers and 28o men went missing, mostly captured  by the Germans.  He followed his regiment in that retreat down to the Marne and under the leadership of acting Lt Col. O’Sullivan crossed the Aisne at Soupir on 13th September where the Connaughts took a severe mauling at La Coeur de Soupir the following day whenthey lost 100 men killed and 150 injured but giving the Germans a bloody nose with their 3000 casualities.

Again a few days later at Verneuil they had four officers and 40 men killed and 35 casualities after which they were pulled out of the line and put into billets before being moved up to Poperinghe near Ypres where they received a draft of 4 officers and 280 men.  They went back into the line on the 21st at St Julien where they had 16 men killed and 55 injured but three days later were recalled back to Ypres and sent out to Polygon Wood a few miles to the southeast of the town where in one of the most intense set pieces of this 1st Ypres campaign, the Connaughts lost 35 men killed and 100 wounded and missing.  With most of their officers  lost they were withdrawn into reserve on 2nd November.  In that withdrawal John Lovell was killed, his body never found.  The survivors from the originals who landed in Boulogne on 14th August would have been extremely tired, hungry and disheartened men having lived through the carnage of those 79 days and been in battle order for at least 65 of them and having marched over 500 kilometers.  The unfortunate Bernard is also remembered on the Menin Gate Memorial.

The 2nd Battalion were amalgamated with the 1st Battalion on 5th December 1914. Of the 1192 men who landed at Boulogne and with drafts of 410 men in the interim, there were only450 men who answered roll on amalgamation showing a casuality rate of 62%.

If I carry on like this my blog will become book length and boring, so I will try and curtail my descriptions of the rest but it will be difficult.

5.  2nd Lt Joseph Patrick Dignan Age 29 was commissioned into the 4th Battalion Connaught Rangers in March 1915.  He is an old friend of mine having written about him several times.  He was one of four brothers from Ballinagard House in Roscommon, sons of the Under Sherriff of Roscommon and the County’s Recruiting Officer, Charles Colman Dignan.  Joseph enlisted as a private soldier in the Manchester Regiment in the enthusiasm of the first weeks of the war but soon sought his commission.  His three brothers were commissioned into the South Irish Horse.  Joseph and two of his younger brothers had been educated at my old alma mater St Bede’s College in Manchester, so our  links are close.

In his many letters home whilst he was in Officer Training at Fermoy in Cork, Joseph talks of his frustration at not getting to the Front.  Then in July 1916 his chance came, the Inniskilling Fusiliers had taken an awful hammering on the Somme and a cadre of young officers from the Connaughts were sent out on attachment, unfortunately for them most would be dead in weeks.  I think Joseph lasted the longest but he was killed whilst on night patrol with 8th Battalion at Wyschaete on 16 October 1916.  He is buried at Kemmel Chateau Military Cemetery at Heuvelland in Belgium. His brother Albert Guy was killed on that fateful day 21 March 1918.  See Cpt Crofton below.

6.  Private Terence Murphy Age 29 No. 8713 of 2nd Battalion Connaught Rangers and of Ballysodare, Co Sligo, just up the road from us in Boyle.  He was one of the many who went missing on 26 August 1914 at La Grand Fayt in the retreat from Mons.  I will not say anymore about him now but will leave him for my next blog when I will talk of our trip to his grave in Guise.  He was shot by German firing squad on the morning of 25 February at Guise Chateau along with 10 other soldiers and one civilian and is buried in Guise Communal Cemetery in northern France.

7.  Private Bartley Higgins age 4o No. 3475 of 5th Battalion, Connaught Rangers and lived in Green St,  Boyle with his new wife Kate Durkin, they were married just before the war on on22nd February 1914.  He enlisted immediately war was declared, he probably had previous service in the Boer War and was posted to the newly formed 5th Battalion under the command of Lt Col Jourdain at Renmore Barracks in Galway.  A son was born to Catherine and Bartley on 22nd November 1914.  Bartley was in the Royal Barracks in Dublin at the time, let us hope he received a few days leave to attend his son’ Michael baptism.   After intensive training he sailed with the 5th Battalion to Gallipoli in July 1915.  On 2nd August he was promoted to Lance serjeant and was one of 749 men and 25 officers who landed at North Beach, Anzac on 6th August 1915.  He then endured 17 days of hell on that peninsular until down to 550 men they stormed Hill 60 on 21/22 August 1915 and captured two very strategic wells on the lower slopes of that rising ground but in doing so sustained 267 casualties.  Bartley was severely wounded and died the next day 23 August 1915 and he is buried at 7th Field Ambulance Cemetery overlooking Embarkation Pier and the Aegean Sea along with 11 other Rangers.  Unfortunately most of the dead from this attack and a further one a week later could not be recovered and their bodies and then their bones lay there for nearly 5 years  until the British Army came back there in 1919.  Observers could not understand why the slopes of this hill had snow on it.  It was only when they got close did they realise the white affect was in fact the sun bleached skeletons of Connaught Rangers picked clean of flesh by the weather and wild life.

8.  Captain Thomas Horsfall Crofton Age 28 of 6th Battalion Connaught Rangers and of Longford House, Ballysodare, Co Sligo.  Captain Crofton came from a well respected family of gentry who had branches of the family in Roscommon and Sligo and in fact his decendants still live at Longford House.  He had been awarded the MC for an act of outstanding bravery when he was caught up in the Kaiserschlacht (The Kaisers Battle) on 21 March 1918 when the German Army with one last throw of the dice tried to break through the Allied lines on the Somme.  They poured over the unsuspecting 6th Battalion causing massive casualties.  Thomas’s name is remembered on the Poziere Memorial along with Lt. Albert Guy Dignan of the South Irish Horse, Joseph Patrick Dignan brother see above.  Thomas’s body was never found.

9.  Serjeant Benjamin Dolan Age 25 No 1603 of the Royal Army Medical Corps and also of Gloria, Cootehall. Another local boy and one of the unsung heroes of the British Army working in terrible conditions to help the injured find peace.  He was killed on 4 July 1915 probably when helping the wounded into boats at Embarkation Pier just north of Anzac.  The Turkish guns had the pier in their sights and as soon as they saw activity they would saturate the area with shells.  Evacuation from this point was therefore abandoned.  Benjamin is buried in7th Field Ambulance Cemetery in Turkey overlooking the pier.

10. During the whole of the Gallipoli campaign 100 soldiers were found guilty of abandoning their post or cowardice in front of the enemy. 97 of these men had their sentence of death commuted,  That sentence was carried out on the remaining three.  Private Harry Salter age 24  No 16734 of the 6th Battalion East Lancashire Regiment and of Bridgewater in Somerset was one of these three, shot dead by British firing squad on 11 December 1915 prior to the British forces abandoning the peninsula.  One of the first to land and one of the last to die in this deadly campaign.  I have massive sympathy for him.  If you are going to desert, Gallipoli was not the place to do it, there was no place to go unless you could swim the Aegean, he was obviously suffering from combat stress reaction or shell shock.  During the whole of the Great War the British Army shot 266 soldiers for cowardice or desertion, the legality of which left a lot to be denied and in 2006 the British Government granted them all a posthumous pardon. Harry is buried at Green Hill Cemetery near Suvla in Turkey.  His grave is just on the left hand side as you enter the Cemetery.  If any reader is ever lucky to get over there, hunt out his grave and say a prayer for him and his two comrades.

11. Private John Daly No 10540 of the 2nd Battalion Connaught Rangers and of Green St Boyle.  Another local lad, soldiers families tended to come from three streets in Boyle and those streets had the worst housing stock in the town.  Green Street leading up to the Church of Ireland church at the top of the hill, Quarry Lane at the back of Bridge Street and in Mockmoyne in houses built for soldiers in the mid 18th century.  John was also on the boat on the 13th August 1914 along with Terence Tighe.  He also was in reserve that day at Mons and took part in that chaotic retreat but he went missing his body never found and nobody can say on what day he died,  The War Office eventually gave him a date of death as 26 August 1914, the tragic day at La Grand Fayt.  John is remembered on La Ferte sous Jouarre Memorial which stands on the banks of the River Marne more or less on the spot where the German advance was held in early September 1914.  On the memorial there are the names of 3882 soldiers from the BEF who were killed in those first few weeks and have no known grave, among them 48 Connaught Rangers of the 2nd Battalion including at least three men from Boyle.

In completion of this posting I would like to thank Oliver Fallon, the Chief Archivist of the Connaught Rangers Association for his unwavering attention to all questions I have thrown at him over the years and without his attention to detail I would have been lost with just bare bones.

All this talk recently of my last few years at school has started me thinking of my life outside the college.  You had to have one or you would be driven daft by the illogicality of the system.  Joining the organization called the Young Christian Students brought me and the inevitable Sheehan into contact with the girls from Notre Dame, a convent grammar school in North Manchester.  Thinking about it we were the only two boys from Bede’s, that I ever remember being in this devout and worthy society,  possibly because we were nearer the devil than god and were therefore more in need of a christian ethos.

The Notre Dame girls were all in the same year, but in two or three different cliques and we had to tread very carefully so has not to upset one or the other. Friendship with one of these cliques lasted well into our twenties and only lapsed as each of us got married.

After school we joined the Young Christian Workers, a parish based organization which brought us in contact with the local girls who were generally older than us, but that was how Sheehan liked it.  Neither association had much of a religious base but both were just social gatherings and as hard as we tried the girls all made sure we abided by the christian ethic.  This era in the mid 60s seems to me to have been blown out of all proportion by history which has called this period the Swinging Sixties.  Certainly not for us lads in Manchester, judging by recent media reports, we would have been better off in a monastery.

Around this time also I was spending lots of time at the Connor’s house on Birchfields Road.  Jim Connor, a builder and property repairer, employed me from the age of 15 until I was 21, during holidays and at weekends for 2s6d per hour (about 12p in new money) with no overtime.  I was glad of it and in all that time never thought to ask for a rise.  He had seven daughters, Sheila, Joan, Pauline, Angela, Eileen, Mary and Rita.  I was the same age as Pauline and was also friendly with Angela and Eileen.  It is amazing how over the years our lives would be connected and even now I meet one or the other.  A splendid family

Jim Connor apprenticed us, myself and Sheehan of course, to his brother Frank who ran the painting and decorating side of the business.  Frank was a real fraud; he spoke with a cut glass accent, lived in Gatley and nobody would ever have thought that he was a Rusholme man born and bred.  For all his snobbish ways he was the best exponent of cursing I have ever heard.  He had served in the Navy during the war and could swear in three languages.  he said one of them was Maori and I had to believe him as he had emigrated twice to New Zealand but had returned home both times

Most of our work was at Xaverian College, our rival school.  We became very friendly with the two heads; first Brother David and then Brother Cyril.  They took much delight in seeing two Bedians labouring at their college.  They seemed such nice, friendly fellows, nothing like Duggan and Burke, our authority at school, but I suppose they must have had their hard sides as well.

Frank Connor was our self-styled mentor; he did not hold with education, self improvement was his banner.  “Stick with me and you will soon pass all your exams, you little fuckers”, he used to say in his gilded Oxford tones.  Another eloquism of his when putting strict limits on the times we were taking to complete our tasks was “if you haven’t finished this by 12 o’clock, I’ll string you from the yardarm by your bollocks”.  There was others a lot worse but decency forbids.

The few quid I received from Jim Connor funded my early drinking career.  My embibing started in Duncan Road when I was about 14 and my father won a crate of Guiness in a raffle.  He did not touch alcohol, citing a visit to the Grand National in 1935 when along with other apprentices he was violently sick after drinking too much.  I must say this anecdote fell on very stony ground as being violently sick is part of the normal growing up process for young christian men.

Anyway, the crate of Guiness was put under the stairs and forgotten about except by me.  My grandfather had recently died and my mother and father were out on their various christian duties around the parish, I was alone in the house which was television free and I resolved to enjoy the case of stout.  It took a lot of willpower and a lot of grimacing to force the first few bottles down, but by the time I finished the crate a few weeks later it was going down like nectar.  I followed this up with a visit to the Kingsway Hotel, I was 15 and the bitter beer was 1s and the mild beer was 10d (about 5p and 4p in new money).  After that my alcoholic ventures were a stroll.

Jim Connors wages also paid for a party, my 17th, at our new house on Birchfields Road.  Knowing what a sensible soul I was my mother and father left myself and about 50 others to celebrate.  I had bought a firkin of bitter and a firkin of mild from the Conservative Club and my father had set both barrels up the day before so as to be at their peak on the night.  The parents went off socialising and by 11 o’clock there had been a slight deterioration on the scene, when they returned earlier than expected.  My father’s first move was to rush upstairs and I can only describe it as like throwing a fox into  a henhouse.  Their was a lot of fluttering and squawking, with chaos ensuing on the stairs, but at last the fox, my father that is, got his prey, in the shape of a very romantic Mike Harding,who was in deep conversation with his girlfriend,  Pat, from Loretto College.  Allowing them time to finish their chat, he picked Harding up and threw him down stairs and out the door.  It must have done the trick because he married the girl shortly afterwards, both at a very young age.  Mike Harding went on to do very well in the entertainment business, I put his success down to my father’s right foot, Mike is not so sure.  I met him recently at Knock Airport, he had hardly changed in all those years and remembered well his exit.  He said he still had the bruises to prove it.

I started this blogging vehicle on 24 November 2009 and since then I have written 59 blogs almost on a daily basis with the exception of an alcohol refuelling stop over the Christmas.  Blog writing is a little like walking across the Sahara Desert.  You set off nice and fresh with plenty of water but after two months and no oasis the water is rationed and after another while almost non-existant and the end of the journey is nearer than the start, so you have to keep going with not at all the same style and vigour as you did at the begining.  I am running out of water or should I say ideas and my daily offerings are becoming more banal but I have to press on until this searched for oasis or inspiration appears and I can refresh and march on determinedly.

So while I stumble and fall and drag myself forward I will return to that old chestnut which I must have squeezed completely dry over the last few weeks.  The Irish bishops and their complete lack of grip on reality.  But wait I think I can see water.  Is it a mirage or is it really an oasis?  They were there on the News on Monday night prancing and posturing in front of the papal procession in their long white dresses waspishly tied at the waist with their scarlet fascias and rakishly set off with a white ferraiolo slung across their shoulders, for all the world like girls at a country dance ladies excuse me, waiting expectantly while the Pope walked amongst them preening and clucking like a little red rooster hoping for one of these white beauties to entice him.  What do they think they were doing, what message did they think they were giving out to the world.  They were there to discuss child abuse by priests and not to take part in a mannequin parade.  As a good friend of mine, Michael Cryan, said yesterday morning “Nero fiddling while Rome burns comes to mind”.  These fancy dressed clerics with their medieval affectations pawing their Teflon leader while the Church is ripping itself apart (there is teutonic rumblings of even worse abuse in the cockerel’s own farmyard)  If politicians tried to do the same and not act in a responsible manner they would be voted out of office before they returned home.

Do they not understand there is work to be done and serious work at that.  We do not want pomp, ceremony and vacuousness.  We want accountability, admittance of guilt, empathy with the abused and firm, firm plans on how to go forward.  To be leaders and shepards you have to be part of your flock, you have to belong.  These boy scouts in Rome could have come from Mars for all I can see, so remote are they from public thinking.  I just hope the seriousness of the situation somehow sinks into these jesters because the abused have now got the bone between their teeth and they will not let go and the Church will suffer unthought of harm in the years to come as the majority of practising Catholics get hauled from their comfort zones and made to confront these bishops, these men of riddles and forked tongues who do not deserve a comfortable old age.

So once one strata of power is removed let us turn our attention to the priests.  In order that we get every one of these abusers, some could still be hidden, all of them should be punished by making sure they all marry a woman of their choice and that should be sufficient punishment for most, any that survive the ordeal should be canonized.

We are nearer the water, we can smell it, but alas, it is a mirage, a sham, an illusion. What the Pope and his acolytes are giving us is not what we wanted , expected or deserved.  The verdict of this two day garden party is that child abuse is a sin and these bishops have to go back home and hope and pray it never happens again.  Anyway the Pope claimed that a weakening of the Catholic faith in Ireland has been ” a significant contributing factor in the phenomenon of the sexual abuse of minors”.  So it is not their fault at all, it is our fault and our childrens fault.  It is we who unzipped those clerical trousers, it was our children who deftly pulled the clerical member from its cosy nest and put it carefully where the sun don’t shine.  We are to blame, what a relief it is to know the truth.

Well whether it is a sin or it is not is feck all to do with anything, because without doubt it is a crime and these abusers and the men who tried to hide this crime from the authorities and systematically covered up these heinous transgressions need punishing and I just hope the Gardai and the Government plough their own furrow and bring these people to justice.

As for Drennan and his ilk it seems to me that they have been exonerated by this Roman beanfeast and our only hope, Archbishop Martin, has been told to back off.  His position it seems is now untenable and for me he should walk away and let the scum float on the surface like they have probably always done.  Never in all my life have I heard such drivel in what is coming out of Rome.  Never in all my life have I seen evil being allowed to take sway over good to such a degree.

What about the poor abused.  What about us who have lived our whole life in the Church.  I am 64 on Friday and I think that I have wasted all those 64 years accepting what these wastrels have told me, it fills me with despair and anger.

For my secondary education in Manchester I went to St. Bede’s College, the Premier League for all Catholic boys, having first of all passed my 11+ examination and attended an interview with Monsignor Thomas Duggan, the Rector of the College.  It was a school run by priests with a good % of lay teachers.  Its old boys were famed throughout the colonial world, mainly clerics but scores of lawyers, architects and engineers.  The Qui Ante Nos column of the Baeda, the school magazine, oozed class and distinction.  However we Baby Boomers as we were called, those that had sprung from exuberant couplings after Hitler’s downfall, we Baby Boomers were a different kettle of fish, claimed mainly from the backstreets of Manchester.  We were cynics first and scholars last.

However the College counteracted this subversiveness by appointing Father John Rigby – Jack to us – as Prefect of Discipline.  A man who excelled at sport, particularly rugby and boxing, stood about 6′ 1” in his stocking feet and had a nose to prove his extramural activity.  His main purpose was to collect the dinner money and thrash us pupils as diligently as the law would allow.  A nice man but with too much energy and vigour.  He used to have one day a week off, I presume for weight training, skipping and a little bag work.  On that day off, Fr. Groarke – Tojo to us – would assume the task of punishment.  Now Tojo, called that because of his nipponic feature, was not a strong man, rumour had it that he had grown to resemble an oriental having been incarcerated for four years in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp after the fall of Singapore.  He was that weakened by that experience, that even a dozen years later, he could barely lift his right arm when the weight of the strap was added.  The strap, to the uninitiated, was a piece of leather about 450mm long and 50mm wide and about 6mm thick, attractively embroidered at one end to stop it sliding out of the floggers hand.

So Jack was to be feared and we malefactors used to queue up outside Tojo’s door on his day on duty with our disciplinary notes in hand, these had to be signed by Tojo once punishment had been given and taken back to the teacher who had been put out by our unruly behaviour.  Tojo would strap away all afternoon or as long as his strength lasted but with little effect, he had a kind of swedish massage of a stroke.  After a while this subterfuge was noted and the rules altered and we had to return these notes within 24 hours of issue.  We then had to line up outside Jack’s study to await his return from lunch.  Steak and a butcher’s dog come to mind.  The trick was to be at the head of the queue because after the first five or six boys had been punished Jack was only just getting into his stride.  After a few minutes of this violent exercise, his timing and strap action was second to none, he could have strapped for England.

All we old stagers carried a bottle of methylated spirits in our bags.  The coolness of this spirit helped to sooth the fire emanating from our palms.  Unfortunately the hand and fingers were in no state to unscrew the cap from the bottle, so an attendant friend used to open it and pour the liquid out.  The stairs leading down from Jack’s study on the first floor smelt like an oil refinery.

It has to be said, we were an uncouth lot, tempered by the spirituality of the boarders, those boys who were training for the priesthood.  The College was a conveyor belt for this activity but even in my time so very few lasted the course, driven out by a change in their vocation or possibly by a thrust from the wrong direction.  Why lock these boys up at 11 years of age and try to make them rounded individuals by 23 years old, after 12 years of captivity you must be a mess.

A close friend of mine throughout school was a lad from a neighbouring parish and of Kerry extraction.  His name is not necessary, we will call him M.  He was brilliant, every subject came to him so easily, without any study he would be at the top of most subjects.  His drawing was excellent and he was always producing cartoons of the staff and pupils.  However discipline was not his forte.  He was always in trouble and he would have been weeded out except that his brilliance outweighed his misdemeanour and the authorities thought they could change his troublesome ways.  Even my father tried to steer me away from his influence but to no avail.  His knowledge of American blues singers like Billy Leadbetter or Leadbelly as he was known, was overpowering and we used to sit listening to his scratchy records and planning ferment.

The teachers at the school in the main were blase about their subjects, faced with such quality their job was easy, they just churned it out.  The difference was that we boys born after the war were imbued with a different spirit to those born before.  They knuckled down and accepted disciplinary procedures, we for some reason could not, we questioned everything, therefore 80% to 90% of the teaching staff failed us.  Only the young teachers succeeded and there was not many of those.  The one outstanding teacher, who matched us wit for wit, was a fellow called Anthony Martin – Spike to us – he had spotted the post war rebelliousness and moulded his English classes to suit, getting us to read Waugh, Orwell, Huxley, Steinbeck, Amis, Dunleavy et al from a young age using them as an add on to our boring set books.  He remains one of my greatest influences.

The antithesis to Spike was the College Rector, Monsignor Thomas Duggan,.  Here was a man to despise.  dressed in his black and scarlet robes, he stalked the College, dispossessed of humour, amity, or christianity.  His eyebrows did most of the talking.  He was the last resort as regards school discipline.  If teachers thought that a particular boy had transgressed to such a degree, where even Jack Rigby’s physicality would not prevail, he was sent with a note to the Rector.  M was such a boy, aged 14.

The meeting had to be booked in advance and I give here M’s account of what happened, it is virtually verbatim and ties in with the boys who suffered similar fates, so it is not the made up ramblings of some miserable woebegone. He told me these details early one evening about ten years later.  At the time he gave only bare details and we all laughed it off as just one of those things.  As he told it he stumbled over words and you could see the pain and anguish that was within.

“I knocked on his door and waited his bidding.  I entered and there was Duggan sitting in an armchair at the end of the room. I was told to stand in front of him and drop my trousers and underpants.  He looked at me as I stood naked for some time and told me how naughty I had been and that I had to take my punishment like a man.  He told me to lie across his knees and he gently caressed my raised arse.  He took a leather strap from a side table he hit me across the buttocks about six times.  After each stroke he again caressed my arse sticking his fingers deep into the rear of my crotch.  There was minutes between each stroke, I was terrified.  The whole affair took about 20 minutes and then he told me to stand up, put on my trousers and go.  He never got up from his chair and I stumbled out in tears, not from pain but it did hurt but I cried from embarrassment.”

Nothing was mentioned, nothing was said.  The staff must have known and condoned.  How did this punishment fit the crime.  I suppose everyone who metes out punishment needs gratification in different ways.  M certainly did not go back for more, but as brilliant as he was at his various subjects he was eventually pushed out of school like a used rag, never rose above labouring jobs, a tenuous marriage and drug misuse.  He died aged about 57 in a drug den in Gorton.  You just wonder how much his ignominious treatment at Duggan’s hands had to do with his decline and eventual fall.