Paul Malpas

Having been inundated with requests for more stories of Longsight in the 1950s, my tales of life in St Robert’s parish have had more comments than others, I have racked my addled brain to think of the idiosyncracies of the place.  I thought I would dwell for a while on the people who lived around me as a youngster and try and describe them and the things they did that influenced my life so much.  To avoid any slight embarassment I have changed the odd family name and hope they do not mind.

We lived in Duncan Road in Longsight, between Hamilton Road and Slade Lane.  Duncan Road extended the other side of Hamilton Road towards Beresford Road and the Anson Hotel but that was the posh end, with little well kept gardens with gates that worked and shining brass letter boxes and knockers.  We lived in the poor eastern end with no gates to gardens that were only ever dug over once a year by “Bob-A-Job” scouts, not for cultivational purposes but to give them a job for their shilling.  The houses had seasonal mice but were riddled with cockroaches or blackjacks as we called them, insects about an inch long, with the capability of flight in their mature state, who loved spending the night in sweaty shoes.

No 13 was our house where my grandfather, Jim Crehan from Ballinamore Bridge in East Galway, was relocated after his house in Miles Platting had been flattened by a one ton high explosive bomb dropped from a Heinkel 111.  The bomb obviously intended for Bradford Gas Works, where he worked, missed the target by a couple of hundred yards but unfortunately hit his neighbours, killing 44 of them.  We, Mam, Dad, myself and my brother Kevin, moved into this rented accommodation in 1947 shortly after Kevin was born and my father bought the place for a few hundred pounds after my grandfather died in 1958.  There was another brother Michael but at this time only a twinkle in my father’s eye and really the scrapings of the bag as he came along 16 years after me, when my mother was well into her 40s.  I think we were the only Catholics living on our end of the street until the Poppaladas arrived later. We were surrounded by god fearing agnostics and atheists and we were certainly the only family that kept the Sabbath Day holy, ensuring that at least one family swelled the contents of the collection boxes.

On our side of the road at the Slade Lane end there was a church and a hall belonging to some strange, to us, religion.  Anything non-catholic was strange and this church anyway had probably had its day as I never remember seeing anybody go in or come out of the place except on one day a year when their Boys Brigade band sent the slates rattling when they marched up the street to god knows where.  I think they were some kind of Methodists or Presbyterians, but our lives were well controlled by our parish priest and we were taught not to get too imquisitive.  As it happens this church still stands today, so you would think it must have some devotees.

Next to this church in our row of terraced houses lived the curate of St Agnes’ church, the posh Anglican church at the southern end of Hamilton Road.  He kept himself to himself, a meek and mild chap, who probably did not like living where he did, surrounded by nutters, non-churchgoers and serious Catholics.  After his house there were three more houses which also retained an air of isolation.  People lived there, we used to see the odd light in winter but we never saw the habitues.  Next door to us was Jim Miller, the most successful man on the street, he was the driver of the London express steam train out of London Road Station into Euston Station and back again, six days a week.  A man to be admired as were his wife’s egg and tomato sandwiches, which she used to make us when we were invited into her house to have tea with her grandson, Christopher, on his frequent visits.

On our other side lived the Mellors and the star of our street, their daughter Eveleen, the best looking girl in Manchester or so the Burtonwood GIs used to think as they wore a track in the granite flags in our footpath  traipsing out of their camp at weekends, hoping to spend an hour in Eveleen’s  company.  Winning beauty competitions was like shelling peas to her, she was the queen of Butlins and Pontins holiday camps.  She was probably seven or eight years older than me and I could not understand her popularity as she struck me as being rather vapid ( a word I only understood years later).  She used to take us to the Galleon outdoor swimming pool in the Summer and there, lieing on the grass at the side of the pool, resplendent in her swimming costume that I never ever saw get wet, her popularity was obvious, as you could not see her for the hairy legs of admirers.  Eventually after going through a couple of thousand GIs at Burtonwood and half the male population of South Manchester, she chose a man from Tampa in Florida, where she lives in blissful retirement to this day.

Beyond the Mellors lived the Jones, a mild mannered cockney cost accountant with a penchant for Lilliput and naturist magazines who had a wife of dubious morals, who most nights used to jump into stopping cars at the top of our street.  I used to play with her two sons both born during the war and a year or two older than me.  Their arms were always covered with scabs where their mother had stubbed out her cigarette on them in some weird form of discipline.  Next to the Jones lived the Clarkes, decendants of Romanies, who later became sucessful fish and chip shop owners in Didsbury.  They had a son John who married a famous folk singer and a daughter who  snapped up another GI from Florida, in those days it was the only sure way of winning the pools in Longsight.

Next to the Clarkes but across the entry that led to Palm Street lived the Wagstaffs.  Just a mother, with no apparent father, whose claim to fame was wringing the necks of her son’s pigeons one day, which he kept in a loft at the back of their house.  She reckoned their cooing was driving her daft.  He was too tough to show any emotion at this sad event because he was our street’s resident Teddy Boy whose main achievement was getting stabbed by another of his ilk outside the telephone box at the top of Slade Grove.

Further on down the terrace after a few more houses with just women in them, lived Geoffrey Smith ( men were in short supply in Longsight, whether it was the war that killed them off or the pleasures of army life made them stray, I don’t know).  Geoffrey only had one eye, an everyday complaint in our neighbourhood, children generally lacked something, an arm, a leg, an eye or a digit, crutches were a common sight but this Nelsonian attribute did not deter Geoffrey in the slightest.  Although not good at contact sports, he was a wizard at the game of marbles, using his glass eye to great effect.  I never saw him lose a game, when with a shake of the head and a swift movement of the right hand this gleaming blue eyed prosthesis became ready for use.

Opposite Geoffrey’s house lived the Stanistreets, whose son John was a few years older than me.  His father, Mr Stanistreet, used to sit on the steps of his house, unshaven and smelly and took great delight in luring young children up to himself, grabbing them and rubbing his stubbled, slavery chin into their faces.  I suppose whatever floats your boat but we never looked upon it as having sexual connotations, mind you we did not know what sexual meant those days but he seemed to get great satisfaction from his actions.

I still had not learnt what sexual meant when Elizabeth Rudden, across the road from us, suggested to me that she would pull her knickers down if I dropped my pants.  I did and felt sorry for her, somehow realising she also was deficient in some way.  Some kids had no eyes, some had no arms, some had no legs, some no fingers, poor Elizabeth had no willy.  I put it down to the house she lived in.  Her grandmother was an Irish woman, who I doubt ever washed.  You could smell her from across the street.  She owned a large four storey end of terrace, which she used as a lodging house for Irish lads working in the burgeoning construction industry after the war.  On a scale of 1 – 10 with 10 being luxury, this lodging house was probably minus 20.  Bare floorboards and beds of sorts in every room. Elizabeth and her stinking forebears all lived in one room, not a man, only lodgers to be seen.

Up the road from the Ruddens lived a mad Belgian woman, who used to lean out of her bedroom window and harangue the street.  They said she was Belgian but she could have been from anywhere that spoke a foriegn language.  Belgium in history as been blamed for most of the world’s ills, so why not blame it for this poor encumbered woman.  She used to follow us to church some Sundays when Fr Brennan took over after Fr O’Shaugnessy’s death and she used to shout down his sermons.  Poor Fr Brennan was too kind a man to remove her and he used to carry on with his prepared text while she taught us all Flemish.  The apparitors had a meeting and my father because he was a neighbour was asked to head her off at the pass but she was crafty and often evaded his blockade by going in different doors.

Next to this lady lived a family of Italians, who moved in about 1960, they had been living a few streets away but their family had increased, so they moved to our mansions.  I began to realise then what sexual meant.  Their eldest daughter, probably a year younger than me, was blossoming into a beautiful girl, she went under the equally beautiful name of Agatina Poppalada and by god wasn’t she a looker.  It took me six months to pluck up the courage to approach her, as she sported herself up and down the street in the fashion of the day.  Her mother was a dressmaker and knew how to turn her daughter out.  Unfortunately six months was far too long for Agatina, so by the time my courage was plucked, Lesley Murphy from Slade Lane had her in his grasp and would not let go.  Lesley was a ne’er-do-well but he obviously had something I didn’t and taking your opportunities must have been it.

I was 16 in 1962 when we left this fragrant meadow and moved to richer pastures but I always look back with fond memories and thank the lord that I was given the chance to experience the riches of Longsight that have formed my character.

In June 1996 the IRA did most people in Manchester a bit of a favour.  They detonated a bomb, the biggest in peace time history, on Corporation Street, near to the junction with Market Street.  The bomb caused that much damage, it advanced the development of Manchester city centre by about 30 years, leaving us with a city centre today that anybody would be proud of.

The damage was so great in relation to the infrastructure that most buildings within a few hundred yards had either to be demolished or had to have fundamental demolition to large parts of its structure.  This led the movers and shakers to think that while we are doing this we might as well do that as well.  Insurance and investment money came pouring in from all angles and kept the construction industry in business for many a year.  No wonder that although the authorities knew who the culprits were they did not have them arrested.  Had they not done Manchester and the North of England a great service?

The only building within the bomb’s vicinity that did not get demolished was the Royal Exchange, a massive Victorian monolith which had experienced Hitler’s bombs in 1940 and stood to tell the tale.  It was formerly the heartbeat of the textile industry which conducted world wide trade within its porticos, but was now offices, shopping centre and avant-garde theatre.  We, as demolition contractors, were lucky enough to win the contract for the complete internal demolition and clean up of this building and so we embarked on two years of hard, busy and lucrative work.

Back at home my fifth child, Paddy Jo or on formal occasions Patricia Josephine, with one eye on her fast approaching second level education, was expressing a wish to learn to play the piano.  She was just over eight years old when the bomb inadvertently did her a favour and well into her tenth year by the time the favour was realised.

The Royal Exchange, as I have explained, was high, deep and massive.  Nine floors above the ground, four floors below and all sat on a footprint of 60,000sq. ft.  As each floor was handed over by loss adjustors and insurance men, we moved in and cleared everything back to structure.  Hard and difficult work in the confined spaces in which we were asked to work.  We literally shifted several thousand tonnes of debris in our time there.

Some time in late 1997 we were given the undercroft to clear.  The undercroft was the lowest floor of four basement floors, accessed by street traffic from a vehicle lift situated on its southern elevation, opposite Half Moon Street.  It was a warren of storerooms and service equipment rooms housing heating and ventilating and electrical equipment.  The tenants of these storerooms and there was several dozen of them had been permitted entry and had taken out what was considered valuable.  Any item they could not remove because of its size had to be bubble-wrapped and it was part of our responsibility to recover the said bubble-wrapped items and place same onto the tenants’ transport.  Everything not bubble-wrapped had to be removed to tip.

One day in the first week of this operation, we were given the keys to a long tunnel-like room, full of point of sale advertising boards for a shop upstairs that had once sold cosmetics and beauty products.  Struggling through this dusty and out of date paraphenalia and right at the end of the tunnel was a piano with no bubble-wrap around it.  I called the Project Manager on the radio, pointed out the instument to him and asked him the obvious question.  He turned to our job description and said “if it is not double-wrapped, tip it”  Although Paddy Jo did not know it then, her constant pleadings had been answered.

Within an hour of our meeting, the not bubble-wrapped piano was on the back of one of our pick-ups and making its way to our house in Heaton Moor.  With a little effort, four of us lifted it off the pick-up and safely installed it in our front room.  Helen set to work with damp cloths and polish and when I returned that evening there was this wonderfully manufactured upright piano dressed in the most beautifully coloured walnut cladding, a most desirable object.

A piano tuner was called and enquiries made for a piano teacher.  Within 24 hours we had both.  The piano tuner said it was a great example of a horizontally strung piano dating to about the 1870-1880 period.  The piano teacher said Paddy was approaching her lessons with great enthusiasm.  All our hopes and dreams were answered.

A couple of weeks later I received a message from the Project Manager asking me to come up to his office.  I entered and there sat a very irate looking matronly figure, who turned out to be the one-time manageress of the previously mentioned beauty parlour.  “Where is my piano, I did not think I had to bubble-wrap it” she squawked.  It seems, to ease the tensions of the day that rapidly build up in beauty emporia, madame used to visit her dungeoned piano and knock hell out of the ivories until her stress levels decreased.  The Project Manager winked at me and enquired as to where we had stored it.  I was nonplussed for a second but thought for the sake of everybody, I had better be straight.  I explained to the rapidly quietening lady that we had to remove it from its position  in order to keep the work moving but we realised that it had value to someone and that we had it in safe storage at our depot.  I received a delivery address but no thanks and the following day Paddy Jo was heart broken, the lady was happy and the piano teacher was out of work.  However the Project Manager was very pleased at the way he had been extricated from a very tricky situation.  But I had a problem how to placate my darling Paddy Jo and how to keep the piano teacher in business.

Longsight, in Manchester, where I spent my formative first 20 years, is a market for anything.  If you want it, Longsight has got it.  Within hours of me sending out distress signals I was informed of this piano showroom situated in an old mill in Hamilton Road, where I used to play as a kid, climbing its sheer vertical sides and generally doing anything that was just one step from death.  This showroom specialised in refurbished pianos and it was from there, having handed over a pocketful of spondulicks, Paddy’s refurbished Walberg piano was delivered next day.  Paddy and the piano teacher happy, me teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.

Paddy grateful to her splendid father, attacked the piano with all the vim, vigour and verve she could muster and 18 months later won the Music Scholarship to St. Bede’s College, in Whalley Range, my old alma mater. This Scholarship payed 50% of the fees during her stay at College.  With about £3,000 of a saving a year over her seven years at school that piano owed me nothing.  Paddy continued learning and finished up passing her Grade 8 examination which is as good as the normal piano player wants.  Mrs Rosamund Meehan, Deputy head of the school and Head of Music considered Paddy to be an excellent musician  That piano, the mahogany one, mentioned in my blog posting of 13 January 2012 entitled A Man With A Van, after crossing the Irish Sea the other day is hopefully going to earn some other deserving kid’s parents a few quid as well but it is all down to that beautifully clad walnut piano that we borrowed from that lovely lady.

As a follow up to yesterday’s blog posting, I want to pursue this idea of changing your first name halfway through your life.  By pursuing this thought it might help me to understand and start to like people I have no particular regard for and it might also help me to understand myself a little better and help me to get to grips with my reactionary self.
I am going to take as my example Baroness Scotland, the lady I clumsily tried to make sense of yesterday.  I am using Baroness Scotland because I have no regard for her present self but I could easily use any number of men or women who pick up a new Christian name in middle life.  Sir and Lord are very popular.  I want to stress that by picking Baroness Scotland that this is not a gender or even an ethnic thing, it is just purely a christian name thing.
Ever since Patricia Janet Scotland learnt to cry, the tenth child of 12 children born to her parents in that pretty little house on that beautiful island of Dominica in the West Indies, she started to answer to her family name of Paddy, or if discipline had to be meted out Miss Patricia Janet.  She was fond of these two names, they had a certain cachet, as she made her way through several schools and colleges before being called to the Bar at the tender age of 22 years old in 1977 and then still luxuriating in the name of Patricia Janet she became Queen’s Counsel at the ridiculously early age of 36.  She was doing well, really well, so I do not understand why having done so well with her parentally given names of Patricia Janet, she should wish in 1997 at the age of 42 to change her name to Baroness.
It is a stupid masculine sounding name, hard and rough and no way matched her petite, girlie nature and physique.  All I can think is that she was not happy with her feminine side to decide on lumpy Baroness, but she was 42, as I said and on the cusp of middle age and she did what so many English people did and still do, she changed her name.
Now I am a rough as arseholes, straight talking, hard living, son of a gun and having learnt my trade over a great number of years, nobody in this world would have the nerve to call me a fay Sir or Lord, let alone myself.  I was born Paul and I will stay Paul but that is not to say other people, from time to time, have called me different names behind my back in the past.  It was their choice not mine.
So there we have it, the nice warm feminine, bubbly Patricia Janet at the age of 42 changed herself and almost her sex into this hard , knobbly and damaging Baroness.  It was at this point I started to dislike her.  I had followed her passage through Walthamstow School for Girls (strange for a good Catholic girl, but obviously they do not cater for good Catholics down there in London like they do in my stabling ground of Manchester), Mid-Essex Technical College, Cambridgeshire College of Arts and Technology, the University of London and Middle Temple and I was pleased with the fact that our Paddy was going places and then in 1997, full stop.  She became a waspish, supercilious, ladder climbing Baroness and that put an end to my love.
It is some years now since I last indulged in my fantasies with Patricia Janet and I wonder sometimes how she has got on with spiky Baroness, I doubt that she has still got that wondrous, loving, happy self of her early life and I bet that she is really that dumpy, miserable, knife sharpening, hard Baroness I have imagined.
So I would like to throw this idea out to the floor and ask all her confreres and all you lawyers out there who think they know me and there must be plenty who do because just like Baroness I also have previous and I must have met plenty of you in different courts of law up and down the land in the last 66 years.  Do you know the girl?  When you all meet up at your late Friday afternoon soirees, do you come across her?  Is she half as nice as she used to be when I was first attracted?  Or has she suffered, has she deteriorated since that mind bending moment in 1997 when she decided to veil herself in this puritanical persona and call herself Baroness.
So please report back you importers of forked tongues, cast off your cloying, brotherly, natural instincts and tell me the truth, tell it as it is for once in your smarmy, elusive, inveracitic lives.  Am I to remain forlorn or is there a glimmer of hope.

We are a little further along the road to exposing more of the Duggan scandal that tortured St. Bede’s College in Manchester between 1950 and 1966.  Monsignor Thomas Duggan was Rector of the school during this period and witness accounts tell of his sexual, mental and physical abuse of young boys that took place during the whole of this time.   Actual sexual abuse, regarding penetration of the anal region, was tailing off by 1966 but it still occasionally occurred.   I am seriously considering writing a book about the man,  his ways and his perversion, to warn people of the un-policed evil that still exists at the heart of the Catholic Church today.

Yet the Catholic Church, in the form of the Salford Diocese, is still saying that they had nothing on the man, their records are clean, although Barry O’Sullivan, the Coordinator of the Child Safeguarding Commission of the Salford Diocese as said on record that he has been a priest for 23 years and has heard stories about Duggan for all that time.  See Philip Gilligan’s blog http://caads.blogspot.com/2011/04/duggan-there-is-no-evidence-to-suggest.html

But myself, Bishop Terence Brain and Barry O’Sullivan all know different.  In fact myself and O’Sullivan had a telephone conversation on 8th October  2010 during which he explained to me how the Bishop, the Chair of St. Bede’s Governors, Monsignor Quinlan, the headmaster of St. Bede’s, Mr. Michael Barber,  Michael Devlin, a solicitor and Chair of the Safeguarding Commission and O’Sullivan had met up in early October 2010 and discovered “serious and sensitive” evidence against Duggan that was too “serious and sensitive” to discuss over the telephone and that it required my presence at a meeting in Manchester as soon as possible.  The next day O’Sullivan fell out with me and this meeting never happened and the truth about Duggan never saw the light of day.

But the truth about Duggan is coming out, on a daily basis, with testimonies from his many victims, all Old Bedians in the mid 50s to mid 70s age group.  When you think about it Duggan was in clover, all those young boys to choose from, all scared to death of him, with the power the Church had over all Catholics in those days.  The boys, the few who spoke of their ordeals, were not  believed by their parents in the main and the various bishops, including Bishop Vincent Marshall, Bishop George Andrew Beck and Bishop Thomas Holland who had all received parental warnings and chose to cover it up and Bishops Kelly and Brain who pushed this information to the furthest reaches of their files.

To my mind this knowledge by the bishops is possibly the most wicked of the sins committed around this subject.  To allow a known pervert free rein to do has he wanted, with whoever of the boys within this cohort of 2500 who passed through his hands during the 16 years of his aegis, was an unbelievable act of vicarious liability.  Probably the biggest sinner in this whole business was Bishop Geoffrey Burke, who worked with and was the right hand man of Duggan for 25 years and was rewarded with his Auxiliary Bishopric after Duggan was sent out to grass at St. Mary’s in Langho in 1967 and for a further 21 years kept the sins of Duggan quiet.  Not far behind Burke are the staff of St. Bede’s, who repeatedly and often, too often to be healthy,  sent appointed boys up to Duggan, as and when he required them.  They might now,  those that are still living, of course,  squeal and get angry and say they did not know this sodomy was being perpetrated, but they knew, the whole bloody school knew.

The pattern of Duggan’s behaviour,  by the week,  is becoming more and more certain.  To an extent,  but not always, it started in Preparatory School, which was in a large house,  just outside the walls of the main school.  This establishment prepared youngsters for the 11+ Examination,  the passing of which entitled the child entry into the senior school.  In the main this school kept itself separate from all the senior school’s activities,  except for the fact that Duggan was  in overall charge.  Two priests in the Prep,  as it was known,  have been accused of sending these young boys up to Duggan for absolutely no reason at all.  It was  as though they were grooming their charges,  some of whom were only nine years old.  These priests, Fr. Bernard Rylands and Fr. Charles Mulholland have been mentioned in various testimonies, with Mulholland especially,  forcing some boys into sexual activity of the grossest sort.

Duggan’s victims,  in the main,  were  quiet  placid individuals,  generally from poorer backgrounds than the majority, some had emotional problems in their families and Duggan knew it.   His activities started with quiet chats,  then simple threats of punishment or expulsion from the school;  then massaging of the pubic and anal regions,  which calmed some of the victims and these he then penetrated,  afterwards wiping them clean and then diminishing them with cruel words to make them think it was all their fault.

The boys who have come forward have been very brave individuals, some have been prescribed tranquillisers for all their adult lives,  some have had long sessions of therapy,  some in 40 year marriages have not told their wives, some were unable to sustain relationships,  nearly all had an inbuilt anger that portrayed itself frequently and all had a sense of guilt of their juvenile experiences.  To listen and read of their trials and tribulations is heart rending and at times horrific.

Duggan was a bullying, psychopathic, sexually very active and unbelievably cruel man, disliked by everyone who ever knew him.  If he were alive today  he would probably give the details of his illigitimate birth as mitigation for his crimes,  but that would not wash.  He was an educated,  scheming  horror of a man,  disliked by pupil,  lay teacher and priest.  However he was not the only psychopath on the staff.   There was the likes of Fr.  Joseph Coulthard and Fr.  Hynes  who dished out illegal physical punishment by the day and who were hated by everyone who came into contact with them.  But Duggan was different,  his sin was Machiavellian in its origins,  carried out with malice aforethought and required the conspiracy of those all around him.  How he got away with it for all those years is too dire to consider.

Most of his victims were culled from the first three years of senior school (11-13 years old) and some  from preparatory school (9-11 years old) after that presumably they became too mature to handle.  Very,  very few reached O Level status,  being weeded out and discarded after they had served their purpose.  Just a few quick calculations will tell you that in the 1957 intake 139 pupils were accepted and 108 were entered for O Levels.  In the 1956 intake 122 were accepted and 80 were entered for O Levels.  Of the 1957 intake 31 pupils had been discarded and of the 1956 intake 42 had been discarded.  All these boys had passed their 11+ examination and were in the top 6% in the country of their age group,  so we were told.  These 73 boys were denied a reasonable and humanitarian education and were then discarded,  most after serving their purpose.

In conclusion I would like all Old Bedians who have not yet been in touch to contact me through the Comments section of my blog or better still e-mail me on malpas46@eircom.net.  We have to get the message across and have it proclaimed to everybody, that abuse of the most hideous form took place at St. Bede’s College all those years ago.  It is no use saying it is water under the bridge and let sleeping dogs lie.  This perverse behaviour has ruined the lives of many young and now old men.  It cannot be left to disappear like some want it to;  it has to be shouted from the roof tops  so that all might know of the canker in the Church and in the Diocese of Salford in particular.