Paul Malpas

Over the last few years since starting this blog in November 2009, I have written on occasion about the parish I grew up in and surprisingly these postings received more attention than any other pieces I have written, which I suppose vindicates my theory that Longsight in those days was a lovely place to live and that we at St Robert’s were a lucky bunch of blighters to have such smashing pastors that ruled and organized our lives.  There was no apparent skulduggery by clerics, there was no serious questioning of religion, all the bishops seemed to be decent men who easily received our approbation.  Old days in an old church was the subject of one of my postings and it surely is a true reflection of those days.

A lady who was at school with me and has been a frequent contributor to my blog expressed an interest in giving her story of her childhood and its happy times as we baby boomers kicked off the post war years in style.  Jean Skitt is the lady’s married name but we at St Robert’s knew her as Jean Gay, who patrolled the streets of Longsight with her brother Cliff in those far off halcyon days.  So today I give you Jean Skitt and her lovely piece on her childhood in and around St Robert’s parish.

With all the comments I have received lately about a piece I penned over two years ago, I thought I would continue on the same theme and write of more thoughts I have about life in Longsight and especially life attached to St. Robert’s parish and school and try to invigorate our selective  memories.

I was born in February 1946 and anybody with a glimmer of simple mathematics can work out that my conception was based on celebrations attached to Mr Hitler’s demise, nine months previously in May 1945.  So I am the only man I know that rejoices in that horrible man and his fortunate death but I doubt that my parents were the only ones celebrating in early May that year.

I was born into a family that had virtually nothing, having been bombed out of their house in Miles Platting during the Christmas Blitz of 1940.  They were at the start of the long weary trail of putting one foot in front of the other and building from scratch.  But in other regards I was born into wealth, into Longsight and its many characters and more importantly into St Robert’s parish, centred on Hamilton Road.  The Catholic Church then, as opposed to now, put its arms around its families and guided us through the hard times.  It seemed to cater for more than pastoral care, it actually managed our existence in times young people now will never understand.

I started school after the 1950 Christmas holidays; I was four years and ten months old and I could read and write in a fashion that was probably better than my script today.  I entered Miss Standen’s class, an old lady who retired shortly afterwards but not before she put me on the road.  My memories of her say she was a kindly woman endowed with lots of patience, ideal for the task in hand.

The following September I moved up to Infants 2 which I think was in the care of Miss Willoughby and then onto Infants 3 and that ended the soft times.  They thought at eight we had certain responsibilities in life and one of these was to accept punishment rather than chastisement for any misdemeanour. Junior One started for me in September 1953, in the newly built prefab adjacent to Farrer Road, built for the first of the baby boomers of my generation.  It seemed the war ended and love started in 1945.  Our teacher in Junior One, a young decent woman who was shortly to get married, decent in that she could control her class by a mix of sternness and niceness, a mixture that was missing in some of the teachers.  Her very presence calmed you and made you listen.

Then onto Mrs McGrath’s class, Junior Two, and it was in this class that the powers decided punishment was the answer to all problems.  Mrs McGrath was the Headmaster, Paddy McGrath’s wife and must have wanted to keep her husband in shape so that any murmur at all was sufficient to send us down the corridor to her husband’s office for a dose o0f his feared strap, which he summarily dished out outside his room for all and sundry to see.

We moved up to Miss Wallace’s class as we approached 10 years old and the punishments got worse.  Miss Wallace, so the rumour went, was attracted by Paddy McGrath’s punitive muscles and always dressed smartly when he was around, tidying up her make-up and recoating with lipstick if Paddy was due for inspection.  It was thought that her and Paddy were close,  but how close in those Catholic days, I don’t know.  Miss Wallace had a grim countenance, only  brightened by Paddy’s frequent visits.  She was always calling me big-headed and far to cocky, always beating me over the hands with the edge of a ruler.  Her possibly unrequited love affair with Paddy might have had something to do with her dissatisfaction of me, but I for my part could not understand her grievances against me because my examination results were always top class and I always wondered what I had to do to escape such duress.  Confidence was not the thing authority respected those days.  Control and subserviance were the qualities to attain.  My reports, which I still have, tell me that I was top of the class of 47 children and still getting beaten to within an inch of my life.  I suppose trying to control 47 Longsight kids was a task in itself, if you were not on top of your game, without trying to teach and vexation did rise to the top more often than not.

I have to say that punishment never ever taught me a lesson either at St Robert’s or at St Bede’s where I went after 11+, it only made me more determined to plough my own furrow.  I think we thought of punishment as a necessary evil, something to be endured, like cutting your knees whilst playing football in the school yard.  A means to an end.

The senior class before the 11+ examination was Junior Four and Mr Groarke’s class.  A fine and fair man, a good teacher, who could dish out punishment just the same.  When he punished you , you felt that you had deserved it.  With Paddy McGrath and Miss Wallace hitting you, you wondered why.  People I remember in that class, most of whom went on to Senior One (there was no secondary schools for most in those days and comprehensive education had not been thought out), were Pauil Richardson, Barry Mannock, Stuart Robinson, David Evans and Alan Morris, David Duffy and Anthony Fahey.  I seem to remember more girls as they were more competitive in the exams, Pauline Connor (one of seven daughters of Jim and Helen Connor), Pauline McGhee, Belinda Maloney, Mary Leydon, Rosemary Keogh, Marlene Moran and Maureen Smith from up North Road, Maureen Sargent and the Swiss girl, Helen Vogeli who did not seem to mind the change in language.  It is funny how you remember some but not others, but there was another 31 kids there somewhere and probably a little reminder and they would all come flooding back.

I was co-opted onto the altar boys at St Robert’s when I was seven, my mother bought me the cassock from John Neville’s in Manchester and my Aunty Kath made the cotta with some fancy lace trimmings on the sleeves and round the hem and Fr Dwyer instructed me in the Latin rites and made me know how important and special was the role of an altar boy.  A few years ago whilst writing my Memoir, a 400 page tome, which I did for my children rather than for publication, I discovered a photograph taken prior to an altar boys trip to Blackpool.  The photograph is strange these days, there was a group of men and boys about to go on an outing, all dressed up in shiny shoes, suits, shirts and ties, no leisure wear, anoraks, tracksuit trousers or trainers.  It must have been taken in 1958  because I was wearing my first year St Bede’s uniform, grey short trousered suit with school tie and blue shirt.

The two priests sat centrally, Canon O’Shaughnessy andf his curate Fr McCardle.  Some of the St Vincent De Paul Society stood at the back who were a lot older than us.  Reggie Singh, who chanced his arm with Evelyn Mellor who lived next door to us but who never stood a chance with the battalion of GIs, fresh out of Burtonwood who were queueing up to register their claim.  Next to him there was John Sparks, Bill Bagnall, Robin Clancy, the twins father, Mr White, John Shepard, John Walsh who became a dentist in Clare and  John Mulcahey.  Lads who were older than me at Bede’s, John Watkins who lives in Zurich now, Michael Power whose sisters , Aileen and Geraldine, I knew and Mike McPartland.  There were “Punch” Donelon’s two sons, Chris and Sean and Anthony O’Malley who went to Xaverian and ended up in Law.  The Harrison twins, John and Michael, Michael continued to serve on the altar until the church closed in 2003, devoting nearly 50 years of his life to the cause.  Then there was Stuart Robinson from Swayfield Avenue who went on to marry Cath Philbin who became Lord Mayor of Manchester, Anthony Millington who I continued to meet the odd time at Houldsworth Golf Club and his brother Paul who I last saw in his butcher’s shop on Meldon Road.  Paul Hopkins was there the son of Gabriel Hopkins, a local shop owner, politician and friend of my father’s, Paul became headmaster of a secondary school in North Manchester.  John Halloran I notice, John was the nephew of a famous Daily Mail journalist whose name at the moment escapes me. There was Tony Deacy who was making a name for himself in the construction industry until he was tragically killed on Longley Lane in 1973 aged 26. also I see Kevin Kelly, son of the church organist Mrs Kelly and his fellow skiffle group member, my brother Kevin, who the following year took up with the Holy Ghost Fathers, John Howarth, Michael Leydon and Robert Fannon.  The White twins , Peter and Paul, John O’Grady and a lad called Davidson (Jeremy, I think).  There are two boys I cannot name but I will do one day when I finish this process.  Whatever happened to most of these faces, they all look very serious and I doubt the 54 years will have changed the ones that are still living that much.

These lads and men formed the backbone of the parish at that time, serving at every church service.  I wonder how many, like myself, have drifted away because of the Church’s inabilities in reinventing itself.  Its power and control was great for the war weary 1950s and before but the Church had given us education and most of us eventually empowered  with this wisdom, realised the faults in its system.  For me its only fault, propagated by lowly priest, dandy bishop, aloof cardinal and disdainful pope was the massive corporative cover up of clerical abuse which has been in practice all my life and which they are still trying to conceal when they have been caught bang to rights as their suppurating corpse twitches on the altar of life.

But back to Longsight and St Robert’s.  Nowadays I wonder at the distances some of the kids walked to school, especially a school in an urban environment.  Marlene Moran from long gone Greenwood House flats on Kirkmanshulme Lane, must have been the farthest.  The Sacred Heart in Gorton or St Joseph’s in Longsight would have been nearer.  Barry Mannock who lived off Stockport Road, near Mount Road and would have been quicker going to St Mary’s and in fact all the St Richard’s children who had unfortunately no school to go to.  I understand the position as now reversed itself and all the St Robert’s children now go to St Richard’s.

It is strange also to think of shopping in those pre- supermarket days.  We lived on Duncan Road and except for occasional trips to town, all the shopping to satisfy our daily needs was done within a 100 yard radius of where we lived.  Mrs Bunting’s greengrocers shop was at the top of the road on Slade Lane, Ernie the butcher on the corner of Clitheroe Road and Dixon Street, Mrs Reynolds grocer’s shop opposite and the off-licence on Clitheroe Road where I used to go with a jug when my granddad was to poorly to stroll down to the Anson Hotel.  The jug would be filled with beer from a pump and I would head back down Dixon Street, having a few slurps to stop it from spilling .  All these shops would have been full if three customers came at once, so you just wonder at where the hundreds come from that fill the supermarkets 24 hours per day.

We were all surely an insular bunch, living in our own little cocoon that the parish had created.  We did not notice the poverty all round us; the only time we ventured further than the top of the street was when we went to the pictures.  Longsight and Levenshulme were well endowed with picture houses, from the flea-pit Queens at the Stockport Road/Slade Lane junction to the opulence of the Regal Cinema in Levenshulme, which does keep reinventing itself, from a cinema to a bowling alley to a showcase curry house.  Sometimes three cinema visits a week were called for to satisfy our needs in those pre-TV days and on the way home, a bag of chips in the previous days newspaper.  You could read the news off the chips, the type transferring itself from the newsprint onto the potatoes.

Well there is 2100 words fashioned out of nothing with still plenty to talk about in Longsight and its church of St Robert.

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.

I live in a really beautiful part of Ireland, in Boyle in north County Roscommon.  Our house is so close to the Boyle River that from a distance it looks as though the river runs through our front room and in fact it often tries to do.  Down the river a few hundred yards, the waters spill out into historic Loch Ce, a lake of christian pilgrimage for a thousand years.  The Premonstratensian, Augustinian and Franciscan monks all built abbeys on its shores and islands following on from St. Columcille’s monks who built a monastery on Church Island and a church at Drum on the river, at the side of our house in the 7th century.  The lake is six miles long and 4 miles wide and dotted so they say with as many islands as there are counties in Ireland.

Sail to the northern end of the lake and take the road through the village of Corrigeenroe (Little Red Rock) and you are taken along the eastern side of Lough Arrow which is just over the Sligo border.  You are in the ancient Barony of Tirreril, the Land of the McDonaghs, an ancient royal clan that owed allegiance to the McDermots, who were the royal chieftains of this area since the 10th century.  In Tirreril lived the O’Higgins family, a highly thought of family with big estates and a history going back to the O’Neills in the 6th century.  The O’Higgins were liked by all the local big-wigs, the McDermots, the O’Rourkes, the O’Garas and the McDonaghs for their poetry and their intellect.

It was here in 1720, on the shores of Lough Arrow, Ambrose O’Higgins was born in much reduced circumstances because of the Cromwellian persecution and later Jacobite/Williamite upheaval.  It was the time of the Penal Laws, when Catholics were disarmed, stripped of land and reduced to the level of servants.  They were disenfranchised, forbidden to marry Protestants,  join the Army or receive a decent education.  It was a time when most gifted and doughty men left Ireland and filled the ranks of the military and civil service in all the countries in Europe.  They called it the Flight of the Wild Geese.

The O’Higgins family became tenant farmers for the Rowley family in Meath after their land was eventually all taken off them.  In about 1750, aged 30, Ambrose took the plunge and ended up in Cadiz in Spain where he worked for the powerful Irish/Spanish merchant family of Butler.  After some few years in Cadiz, Ambrose decided to seek his fortune in South America.  He worked in Venezuela, Peru and Argentina before getting his big chance.  He worked out a route from Mendoza, in western Argentina, over the Andes into Chile, thus joining up two Spanish colonies that previously had had little contact for most of the year other than by sailing round the Horn.  This route worked and for the first time ever the two colonies could remain in contact all year long.  By now he was enlisted in the Spanish Imperial Service and besides developing this route, he was asked to stay in Chile by the Spanish authorities and join the Army, which he did and sucessfully put down an Indian uprising, humanely and not cruelly, for which he was thanked by both sides and eventually he was upgraded to the position of Governor of Concepcion in 1786.

In 1788 king Charles III of Spain made him Baron of Ballinar for his services to the colonies.  He soon became leader of the Spanish Army and eventually Governor of Chile.  He entered on a programme of road building and rebuilding of ancient towns.  For this service the new king Charles IV made him the Marquis of Osomo in 1796 at the age of 76 and appointed him Viceroy of Peru, the land of which covered present day Peru, Chile, Bolivia, north west Argentina and western Brazil.  It was the most powerful position in Spanish America and he died suddenly from overwork in 1801 at the age of 81.

In 1777 Ambrose at the age of 57 fell in love with an 18 year old girl, Isabel Riquelme, of a powerful mixed race family.  In accordance with society’s rules at the time, he was not allowed to marry her at the risk of losing his hard won position but in 1778 Isabel bore him a son, Bernardo.  Ambrose never met this boy and never ever recognised him but he provided the money to bring him up and pay for his education in London.  It was here, at the age of 18, influenced by South American independence seeking  politicos, did Bernardo start to put his thoughts together towards an independent Chile, free of Spanish rule.  After a short time in Spain he returned to Chile in 1802 and started farming a large piece of land willed to him by his father.  In 1806 he entered the Chilean Parliament.

The Independence thinkers were helped considerably by events in Europe, Napoleon of France took control of Spain in 1808 and whilst he was involved in his European campaigns the Spanish/Chilean ruling class formed their own government, ruling the couintry in the name of Napoleon’s captive king, Ferdinand VII and Bernardo was elected deputy in the first National Congress of Chile in 1811.

After Napoleon started to lose his power in Spain after Wellington and Nelson had given him a bloody nose, the Spanish imperial forces invaded Chile to regain control of the country  but Bernardo defeated them at Linares.  In October of that year he effectively took command of the Chilean Army and defeated the Spanish forces again at El Roble with the famous cry of “Lads!  Live with honour, or die with glory!  He who is brave follow me”  However at a later battle at Rancagua, the Chilean forces were soundly beaten and Bernardo was lucky to escape with his life, scurrying into Argentina.  He returned to Chile in 1817 and defeated the royalist forces at Chacabuco.  Bernardo became Supreme Director of the newly independent Chile in 1818.  He founded the Chilean Navy but after five years with the cost of arming the new country it teetered on the edge of bankruptcy only saved by a £1 million pound loan from England but by then he had run foul of the country’s opposition party and in 1823 at the age opf 45 he was deposed.

He left Chile, never to return, in a British naval vessel intending on returning to Ireland but he met up with Simon Bolivar in Peru and joined him in his successful fight for independence and then went into retirement for the next 20 years.  By 1842 the tide of public opinion had turned towards him in Chile and he was invited back and given back his old rank of Captain General of the Army but on his journey back he suffered a heart attack and was buried in Lima in Peru.

His remains were exhumed in 1869 and brought back to Chile and he lay in a marble coffin in Santiago whilst it was decided where he should be buried.  He had wanted Concepcion but the Chilean people wanted Santiago.  It was not until General Pinochet finally put him down in 1974 in Santiago was the argument decided.  Wherever you go today in Chile, Bernardo’s name shouts out from street names and statues, districts and docks.  He is their Deliverer.

Not bad for two men from Tirreril whose countryside was bypassed by the 20th century.  Even today there isn’t much change from the countryside Ambrose knew.  It is a quaint, quiet backwater but full of more history than most parts of Ireland.  So this evening as you settle by your fire in your favourite armchair, lift your glasses of Cabernet Sauvignon or even better, Carmenere, because without these two boys you might not now feel so smug.  Do not forget that the South American vines saved the European wine industry in the late 19th century when an outbreak of phylloxera nearly killed every vine on the Continent.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Ambrose and Bernard!