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.

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!

For my sins and as General Secretary of the Connaught Rangers Association, I help to put together The New Ranger, an annual magazine for the Association members.  The Association’s purpose is to build up a data base of soldiers who served in the Regiment, one of the proudest regiments ever to serve in the British Army and to remember those men who died fighting for what they thought was their country.  The Regiment was disbanded along with several other Irish regiments in 1922 when Ireland gained its independance from England after having 2500 of its soldiers killed in the First War.

Whilst carrying out these duties just prior to the last edition going to press a strange thing happened to me.  I was editing a piece by a chap called Jack Fallon about the opening of a monument in a churchyard in Killure, near Ahascragh, in East Galway.  This monument was to the 12 men of the parish who gave their lives in the First War.  I thought I would tag their names onto the bottom of Jack’s report.   The last man on the list was Pvt. Matthew Wilson No7010 of 2nd Battalion Connaught Rangers and on the programme for the day it said the date of his death was 25th, 1915. No month, not sinister but just probably a typing mistake.  So I resolved to find out the month of his death.  By 1915 the 1st and 2nd Battalions, after both receiving a massive mauling in late 1914 had been amalgamated into one Battalion, yet the programme said he was with 2nd Battalion in 1915.  I noticed that he was buried in Guise Communal Cemetery, which was behind German lines for most of that war.  I googled Guise Cemetery 1915 and up came the graves of soldiers and a magnificent memorial to 11 English soldiers  who it said had been shot by the Germans on the 25 February 1915, and there on the list was Matthew Wilson, our man from Killure.

This started me thinking and I rooted through all the reports coming through for inclusion in the magazine and there was the story of these 11 men sent in by Hedley Malloch, who lives in Lille, in Northern France.  I felt as though fate had taken a hand and that I had to tell the story.  So with apologies to Hedley I will give my cut down version.

The party of 11 soldiers consisted of  five men from 2nd Connaught Rangers, five men from 2nd Royal Munster Fusiliers and one man from 15th (Kings) Hussars.  On and just after the 26 August during the long and chaotic retreat from Mons in the first week of the war these soldiers were 11 of  literally hundreds of men who were cut off from the main Expeditionary Force and were captured by the Germans or escaped back through to their own lines or escaped back to England through routes opened up by Nurse Edith Cavell and her friends in Brussels.  These 11 had not succeeded in escaping but had followed the line of the German advance knowing this was going to be a quick war and as the saying went, “would be over by Christmas”.  They were sheltered by the people of Iron, a small village about ten kilometres north of Guise, from about 15 October 1915, having existed for the first two months by scavenging and living off the country  in a land of valleys, woods and great forests, a great place to hide.

Eventually as the winter progressed,  Vincente Chalandre, who had a mill in the village, brought them inside where they remained for some time.  Unfortunately as with every small community that had been sworn to secrecy there was a weak link in the chain and in a cauldron of envy, love, fear, and jealousy, this link broke, when an old man called Batchelet informed on the soldiers who were arrested on the 22nd February 1915.  No German records exist of what happened but early in the morning of 25 February after a night of beatings and general cruelty, the 11 soldiers and Vincente Chalandre were led out into the grounds of the Chateau at Guise and shot by firing squad, their bodies allowed to fall into a prepared ditch and they were covered over.

To be fair to the Germans this might not have been over-reaction.  Amnesties had been declared at least three times in their six months on the run and they had plenty of time to give themselves up, but it was on the top end of harshness by the Germans, however the women who were involved were all spared and given prison sentences. Bachelet the informer was arrested after the war but died in custody before his case came to court and to the end he was calling them deserters.  So these six Irishmen, three Yorkshiremen, one from Birkenhead and one man of Kent met their end through no fault of their own, perhaps they are still muttering and moaning like all soldiers do and wondering what to do next.  At least the people of Guise and Iron still remember them and Matthew Wilson has the added bonus of being remembered by the people of Killure.  An outstanding thing in Ireland where only now after 90 odd years are these brave Irish dead getting their sacrifice honoured.

The 11 soldiers were:-

Pvt Denis Buckley No 6240  2nd Royal Munster Fusiliers.  Born Cork.  Age 25

Pvt Daniel Horgan No 9582  2nd Royal Munster Fusiliers.  Born Cork.  Age18

Pvt Fred Innocent No 7845  2nd Royal Munster Fusiliers.  Born Bradford Age 27

Pvt John Nash  No 10084   2nd  Royal Munster Fusiliers, Born Sneem, Kerry Age 21

L/c James Moffatt No 7925 2nd Royal Munster Fusiliers Born Birkenhead Age not known

L/c John William Stent No 6943 15th(The King’s) Hussars Born Bromley, Kent Age 24

Pvt George Howard No 9381 2nd Connaught Rangers Born Sheffield.  Age 28

Pvt Terence Murphy No 8713 2nd Connaught Rangers Born Ballisodare, Co. Sligo Age 29

Pvt William Thompson No 9472 2nd Connaught Rangers Born Sheffield Age 24

Pvt John Walsh No 6594 2nd Connaught Rangers Born Tullamore, Co. Offaly Age 33

Pvt Matthew Wilson No 7010 2nd Connaught Rangers Born Ahascragh, Co. Galway Age 37

MAY THEY REST IN PEACE

Well fate definitely did take a hand, Hedley Malloch wanted to erect a monument to these forgotten men and worked tirelessly for a number of years with the townsfolk of Guise and the villagers of Iron and helped by donations from our Association and the Royal Munster Fusiliers Association, the stage was set. Land in the centre of Iron was granted and our own in house team of stonemasons Feelystone of Boyle designed, exported and erected this beautiful monument in time for the opening ceremony on Saturday 17^th September 2011

Twenty members of the association flew over for the ceremony and to a man/woman were moved/ amazed/shocked/delighted and flabbergasted at the kindness/generosity and welcome we received from the local French people.  Hedley Malloch had done everybody proud with the attention to detail and management of the whole day and the invitations he had prepared for all the right people.

We flew into France on the Thursday and visited the spot on the Marne River at La Ferte sous Jouarre about 40 miles from Paris where the German advance through France was stopped in September 1914.  On the banks of the river is a magnificent memorial to 3800 who died in those first few weeks of the war who have no known grave, including 50 Connaught Rangers.

The next day we were at Soupir on the River Aisne where the 2^nd Battalion got knocked about a bit when pushing the German Army back after their progress was arrested at the Marne but for every punch the Rangers took they gave ten blows back and the German casualties were a massive, 3000 plus.  It was here on 14th September 1914 that Acting Lieutenant Colonel Charles O’Sullivan, father of film star Maureen O’Sullivan, was badly injured and his brother in law Lieutenant John Irwin Fraser from Knockvicar, Boyle was killed.

Saturday was a lovely sunny autumn day when we assembled in the car park at Guise.  To our surprise three Scottish pipers in full  uniform jumped out of a car next to us, complete with bearskin hats, kilts and sporrans and started warming up there and then, the pibroch waking the town from its Friday night slumber.  It was as well that these pipers were not Scots but from Albert on the Somme and were big enough to fend off any shouts from the rudely awakened. Led by Hedley we marched to the bottom of the hill leading up to the Chateau where we were joined by the town’s brass band and about 100 townsfolk.  A quick hike up the hill with pipers and brass band taking it in turns to keep us in step brought us to the gates of the chateau where a contingent of Light Dragoons, which the King’s Hussars had morphed into and who were preparing themselves for Afghanistan after Christmas, were waiting with another 100 more townies.  Along with them were five Essex Regiment re-enactment men in 1914 uniform complete with standard issue Lee Enfield rifles and the standard bearers from 12 French military associations.

Though I say it myself, we made a fairly impressive sight as we marched through the gates of the chateau to the spot where the 11 soldiers and M.Chalandre were shot on that February morning in 1915.  It was from here that the remains of the soldiers and M. Chalandre were exhumed and reinterred in Guise Communal Cemetery in 1923.  There was a simple service and short speeches over a memorial stone, set in concrete and a last post was played by a member of the band.  We then marched off in true army style with pipers and brass band blowing their heads off, the French standards and ours carried by the indomitable Willie Beirne, fluttering in the Autumn breeze and about 250 people tripping along with true military precision at about 120 steps to the minute.  The music and the march were that impressive I felt like enlisting in some regiment there and then. Right down the main street of the town and through the well thronged market place with crowds cheering and clapping us all the way, we soon completed the mile march to the cemetery, where there were two more remembrances, one over M. Chalandre’s grave and one over the soldier’s tomb.

After the ceremonies, speeches and renditions of Les Marseillaise and Last Post, it was back to town in the same style and at the same pace, to L’Hotel de Ville, where the mayor and various civic dignitaries greeted us with a champagne reception and more speeches and exchanges of gifts.  It was an amazing and generous affair and it shows these people, whose families lives over several generations were ravaged by war, will not forget.  It was very emotional and I will always remember the streets of this little town, lined with people clapping and giving vent to loud hurrahs as we passed.  We really felt we were special people.

Then it was off to Iron, a little hamlet about five miles away, where the soldiers were protected and fed by the villagers and M. Chalandre for some months, before being captured by the Germans after a tip off from a cuckolded old man.  There was a similar array of talent with slightly more civilians than at the morning ceremony in Guise.  Assembly at the mill where the soldiers hid and then a sprightly march to the memorial in the centre of the village, past the site of M Chalandre’s house, which was burnt down as a German reprisal.  Many speeches and thank yous from various guests impressively translated by Hedley Malloch and then the memorial and a very impressive one at that erected personally by father and son Feeley, was unveiled by the very decent Barry Manilowe look alike, Mayor of  Iron.  Four rounds were fired over the monument as a mark of respect from the Essex Regiment and then into the village hall for another reception, this time with savoury pasties, local cider and pastis.  The villagers had got together a little museum of articles and photographs showing what the village was like under the German fist, all very interesting.  The highlight for us was meeting M. Chalandre’s grandson who was overcome with emotion to think that we, who had come so far, were remembering his grandfather.  The privilege was ours with the locals turning up in force to honour men of the Connaught Rangers.  They will never forget. Adieu a Guise et a Iron et les peuples de Picardie.

The following day we went to Verdun which is a story in itself and the trip finished with a quick trip around the Somme taking in Guillemont church where the Connaught Rangers are honoured for retaking the village and winning a Victoria Cross in the process and we finished off at Ronsoy Wood where the 6th Battalion were massacred on the 21^st March 1918 at the start of the Kaiserschlact, Germany’s last throw of the dice, which nearly succeeded except for the fact that they ran out of ammunition and then home to England, Ireland and Portugal after a very emotional and special experience.

Today I have been stung into action by one of my oldest correspondents, a man who originally came from Boyle, where I now live and who likes to be reminded of the old place.  However he is getting no reminders from me this Sunday morning, as I look out of my kitchen window and watch 40mph howling westerlies blowing the heavy rain horizontally across the garden in an unimpressive 12 degrees centigrade temperature and this mid-July.

My correspondent has not liked my feeble, choleric attacks on the Salford Diocese and my alma mater, St. Bede’s College.  He, I fear, is one of the old school, I suggest, and does not want the boat rocked in any way.  So my subject this morning, brought on by another correspondent from British Columbia, where I, also have relatives, is ancestry.

This ex-Mancunian, but now British Columbian has briefly explained her ancestry of English ascendency, turned Irish patriotism, with solid religion both sides of the brush and always verging on celebrity status, which explains the stunning intellect that runs through all her siblings.  Her ancestors volunteered for everything, the army, the priesthood, the medical profession and the IRA.

However my ancestry is far from that, we Malpi were the dumb strugglers, who never raised a voice in anger, accepted what life threw at us and just got on with it and with the small amount of education we received, made the best of our meager talent but learnt enough not to volunteer for nowt.  We  were people, who when told to jump, bloody well jumped but we had enough devil in us not to jump too high.  Not for us posh colleges and velvet gloves, but village schools and no gloves at all and for a long time no bloody shoes either.

My maternal side I have spoken with relish about before, so I will not bore you with too much detail.  The four great grand-parents from Queen’s County, or Laois as it is now, Kildare and two from Galway all lived through the Famine and carried on regardless.  Their fathers and the fathers before them had lived all their lives paying unjust rents for scraps of land to absentee, in the main, landlords.  These four are proof to scotch that old wives tale, that England set out, with genocide in mind, to remove the Irish nation from the face of the earth and use the vacated land as an agrarian idyll, where they could holiday in peace, drinking Red Barrel beer and riding home on the backs of asses with beautifully manicured hooves.

These four great grand-parents eventually bore stock that decided to come to England, to haunt the religious anglicans, who were by now ashamed of their previous demographic fumblings.  None of the four made it much further than the first rung of the ladder.  They preferred to shovel coke all day into gas retorts or wheel around fruit and vegetables by the tonne.  This way they built up a thirst and met lots of people.  They were there in the latter part of the 19th century, working hard and turning Manchester into one of the main armament exchanges that was channeling weapons into Ireland and making it  into the boiling pot it became in the first quarter of the 20th century.

However my maternal grand-father, who survived the Fenian War, the Sudanese War, the Boer War parts 1 and 2, the First World War, the Second World War, the Korean War, the Mau Mau and Cypriot Uprisings and the Suez Crisis without bothering his arse to fight in any of them, gained victory in his old age and retirement by living to the ripe old age of 84, astounding for a man who had worked at the blunt end of a gasworks all his life.  He took a weekly amount from the Manchester Gas Board as a pension on retirement instead of the lump sum and gained great satisfaction from living in profit for his last nine years.

My fraternal great grand-parents were made of exactly the same metal but totally different, dissimilar in style and outlook.  For a start they were of Protestant lineage, who only saw the inside of a church when it mattered ie. for marriages and deaths as opposed to my maternal side who more or less lived in church.  These Protestants put their faith in hard work and kept at it.  On my father’s fraternal side, they were a  Cheshire species, saddlers from Poynton, on the Stockport/Macclesfield road.  They were an important part of the community.  A saddler in those days, was like a Mercedes dealership nowadays, only without the suits, free drinks, showrooms,  money and limousines.  The youngest son, my great grand-father, broke away and got himself a bit of land on the Bredbury/Denton border and began breeding shire horses for Robinson’s Brewery stables in Stockport, amongst others.  He is probably the most successful commercially of my forebears, he bedded two sisters and the two families became entwined like a can of spaghetti.  He died a happy man in the 1920s with his remarkable saying ringing in his ears.  “There is always room for one more”.

On my father’s maternal side, I come from generations of hard rock miners, hewing scraps of tin out of the hard Cornish sub-strata.  Henry Allen was married to Avis John, the daughter of a courageous Cornish woman, Grace John, courageous in as much as she had five children in her first three years of marriage.  They came from Ludgvan, just outside of Penzance.  When the Cornish tin mines were exhausted in the 1870s, he had two options, go to Bute in Montana, where the money was good and the danger greater or head up north to Cumberland, where seams of tin were opening up.  He chose the short distance and took with him Avis and five children, stopping off for a few years on the way at Llantrisant, in South Wales, to mine iron ore and siring another three children, before settling in Arlecdon, near Whitehaven.

So there we have it, all hard workers, never put a foot out of line and never volunteered for nowt.  I suppose that is what they all had in common.  That must be where my life’s maxim was bred.

HEAD DOWN AND KEEP PLOUGHING.