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!

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.

I have just returned after a couple of days in Dublin and I am amazed at what I saw. By nine o’clock at night there was not a shop doorway or office block entrance available or vacant. The homeless were in command and sleeping in niches that offered only the scantest protection from the incessant rain. There must be some remedy for this disgraceful scene, especially with the thought that there are 300,000 vacant dwellings in Ireland. Surely it is not beyond the wit of the Health Service Executive to put two and two together and make four, somehow.

When daylight comes to the streets, the pavements fill with beggers of all nationalities and I am not sure there is a link between the doorstep dwellers and the beggers, they appear different in terms of age and nationality. It is disturbing and sad that such a situation exists. It was always to some extent there, with the women and children of the travelling community but the begger’s numbers have increased tenfold these past few years and it is not just women and children of the travellers now, it is man woman and child of most nationalities known.

A walk down Talbot Street or up O’Connell Street will show you the problem, grotesquely deformed cripples and other limbless unfortunates litter the pavements, saying nothing, but holding up empty plastic coffee cups for us rich or not so rich, to fill up with loose change. Not only is it very uncomfortable to witness and so perplexing to deal with, it can also do no good for the lifeblood of Dublin, it’s tourist industry.

Obviously all these poor people are supported by the state and if not you would wonder how they came to the country. Some will be mentally impaired and somehow or other should be cared for by the authorities. The country cannot wash it’s hands of them and allow them to die like dogs in the street. This is not Ireland of 100 years ago. I might have the whole thing wrong and it might be that the State is falling over itself in caring for these people but I am only expressing the thoughts of the occasional visitor who has this problem thrust in his face.

But enough of rant, I came to Dublin at the invite of O’Brien Press to attend the launch of a new book by a young writer, Neil Richardson. I was interested in attending such an occasion because I had watched a performance of a play by Neil entitled “From the Shannon to the Somme” in March this year in the Little Theatre in Athlone. See my blog of that title posted on 27th March 2010. I was then so impressed not only with the acting and the direction of the play but also with the script and how well it was researched by one so young. Neil is in his mid-twenties.

So I was pleased and proud to attend this launch having spotted the writers talents some months ago. It is his first book and it has taken three years of research and is entitled “A Coward If I Return, A Hero If I Fall” which is a line in the poem “Lament” by the Donegal writer, Patrick McGill, who fought the whole of the First World War with the London Irish Rifles. It tells the same story as the play but this time in facts and figures and explains the anguish of the families on receiving the dreaded telegram and paints pen pictures of the Irish men and boys who volunteered to fight in this atrocious conflict and describes the dichotomy faced by the 200,000 returning Irishmen at the end of the war.

They had enlisted in 1914 into what was then their army and what had become the enemy’s army, by the time they were demobbed in 1919. They were coming home to hatred, social ostracization, unemployment and having to live with this and the inevitable post traumatic stress brought on by the war. Nationalistic zeal was running high and they were shunned and forgotten. We are not talking about a few thousand men here, but something like 30% of the 17-35 year old male population, a vast amount of people. Faced with these difficulties is it any wonder so many of them did not return but chose to try and make a go of it in England, America, Canada and Australia. To quote Yeats, everything was “all changed, changed utterly”

The evening commenced with a eulogy on the writer by Michael O’Brien, the publisher, who was amazed that one so young could write with such maturity. Dr. Tom Conan, former Lt. Colonel in the Irish Army and now Defence Correspondent for The Irish Times amongst other things, followed up, reporting some of the startling facts gleaned from the book. There were 50,000 Irishmen killed in that war, roughly the same amount as Americans killed in Vietnam. Vietnam is seared into the American psyche, these 50,000 Irishmen were forgotten in that surge of nationalism in the 20s and 30s. In Easter Week in Dublin 450 civilians, rebels and British soldiers were killed, in that same week in Loos in Northern France 538 Irish soldiers, mainly from Dublin, met their death, mostly by chlorine gas, a horrible killer. The world knows about the dead in Dublin but nothing about the dead in Loos. His talk was emotional and serious and explained the soldiers lot in conflict.

Neil then spoke of his early interest in the war, his long years of research and his pleasure at seeing so many people at the National Library for this occasion. It was obvious from his easy speech on the subject, while he rattled off names and numbers, facts and fables that his research had been deep, accurate and unique.

I brought the book home and started reading and finished the last of its 350 pages in two days. It is a compelling, eye-opening and easy read. It explains the problems it set itself in its title, in a way that, as far as I know, has never been tried before. It’s uniqueness in this genre is a main reason for buying the book. I was so pleased to have accepted the invitation on behalf of the Connaught Rangers Association and so proud to have been at such an august occasion.

Best of luck Mr. Richardson with this work and may you have continued success throughout your career.

First of all I would like to apologize to anybody who reads this blog on a regular basis.  I have been very busy and have only managed to squeeze in one blog in the last week.  A cousin of mine died  a week ago, trgically young at 54 years of age and I went over to England last Thursday to a very emotional but lovely funeral.  A funeral is a very necessary and cathartic experience for all that have been  touched by the deceased’s life.  The tentacles of humanity, stretching out and gathering in all those people, who have at some stage  had their spirit lifted by the finished life-force, for one final celebration.  It is happy and sad and necessary and this particular celebration was made all the greater by the beautiful panegyric of the priest, Father Bernard Sparks, a great and longtime friend of the family.

I left the gathering after a couple of hours and went back to my daughter’s house in a very contemplative mood.  For reasons I will not bother you with, I had not seen the lady, my first cousin, for a number of years.  As you all grow up and move around and settle into a path of life, touch can easily be lost and this is what made this death all the harder for me.  At one time I was so close to her and her family and now I would not have recognized her in the street.  She died before I knew her and yet at one time I knew her well.  Somehow I had missed out on a good life and that is a big miss.

Away I came and the following morning was more than pleasantly surprised from a comment I received on a blog I wrote  on 12 January 2010 called The Importance of Blogs. I had just heard that Catherine, who has just died, was terminally ill and I dedicated this blog to her and her family.  It traced her mother’s  family tree back to the Famine in Ireland, it was a piece of their history they were unsure of because of their mother’s premature death, nearly 50 years ago.

This comment was from a lady who had just read this blog and realized that she was a second cousin of mine and Catherine’s, her grandfather and my grandmother were siblings.  She was from a branch of the family that had gone their separate ways in the 1930s and for whatever reason  touch had been lost.

That is why the blog is such an amazing and powerful tool if used properly.  You often think that once a piece has been posted, that is it, gone and forgotten, but the internet and blog field leaves it there like a bright shiny cherry on a tree waiting to be picked and eaten by passing strangers.  It is there for evermore, hopefully to be appreciated by everyone and that is what happened.  So now as one cousin goes another comes to light and hopefully will not disappear as quickly.

As I was writing these words this morning, there came news that  will only double my efforts in this field.  My daughter, Katy, has entered the final stages of pregnancy with the anticipation of twins.  She is slightly premature but the experts say that this is normal with multiple births and that mother and foeutuses are fine, with estimated weights of 5lb with still four weeks of cooking  to go.  However she will now have to go into hospital for their delivery,  a thing she dreads.  She was looking forward to a home birth and had an army of midwives lined up to take care of any eventuality.  She will have to be forthright and clear minded and not let these tinkerers of mortality, the doctors, try to bully her into treatment she does not want, just to suit the timetable of the maternity suite.

My wife has flown the coop and is now in Dublin boarding the Holyhead boat with a rolling pin in hand.  God help the doctors at Stepping Hill Hospital.   I am left with the young fellah, a mop and bucket and various dusters and told to make sure the house is perfect on her return.  That might not be until these twins are weaned so I have plenty of time.  The male’s station in life as with all things historic is a lonely one, but I suppose I have the pub and my blog and all the interesting things that both these channels deliver, but I must get on, the mop is doing a lonely dance in the bucket of hot water I prepared earlier.

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

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

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

Maud M born in 1886

Joseph Patrick born in 1888.

Eveleen Victoria born in1891.

Alfred Charles born in 1892.

Albert Guy born in 1894.

Mabel B. born in1897.

Cecil Joseph born in 1899.

Hilda Angelina born in 1902.

Ethel W. born in 1906.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As I moved out of my early teens and started to stumble around trying to make sense out of what was happening around me, my circle of friends and aquaintances increased, but they were nearly all culled from the working class areas of Manchester.  Harpurhey, Gorton, Longsight, Chorlton on Medlock, Ardwick and Wythenshawe.  There were one or two from finer parts, but with these, our mutual attraction was sport and mainly cricket.  It did seem that like attracted like and we at the bottom had a job climbing the ladder to join the cleaner and more studious from the hygenic outer suburbs, who had a different, more relaxed, but I do not think as exiting a life as that which we were trying to pursue.  I remember one chap from Gorton explaining to me one night that I should not be in this elite group of working class kids, because we lived in Birchfields Road and were therefore rich and middle class.  I could not understand his logic, we did not have a pot to piss in, but lived off the aspirations of my parents.  I suppose his argument was a little bit of inverted snobbery that Old Labour revelled in.

However his outlandish views did not stop me from ploughing my furrow and the friendliness of the girls kept my furrow very straight.  Okay we did not live in some landlord slum, but we walked everywhere or caught the bus if we had any money and time was pressing and it was amazing how good and cheap the bus service was then.

Most of my memories of those teenage acquaintances were of the lack of fathers; by the time these kids were 15 or 16, the fathers, when they were needing them the  most were disappearing.  No, there was no migration of healthy masculine types to the arms of women demanding what the 1960s expected of them.  No, these men were dying.  Once they had passed 40 the ravages of the war and 20 years in the terrible conditions of the working class workplace took their toll.  They were dying of all types of respiratory illnesses, the last vestiges of TB and heart conditions brought about by excessive smoking and bad diets.  The lad who had accosted me about where on the class scale I should be, had lost his father the year previously and in some bizarre thought process considered himself lower than me.  His father’s loss was a massive blow and as with them all it took him years to recover.  I remember one kid, we will call him B, when we were about 14 and in a Latin class with Ron Smith.  There was a knock on the door and in walked Geoff Burke, the Headmaster, “B your father died this morning, remain in school and go home at your normal time”.  The delivery and shock was nearly as bad as the event.  Certainly Burkes bedside manner was not what you would expect and B naturally blubbed at the back of class for the rest of the day.  We at 14 did not know what to say or do, nor it seemed did any one else.

These sudden departures of fathers at the demanding age these kids were at, affected them in a far more serious way than we can believe, these were loving fathers not the feckless fruit of 21st century philosophy.  These men were dying because employers were cutting whatever corners there were to be cut.  There was no thought of Health and Safety or no regulatory bodies to control all the thousands of back street workshops that brought Europe back from the brink in those times ravaged as they had been by wars and recessions.

The housing stock was atrocious in the poorly maintained landlord estates, and massive waiting lists in the few slightly better maintained corporation owned properties.  Most houses in the districts mentioned had no internal toilets, relying on outside loos, there were even some  with shared accommodation.  Most houses only had cold water, with hot water being heated by gas fired water heaters over kitchen sinks or by back boilers behind fires, that needed total precision when planning a bath, when every one lined up to take it in turns to spruce themselves up in two inches of degenerating and murky warm water.  Pity the last man in.  In some cases that precision was not available so that baths were not as frequent as they might have been.  There were no showers, no central heating, relying on one fire in one room as the only source of heat.  To day new and well refurbished houses stand in their place but it strikes me that the quality, kindness and friendliness of the people is not there.  That generosity of spirit that pulled everyone along seems to have vacated the cupboard.

We all suffered strange illnesses and everyone was plagued with boils and other skin eruptions, an obvious sign of vitamin deficiency.  We ate enough but probably a lot of the wrong thing.  Fresh fruit and vegetables was not a must-have but as a whole we were generally fitter.  There was no television so most people spent more time out of the house playing sport or going to the cinema two or three times a week.  there were no cars so every one walked.  Even in winter in the dark, black streets of Manchester everybody walked with not a worry in the world.  You were as safe as houses.  We often used to walk there and back to Manchester, three miles each way.

We had no money but we had a few brains between us and that enabled us to pick our way out of the maze and eventually after a few years pottering about in the mire of life we made a decent fist of what we set out to do.  No thanks at all to most of the so called education we received free gratis, but more to do with guts and having seen the bottom of the heap.

It seems today that if you have not made a success of your life at twenty, you are a failure.  Bollocks to that.  Head down and keep ploughing is how I have always tried to live.