Paul Malpas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clerical sex abuse of children is nothing new it has been going on since priests became priests and is a direct result of the abuse of power.

Up until the 4^th Century AD, the priests of the Church were just ordinary lay people from various levels of society, who took it upon themselves to preach to the people on this new religion of Christianity.  They were accepted for the fact that they were intelligent and had knowledge and could speak and explain this new concept which Emperor Constantine had recognised as the official  religion of the Roman Empire and they could  translate the complicated teaching so that the ordinary man could understand.

These priests eventually evolved into a distinct privileged class and the best of them became bishops running the various districts or dioceses of the new Church in charge of a  number of priests who showed them allegiance.  They still lived normal family lives, marrying and having children but from the 4^th Century onwards the leaders of the Church were starting to advocate for celibacy to become part of the priestly state, but it was not until 1139, 800 years later at the 2^nd Lateran Council was the mandate for celibacy passed.  Even then there were priests living open married lives into the middle of the17th Century and some even admit today the practice continues with some priests in the face of constant denials by the Church.  The ridiculous thing today is that the Church is accepting Anglican priests into the priesthood of the Catholic Church complete with wives, children and presumably girl friends, to work alongside Catholic priests living under the yoke of celibacy.

However before celibacy began priests had started to commit adultery with women met with in their priestly work and had sex with minors under their control.  There were no real laws or rules dealing with this problem but the bishops of the time could see this dilemma needed sorting out.

The Council of Elvira in Spain in 306AD was the first mention of this problem in Church history and what catches the eye is that the worst form of abuse thought of at this time was priests committing sodomy on young boys and it was decided at this Council that priests found to be committing these acts had to be deprived of Communion.

Over the next 500 years various synods, which were a gathering of bishops getting together and forming legislation, spoke out and legislated against illicit sexual activity by priests.  In 1140 Gratian, a monk, collected all this legislation into a book, The Gratian Decree, which although never official became the basis of Canon Law.  After the passing of the Medieval Period, the various popes became the source of most legislation in this matter.

The Church realised very early on that the Sacrament of Confession proved to be the source of much of this abuse.  People were laying bare their souls and problems to priests, some of whom were taking full advantage of these vulnerable people and helping themselves sexually with threatened blackmail and sexual bullying after the individual’s confession.

Confession had long been part of the Church’s ritual, but in the form of mass confessions.  Individual private confession originated in the Irish Church in the late 6^th Century and spread eventually to all areas of the Christian world.  It became obvious that priests needed guidance on how to conduct this sacrament and how to deal with the various sins confessed.

This manual for priests took the form of several books written by learned scholars and were called Penitentials.  Several of these Penetentials refer to the sexual crimes committed by clerics on young boys and girls,  The most important and apt is the Penitential of St Bede, in the 8^th Century.  The Venerable Bede, the famous English historian and religious intellectual from the north east of England, is the man St Bede’s College in Manchester is named after.

His Penitential advises that priests who commit sodomy with young boys be given increasingly severe penances commensurate with their role, bishops receiving harsher penalties than mere priests.  The regularity with which these types of sex crimes were mentioned in these Penitentials show that the problem was not isolated, was known about in the community and was treated much more harshly than the same crime committed by laymen.  These Penitentials were the main books of reference from the 6^th to the 12^th Century.

Although mandatory celibacy was only decreed from 1139 it was never fully accepted.   Clerics married, committed adultery, had casual sex, homosexual activity flourished and acts of sodomy with children were rampant throughout Medieval times.  Gratian, the year after the 2^nd Lateran Council, repeated Bede’s Penitential and said that clerics should be punished harder than laymen and advocated the old Roman Law of Stuprum Pueri: that sexual violation of young boys be punished with death.  Even then, a 1000 years ago, the leaders of thought in the Church could see the mental damage this practice had on young boys.

So do not ever be misled by the argument put out by the Church recently that these  acts of abuse by priests is as a result of Vatican 2.  It is a result of the abuse of power and has been in existence since priesthood began.  In those early days the whole congregation knew about it and the authorities tried  unsuccessfully to eradicate it.  Why this abuse is a surprise to us today is because the modern authorities in the form of the Pope and his bishops have tried to cover it all up.

I was reading this morning how Hubert Vaughan, Bishop of Salford and founder of St Bede’s College in the 1870s named the school after his brother, the Bishop of Sydney, who had the monastical name of Bede.  This is not the case, St.Bede’s was named directly after the Venerable Bede in the hope his name would protect the school from sexual abuse.  He could not have been more wrong with the type of men his successors put in charge of the College.  He should have called it Salome’s; we might have stood more of a chance,

As I explained in yesterday’s posting, that overwhelming depression that had descended on St Bede’s before my time and was throughout my stay and afterwards, according to my correspondents, tainting both student and teacher alike, never found its way to the sports field.  So as I hated my experiences at the school and pondered long and hard on the devastating effect it had on myself and others, I thought nothing of turning out for Old Bedian cricket and rugby teams.  There it was a different world into which the College never encroached and in fact the term was a slight misnomer in that at least 50% of the lads who played  sport at Old Bede’s had never attended the College

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For me the highlight of the sporting year was the annual cricket tour to the Wye Valley on which I went for four years from 1966 to 1969 until unfortunately work took over my life.  They really were magnificent days, setting off in a coach with a really decent set of lads, all older than me; lads I had revered at school for their prowess on the cricket team, lads who were playing at a high standard in league cricket and all treating me as an equal.

Lads like Joe Smith, a crazy left arm fast bowler from Unsworth, near Bury, who taught Classics at Stonyhurst College, that Jesuit pile in Lancashire.  He spoke with a broad Lancashire accent and I always wondered what Xenophon or Pliny would have sounded like, with its Lancastrian twist, to the privileged kids at that school.  To be any good as a fast bowler you have to be fairly crazy and Joe’s lunatic antics often used to get us into scrapes where we generally used to escape with honour.

Other lads on the tour who had been through the mincer that was the College were Dave McGarry, a very good footballer and batsman, who liked bowling leg breaks, and happened to be our in house chaplain and peacekeeper.  Chris O’Rourke, a top wicketkeeper/batsman who had trials for Lancashire and captained Stand in the Lancashire and Cheshire League and Len Whelan, a teacher and drinker, who had all the attributes of a good fast bowler but could not convert this God-given physique into cricketing ability but he made up for this fault with tremendous enthusiasm.  Len was married to a cousin of my future wife, Helen and went on to teach at Bede’s Prep many years later.  He died suddenly in the 1990s leaving his large family devastated.

The normal tour was a first stop at Shrewsbury or Ludlow, then onto Leominster, our usual headquarters followed by games at Bromyard in Worcestershire and at Hereford, playing the occasional game at Ross on Wye and always finishing off playing the Welsh Brigade army team at their permanent barracks at Crickhowell, near Abergavenny, having lunch in the Officer’s Mess and drinking out of silver goblets at the bar.  Crickhowell was a massive army camp and could always put out a very good team.

The second year we played them their team was captained by one aptly named Major Poncia, I tell no lie but he was actually a very good batsman who opened their innings.  We had taken three cheap wickets with Joe Smith bowling at his best when Corporal. Jones joined Major Poncia at the crease.  After an over or two settling in the Major drove a ball through the covers and shouted to Jones to run two.  Our cover fieldsman was a very able man and collected the ball at which Jones denied his captain and sent him back at the start of his second run.  The ball was returned swiftly to the bowling end justifying Corporal Jones’s fears. Major Poncia who had been embarrassed by his swift and ungainly retreat and enraged at this apparent insubordination, tucked his bat under his arm and marched down the pitch to the luckless Jones and demanded off the poor man that “when I say run, you’ll bloody well run Corporal”.  This bit of disciplinary action caused all us non-combatants to roll about the pitch laughing our heads off and this little piece of Army rebuke was repeated many times over by the northern bretheren and shortly afterwards the enraged and perplexed Major Poncia was bowled out to a completely un-Poncialike stroke.

The atmosphere became distinctly unfriendly from then on, we won the game easily and we had to fend for ourselves in the mess that night, we were not as welcome as we had been at lunchtime.  We did not know the ropes; we had no idea on protocol; we had never done National Service.  I bet Poncia wished us to be called up there and then.  We played one more game the following year but we had been demoted to the Sergeant’s Mess and no officers played and after that we became personae non grata alas.

Always these tours were carried out in blazing summer weather, playing teams who were genuinely talented and glad to see us.  They took time off work to play us midweek and gave us a welcome that is now rarely seen.

One year at Leominster, a most picturesque ground with a footpath running through it, whose users had right of way over the cricket and caused the game to be interrupted every now and then, we were chasing runs in the late afternoon when I went in and scored 50 off about 30 balls.  Even the footpath users stopped to admire the sport, we won and I was feted for hours afterwards .

Years later and Dave McGarry had just started his sermon one Sunday morning, I was late and found a seat at the back of  St Catherine’s church.  We had not met for a good few years but Dave spotted me and did a right turn with his prepared speech and dumbfounded the congregation with a ball by ball commentary on the closing overs of that day at Leominster.  I do not know if he was down on his collection that morning but at least he remembered an old mate.

The A49, which went through most of the towns we played at, was for me the best 100 miles of road in the country.  For many years afterwards I detoured and took it remembering the good times of youth and at the same time trying to blot out my wasted years at the school.

This Christmas whilst indulging in a bout of omphaloskepsis and at the same time suffering  great pain emanating from my nethers, I asked myself where it all went wrong and eventually after much gazing I narrowed it down to a day in February 1957 when I set out from Duncan Road, in Longsight, Manchester to catch a bus up Stockport Road to Ardwick Green and St Gregory’s School to take my 11+ examination.  In those days every child took this examination to see whether they were good enough to go to Grammar School, Technical School, or in fact remain insitu at their Primary School, to waste their time in the mundane until released at 15 or 16 to fill the unskilled jobs that the country was full of at that time.

So armed with pen and pencil, ruler and pencil sharpener all wrapped up in a little wooden pencil case, we sat in quaky  miserable silence in the grim classrooms of the aforementioned school whilst we were examined in the arts of Arithmetic, English and IQ.  I, unfortunately, was classed as very bright and St Bede’s College in Alexandra Park, Whalley Range was my lot.  This was a  school that gave all parents of the time a great buzz and advanced them up the local society pecking order a great deal and turned decent  working class folk into the yuppies of their day.

However for us guinea pigs thrust into the cauldron of early baby boomerism,  St Bede’s was not at all what it was supposed to be.  From the very first day or at least from the day that the gloss wore off, we were aware of a canker in the place.  Nobody was happy, nobody smiled.  Staff and pupil alike could be seen to not enjoy themselves.  This aura of gloom and misery descended from the top but we could not put our finger on it.  For all our years at the school and for many years afterwards, whilst we tried our best to forget the experience, we were bound up in totally negative thoughts of our time at Bede’s.  We now know what this gloom and misery was all about and we can put our hard times into perspective and try and remember the few decent things from those days, like Spike Martin’s classes and the sportsfield where this despondency never encroached.  I do not ever remember the authors of this wretched atmosphere walking down Alness Road and onto Brantingham Road where our playing fields were situated.  No, Messrs Duggan and Burke just sat in their studies and grimaced while they thought of the next best boy to abuse or the next stupid College rule to make.

I had six years there and on the cusp of third level education when Duggan decided my face did not fit and that I had to go.  He took his time about it and must have examined me closely from a distance before he decided I was for the chop.  He did not even inform my parents as any right man would have done.  For my part I was so badly damaged mentally by my experiences I was glad of a way out.  I had lost touch with reality.  I had become an automaton only able to turn up in the morning and go home at night, not able to soak in anything that the devastated and underqualified staff had to offer.

So at 17+ I left the school, thrown onto the midden that I had been told would not be there for us top 6%, with not an idea in my head as to what I wanted to do, with never a steer by anybody at the school about what was at all possible for a well qualified midden dweller.  Basically I was back with the lucky kids who failed their 11+ level, only they had had four or five years to sort out  where they were heading  and were  content with their lot.  In actual fact due to the sticky consistency of this middden it became intensely more difficult to escape from than the morass that those who had failed their 11+ and left school at 15 or 16 found themselves in  I have never ever got over that feeling of uselessness that I suffered at that time.  Six years spent in expensive and at times intellectual education and then wiped off the blackboard like chalk scores at the end of a game of darts.

The only saviour of this whole chapter was that I was back amongst my own, the uncomplaining, hard working underbelly of Manchester and because of them I had inherited this willingness to work and work hard, so I soon found myself a mattress, a job on a building site, where I could at least come to terms with my lot.  The only trouble was, my aquaintances and those of my age group had had two years more experience of this dilemma and had learnt  the angles and ways of humble life.  I had to learn fast and I did but I do not owe one iota of that cunning reflex to Bede’s.  I had reached the end of my six year vaccuum and I was starting again as if at 11 years of age to try and make something of what Bede’s did not give me.

How can a school with the reputation that St Bede’s had, waste so much of young people’s lives.  The very time when young boys need two strong and helpful arms to save them if they stumble,  all St Bede’s offered was a one way ticket to oblivion.  As I have explained in previous postings 20 – 30% of each years intake were unceremoniously discarded when all they needed was some help to get over whatever personal hump was blocking their path but all Burke wanted was a well oiled smooth running educational establishment regardless of personal hurdles.  I remember him coming into our class one day and saying ” B…… your father died at work this morning you will stay in school and go home at the normal time” then swept out of the room.  The boy was devastated but dare not move.  The teacher embarrassed beyond belief but too emotionally  immature to react.

Whereas we now know what Duggan wanted, a smooth young fragile boy, personally picked out of the many hundreds that came before him.  He seems to have had no interest in the school or the staff.  They were just there for his own personal and vicious ends.  These poor abused boys were discarded as soon as their use was over.