Geoffrey Burke, Auxillary Bishop of Salford and Titular Bishop of Vagrouta.
A fellow called Geoffrey Burke was our headmaster at school, St. Bede’s College, the premier Catholic Grammar School in Manchester and its environs. He eventually became an Auxillary Bishop of Salford in 1967, only four years after I was hounded out of the school. I might have been holding him back.
I knew Geoff well as he was a friend of our parish priest, Canon Vincent O’Shaughnessy and often took services at St. Robert’s where I was an altar boy. As altar boys it was expected that we treated him with dignity, in return for which he gave us a spiteful grimace. In the school he was worse and if anybody could bear a grudge it was him. In the school his subject was History and in particular Reformation History which he taught us in Upper 5th for O Level. His brand of history had nothing to do with Tudor History but only that of his dream woman, Bloody Mary. Henry VIII and Elizabeth I did not enter the frame, so unless you read outside of the box you would never pass history. He seemed so out of touch with reality you often wondered at his pronouncements. I suppose a little like the bishops of Ireland today.
I remember one day in 1962, the first day back in 6th Form. Myself and Mike Sheehan having both acheived seven passes at o Level (the maximum in our stream of Classics), we were confident with our abilities but possibly not with our behaviour. We presented ourselves at the morning assembly, all the staff of the College in their mortar boards and gowns were on the stage in the hall. The whole school, then around 900 boys, were present as Jack Rigby, the Prefect of Discipline, stepped forward to read out the names of the new boys and the classes they had been allocated in the Upper 3rd or First Year and then the names of the boys and their streams in Lower 4th or Second Year, either Classical, Semi-Classical, Modern or Remove. Then the whole school were dismissed except for us boys in Lower 6th or Sixth Year. There were three streams in this year, Classics, Literature and Mathematics and the names read out for each stream and then dismissed, leaving myself and Sheehan standing in the vast open space of the Hall with the emblazoned staff still standing on the stage looking down at us. It must be remembered here that there had been no previous discussion, no letters to parents explaining that we were persona non grata. Geoff Burke stepped forward saying “what have you boys come back for? See me in Our Lady’s Corridor in Five minutes”. We did as we were bid and shuffled off, dismayed and disheartened and attended the interview some minutes later.
“We did not want you back; you caused enough trouble for us last year. Why have you turned up this morning?” We mumbled something along the lines that we did not have anywhere else to go. Geoff thought for a minute and said “I’ll tell you what we will do. We will let you go into the 6th Form if you join the Saint Vincent de Paul Society.” Not knowing what that entailed, we immediately agreed and following the maxim of divide and conquer, Sheehan was allocated Classics and I, Literature.
Our first SVP meeting took place a week later on a Saturday morning. We were given 200 Senior Service cigarettes each and told to go round Newholme, the geriatric facility at Withington Hospital and distribute 100 cigarettes each to the patients and the following day to go down to Salford Docks and distribute a further 100 each to the poor sailors on the boats, tied up at the docks.
We could not believe our luck or Geoff’s stupidity, we never gave the charity of the SVP a second thought. The old folk got about 20 of their 200 and the next day we visited the docks and ascended the walkway on to what seemed like a deserted ship. The sailors must have been ashore doing what sailors do; only the chef was on board in the galley. He was as mad as a hatter and thought we were either trying to stow away or hoping to steal the ship’s cargo and he chased us off the ship, brandishing a cleaver and cursing in some foriegn tongue.
Although we continued with the geriatrics for a few further weeks. we never went back to the docks. We were never as rich disposing of 140 fags a week each. We kept 60 apiece for our own consumption. This went on for five or six weeks before the source dried up. In all this time we did not think of the crime we were possibly committing, our only thought was to treat the school as they treated us, with scorn and derision. We knew we were on borrowed time and we eventually stopped going to meetings. If Geoff Burke knew of this he never said anything and we kept out of his way and in fact buckled down to the grind for a while. Sheehan was thrown out of school on some trumped up charge by the equally despicable Fr Dodgeon at Easter and I was asked to vamoose that summer after preferring to watch the Australian cricket team instead of doing games. We both survived.
Tags: Bedes College, Bishop Geoffrey Burke, St, The Saint Vincent de Paul Society