Paul Malpas

Since I did that piece on Geoff Burke last week, I have not been able to get the school off my mind.  My opinion is that at the end of the 1950s and the early 60s the school was still firmly stuck in the 1930s.  The staff by this time about 50/50 laymen to priests had few young bloods.  About half had worked there before the war, probably 30% had been students before and during the war and only 20% of them had received their 3rd level education after the conflict. The majority of them were well and truly anchored in the past and did not understand the different mind set of us Baby Boomers, we who born after the war, and brought up to the incessant cackle of politicians flexing their muscles with invasions and atomic bombs.  We wanted to learn differently, we were not going to listen to jingoism and past glory.  We wanted the truth and now.  We were experiencing a kind of freedom and we wanted more.  We had no time for the old hat we were being force fed by these old fogies.  There was a new world out there with new writing and new ideas.  The past was  and should be dead.  This was where Spike came in or Tony Martin as he chose to be called, spewing out good  ideas, new literature and interest in our lives, giving the class a spark which so very few of the others managed.  They, weighed down with the drabness of the previous thirty years and worn out with the deprivations of the war, were just going through the motions and not even, I doubt, considering any benefit we were trying to take from the lessons.  Except for the fact that we were supposed to be the pick of the bunch, we would have all failed miserably.

Discipline was the only thing that nearly kept us in check and we soon found ways of beating the system.  There was one character there amongst the staff, who took up this banner and devoted his whole life at Bede’s to this dogma.  Father Hynes, and I use his title warily, a singularly sadistic misanthrope if ever there was one, he taught a form of science at the school and because of that I am glad to say, he never taught me, but in his extra-curricular capacity, we were always running into each other.  This fellow got such a kick from punishment and discipline he actually volunteered for the job of assistant Prefect of Discipline, when old Tojo became too weak to lift up the strap.  See my blog of 31 January 2010 called Decline And Fall to appreciate Tojo. Hynes was a tall, 15 stone (96 kilo) man who wore spectacles that looked like bottle bottoms and who had heavy jowelled, poorly shaven, features.  We called him Swine Eyes.  Where he came from and where he went to I do not know, but he disappeared off the radar very quickly after I left school.  Perhaps God put him there with the sole purpose of chastising me.  He just seems to have been put on this earth, fully formed, for five years and filled with all the distrust, deceit, foul temper and sadistic nature that was common in the upper echelons of the Nazi Party.

One of the rules of the school was that outside of the school gates, you had to wear the school cap and m0re hours were spent by this man enforcing this rule than he spent teaching science.  This rule developed a style a style all its own; perching the cap that would be sizes too small on the back of the head.  It more than resembled a skull cap.  It was a triumph of engineering and ambulatory skills to endeavour to retain the cap in position when it was worn at about 15 degrees to the vertical.  Most of the 6th form used to go out at lunchtime for chips or to smoke, which were both forbidden and once out of school, remove the cap and stuff it into the pocket.  Swine Eyes, forsaking lunch and at his own bidding, used to patrol the streets in his little Heinkel bubble car (appropriately enough) looking for “”anyone bringing the name of the school into disrepute”.  We had to be as aware as an Indian scout; smoking, eating chips and listening out for the phut,phut,phut noise of his little bubble car.  The genocide in Ruanda comes as no surprise when you see people like him in action.  Given the freedom he would literally have killed or tortured us.

Most of the other staff were just grey nonentities waiting for retirement.  Some were just no good.  One such was Tony Lawton, a priest and new Prefect of Discipline when Jack Rigby gave up after a number of years, sick and mortified with the blood and guts that had daily to be swept from the floor of his office.  Tony Lawton was put in charge of the 1st XI cricket team, a man who had no idea about cricket and therefore eminently qualified to take charge of such a post.  I was bowling my offbreaks at him in the nets and a lovely ball pitched a foot outside off-stump and turned quickly knocking his middle and off stump back.  “Bowl properly Malpas, or do not bowl at all” Lawton roared.  Spike was standing at the back of the nets and I saw him shaking his head.  “Never mind him” he said afterwards when he saw me close to tears.  I had to mind, I was on the school 1st XI, a year before my time.  I had to mind and I never played for the college team again, joining Swinton Criket Club where my coach Gerry Blyth was the professional.

It was the begining of the end for me, My mate Sheehan had already been thrown out that Easter on the recommendation of Terry Dodgeon, a priest and Classics master who followed the same sadistic path as  Geoff Burke, becoming headmaster and then Rector of the school.  He was still there the last time I visited the place, befuddled with drink and still only knowing the Greek and Latin that his Oxford education gave him in the 1940s.

The Australians were touring England that  summer of 1962 and one of the test matches was at Old Trafford, shortly after my spat with Lawton.  Instead of doing games, one afternoon, I went off to watch the match (the only time I had ever missed games, it was too important to me).  It rained at the school grounds but not at Old Trafford about three miles away.  The boys were called back to school, a roll call was made and Malpas was missing.  He had gone AWOL

On the next day, at the start of summer examinations, I was called out and told to report to Duggan.  Tommy Duggan, was a Monsignor and Rector of the school.  Again read all about him in Decline And Fall posted on 31 January 2010.  I stood in the doorway of his study, not daring or willing to go any further.  He sat at his desk.  He said “where were you yesterday Malpas?”  I said “watching the Aussies, Monsignor”.  “You might as well leave” he said and something about about a camel’s back and that was it.  I went home and bluffed it out for the few days remaining of the school term and started my holidays.  No consultation with parents, no written notice of the school’s intent.  I was not unhappy with my sudden freedom.

For my secondary education in Manchester I went to St. Bede’s College, the Premier League for all Catholic boys, having first of all passed my 11+ examination and attended an interview with Monsignor Thomas Duggan, the Rector of the College.  It was a school run by priests with a good % of lay teachers.  Its old boys were famed throughout the colonial world, mainly clerics but scores of lawyers, architects and engineers.  The Qui Ante Nos column of the Baeda, the school magazine, oozed class and distinction.  However we Baby Boomers as we were called, those that had sprung from exuberant couplings after Hitler’s downfall, we Baby Boomers were a different kettle of fish, claimed mainly from the backstreets of Manchester.  We were cynics first and scholars last.

However the College counteracted this subversiveness by appointing Father John Rigby – Jack to us – as Prefect of Discipline.  A man who excelled at sport, particularly rugby and boxing, stood about 6′ 1” in his stocking feet and had a nose to prove his extramural activity.  His main purpose was to collect the dinner money and thrash us pupils as diligently as the law would allow.  A nice man but with too much energy and vigour.  He used to have one day a week off, I presume for weight training, skipping and a little bag work.  On that day off, Fr. Groarke – Tojo to us – would assume the task of punishment.  Now Tojo, called that because of his nipponic feature, was not a strong man, rumour had it that he had grown to resemble an oriental having been incarcerated for four years in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp after the fall of Singapore.  He was that weakened by that experience, that even a dozen years later, he could barely lift his right arm when the weight of the strap was added.  The strap, to the uninitiated, was a piece of leather about 450mm long and 50mm wide and about 6mm thick, attractively embroidered at one end to stop it sliding out of the floggers hand.

So Jack was to be feared and we malefactors used to queue up outside Tojo’s door on his day on duty with our disciplinary notes in hand, these had to be signed by Tojo once punishment had been given and taken back to the teacher who had been put out by our unruly behaviour.  Tojo would strap away all afternoon or as long as his strength lasted but with little effect, he had a kind of swedish massage of a stroke.  After a while this subterfuge was noted and the rules altered and we had to return these notes within 24 hours of issue.  We then had to line up outside Jack’s study to await his return from lunch.  Steak and a butcher’s dog come to mind.  The trick was to be at the head of the queue because after the first five or six boys had been punished Jack was only just getting into his stride.  After a few minutes of this violent exercise, his timing and strap action was second to none, he could have strapped for England.

All we old stagers carried a bottle of methylated spirits in our bags.  The coolness of this spirit helped to sooth the fire emanating from our palms.  Unfortunately the hand and fingers were in no state to unscrew the cap from the bottle, so an attendant friend used to open it and pour the liquid out.  The stairs leading down from Jack’s study on the first floor smelt like an oil refinery.

It has to be said, we were an uncouth lot, tempered by the spirituality of the boarders, those boys who were training for the priesthood.  The College was a conveyor belt for this activity but even in my time so very few lasted the course, driven out by a change in their vocation or possibly by a thrust from the wrong direction.  Why lock these boys up at 11 years of age and try to make them rounded individuals by 23 years old, after 12 years of captivity you must be a mess.

A close friend of mine throughout school was a lad from a neighbouring parish and of Kerry extraction.  His name is not necessary, we will call him M.  He was brilliant, every subject came to him so easily, without any study he would be at the top of most subjects.  His drawing was excellent and he was always producing cartoons of the staff and pupils.  However discipline was not his forte.  He was always in trouble and he would have been weeded out except that his brilliance outweighed his misdemeanour and the authorities thought they could change his troublesome ways.  Even my father tried to steer me away from his influence but to no avail.  His knowledge of American blues singers like Billy Leadbetter or Leadbelly as he was known, was overpowering and we used to sit listening to his scratchy records and planning ferment.

The teachers at the school in the main were blase about their subjects, faced with such quality their job was easy, they just churned it out.  The difference was that we boys born after the war were imbued with a different spirit to those born before.  They knuckled down and accepted disciplinary procedures, we for some reason could not, we questioned everything, therefore 80% to 90% of the teaching staff failed us.  Only the young teachers succeeded and there was not many of those.  The one outstanding teacher, who matched us wit for wit, was a fellow called Anthony Martin – Spike to us – he had spotted the post war rebelliousness and moulded his English classes to suit, getting us to read Waugh, Orwell, Huxley, Steinbeck, Amis, Dunleavy et al from a young age using them as an add on to our boring set books.  He remains one of my greatest influences.

The antithesis to Spike was the College Rector, Monsignor Thomas Duggan,.  Here was a man to despise.  dressed in his black and scarlet robes, he stalked the College, dispossessed of humour, amity, or christianity.  His eyebrows did most of the talking.  He was the last resort as regards school discipline.  If teachers thought that a particular boy had transgressed to such a degree, where even Jack Rigby’s physicality would not prevail, he was sent with a note to the Rector.  M was such a boy, aged 14.

The meeting had to be booked in advance and I give here M’s account of what happened, it is virtually verbatim and ties in with the boys who suffered similar fates, so it is not the made up ramblings of some miserable woebegone. He told me these details early one evening about ten years later.  At the time he gave only bare details and we all laughed it off as just one of those things.  As he told it he stumbled over words and you could see the pain and anguish that was within.

“I knocked on his door and waited his bidding.  I entered and there was Duggan sitting in an armchair at the end of the room. I was told to stand in front of him and drop my trousers and underpants.  He looked at me as I stood naked for some time and told me how naughty I had been and that I had to take my punishment like a man.  He told me to lie across his knees and he gently caressed my raised arse.  He took a leather strap from a side table he hit me across the buttocks about six times.  After each stroke he again caressed my arse sticking his fingers deep into the rear of my crotch.  There was minutes between each stroke, I was terrified.  The whole affair took about 20 minutes and then he told me to stand up, put on my trousers and go.  He never got up from his chair and I stumbled out in tears, not from pain but it did hurt but I cried from embarrassment.”

Nothing was mentioned, nothing was said.  The staff must have known and condoned.  How did this punishment fit the crime.  I suppose everyone who metes out punishment needs gratification in different ways.  M certainly did not go back for more, but as brilliant as he was at his various subjects he was eventually pushed out of school like a used rag,never rose above labouring jobs, a tenuous marriage and drug misuse.  He died aged about 57 in a drug den in Gorton.  You just wonder how much his ignominious treatment at Duggan’s hands had to do with his decline and eventual fall.