Paul Malpas

In the summer of 1967 I went on my first proper touring holiday of Ireland without staying with family or friends.  Myself and two other lads in a car belonging to one of them, drove off the boat in Dublin and we travelled down through Kildare, Carlow and Kilkenny, without feeling we were in Ireland, but it suddenly changed when we hit Waterford and eventually stopped in Tramore, a delightfully clean sea-side town on the south coast.  We arranged digs in a neat B&B and set off to explore the town, where we learnt that there was a festival on that weekend.  Now it was our first taste of festivals and we did not realise that the bars all had extensions to their normal opening times.

We set off that evening at about 6.00pm  visiting different alcoholic establishments.  The loudspeakers strung from buildings were trumpeting out the new hit song of Johnny McEvoy’s, Irish Soldier Laddie, as he was the star of the festival that night.  The next thing I remembered was waking up the following morning and lifting my head up and I painfully became aware that the pillow that I had been sleeping on, came up with my head.  It was stuck to the side of my face.  Dried blood from various wounds had created a very powerful and agonising bond.  After much struggling and plentiful flows of blood, I managed to extricate myself from the pillow case, but to this day I do not know how I received the wounds and my companions were not able to shed any light on the matter either, or in fact whether we had seen Johnny McEvoy, although we did remember buying tickets.  We learnt the hard way and after nine hours steady drinking we should have realised that we should have paced ourselves better.

Over the next few days we slowly motored down through Cork and Kerry taking things very easily and eventually recovered our equilibrium and my good looks.  I remember during this time having a memorable breakfast in Bandon, in West Cork, that really set me on the road to recovery.  We made a burst through Limerick and Clare and hit Galway early and found digs on Father Griffin Road at 13s 6d per night, although we were put back a little when the two old ladies who ran the place asked us whether we drank.  We assured them that our habits were moderate and what really swung it for us was the fact that my grandfather came from Ballinamore Bridge, only a few miles from their homeplace of Newbridge in East Galway.

We went out for a few pints that afternoon and the two boys decided they were going to have an early night, but I as usual, a glutton for punishment, went out again and hit the town man-fashion.  I remember listening to some great singing in one bar and probably stayed for one drink too many, but I returned to the digs, as I thought, in a reasonable state and I was fumbling with the strange key at the doorstep, when the door opened followed by anguished gasps from the two old ladies.  As I passed them, I bade them goodnight and made my way upstairs to the room where the other two were fast asleep.  As I was undressing there was a knock at the door and a strangulated voice cried out “if you are going to vomit, please vomit in the lavatory”.  I went to bed wondering what all the fuss was about.

The lads slept through it all and the next day at breakfast the two ladies informed us that their brother had died during the night in Newbridge and that they were going back home to supervise the funeral and that they were going to have to shut up the Galway house for a while.  We said nothing but that we were sorry for their trouble and  packed our bags and went down the road to Salthill where we found digs for 10s 6d a night, a saving of two shillings on the Galway digs and where there was a Red Barrel festival on and this beer was half price that night.  An ill wind as they say.

We had a great week in Salthill, meeting some priests from Manchester we knew on the golf course, who took us for lunch to a hotel in Spiddal.  My first experience of the Gaeltech and relaxed priests, they could not half knock it back.

WE eventually arrived back in Dublin to find a strike had effected the B & I boats, but we were told that if we made our way to Belfast, a place could be had on the overnight boat to Liverpool.  So up through Drogheda, Dundalk, Newry and Banbridge we scuttled and into Belfast, where we eventually boarded the boat.  The end of this journey was quite an experience for us after sampling the delights of Ireland.  There was a general air of menace about the place.  Pavements were painted red, white and blue and there was paintings of King Billy on his big white horse on several gable ends.  Sectarianism seemed to be rife and this was  a few years before the civil rights people started to protest and with good cause it seemed to me.  It was obvious bloodshed was just round the corner and we were glad to be out of the place.  It was 32 years before I went back to Belfast and it appeared no different, again I was glad to reach the Donegal border.

The most significant presences in my life have been my wife, my mother and my maternal grandfather, listed only by age and beauty and not by craftmanship.  My mother naturally got to me first and filled my head with masses of dark curls, so much so, that I had to have my hair cut on that very first morn as it was interfering with my feeding.  Oh how I rue that fact, for if they had let it fester, I might have some growth today.  My grandfather took me over from the age of five and moulded me in his image, so that from that age, until he died when I was 12,  he modelled me on his version of an Irishman.  After that my mother re-embraced me and for a number of years pushed and prodded me into shape before eventually handing me over, in fairly reasonable form, given the rough material she had started to sculpt me from,  to my wife, Helen.  Helen had little to do but finessing the fine figure she had been given and ironing out one or two character malformations that had appeared during my education at the hard school of knocks that was St. Bede’s College and my early working years at John Laing and Alfred MacAlpine, malformations she is still struggling with 37 years on.

For those early formative years between the ages of five and twelve I would like to thank my grandfather because although he did not realize it, he taught me to place bets on horses, drink Guiness, shave and sing.  All the most important attributes a man needs to be able to function sucessfully in this life.

James Patrick Crehan was born on 1st May 1874 at Ballinamore Bridge in East Galway which, as he often told me, was five miles south of Ballygar and ten miles north of Ballinasloe and he died in Longsight in Manchester on 27th October 1958.  Born on the first day of Bealtaine, a pagan festival celebrating creativity in old age and rebirth, he was highly qualified in his senior years of 77 to 84 to put his heart and soul into my social education.

When you consider his life span in its historical context, nobody could have lived through a more demanding 84 years than he did.  In Ireland he was born from a union of Famine survivors and was present during the latter stages of Fenianism and the birth of the Irish Republican Brotherhood.  He was in Ireland for the First and Second Home Rule Bills of 1896 and 1893 and in England for the Third and protracted Bill 1912-1914 which became further delayed with the outbreak of war and he lived through the Land League argument for his whole time in Ireland.

He came to England in 1893 and never for one second forgot his birthplace.  He came during the African Wars in Rhodesia and the Sudan and the war against the Boers in South Africa.  He was 40 years old at the start of the First World War and lived through the turmoil in the Irish enclaves in North Manchester created by the War of Independence and ensuing Civil War in Ireland. He celebrated the signing of the treaty and never had any time for the “Spaniard DeValera”.   He had retired when the Second World War started in 1939 and he saw out the Korean War of 1950-1953 and sat back in his last few years as the Cold War started to unfurl.   84 years of world wide conflict,84 years of unremitting social struggle and bellicosity.

After a few years labouring for different contractors he was eventually employed by the Manchester Gas Works Company as a fireman or stoker, where he spent the next 39 years shovelling coal into the retorts at Bradford Gas Works in the first stages of gas production.  He kept these labours up until past 60 when his 6′4” frame could no longer work with the same youthful vigour and the Company put him collecting money out of the domestic meters.

He had married in 1919 at the age of 45 and helped produce twin daughters in 1922 and a third in 1925 who tragically died in 1930 of meningitis.  He spent his retired war years as an Air Raid Warden (ARP) helping the police force in protecting the public before and after air raids.  During one of these raids on Christmas Eve 1940, his house in Miles Platting, just off Oldham Road, was destroyed along with 70 or 80 others and 44 of his neighbours killed, when a land mine or aerial mine dropped from a Heinkel 111 bomber into the junction of two entries at the back of two streets of houses.  This type of bomb was a one ton high explosive bomb strung under a parachute and dropped in pairs, which came down slowly with a high pitched whine calculated to give maximum fear along with maximum explosive effect.  Although he and his family were only 50 metres from the bomb, they were in their air raid shelter as opposed to their house and therefore were safe.  My mother crawled out when the all clear was sounded some hours later and was met with a scene of devastation but she caught the 53 bus at the top of the road and went to work.

Has his retirement continued after the war, he was heartened by the growth of the Irish population in Longsight, his adopted home after the bomb.  Men from Galway, Mayo and Roscommon used to join him every night in the Anson Hotel for a few pints or bottles of Guiness. He collided with a motorbike on a zebra crossing on Slade Lane, the motor bike came off worse and he walked home, but a bruise on his shin turned ulcerous and knocked him back a bit and he could not walk but he had his Guiness imported and he continued with his pipe and chewing tobacco and he sang to himself or to any one who was around everyday of his life to the last.  He went quickly in the end with pancreatic cancer and St. Robert’s Church was full of old time Irishmen celebrating the end of a hard fought life.  I served as an altar-boy at his funeral mass and mingled with the congregation both outside church and at Moston Cemetery and my toes tingled as I heard these giants of mourners whispering to each other that there was never a finer man.

Tomorrow I will tell you of my years of education knocked into me by this very fine man and also of the idiosyncracies of living with a person one generation removed from the famine, a man of the 19th century.