Paul Malpas

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.

When I decided to throw in my lot with Ireland and came to live here full time some five years ago after years of living a ping pong existence between the two countries, I decided that my time should be taken up with it’s history and ideally in the explanation of that history i.e. it’s archaeology.

So as soon as I could, I sought admission to an Archaeology Diploma course at Galway University, or NUI Galway as it likes to be called. What qualified me for this course was my point blank refusal to send them my General Certificate of Education results which I had sat some 50 years previously.

What followed was a thoroughly enjoyable two years of mainly thought provoking lectures on Ireland and particularly west of Ireland archaeology, only marred for some by the Head of the Archaeology School telling us towards the end of the first year that the Celts never came to Ireland. This statement did not disturb me, but in a class of Celts it was almost like being called a bastard. So much so that three of the class never appeared again and from the rest there was constant mutterings for the remaining 15 months, so engrained is this Celtic myth in the Irish psyche. In fact a myth introduced by politicians at the end of the 19th century to give some kind of focus to the new and burgeoning state of Ireland. Therefore let me just confirm the fact that THE CELTS AS A PEOPLE NEVER CAME TO IRELAND, however it is true that a few ideas were exchanged with the intermarriage of eminent families in Ireland with their neighbours on the continent of Europe.

The course finished and my examination results were satifactory enough for me to be invited down to the University to celebrate Graduation Day. Now I had already experienced one graduation ceremony with my eldest daughter at Nottingham University some years before and at that time was overwhelmed with the gross waste of time , money and energy expended in the simple task of handing over a peice of paper.

Thousands of students with parents in tow buying gowns, hats and dresses journeying down to the university campus to wallow in their millisecond of fame in front of a stageful of multicoloured academics who should surely be doing something better suited to their intellects. Since that time all my children and I have many, have taken in my thoughts on the subject and refused to expose themselves to this financial legerdemain.

I explained this to the nice lady from the University Graduation Office who rang me wondering why I had not filled in the application form for this gratifying day. Halfway through my verbiose diatribe she put the phone down leaving me unfulfilled. However my diploma arrived by post written in a quasi Latin script, I and at least 20 other people have tried to interpret without success. No wonder doctors and scientists can be accepted for positions of authority by flashing these pieces of parchment illuminated by Book of Kells type illustration and gobbledygook script. No one can translate the document therefore no one can refute the lies in the job application.

However the course was a tremendous success for me personally and I now know more about North Roscommon Archaeology than 99.9% of the natives and it helped me greatly in my understanding of the landscape which is integral in the formation of its archaeology, but I still cannot understand the academics, people of powerful thought, who annually put themselves through this graduation charade.