Paul Malpas

With all the comments I have received lately about a piece I penned over two years ago, I thought I would continue on the same theme and write of more thoughts I have about life in Longsight and especially life attached to St. Robert’s parish and school and try to invigorate our selective  memories.

I was born in February 1946 and anybody with a glimmer of simple mathematics can work out that my conception was based on celebrations attached to Mr Hitler’s demise, nine months previously in May 1945.  So I am the only man I know that rejoices in that horrible man and his fortunate death but I doubt that my parents were the only ones celebrating in early May that year.

I was born into a family that had virtually nothing, having been bombed out of their house in Miles Platting during the Christmas Blitz of 1940.  They were at the start of the long weary trail of putting one foot in front of the other and building from scratch.  But in other regards I was born into wealth, into Longsight and its many characters and more importantly into St Robert’s parish, centred on Hamilton Road.  The Catholic Church then, as opposed to now, put its arms around its families and guided us through the hard times.  It seemed to cater for more than pastoral care, it actually managed our existence in times young people now will never understand.

I started school after the 1950 Christmas holidays; I was four years and ten months old and I could read and write in a fashion that was probably better than my script today.  I entered Miss Standen’s class, an old lady who retired shortly afterwards but not before she put me on the road.  My memories of her say she was a kindly woman endowed with lots of patience, ideal for the task in hand.

The following September I moved up to Infants 2 which I think was in the care of Miss Willoughby and then onto Infants 3 and that ended the soft times.  They thought at eight we had certain responsibilities in life and one of these was to accept punishment rather than chastisement for any misdemeanour. Junior One started for me in September 1953, in the newly built prefab adjacent to Farrer Road, built for the first of the baby boomers of my generation.  It seemed the war ended and love started in 1945.  Our teacher in Junior One, a young decent woman who was shortly to get married, decent in that she could control her class by a mix of sternness and niceness, a mixture that was missing in some of the teachers.  Her very presence calmed you and made you listen.

Then onto Mrs McGrath’s class, Junior Two, and it was in this class that the powers decided punishment was the answer to all problems.  Mrs McGrath was the Headmaster, Paddy McGrath’s wife and must have wanted to keep her husband in shape so that any murmur at all was sufficient to send us down the corridor to her husband’s office for a dose o0f his feared strap, which he summarily dished out outside his room for all and sundry to see.

We moved up to Miss Wallace’s class as we approached 10 years old and the punishments got worse.  Miss Wallace, so the rumour went, was attracted by Paddy McGrath’s punitive muscles and always dressed smartly when he was around, tidying up her make-up and recoating with lipstick if Paddy was due for inspection.  It was thought that her and Paddy were close,  but how close in those Catholic days, I don’t know.  Miss Wallace had a grim countenance, only  brightened by Paddy’s frequent visits.  She was always calling me big-headed and far to cocky, always beating me over the hands with the edge of a ruler.  Her possibly unrequited love affair with Paddy might have had something to do with her dissatisfaction of me, but I for my part could not understand her grievances against me because my examination results were always top class and I always wondered what I had to do to escape such duress.  Confidence was not the thing authority respected those days.  Control and subserviance were the qualities to attain.  My reports, which I still have, tell me that I was top of the class of 47 children and still getting beaten to within an inch of my life.  I suppose trying to control 47 Longsight kids was a task in itself, if you were not on top of your game, without trying to teach and vexation did rise to the top more often than not.

I have to say that punishment never ever taught me a lesson either at St Robert’s or at St Bede’s where I went after 11+, it only made me more determined to plough my own furrow.  I think we thought of punishment as a necessary evil, something to be endured, like cutting your knees whilst playing football in the school yard.  A means to an end.

The senior class before the 11+ examination was Junior Four and Mr Groarke’s class.  A fine and fair man, a good teacher, who could dish out punishment just the same.  When he punished you , you felt that you had deserved it.  With Paddy McGrath and Miss Wallace hitting you, you wondered why.  People I remember in that class, most of whom went on to Senior One (there was no secondary schools for most in those days and comprehensive education had not been thought out), were Pauil Richardson, Barry Mannock, Stuart Robinson, David Evans and Alan Morris, David Duffy and Anthony Fahey.  I seem to remember more girls as they were more competitive in the exams, Pauline Connor (one of seven daughters of Jim and Helen Connor), Pauline McGhee, Belinda Maloney, Mary Leydon, Rosemary Keogh, Marlene Moran and Maureen Smith from up North Road, Maureen Sargent and the Swiss girl, Helen Vogeli who did not seem to mind the change in language.  It is funny how you remember some but not others, but there was another 31 kids there somewhere and probably a little reminder and they would all come flooding back.

I was co-opted onto the altar boys at St Robert’s when I was seven, my mother bought me the cassock from John Neville’s in Manchester and my Aunty Kath made the cotta with some fancy lace trimmings on the sleeves and round the hem and Fr Dwyer instructed me in the Latin rites and made me know how important and special was the role of an altar boy.  A few years ago whilst writing my Memoir, a 400 page tome, which I did for my children rather than for publication, I discovered a photograph taken prior to an altar boys trip to Blackpool.  The photograph is strange these days, there was a group of men and boys about to go on an outing, all dressed up in shiny shoes, suits, shirts and ties, no leisure wear, anoraks, tracksuit trousers or trainers.  It must have been taken in 1958  because I was wearing my first year St Bede’s uniform, grey short trousered suit with school tie and blue shirt.

The two priests sat centrally, Canon O’Shaughnessy andf his curate Fr McCardle.  Some of the St Vincent De Paul Society stood at the back who were a lot older than us.  Reggie Singh, who chanced his arm with Evelyn Mellor who lived next door to us but who never stood a chance with the battalion of GIs, fresh out of Burtonwood who were queueing up to register their claim.  Next to him there was John Sparks, Bill Bagnall, Robin Clancy, the twins father, Mr White, John Shepard, John Walsh who became a dentist in Clare and  John Mulcahey.  Lads who were older than me at Bede’s, John Watkins who lives in Zurich now, Michael Power whose sisters , Aileen and Geraldine, I knew and Mike McPartland.  There were “Punch” Donelon’s two sons, Chris and Sean and Anthony O’Malley who went to Xaverian and ended up in Law.  The Harrison twins, John and Michael, Michael continued to serve on the altar until the church closed in 2003, devoting nearly 50 years of his life to the cause.  Then there was Stuart Robinson from Swayfield Avenue who went on to marry Cath Philbin who became Lord Mayor of Manchester, Anthony Millington who I continued to meet the odd time at Houldsworth Golf Club and his brother Paul who I last saw in his butcher’s shop on Meldon Road.  Paul Hopkins was there the son of Gabriel Hopkins, a local shop owner, politician and friend of my father’s, Paul became headmaster of a secondary school in North Manchester.  John Halloran I notice, John was the nephew of a famous Daily Mail journalist whose name at the moment escapes me. There was Tony Deacy who was making a name for himself in the construction industry until he was tragically killed on Longley Lane in 1973 aged 26. also I see Kevin Kelly, son of the church organist Mrs Kelly and his fellow skiffle group member, my brother Kevin, who the following year took up with the Holy Ghost Fathers, John Howarth, Michael Leydon and Robert Fannon.  The White twins , Peter and Paul, John O’Grady and a lad called Davidson (Jeremy, I think).  There are two boys I cannot name but I will do one day when I finish this process.  Whatever happened to most of these faces, they all look very serious and I doubt the 54 years will have changed the ones that are still living that much.

These lads and men formed the backbone of the parish at that time, serving at every church service.  I wonder how many, like myself, have drifted away because of the Church’s inabilities in reinventing itself.  Its power and control was great for the war weary 1950s and before but the Church had given us education and most of us eventually empowered  with this wisdom, realised the faults in its system.  For me its only fault, propagated by lowly priest, dandy bishop, aloof cardinal and disdainful pope was the massive corporative cover up of clerical abuse which has been in practice all my life and which they are still trying to conceal when they have been caught bang to rights as their suppurating corpse twitches on the altar of life.

But back to Longsight and St Robert’s.  Nowadays I wonder at the distances some of the kids walked to school, especially a school in an urban environment.  Marlene Moran from long gone Greenwood House flats on Kirkmanshulme Lane, must have been the farthest.  The Sacred Heart in Gorton or St Joseph’s in Longsight would have been nearer.  Barry Mannock who lived off Stockport Road, near Mount Road and would have been quicker going to St Mary’s and in fact all the St Richard’s children who had unfortunately no school to go to.  I understand the position as now reversed itself and all the St Robert’s children now go to St Richard’s.

It is strange also to think of shopping in those pre- supermarket days.  We lived on Duncan Road and except for occasional trips to town, all the shopping to satisfy our daily needs was done within a 100 yard radius of where we lived.  Mrs Bunting’s greengrocers shop was at the top of the road on Slade Lane, Ernie the butcher on the corner of Clitheroe Road and Dixon Street, Mrs Reynolds grocer’s shop opposite and the off-licence on Clitheroe Road where I used to go with a jug when my granddad was to poorly to stroll down to the Anson Hotel.  The jug would be filled with beer from a pump and I would head back down Dixon Street, having a few slurps to stop it from spilling .  All these shops would have been full if three customers came at once, so you just wonder at where the hundreds come from that fill the supermarkets 24 hours per day.

We were all surely an insular bunch, living in our own little cocoon that the parish had created.  We did not notice the poverty all round us; the only time we ventured further than the top of the street was when we went to the pictures.  Longsight and Levenshulme were well endowed with picture houses, from the flea-pit Queens at the Stockport Road/Slade Lane junction to the opulence of the Regal Cinema in Levenshulme, which does keep reinventing itself, from a cinema to a bowling alley to a showcase curry house.  Sometimes three cinema visits a week were called for to satisfy our needs in those pre-TV days and on the way home, a bag of chips in the previous days newspaper.  You could read the news off the chips, the type transferring itself from the newsprint onto the potatoes.

Well there is 2100 words fashioned out of nothing with still plenty to talk about in Longsight and its church of St Robert.

St Patrick’s Day 1973 dawned clear and bright: it really was a lovely day for March.  The sun shone and it was very warm, in my recollection probably the best St Patrick’s Day for weather.  After a couple of liveners at the Conservative Club, it was down to St. Robert’s church, where we had chosen to marry because of its light and colour as opposed to Helen’s parish church, St. Cuthbert’s, which was brown in its different shades.  Kevin, my brother, was best man and Ann, Helen’s sister, was chief bridesmaid.  The two of them still courting and for a good while longer until their final sad breakup.  The other two bridemaids were Helen’s school friend, Angela Pelham from Langley and Carmel Caffrey from Leicester who was at university in Manchester and was courting Matt Towey, Helen’s brother.  Helen looked a treat in her wedding dress; even now looking back on wedding photographs of the beautiful bride, I bless myself on my luck.

The wedding breakfast took place at the Vth Inn in Manchester, on Crown Square, a part of the Stanneyland’s empire and soon to be an upmarket Italian restaurant, Isola Bella.  We had the feed and I, nervous as a kitten, spluttered out a few words of thanks.  We all agreed that speeches were all a serious waste of drinking time.  We left the Vth Inn in our gleaming green 1600GT Capri and headed for the club where a full afternoon and evening’s entertainment was on the cards.

Cleverly I had instructed my mother to have a wrap up of bacon, egg and sausage waiting at the Club for the first breakfast at our new house the following morning.  We had bought a house in Chorlton on Mauldeth Road West for £7,000 from an old lady.

Everyone gathered at the Club whilst some serious drinking took place and in the evening a band called the Kentucky Ramblers took the stage, I have never heard of them since but what a great show they put on.  We were drinking till 2.00am when I left with my bride.  Jim & Peg Towey had done us proud paying for the meal and a few rounds of drinks, my mother paying for the flowers and I paid for the buffet in the evening.  When you think that after 12 hours drinking, I drove home with Helen, we certainly took some chances those days.

With my last dregs of energy I carried Helen over the threshold and I was soon snoring my head off in the new bed upstairs.  Worst of all I had left my breakfast parcel at the Club and so on wakening at 7.00am the following morning, starved with the hunger, we decided to head for Towey’s, where Jim was just up and we soon had breakfast on the go.

After that the whole of the following week was taken up with a male celebration of the union.  Jim Towey and his brothers, Pake, Mick, Tom, Matt,  Malachy and myself and Jim Duffy, their brother in law, and a fellow from Clare called John Lehane, used to sit down at the lunchtime opening and drink our fill.  These men were all in their middle 50s and having gone through that period myself, I can only admire their concentration, powers of endurance and attention to duty that week.

I remember one dinnertime session, the pubs shut at 3.00pm those days, Bert Flint, the landlord of the Old House at Home on Burton Road, gave us some leeway and did not start shouting time until five minutes past the hour.  There was the Towey’s, Jim, Pake, Mick, Matt &  Malachy, Jim Duffy, myself and of course the ever present John Lehane, eight men and twenty four pints on the table.  We drank them and were on our way home for 3.15pm.  Back to a wonderful dinner at Peg’s and then a quick snooze before setting off once more for the Old House at 7.00pm. the women with us this time, those that wanted to come that is, most of the older women had seen this craic so often they stayed at home and waited for the men to run out of steam.

After a week of this enjoyment or carnage, everybody went home and we were left to our twosome and hard facts had to be realised.  I was one week into married life, totally skint, with a mortgage and HP payment due.  Over the previous two years I had been playing golf and with my previous good fortune I had bought a highly prized kangaroo skin golf bag of professional size and quality off the Australian professional at Shifnal Golf Club in Shropshire.  I sold it for £60 and threw in the clubs for nothing, thinking I was that poor I would never play again.  This gave us some respite and I settled down at last learning how to make a family with my beautiful and patient bride.