Paul Malpas

Today I want to tell you a story about a remarkable Roscommon woman from the town of Lanesborough.  Now I know Lanesborough is in Longford, so she must have been from the west bank of the Shannon, she was very proud of her Roscommon roots.  She was born Kathleen Gill in 1928, I think, which would have made her 82 if she had lived today.  Kathleen came to Manchester in the early 1950s along with thousands of her countrymen and women and met and married a man from Bellavary in Mayo, James Nolan or The Bundle of Rags as he was nicknamed.  The cabs of construction plant were notoriously cold and Jimmy used several layers of old clothing to keep himself warm.  By 1970 the pair had been married about 17 years and between them had five children.  A boy first, two girls and then a set of twins of either sex, who were three years old when she was found to have breast cancer at the age of 42.

My story really starts in the Christmas of 1969 when a friend of mine, Jim McHale from outside of Castlebar, invited me to spend Christmas at his mother in law’s house in Rooskey, about six miles north of Charlestown, on the Sligo/Mayo border.  Once at Mrs Henry’s house, where we feasted on the finest potatoe cakes I had ever eaten, we called to a neighbours house, who Jim said had relatives in Manchester.  The lady of the house welcomed us as she has done many times since and started telling me of her husband’s three brothers, Jim, Matt and Malachy, in Manchester.  Within seconds I had them pinned and that was the start of a 41 year friendship with that woman, Aggie Towey.  In fact Jim Towey had a son who was at school with my brother in Grange over Sands and what was more important, he had two long haired blonde daughters, Ann and Helen, who I had met up with at a garden party some years before and had slotted into my memory for future research.

On my return I determined to  look them up and did  but it was not for a few months afterwards that I ran into Helen again who had originally took my fancy.  She was a lovely blond haired, round faced girl who at 5 foot nothing and seven stone weight, was perfectly formed, going in and out in all the right places.  She had a mind as sharp as a razor and a tongue of equal quality.  Her temper had been moulded by her father; the type who hit first and ask questions later.  I thought the plusses far outweighed the minuses and I would soon have her under my spell.  In retrospect, with our two years courtship and 37 years of marriage I have not managed to tame that wildness yet but I am hoping.

At that time Helen spent most of her time at Nolan’s house looking after Jimmy Nolan’s five kids. Kathleen, who I had not yet met had been taken into hospital for a mastectomy and Helen’s every waking hour was spent in this house doing the cooking and cleaning.  I thought what a hero and made my clumsy play that was instantly rebuffed.  I could see Helen’s attachment to the family and a short while later after Kathleen returned from hospital and we had been introduced, I started turning up at the house more and more frequently trying to impress Kathleen as much as Helen, that my suit was in earnest and that I was worth considering.  Kathleen, a lovely woman, could see my providence before Helen.  Realising this I pressed on knowing that Kathleen would also impress on my intended all the wonderful characteristics I then posessed.  I had plenty of money; I could drink like a fish; I could handle myself in a scrap; I was of Irish Catholic stock and many and much more

In some things I had a certain clumsiness like not being able to say the things that girls liked to hear.  I had lived and worked all my mature life with a bunch of savages, so I knew it would take time for the edges to be smoothed out.  The problem was did I have that time?  I asked Helen out again and with Kathleen’s urgings from her sick-bed, she agreed to go for a drink.  Down to the Old House at Home on Burton Road we went and I was just into my first game of Don, a local card game, and my first pint, when these two lads, who were full of booze, started making a nuisance of themselves.  I said something to them and immediately we were rolling round the floor in a kind of horizontal quickstep.  We were eventually pulled apart and I was able to continue my game of cards.  Helen was goggle-eyed and we soon left and I took her home to Kathleen who revelled in the story.  Not only did I tick all the right boxes, I was a hero as well.  This was the Roscommon spirit coming out in her.

Helen came out of shock a few days later and on Kathleen’s exhortation, consented to another night of pleasure in the pub.  I am certain that if it was not for Kathleen, we would never have got together and I think that for the last 38 years, (she died in !972 just a few months before our wedding) she has been looking down on us and laughing at the correctness of her hunches.  Certainly if it was not for Kathleen I would not be sitting here now.  Her hand has pushed me along the road.

Jim Crehan spent 35 years of his adult working life shovelling coal into the gas retorts, firing the coal and clearing out the resulting coke from those long steel tubes.  Back-breaking work, which by its nature, engendered habits which followed him home and into retirement.  Those of course who had retirement.  In 1958 my father contacted the North Western Gas Board, the organization that had taken over The Manchester Gas Company in 1948, to tell them to cancel the pension payment of my recently dead grandfather.  They told him that Jim Crehan was the last Gas Company employee on their books, all the others having died long before.  The dust, the heat and the fumes quickly slicing through the ranks of the recently retired and in fact the ranks of the employed.

On retirement each employee was given the option of a lump sum, which was the equivalent of ten years pension or a weekly payment for life.  Most wisely went for the lump sum, my grandfather decided on the weekly payment.  Once he passed 75, he used to have a laugh every day – for nine years in fact, at the way he had beaten the system.

My grandfather was once a tall man, 6′ 4” my mother always used to say, but when I knew and understood him, he had a bit of a stoop, which brought him down to normal size.  On my parent’s wedding photographs at the age of 67 he was head and shoulders above everyone else, looking remarkably like Kevin, my brother.  He always wore a cap and  full length grey flannel long johns, summer and winter.  During the day he wore a coller-less striped shirt and a knotted thin scarf.  The rest was finished off with a pair of woollen socks, the holes in which, he used to darn himself and after a time there was more darning than original sock, a pair of black boots, moleskin trousers and a waistcoat that was many years passed its best, in which he kept his chewing tobacco and knife for cutting plugs of baccy off the solid block, his smoking tobacco and pipe and his stub of a pencil, which he used for working out his system on the football pools and for writing out bets on the horses.  The whole was finished off with a long black overcoat he wore when stepping out to the pub.

I only knew him in his retired state and taking things easy, he had a chair, grandad’s chair, to the left of the fireplace, on which he used to sit for most of the day, resting, reading the sporting papers, smoking and above all singing.  The cap he wore both inside and outside the house, as he was as bald as a coot and could feel even the whisper of a draught on his head.  In his attempt to get his chin to match his scalp he shaved meticulously every day, taking great care around his small walrus moustache.

The shaving operation was a performance, all done without the use of water.  He would hang his strop up on a hook on the back of the kitchen door, open up his cut-throat razor, which was always kept on the mantlepiece above the fire, and with a gentle up and down motion he sharpened an already sharp  razor.  Sometimes if he thought the razor had been abused somehow the previous day, he would spend ten or fifteen minutes on the whetstone, first of all spitting on the stone and then rubbing his blade in a circular movement on the liquid produced and then reverting to the strop on the back of the door.  As a sign that the razor had reached its keenness, he would pull a hair from my mother’s hairbrush and holding one end of the hair between finger and thumb, he would slice the strand in two without bending it.  This operation gave as much credence to the strength of my mother’s jet black hair as it did to the sharpness of the razor.

He was now ready.  He lathered his face with a soapy foam from a cup, the recipe for which only he knew and without mirror or guidance he performed this death defying feat, leaving his face and chin as shiny and smooth as a baby’s bottom.  However as the years caught up, the razor, with its care and attention, did not lose its sharpness, but his reaction and flexibility certainly did and he started to take lumps out of his flesh.  The ensuing bleeding was staunched by little twists of The Sporting Chronicle, the newspaper of choice for the horse racing aficionado, which gave each day’s horses, their breeding and their form.  These twists he stuck on the wounds which soaked up the blood and stopped the bleeding.  He was a sight to behold, going out to the Anson Hotel for his nightly couple of pints, sprouting newsprint of runners and riders from various cuts.  Later on in life even this butchery failed him and my mother was given the job.  Scared of the cut-throat, she used a safety razor, but my grandfather was never happy as the finished product was never as good.  So the daily sharpening continued just in case his joints freed themselves and he was able to shave himself again.

Another favourite pastime of his was clearing the wax out of his ears with a needle.  I used to wince thinking the needle would disappear into his head and never come out.  Also he would only drink his tea out of a saucer, pouring the tea from a cup so that it cooled quickly,  Never once did I see him drink from a cup.

He loved his couple of pints of an evening, funnily enough I have always been the same, and on his way home he would call at the off-licence attached to the pub and bring home with him two pint bottles of Guiness.  These he stood next to the fire and settled down into his chair and after five minutes or so chat, he would stand and stick the poker into the heart of the burning coals and leave it some time until it was red hot.  Meanwhile he poured out three quarters of the warmed first bottle into a glass and when the poker was ready, he pulled it from the heat, tapped it on the grate to remove any surplus ash and plunged it into the glass of Guiness, with much hissing and steam.  The poker was returned to the fire and the process was repeated as he sat back and enjoyed his hot nightcap.

I did not know I could write so much about this wonderful man but I was young and taking all these remarkable feats in and storing them for posterity.  I have promised myself and Helen that I will limit myself to no more than a thousand words a day so has to improve quality and also and most importantly to enable me to carry out all the household tasks that are set me on a daily basis by my loving spouse.  So I will finish here and continue apace tomorrow with My Grandad  Part3.  I am already 200 words over my rations.

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.

I was born in a suburb of Manchester called Longsight.  Three miles from the city centre, a halfway house, neither inner city deprivation or outer suburban splendour.  A place one came to, to escape the former and aspire to the latter.  Immediately after the 2nd world war it was nearly 100% English in its population, but that changed very quickly.

The war’s aftermath wrought many changes.  Lots of houses with no man, only women and children, the man either dead or strayed. Which resulted in a rise of lodging houses to cater for the single and not so single men travelling around looking for work, men who had been either soldiers or fully employed during the war.  The Irish families started moving in to the area, men who had immigrated during the thirties and had been in good employment as Bevan Boys or on government construction sites during the war and were now raising families.  Slowly also a few Italians, Maltese, Germans and West Indians started to drift in, who because of the war had been washed upon England’s shores.  Once the first wave of Irish settled, they attracted more of their own from the inner suburbs and soon they were rivalling the English in terms of population.

They were obvious for their vigour and zest for life.  the English had been flattened by the war, the Irish had been earning a reasonably good living and had not been ground down.  They had also escaped De Valera and his insular policies and the cloying grasp the Catholic Church had on its congregation.  They liked the freedoms, they flourished and so did the Church.  New churches were being built in all the suburbs financed by the impecunious English and the vim and determination of the Irish.

Into this burgeoning atmosphere I was born and reared, the eldest of three sons, of an English farmer’s son and an Irishman’s daughter.  For us also Longsight was a half-way house although my parents lived in the area all their married lives, moving from modest Duncan Road to the opulence of Birchfields Road in the space of 20 years.

For me , my life and thoughts were formed in Duncan Road, a long wide road split by the three main roads of the district.  Slade Lane to the east, Hamilton Road in the centre and Beresford Road to the west.  The east end of the road was a mixture of early, mid and late Victorian terraced houses, one of which was ours, to the west the houses were Edwardian terraces.  Looking at them now, you wonder how families managed in them, they were that small.  The Irish with their larger broods were taking the bigger houses on the three main roads, the English with their smaller families and wage packets were contented with the smaller houses.

I do not think it can be stressed enough the burden that was put on the English population during the war.  It had worn them out, family values had been eroded and I think they wondered whether it had all been worth it.  In a lot of ways the Irish were fresher and certainly fitter to take on the rejuvenation of the country.

My mother’s family had escaped death when a landmine dropped from an Heinkel bomber had killed 45 of their neighbours and destroyed their home on Christmas Eve 1940 and this was their chance and they escaped to Longsight and a better life.  My father used to  large farmhouse living and having spent the war in a reserved occupation, working long hours on the development of the newly invented radar system, was totally deflated.  This then was my inheritance, my mother’s enthusiasm for life and my father thinking at 27 that his best years were behind him.

My mother worked occasionally, when there was work about and her father a retired stoker from Ballinamore Bridge in East Galway did more than his share of looking after us kids during the school dinner break and after school.  This man helped greatly in forming my character,  he deserves a blog to himself.  Let it just be said for now that I thought the world of him.  He had been born in 1874 and sometime in the 1890s had left Galway and settled in Manchester, eventually gaining regular and full time employment with the Manchester Gas Company for whom he worked until retirement 38 years later in 1939.  He married a Manchester girl of Laois and Kildare parents at the fashionably late age of 44 in 1919 and they had their first children, twins, in July 1922.

In Manchester, in this period after the First World War, there was a great deal of civil unrest brought on by Michael Collins and his mates in Dublin.  To the north of the city along Oldham and Rochdale Roads and along Stretford Road to the west, the police could hardly control the political foment.  Manchester was a channel, formed by friends of Eamonn Boland, Collins’s compadre, through which arms and ammunition were smuggled into IRA hands in Dublin.  One of the blackguards who supplied this channel was the son of a cousin of my grandmother’s Eddie Lenihan.  Eddie was receiving these weapons from his many contacts and while he waited to pass them into the chain, he stored them temporarily at his mother’s house.  His mother naturally was worried sick and called on my grandmother, who was in the throes of marriage to help her somehow.  Mrs Lenihan’s husband, serving in the Irish Guards, had been killed at Loos in 1915 and she had nobody to turn to in trying to save her errant son. Into the lining of their long coats, which women wore in those days, they stitched as many guns as they could and set off walking from Ardwick to Northenden, then a rustic village to the south of Manchester, about five miles away on the south bank of the River  Mersey.  At the bridge over the river,  ran Palatine Road and it was here the two ladies stopped and unstitched the guns and threw them into the muddy waters  and then mightily relieved, made their way home.  I do not think for one minute did this stop Eddie’s gallop, but his feelings are not on the family record.  My mother must have been told this story many times as she grew up for it made a big impression on her young and enthusiastic soul.

During the school holidays and if she was not working, she used to take us on bus trips all over Manchester and mainly the Manchester she knew as a child.  Miles Platting, Newton Heath, Collyhurst,  Ancoats,  Ardwick and completely in the other direction. Styal Woods!  I knew Manchester intimately before I was ten years old.  We did the Styal Woods trip five or six times, I cannot remember now it being nearly 60 years ago but the trips are indelibly etched into my memory.

To get the bus to Styal, we had to walk one and a half miles , to the Birch Villa, a pub in  Rusholme, on Wilmslow Road and wait for its hourly arrival.  Off the bus went, down Wilmslow Road, through Fallowfield, Withington and Didsbury. along Palatine Road into Northenden and points south.  We always used to get off the bus outside Northenden Golf Club and cross the road onto the bridge and look into the muddy waters, whilst my mother related the happenings of thirty years previously.  We never moaned or groaned but after a while of looking into these murky depths,  we crossed the road and waited for the next bus an hour later.  Of this dutiful sons are made.

The follow up to this story is that after another interval of 30 years, I was involved in the demolition industry in Manchester, when it was decided to demolish the old bridge at Northenden and replace with new.  I priced this tender in full knowledge of my family’s past and chequered, I was going to get the job and find the guns.  I priced to do it for next to nothing, we came second or third, the opportunity was lost.  Obviously more than two women in Manchester had a gun up their sleeve all those years ago.

I hope you do not mind two blogs in a day but I might be busy tomorrow.