Chapters 31 - 35
Chapter 31. Aberavon Life, 1925 - 30
In this year of grace, 1995, all my children and, I assume, all their cousins, too, know a deal more than I did when their ages about insurance: they have motor insurance, house building insurance, fire insurance, endowment policies, private pension plans, insurance-linked savings plan - and the Lord knows what else.
These financial wizards of ours have read yards of literature put out by Insurance Companies, Financial Advisers and whatever. They have met and consulted more than one insurance agent and signed a clutch of agreements by which they have undertaken to pay out either monthly, quarterly or annually large sums of money. All that is one sign of some of the changes which I hope have been outlined in this story.
In 1923, when Dad was an insurance agent, he did not talk to people about private pension plans or annual payments for endowment policies: nor in 1923 did he sell much motor insurance, because cars were still a luxury for the relatively well-to-do of whom there were few in Aberavon. He, and his agent colleagues, called weekly on their clients to collect the pennies paid in premiums; a fire policy for the pitifully small number of household goods - but not a house building policy since most people lived in rented accommodation; a penny a week for a death policy taken out in the name of each member of the family - enough to get the £50 or so that would cover funeral costs; maybe a shilling a week (5p) for a small endowment policy to provide say £200 (then more than the average teacher’s salary) when a person retired or, if it was a term policy, after the premiums had been paid for, say, 10 or 20 years.
Later, I would get used to agents calling on Mum. There was ‘the man from the Pru’, another from the Wesleyan and General, and a third from the
Dad, whether on a bicycle à la Peter Walker or, as I remember him, on a motorbike, was good at his job: he had an Irish charm, an easy way with all sorts of people, and ability to blarney as well as to listen. Maybe, too, he used the Church as an aid: in the 1930s we would go carol singing to ‘Catholics only’ houses, knowing that the sight and sound of four little Lanes would get us a silver sixpence. Dad was at least as wise as his children and may well have called on fellow-Catholics to try to sell them policies. As he did so he also developed a side-line. In the 1920s electricity was just being brought to the town, and, once the Tories created the National grid in 1926, the laying of cables went ahead even more quickly. But people were reluctant to have the power taken from the main cable and into their homes: suspicion? fear? ‘better the devil we know (oil or gas) than the one we don’t?’ So the Electricity Company paid agents a shilling for each home they could get to sign up to take the power in. Who better than insurance agents to have, as a second string to their bows, as electricity agents: they called on dozens of homes every week; they were trusted by their clients. And so, from Mum I was to learn later that, as Arthur Daly might have said, “Dad had a nice little earner,” from those shillings.
He was also good at playing with us, small though we were. Later, in the 1930s I told Mum that he wasn’t like the other Dads in
For two and a half years, I was the only child, cossetted by parents and Granddad, cooed over by Careys, Maddens, Davies and others of the clan. Pat’s birth in August 1927 must have put my nose out of joint, although I don’t remember it doing so. Nor do I remember anything of the death of
But I do have firm memories of going to
Like the old Church, the
As in Dowlais, the School was, in fact, almost entirely the one large room. I remember the rows of wooden desks, with four of us sitting on the hard seat attached to the desk. I remember there being two teachers in the room - a Miss Murphy and a Miss Howells. Miss Murphy lived next door to my Twomey Uncle in
The graveyards opened off the small playground and, from an early age, I was fascinated by it. Not necrophilia, I assure you, but, as I now realise, some childish sense of the doctrine of the Communion of Saints. For, while my grandparents corpses were in Pant, here in Aberavon the headstones told of the dead relatives of this and that child who was in my class: here, too, I first read, and came back to in the 1950s even, “...[I can’t remember the name] native of Wexford, died...” What a tale lies behind that stone: a dying wish to be back in
Perhaps my firmest memory of my infant schooling was an afternoon when I went home during afternoon playtime. I can’t remember why I did so: I don’t remember walking from the play ground, down the narrow path between stone church and CYMS Hall: I can only shudder now at the thought of an infant walking along the roadway (for there was no pavement) alongside the Presbytery wall in Water Street and turning into Corporation Road. But I have a firm memory of a lady who was cleaning the brass step which formed the entry to her small home just before the Co-op Bakery (is that still there?). She may have known who I was, for
Because I have a second firm memory of disobeying teachers. While I was in the Infants, the old, small stone church was to be pulled down to make room for the resent, then modern, Church. While that went on, we went to Mass in the CYMS Hall, the altar being placed on the large stage, with moveable chairs taking the place of the customary wooden benches. It must have been while the roof was being taken off that the infants were told that, at the end of school, we were not to go down the pathway, as we usually did, to meet our mothers waiting at the gateway. Instead we were to go through the
The election was, in essence, a referendum: should
So, he resigned from office, advised the King to send for MacDonald, and so, on
“As we stood waiting for His Majesty, I could not help marvelling at the strange turn of Fortune’s wheel which had brought MacDonald, the starveling clerk, Thomas, the engine-driver, Henderson, the iron foundry worker and Clynes the cotton mill-hand to this pinnacle... We were making history.”
Indeed. And their supporters, in Aberavon and elsewhere, hoped that they would ‘make it’. Catholic supporters of the Party took particular pleasure in the appointment of John Wheatley as Minister of Health and Local Government. They knew about Wheatley because the Catholic press then, as now, was eager to draw attention to the success of any Catholic.
John Wheatley was responsible for what has been called “the most important and far reaching Housing Act of the pre-war days”. Local councils were empowered to build houses for rent and were to receive a government subsidy for each house, so enabling the rent charged to be lower that it would otherwise have been, Wheatley, successful and rich, never forgot the roots from which he had sprung.
But his success was, almost, the single success of the MacDonald government. With ‘the Iron Chancellor’ Snowden in charge of the Budget, there was the policy of lowering taxes so that nothing was done to stimulate employment. In MacDonald’s defence, it has to be said that his was a minority government which might be overthrown whenever the Liberals voted against it. Too, he had a very left-wing group of MPs whose speeches and policy statements roused fears of a Bolshevik-style rising in
It may be that my father’s political agnosticism dated from the failure of that first Labour government. He, like many others, had hoped for so much. So many promises had been made about social justice and reform; so many speeches by MacDonald, ‘the Messiah’, yet so little delivered. Wheatley, alone had ‘delivered’, but after 1924 he spoke and wrote scathingly about his fellow Labour MPs. His writings in Catholic papers may have deepened my Dad’s cynicism as regards politicians. Mind you, Irish people had always held their politicians at arms’ length. They ‘knew’ that most of them were ‘in it for what they can get out of it.’ And the Irish-Welsh had seen how some of their union leaders had ‘done well for themselves’. There was the published will of the famous miners’ leaders Will Abraham of Cwmavon. When he died in 1922, this union leader and Labour MP left almost £250,000. How in God’s name did he get all that? Cynics had their own answers. And what of another union leader, Frank Hodges, secretary of the Miners’ Federation in 1924. In April of that year, Miners, Railwaymen and Transport Workers seemed ready to call a General Strike in defence of miner’s wages. It was Hodges in particular, and J.H. Thomas of the Railwaymen, who saw to it that the call for that Strike was never made, and miners had to suffer further cuts in pay. Hodges was accused of betraying his men, a charge which he denied. But he resigned his post, became director of an investment company, was appointed by
“Hodges died a wealthy man in 1947, an interesting example of how THE THING, as Cobbett called the entrenched English system, looks after its own.”
Later, in the aftermath of the split in the Labour Government in 1931, my father would see how that Establishment ‘looked after’ MacDonald, Snowden and Thomas in particular. MacDonald was seen as ‘the arch-betrayer’ for having agreed to form a National government, dominated by the Tories. “Tomorrow,” he said after he had formed the government, “Every Duchess in
So many Labour leaders getting their snouts in the trough. So it is not surprising that the relatively honest, socially-concerned Louis (why else had they studied Rerum Novarum, joined the Catholic Social Guild and worked for Labour victories?) should have become disillusioned. Years later he would tell us that his best hope for the political future was that there should be a strong Labour Opposition (‘to frighten the Tories into behaving themselves’) without ever Labour taking power. He died during the ‘reign’ of Harold Wilson, arch pragmatist, enemy of ideology and architect of the Labour Party’s disastrous history in the 1980s.
One sign of my father’s move away from the Labour Party was the work he did for the election of a member of the CYMS to Aberavon Council.
Karl Wehrle was a noted solicitor, son of a pawnbroker whose three-balled shop stood near the Church in
Back to that small house in
At some point or other, Canon Kelly took charge of things - not an unusual happening in the days when pious people turned to their priest as the first port of call when in need. I would, much later, learn that he advised Mum to go, as soon as Dad was well enough to travel, to live in Cardiff where she would have the support of her sisters: and her mother and father. In Aberavon, while she enjoyed the friendship of many of those among whom Dad had grown up, these were still merely friends and not close family. I am reminded of talking to Jennie after Pat had died and helping her to reach to decision that she, too, should leave Retford and take her five young children back home to
Chapter 32. A Cardiff
Before sitting down to work to-day, I went to the bank, Post Office and Library - and that, as my Teresa will know, is that as far as my shopping is concerned. One of the good things about Boscombe is that it is almost impossible to go out without bumping into someone from the Church, and to-day was no exception. And one of those I met was a youngish Mum with her two under-eleven sons. From her I heard the tale of woe: both boys had grown out of their old winter shoes; both needed also new pullovers, shirts and trousers. She rattled off for me the cost - £30 for a pair of shoes each and I can’t remember how much for the rest. No joke bringing up children in ‘no feel-good-factor’
Wordsworth wrote of the new born as “trailing clouds of glory” as “Heaven lies about us in our infancy,” before “Shades of the prison house begin to close, about the growing boys...”. No Wordsworth, I saw the blissful ignorance of the two boys this morning: neither had any idea of their parent’s worries; life was a football strip. And it could not be otherwise, for neither God nor Nature meant children to be so burdened.
And all that to confess that, for me, the
In the 1930s, too, there was no family income supplement, no raft of benefits which people might legitimately claim as they can in the 1990s. So how did my parents make ends meet in whatever form that took? And how did my proud mother (‘Duchess’ to her sisters in years gone by) and my once-spoilt father cope with the knowledge that all the men in the rest of the Cardiff-based McCarthy clan were among the 8 million or so who had work? Uncle Edgar was a self-employed coalman (and always looked, and probably was, worn out after a day of walking his horse-drawn cart through the streets): Uncle Lynn was a teacher: Uncle John was owner of a small building business: Uncle Will was chief salesman for the local brewery: Uncle Ben was a coal trimmer on the docks as was Uncle Jerry. Only May and Louis had no earned income. I’ll not play the amateur psychologist and try to understand what that meant for them. Maybe my wish not to be a soi-disant Freud may be explained by the story Dad used to tell of his one and only visit to the psychiatrist’s chair. It was in the 1940s when he had some form of stomach complaint for which doctors couldn’t find a cause. Finally he was sent to the psychiatrist: “I go in and he tells me to lie on the couch. Then he says:
“Now tell me,
“The first thing?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I looked at you behind the desk and I thought to myself, ‘What a miserable looking bugger.’“
And the interview ended.”
If it didn’t really happen that way, it ought to have, and the story lost nothing in Louis’ telling of it.
So to Freud. What I do know, from what I remember but more from what I was later to find out, was that Dad then, as later, was a great ‘ducker and diver’. In this ability to do the unorthodox, he was clearly helped by his brother-in-law, my Uncle Ben McCarthy. He was a larger-than-life character: coal trimmer, filthy from a day’s work, he’d come in with his trimmer’s specially shaped shovel and set a room alight. Bathed, fed and ready to go out, he’d have, in my memory, a camel haired overcoat (then the outward sign of the wide boy) and a ready joke before going out for an evening in the billiard hall, the pub or at the local greyhound track. ‘The dogs’ as the race track was known seemed part and parcel of not only his life, but of the life of all the McCarthys: I remember the framed photograph of one noted hound, Mick the Miller, in Aunty Win’s ever so correct and childless home. I remember my Aunty Eileen, daily communicant and, later priest’s housekeeper, going to work at the racetrack in the Tote office. I remember
“By God, this looks like Mam’s Sunday missal. I could take it to church and study form while there.”
I have to assume that it was the more knowledgeable Ben who showed Dad some of the ropes. For I know that one of the sources of Lane income then - and for years to come - was from Dad’s evening work as a bookie’s clerk.
So, one source of income was clerking. There was a standard fee, plus, if the bookie had a good night, a bonus. And there were new acquaintances - bookies, punters and the rest who were also the men who went to billiard halls. Billiard halls: nowadays with squeaky clean young men like Steve Davies and Stephen Hendry bringing snooker into our living rooms, it is almost impossible to remember that ‘ability at snooker is a sign of a misspent youth,’ one of the warnings given out by anxious parents, clergy and teachers. For too many men the well-lit tables in the darkened and often cavernous room (with maybe ten tables in the room) became a welcome refuge from small homes, hard work or the bitterness of unemployment. Not everyone went to play: some - and I did it myself later - merely went to sit along the sides of the room and admire the skills of others. Some went to meet friends and spend an evening chatting in relative comfort. But the hard men went to gamble. As Ben said - and often did - “You can bet on which rain drop reaches the bottom of the window first.” I suspect that my own unwillingness to bet - on pools, horses, lottery or whatever - comes from some sort of antipathy to what I came to see as a McCarthy obsession.
Now Dad had long been a good player: the 2 tables in the CYMS Hall had been his classroom, and some of his elders and peers among his teachers. It would be stupid to exaggerate: he wasn’t a Steve Davis or Hurricane Higgins. But he could score 20 or so in a break, when most people were happy to pot a red and one colour. And, from somewhere, he had a great positional sense. He would, much later, show us. He would make two marks on the table to show where he meant the object ball and the cue ball to end up. More often than not he got the two balls within a small distance of the marked spots. This, as players know, gave him a great chance to play ‘safety’ - to leave balls in positions where opponents found it hard to make a score.
I have to assume that it was the more worldly Ben who introduced Dad to the
I was to hear these stories in wartime and post-war conversations around
McCarthy tables - and, as ever, they lost nought in the telling. That they contained an element of truth, I doubt not, because there must have been some source of income which enabled Mum to make a home for us. At first Pat, Gerard and I lived in a flat over and behind Lynn Thomas’s large pram shop on
But all that economics stuff was hidden from me then - as, indeed, much of what now passes for economics remains a mystery today. So, for me, the
And in
For me those schooldays were indeed ‘the happiest...’ which is more than I’ll want to say about other schooldays. There was Pat, only 3 and a bit, in full time schooling, for St Mary’s had a nursery school. As my sister Mary says, “That was advanced for you.” I envied him because after lunch the nursery children actually went to sleep - on cots? on mats? in the school. My head teacher was a Miss Guise, a tall, devout lady whom I was to meet later when I visited
It was Miss Guise who had to prepare us for, and shepherd us on, the city-long procession in which walked children, men and women from every parish in
It was Miss Guise, too, who got her teachers to prepare us for various concerts and small plays: Christmas, Easter and so on. And, maybe because the McCarthys, including my Mum, were prominent in the choir, I was chosen to be Christopher Robin in some adaptation of the Milne story. It wouldn’t take a Guinness to persuade me (although it wouldn’t go amiss) to sing:
“Little boy kneels at the foot of the bed,
Droops on his little hands, little gold head (me? gold?)
And so, trippingly on, before the devoted gaze of my parents, aunts, uncles, cousins and others. No wonder I’ve remembered the song: no one ever asked me to take the stage again.
I saw Maurice Turnbull - tall, coloured blazer and cap, sun-tanned, auburn haired - when Dad took me to the
Dad also took me, just the once, to
But my most vivid memory of our
So, almost every child had a mixum gatherum of cards; some would be used to swap for others; almost all but the treasured would be used in a game played on the pavement. We used to lean one card between the angle of pavement and wall. Then, kneeling on the edge of the pavement, we took it in turns to flick our cards at the object-card. Whoever knocked that one down, picked up all the cards that had been flicked but had missed. Uncle Ben might well have made a book on it, and offered odds to the winner. We merely flicked - and quarrelled because someone had leant forward too far, or the object-card had not been knocked down but was merely leaning...
Pat and I were playing this harmless game this Sunday morning. Down the street came a well-dressed middle-aged and well-toqued (à la Queen Mary) lady. She was obviously from one of the posher houses further out towards Llandaff Fields and she was on her way to one or other of the Protestant Churches in
Mention of Mass reminds me of the beautiful
Second, that there were framed name cards in many seats: this was the relic of the pew rents which used to be charged in Anglican churches, and I suppose were allowed to people who made such-and-such a contribution to whatever collection. I remember people have to move from a place when one of the family named on a card appeared. I’m glad that’s all gone. And finally, and a happier memory; I remember learning to sing the beautiful hymn, Oh Jesus Christ Remember. Every time we sing it now I have a memory of St Mary’s.
But
In the event, one day Dad saw an advert put in by the South Wales Furniture Company, Neath. They wanted some trustworthy person to go around and collect the weekly instalments due for furniture bought on the relatively new hire-purchase system. As a student I was to find out that this system had been invented by Isaac Singer who had developed the first proper sewing machine in the 1850s. He found that while many American farmers’ wives wanted the machine, they could not afford the 50 or so dollars he had to charge. So he invented hire-purchase. It was still a new idea in
In one sense the job was just up Louis’s street: it was a bit like being an insurance agent - calling on people, collecting their money, keeping records and so on. In another way, too, it appealed to him, for if he got it, he would be able to live somewhat nearer his own roots. If he got it, however, Mum would have to leave the comfort of the support of her mother, father and brothers and sisters and the cocoon that was Canton Catholicism.
So, Dad wrote. How many others did? I don’t know. We do know, however, that when
I say that Dad got the job. It would be better to have said that he was offered the job. Because the offer was made on the condition that the successful candidate would be able to put up a bond of £100 as a guarantee against him running away with a week’s collection. I don’t remember the ins and outs of it all, but I do remember that this bond was a traumatic issue. Remember that £100 then would have bought one-third of the typical 1930s house: it was roughly one-third of a teacher’s salary. It was clearly no small sum. And who, in our family could risk such a sum? Who, indeed, had such a sum? I remember hearing that, like a fairy godmother, the lady from whom we rented the house in
So we were on the move again. I remember the day of the move very well. The South Wales Furniture Company sent a van and two men to carry our belongings to a house which Dad had found (through the Mafia? I don’t know) in Neath. The driver was a surly chap who wasn’t best pleased when he found out that all of us, as well as the furniture, were to travel in the van. And I best of all recall his anger and his words with his mate when Dad insisted that Mum, carrying John in a shawl, was to sit in the front with him, while we three and Dad (and the mate?) sat in the back of the pantechnicon. And in this poverty stricken way, in the words of Paddy Roberts “We bid farewell to Cardiff, gateway to the West” and went on our way to a new town, a new home, a new school - and Uncle Tom Cobley and all.
Chapter 33. A Job For Dad And A New Home For Us: Neath, 1931 - 32
While you reflect on the six Lanes travelling in a pantechnicon from Cardiff to Neath, remember that there was no motorway and that, even in 1940, the trip from Port Talbot to Neath took about 40 minutes while the trip to Cardiff took about an hour - and in a car. God knows how long and how uncomfortable was that journey in 1931.
One thought, too. You may well wonder who, in the depths of the worst depressions, bought new furniture - and so provided dad with a job? I have to admit that it came as a shock to me, as a student and as a teacher, to discover that, for millions of people, the Thirties were ‘a golden age’. But, maybe reluctantly, I had to admit that the ‘golden age’ was no myth - for the millions who had work, regular wages and small families. Between 1929 and 1933 prices of almost everything fell by, on average, 50 percent: food, wool, all metals, all minerals, rubber.... the list is relentlessly endless. For the world’s farmers, miners and rubber planters, this spelt disaster. But halving the food bill meant that millions of people had money to spare: halving the prices of raw materials meant that housing prices slumped. In 1925 a modest 2 - 3 bedroom house had cost about £2,500: in 1933 - 39, the 2 million houses built throughout suburban
And there you have the cause of the 1930s housing boom: lower prices, cheaper mortgages and longer terms. In 1955 I would be teaching with a man who had bought his house in 1936, had paid his 11 shillings a week mortgage repayment and was looking forward to making the last payment in 1956. Of course, in 1936, 11 shillings (55p) had been about one-fifth of his salary. In 1956 it was a much smaller fraction of his inflation-enlarged income.
When people bought new houses, inevitably they bought a good deal more - including furniture. And, as I have said, the relatively new hire purchase system helped them afford to furnish their new ‘castle’. So, while hundreds of men looked in vain for work in Aberavon, Neath, Dowlais, Merthyr and other Lane-Scannell centres, Dad got a job on the backs of the fortunate many who had work and money to spend.
Because he was employed by a Neath firm, we went to live in Neath so that he could be near the job. Our new home was on the
The house, and all its semi-detached neighbours (and there was posh for you: semi-detached) were built on a man-made plateau cut into the mountainside. For the garden behind the house (and that was another bit of posh) run uphill to a wire fence which marked the boundary of the house and the farmer’s field into which we could climb and play. A short walk up the
In Aberavon and
For her, one outcome was that she became very ill - from what I seem to remember was a joint-crippling rheumatic fever. To help her cope - and to save everyone’s sanity - Kathleen Welsh came to stay with us and act as housemother. I don’t know how long she was there, nor whether it was during a College vacation or what. But I do know that her presence served to remind us of the nature of the extended family and the way in which older girls were expected to act as family helper. Just after this, Uncle Ben’s wife died, leaving him with his three little girls. Aunty Eileen, his unmarried sister, moved into Ben’s house and, for many years, acted as housekeeper-mother. Would families behave like that to-day? I shun the more pertinent question: would I behave as generously to-day?
In memory, I recall four places of importance for me as regards Neath. There was the Catholic school, which, unlike
It was in this school that I was prepared for my First Communion which I ‘made’ in the small, very small, dark, stone-built church which stood in the middle of the oldest part of Neath - was it Cow street? Cattle Street? Certainly it was one or the other - a reminder of the weekly cattle market and, at the same time, of the nature of the Catholic community which had build that church in the late 1880s. For my first Communion I was given a small white-covered prayer Book. I remember coming from a Sunday mass to tell Mum that I had read it from cover to cover during
I enjoyed the notion of being able to read so much so quickly, and preferred that to the more difficult bit of ‘living up to it.’ Not sure that things have changed much.
Our priest was a tall ascetic looking Father Thompson whose house was some way from both church and School. It was on the road down from Victoria Park on the bus route to
My father was friendly with several members of a Catholic family called Ivory. I don’t know the origins of that friendship. I do know that, in school, Billy Ivory was one of the ‘big’ boys which meant that he was ten years old to my seven. For whatever reason - family friendship? sympathy for a small newcomer? I had a pair of boots? - he chose me to be one of ‘his’ team in a game he’d arranged for a Saturday morning against a team from another school. So down I went to the Melyn tip: the ‘ground’ was the ash-covered waste from what became the Metal Box Works. The opposition didn’t turn up and back home I couldn’t understand the hilarity when I reported: “The bloody buggers didn’t turn up.” I wonder from whom I’d learned that language of indignation?
The fourth place of interest in Neath was Gnoll park. In the 1980s I found out more about the Gnoll when I read Ben Pimlott’s brilliant biography of Hugh Dalton. There I read:
“The child [Hugh Dalton] was born ... in the comfortable surroundings of the Gnoll [his grandfather’s] country mansion, set in fine gardens near Neath in Glamorgan”
I remember walks through the trees and gardens, and I think I remember a large house. Mary, who now lives within spitting distance of the place now, tells me that there are only a few pieces of ruin there. And somehow I remember the woods and house in autumnal colours - for we did not stay overlong in that Neath house and I may have seen the Gnoll only once or twice.
Neath was not a happy interlude and Dad used his Catholic-cum-pub connections to find a rented home in
Chapter 34. John Street
The house in
The small yard at the back of our house opened into a back lane, used by coal men to drop sacks into the coalhouses, and by refuse collectors to pick up the refuse. For children, the back lanes were cricket pitches, football grounds, places to bowl hoops and learn to ride bikes. Into ‘our’ lane opened the back gates of the next street - with the Murphys, Tuckfields (one of whose granddaughters was to be at
“The smith, a mighty man is he, with large and sinewy hands:
And the muscles of his brawny arms are strong as iron bands.”
A permanently jovial man, he dwarfed Auntie Catherine (‘Cassie’) whom I remember as always in a pinafore and ground-long skirt, her grey hair pulled back in a bun.
And, as I have written before, from there I got into the Scannell-Twomey-Madden net of neighbouring families. There was no street without its number of Catholics, and few streets without either a relative or a close family friend. So, unlike in Neath, there were plenty of people to play with, in lanes and streets then almost devoid of traffic. Billy Owen (‘Owen the Dairy’) who lived in our street, took his milk churns on his round in a horse-drawn cart, on which we enjoyed riding. Our own milkman, from the local Co-op, pushed or pulled his single churn on a hand drawn cart: he had to get it refilled by a sort of bowser that travelled through the town to catch up the many other Co-op milkmen. We used to help the milkmen, bringing the jugs from the women on their doorsteps, watching as the man used a tin cup to pour in either a half pint, a pint, or a quart, and then carrying the jugs back. Apart from these traders, there would be the occasional coal lorry, but little other traffic: older boys, riding bicycles, delivered meat, groceries and goods from drapers and other shops. No wonder we had the streets as playgrounds, although in better weather we used also go down into the marshy fields leading out to Baglan.
Outside the house was one of the six gas lamps which lit the street at night time. I am reminded of that by the lamp which stands outside this house in
Out of
to make what they called “pop calls to Our Lord” in the Blessed Sacrament. I learnt to ‘pop’ into Church for a minute on the way to school and ‘pop’ in again on the way home. I can’t pretend that this meant that I became a great prayer-man. Probably did it because it was expected of me; probably spent the time looking at Stations of the Cross, the many statues, the names of the priests on the four confessionals or whatever. But I do remember the church door clicking open and shut behind me while I was in Church as other people, older and younger, came in. And above all, I remember watching Dan O’Neil, kneeling with joined hands in deep prayer. Now Dan O’Neil (a relative of our O’Neil neighbours) was to be our neighbour when, later, we moved to
As I have written before, the Church was central to Catholic lives, something of which I gradually became conscious around this time. Here my Mum sang in the choir, most notably the contralto solo in Adeste Fideles at Midnight Mass. Every time I hear it sung - in church (but rarely now in vernacular days) or on record or disc, I am reminded of that deep colourful voice. It was about now, too, that I first realised that Mum sang her way through the daily chores - bed-making, dusting, scrubbing, preparing meals ... It is no doubt a false memory, but I seem to recall that she was for ever singing one or other favourite hymn - a huge repertoire, the fruits of years in the choir. I thought it was fitting that at Gerard’s funeral we sang, Sweet Heart of Jesus, one of Mum’s favourite hymns. In 1942-43 when I was in the De La Salle novitiate in
Long before 1942-23 I had been made aware that, like Mum, I was a singer - or at least, a hummer - of hymns. One evening I had gone to the local Co-op grocery stores with Mum’s shopping list and the baby’s pram to carry the goods home. In those simpler days, we stood with the crowd at the counter, waiting for one or other of the girls to let us know that it was our turn. Women would rattle off their needs – “sugar”, and the girl would go and fetch it, “eggs” (and off she’d go), “butter” (ditto) and so on. It was a slow process. But it had its advantages: people talked - or listened, as I found out. It was Bobby Payne’s mother who was behind me in the crowd one evening, and she told me “Mum would have liked that,” which made me conscious of the fact that, without thinking I had been humming, Sweet Sacrament Divine.
That baby’s pram didn’t only carry babies and groceries. It also carried sacks of coke which I used to have to fetch from the local Gas Works near Beach Hill on a Saturday morning. A shilling a bag as I remember, for the coke which was cheaper than the coal which was needed to get the fire going. Coal fires meant cleaning out grates before a fresh fire could be lit: they also meant that the cast iron surrounds had to be blacked every morning to give it a fresh look. Both these jobs were done by Dad - an unusually active father in days when few men took much part in running the home. Later he would be the
But back to that important church, where I was confirmed by the ageing Archbishop Mostyn, where I served at the Benediction when the even older Canon Kelly preached his last sermon before retiring to Ireland, and where I served Masses for his successor, Canon Hannon. He came with a great reputation; Doctor of Divinity, Doctor of Literature, he was among the most learned and respected of men. It was he who, in 1937, set up the local branch of the Catholic Action movement which had been launched in March 1937 by Cardinal Hinsley. It aimed to bring a Catholic voice to be heard both for and against a number of things. It aimed to promote social justice, in keeping with the teachings of Leo’s Rerum Novarum, more developed in Pius X’s encyclical of 1931, Quadragesimo Anno. It was from this time that I remember the leaflets at the back of the church on such topics as the individual versus the State, The dangers of atheistic communism, and the like. These and other leaflets formed the basis for the discussion groups which met regularly in the Hall. Catholic Action also aimed at getting the Catholic voice heard against then modern trends - divorce, smutty literature and films, and the threat to religious education in schools. It was in the election of the committee to run this Aberavon branch that my hero, international star Dennis Madden, proposed by father’s name and so made me realise that Dad was among the ‘great and the good’ of the parish.
The Catholic Action movement was, from the start and by definition ‘under the control of the hierarchy.’ We were, then and for years to come, very much the hierarchical church, with the Bishops ruling the priests and the priests controlling every element of parish life. To-day we are used to having lay-only School Governors; then, and for a long time, priests always chaired meetings of Governors who, in the main, merely rubber-stamped priests’ decisions. To-day lay people run parish programmes, often without a priest being present at meetings. Then, lay people probably didn’t have the wish or the courage to try to run things for themselves, while priests would not have been willing to risk letting them do so. Both sides, clerical and lay, have learned a good deal since then.
One aspect of that priestly control was seen in our schools on Monday mornings. Once the class register had been marked, teachers then ‘marked’ a Sunday register. Had you been to Mass? to Communion? and, horrible to relate as the Latin would have said, children were caned for having ‘missed Mass’, then seen as among the gravest of sins. In the 1980s I was to learn to run a programme in which parents were helped to prepare their children to receive their First Holy Communion. I remember Father John O’Shea’s introductory talk to our parents. He then asked them to suggest reasons why they went to Mass on Sunday. Wise in their own generation, they volunteered the expected reasons: to thank God, to worship as a community, to feast at the table... One older parent noted that no-one had suggested that to miss Mass was a mortal sin. Father O’Shea’s angry (and maybe regretted) riposte was, “If that’s the only reason why you go, maybe you’d be better off not going”. But, in the 1930s certainly, some people, at least, went because it was a Commandment of the Church. And, in my school, children were caned if they admitted to having missed Sunday Mass. Small wonder that for so many there was an over-close link between Church and school days, so that, once they had left school, so, too, they left off going to church. A survey made in
In 1939 Archbishop Mostyn died and his successor was the former Bishop of Menevia, Bishop (then Archbishop) McGrath. His move led to our losing our Canon Hannon who went to become Bishop of Menevia. Archbishop McGrath seemed to centre a good deal of his attention on the issue of mixed marriages - marriages between Catholic partners and those from other denominations. I seem to recall that we had a letter of his on this subject read every first Sunday of the month. He claimed that such marriages weakened the attention towards the faith of the Catholic partner, and threatened the faith-loyalty of future children of such marriages. While he could not absolutely ban such marriages, he could, and did, make things as difficult as possible. In keeping with the then church law, the non-Catholic partner had to solemnly promise that any children born to the marriage would be brought up as Catholics: small wonder that families of non-Catholic partners often cut that person adrift when they married a Catholic. And the marriage ceremony itself was to be as low key as possible: no organ music was allowed, no flowers permitted on whatever altar might be used. Many parishes held the marriage ceremony in a side chapel, or, in some cases, in sacristies away from the sight of an altar at all. Mary remembers the way in which she and Dennis were married. I regret that she was unable to be at the marriage of our Damien to the Hindu Sarupa in the
Certainly I knew children from mixed marriages who did not go to our school: I was to meet them when I went to Grammar school. But I also knew children from all-Catholic marriages who went to state junior schools. One such were the children of the Italian family, the Franchis, who owned one of the better cafes in town. Their son, Tony, went to the
Tony Franchi had a sister, and there were only those two children in this Italian (Catholic in origin) family. The various family tables shown elsewhere in the book show that large families tended to be the norm in Victorian times and in the early part of this century. However, in the 1930s, our family, with finally seven children, was unusually large. When I went to grammar school in 1936, I had many classmates, all non-Catholics, who were only children: small wonder that many of these were willing to come to play in our house, for they had no-one with whom to share in their own homes. But, as my father made me realise later, there were also many Catholic families with one or two children. The parents of such families may well have come from large families themselves - as did most parents of their ages. However, they seemed determined to limit the number of children in their own families. Maybe there had been a dramatic and fairly universal fall in fertility: maybe, on the other hand, maybe Catholics had already begun to disregard the Church’s teaching on birth control/prevention and had, in that sense, become assimilated into the wider community around them.
I have already said that
My poor father sweated for hours as he tried to get me to develop ‘a good hand.’ My knuckles ached from the rappings he gave them as I constantly failed. My mother had better luck as regards the alphabet. For, in my shift from school to school, I had missed the class in which, parrot fashion, children learned to rattle off the alphabet. Indeed, in St Joseph’s I knew boys who could say it backwards as well, while I couldn’t even say it ‘forwards’. It was Mum who helped me, via (not strange to say) a song: to a lively tune it ran:
A, B, C, D, E, F, G,
H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O
All together boys now let us go:
P, Q, R, and when you’ve got that in your head,
S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z
Sing-a-long with Mum worked.
My inabilities in writing and alphabet reciting were, relatively minor blots on the landscape. For, as I now realise, I had a higher-than-average ability at two of the 3 Rs - reading and ‘rithmetic. And since these were to be the subjects taken in the so-called eleven-plus, I was pushed up from class to class so that by the time I was nine years old, I was in class where the majority were aged twelve. Later, as a teacher, I was to see how ambitious heads created ‘fast streams’ so that boys might take O-Level (the forerunner of GCSE) when only fourteen years old. I saw, for myself, how disastrous such a policy was; the ‘pushed on’ lost social contact with the others of their age while failing to fit in with the boys with whom they sat in class. Only, now as I write this, do I see that, in a very ‘unsplendid isolation’, I was forced to play games with much older boys - who may have, at the same time, also resented the ‘favouritism’ they saw I enjoyed at the hands of the head and teachers. They, for their part, no doubt meant well for me.
I knew then, and have remained ever conscious of the fact that, I was taught by many good teachers. One of the advanced things that happened in
The school had no sports field: cricket and a form of rugby had to be played on the macadamized yard, often pot holed and rarely level. Small wonder that, at cricket, we learned to use our feet to get to the bounce of the ball: to have let it bounce meant the risk of it rearing up or keeping disastrously low. In spite of this handicap, in my last year at school, we won the Inter-schools Cricket Shield put up by the Roath Furniture Company. Len Roberts and Geoff Mills took all the wickets in the final while I scored over half the runs made by our side.
The three of us went on a tour of the school to show off the shield - even then Catholics had too little to boast about. The final was reported in the Port Talbot Guardian which also carried the photograph taken by the town photographer, Newark Lewis. My mother kept the cutting for years - and I have to admit, I read it for years - one of my few successes as a child.
When we first came to
It is impossible to suggest to my children - and difficult even for me to recall - what that car meant. It was a small Baby Austin, but as it stood outside our house in
The car allowed Dad to take us on Sunday outings: to Cardiff and tea with the Roblins, to Kenfig Pool to swim, and play cricket (there was a shop in Pyle which we must have kept in business with all the cricket balls we bought there), to the Brecon Beacons and the sites of the huge reservoirs which supplied Liverpool and Manchester with their water: to the Wye Valley and all its beauty, to Tenby where I first realised that, left to itself, the sea was bluey-green and not, as in Aberavon, flecked with coal and brownish from the effluent that flowed down from the valleys and works.
I remember a visit of the Roblins to
When Dad had been told that he was to have a car, he had to pretend that he knew how to drive one. “Can do a motor bike can do a car.” In fact, he went to see Martin Doyle, (brother of one of my teachers) in
Later, Dad would get bigger and better cars, his firm’s ‘thank you’ for his ability at work. An Opel (looked like an early Volkswagon), and, best remembered, the luxurious and powerful Wolseley. Of course, he needed larger cars as time went on and more children were born Mary was born in
He carried the ‘
One final memory of
Now, I understand some of the reasons behind the bullying: here was
a small, under-age, whose essays were read out in class; here, too, the one who had recited his Gospel lesson and was called out to check others - and to note, for the teacher, ones who didn’t know their lesson. What a stupid way to run a monitorial-like school. Here, too, a family just moved in, with car and kids who covered themselves in glory - Pat leading the singing in his class, Gerard carrying the Crown for the Crowning of Our Lady, me getting the Diocesan prize for religious education ... an ‘orrible group of people all told.
I was, in no way, equipped to cope with the fighting, nor was I very street wise. Pat was both equipped, and wise. I remember, when we lived in
Later, when I was sixteen and left school, I realised, one day, that I was now bigger than many of the people with whom I had been at school. Like our own boys, having been smallest in a group, I was now bigger than many. And I can still remember the evening when, deliberately, I went down to the CYMS Hall determined that I was going to call out the two boys who’d made my life a misery. There they were, playing snooker as I leant against the doorway into the upstairs room. I turned round and went home: It didn’t seem worth it; it was enough that I could even entertain the thought of taking them on.
Chapter 35. The Scholarship
We did not stay overlong in the small house in
Anne was born in number 35 and Teresa in number 24. I remember both of their births - with Mum being taken through the pain of childbirth by the ever-faithful Nurse Rees and the equally ever-present Aunty Carey. I remember their births because in one or other case, Dad asked me to stay up with him while Mum was upstairs giving painful birth to one of my sisters. I remember seeing this as one of my first steps to maturing, and being proud of being Dad’s companion as he waited and listened.
There were very few Catholic families in the
So, apart from the two O’Connor boys in
Even the back lanes were different from those around
And, during holidays and at weekends there was the field in the nearby Park in which to play. Here a Taibach gang had their own teams, as did those who came from ‘our’ side of the Park. Here, on make shift pitches and (in summer) wickets, we played soccer, rugby and cricket. Gangs in other parts of the town did the same in their areas, and since we knew some of them from inter-school games, we developed our own unofficial league. Mountain Row had a cricket team, as did Taibach and ourselves - and several others. Quite serious games were organised, with proper score books, a motley collection of pads and stumps (stolen from schools?) and shared bats. Because it was a small town, we soon knew all the good players of our own age against whom we played in inter-school games and gangs, leagues, and with whom we played, if chosen to play, for the Town team against Neath or Cardiff or whoever.
But the Park was where, on a Saturday morning, I used to have to wheel the baby and take my sisters to play on the swings and roundabouts. None of my other friends had younger ones to look after, and the crueller among them took delight in teasing the childminder. In the 1960s when I lectured for the Extension Department of London University, I would have in class, young mothers who had three or more children; they would freely admit that, having been only children in the thirties, they had deliberately decided to have a number of children because they remembered the loneliness of the single child. Maybe my teasers were venting their own sense of loneliness on me in the thirties.
But life wasn’t all games and parks. I was still at
Sometimes, of a morning, Dad took us to school in the car before he went off on his rounds. This treat had a drawback. About fifty yards or so from our house was the newly built Labour Exchange. Here, every morning gathered queues of men waiting for the office to open - either to draw their dole money or, if luck would have it, to find a vacancy for which they might apply. Dad would point to the gathered crowd and, his own experience in mind no doubt, would tell us that that’s where we’d end if we didn’t do well at school. No, I don’t remember being traumatised by this kind of gloomy warning: maybe children are more resilient than pop psychology would allow.
Now and again, having seen Pat safely on his way over the last fifty yards or so, I would stop off to call for Danny Lynch who was in my class. His older brother, Tommy was already in the grammar school, and was to get us a day off in 1938 when, in the RAF, he won a medal for having left the cockpit of a plane to put out an engine which was on fire. Dan was a clever boy with whom I had to compete in class. But he was so poor: He lived with his mother and Tommy in a two roomed part of a house. She was a lovely lady, but aged before her time so that she reminded me of my Gran McCarthy and not, as she ought to have done, of my mother. I can weep now as I write - for her sake: because I used to take her my ‘old’ shoes and plimsolls to save her buying shoes for Dan. And she smiled, and Dan smiled, and we remained friends. What a world it was.
And in my class there was a Bernard Kenure whose uncle was one of the better
-off Catholics (whose son was the much admired senior altar boy), but whose own family lived very poorly. But Bernard had the loveliest voice I’d ever heard. Each Friday, Mickey Callaghan would invite him to come before the class to sing: each time now, that I hear ‘The Holy City’ or, more rarely, ‘The Rosary’, I can see the poorly clad, semi-literate and ill-looking boy whose voice rang out with a vigour that I later associated with some of the great tenors. And where is he now? And what became of him in the meantime? I am reminded of Thomas Gray’s Elegy in a country Churchyard:
“Some mute inglorious
or in Kenure’s case, some Caruso, McCormack....
Living in
Shortly after moving to
After a year or two I was allowed to carry one of the six candles at High Mass and evening Benediction, but never got as far as being a thurifer or of ringing the bell at High Mass. These roles were filled by much older boys and men, who had the grace to walk slowly and with dignity - unlike the self-conscious shuffling of us younger ones. Each Saturday I went to the sacristy to see what duties I had to perform in the coming week: 7.30 a.m. Mass on this day, Benediction on that day ... I remember the cold winter mornings when fingers would be frozen on arrival back home for a hurried breakfast before going off to school.
In school, as I have written earlier, I was pushed through classes in short time so that, in 1934-35 I was in Standard Six, the last but one class in the school. Here, aged 9, in September 1934, I was with boys aged 12 - the girls having their own Standard Six and Seven. Our room had a large fireplace - and teacher’s pets sat near the front so that they kept warm in winter time. Here sat a motley collection in a truly comprehensive school. There was my friend (and friend for many years to come) Jack Folland, whose Dad was a diver with the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (then called the Anglo-Persian Oil Company). I never knew his Dad who was killed in
In the 1870s Disraeli had said that the future of the nation a depended on the health, housing and education of the people. Later, as student and teacher, I was to realise that ‘education’ in the formal sense, was something from which the majority of my peers got little benefit because of the lack of adequate housing, health, diet and parental support. Only then did I realise how fortunate we had been - shoes and not boots, decent clothes and diet, comfortable home and supportive parents. It might so easily have been otherwise as it was for the bulk of those in my classroom in 1934. I never had to be sent to the medical officer because of diseased and running ears as did several other boys: I never had to be sent out to wash my hands as did many others.
In February 1935, just after my tenth birthday, I was entered for the ‘scholarship exam’. This annual event took place on a stated day when children from all the borough’s elementary schools aged 12 or under on the following September 1st, competed for one of the 120 vacant desks in the first forms of the two local secondary grammar schools. There were four parts to the exam: mental arithmetic took forty five minutes, followed by a more complicated arithmetic paper lasting an hour and a half. In the afternoon there was a forty-five minutes essay paper followed by an English grammar paper lasting an hour and a half. We sat in the older part of the school where the partitions had been rolled back to form a very large room (where in May 1935 we would have our party to celebrate the Silver Jubilee). Here we sat well separated from one another, some 100 or so under the supervision of Father Gavin: no teacher was trusted to supervise examinations then. And of that crowd, only four of us had our names in the ‘pass’ list published in the local paper in March: Dan Lynch, Terry O’Connor, Stan Jones and myself were the only Catholics to get to the grammar school in that year. Nor had it been any better in earlier years: nor, as Mary knows, did it get any better in later years. Catholic grammar school children were a rarity.
Roy Howells ought to have passed but he was physically ill all during the examinations: the pressure had clearly got to him in a way which I never knew then or when I did other exams later in life. Jack Folland ought to have passed but didn’t: he was ‘saved’ because his father’s death led to Jack receiving grants which took him to the Rosminian boarding school, Ratcliffe College, Leicestershire. For the rest, there was Jack Banham who went on to the
Some of the children had had two bites at the scholarship ‘cherry’: you had to be under twelve years of age at the start of the academic year following the examination. Most schools entered most pupils in the last possible year. All schools entered some brighter children a year earlier: if they failed in that year they would still have a second chance. I was the only one of the four successful Catholic boys to have been allowed to take the exam at the earlier age: I was just eleven when I sat the exam: Dan and the others were already 12 years old.
My teachers and my Dad must have thought it was good for me to take this exam along with the majority who were older, I remember the much joy in the Lane home: the outing to buy the cap and badge and other goodies: getting the bike from Halfords - and going each week with the shilling instalment for nearly two years. I remember meeting Gerard O’Donovan, who was in the fourth form and was to be the senior Catholic in my time. His father managed a local shoe shop, and his older sister worked in the steelwork offices. Gerard met me in
Ed’s note
Having just returned (Sep 2004) from PT and following the kind advice from Mary Fletcher and Albert and Teresa Hill I contacted The Sec. regarding past issues of the school magazine The Wayfarer. In that magazine I found that the author has been correct in his recollections yet has omitted one or two, for me, interesting facts. God bless him, he is not yet aware (he holidays once more in
(This is why I was always in so much trouble, I guess, going off at a tangent, doing ‘just whatever you bloody feel like, bloody oaf’ (to be said with a hint of Welsh valley accent)).
Anyway, back to The Wayfarer and its reporting of cricketing successes at The Sec..
1939 – Roath Shield Cup winners
Burton Cup winners
1940 – 3rd in the school 440 yds/400 metres
Town representative for cricket
Batting figures 8 innings, total runs 72, top score 30 not out (in the final)
Bowling figures – 8 overs for 7 wickets for 11 runs
Quoted as outstanding player of the year (rugby) for the school house
1941 – Roath Shield cup winners
Best bowling figures in one match (5 for 7)
We hail you, sporting maestro
posted by therealtonylane at 1:46 PM
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