An important centenary

Today the 8th August 2017, it's one hundred years since my late dad was born. The picture above shows his discharge book from the British Merchant Navy. He came home from the sea just before he got married to my mum and then left Ireland to come 1950s Britain.

My old dad was not famous. He did not have any letters after his name, nor medals on his chest. I can't say that he invented anything, nor did he create a successful business empire. He wasn't a manager and he never made it to, nor I think ever expected to be a member of the middle classes nor to own a house or even a car. He was an ordinary decent man (and often referred to by others as a quiet Irishman).

But to me and my family, he lives on in our memories as someone who was quite extraordinary.

On this hundredth year after his birth, I thought it would be nice to reflect on his life and what made him the man who he was. Someone who valued education, despite his own limited education. He knew lots about lots of things; science, engineering, business, history, politics and nature. And he passed that love of knowledge and learning on to us his children and we in turn have handed that on to the next generation.

The picture above shows he was "apparently" born in Malin Head, Co Donegal. You have probably heard of Malin because its one of those places made famous by the daily Shipping Forecast. When the next Star Wars movie "The Last Jedi" comes out in December 2017, you are going to hear a lot more about Malin Head. In 2017, National Geographic Magazine's UK version has accorded Donegal the title "coolest place on earth".

I say that my Dad's apparent place of birth was Malin Head, but he may have actually been born on the island of Inishtrahull. This island is a lost piece of Greenland that eventually ended up resting only seven miles off Ireland's northernmost tip. Regarldess of where he was born, he would have returned by boat as a baby because that's where his family lived.

TRAGEDY

My dad never knew his father. Despite this lack of a paternal role model, he was the most amazing father to us. My grandad, was a fisherman from Inishtrahull. Like many many men (and women) from fishing communities around the coast of Britain and Ireland, my grandad was drowned at sea. It was a hazard of the job and such losses continue to the present day. It's an inherently dangerous occupation. His drowning happened only 3 or 4 months before my dad was born. My granny was therefore left widowed with a family of young children and a further unborn baby due at any time. It's hard for us to envisage the effect of this on her and her family.

My great grandmother, mother to my drowned grandfather was still alive at the time this happened. She therefore had to endure the dreadful experience of seeing the death of another of her children. Her own husband, and another son had also been drowned while fishing from the island around the 1890s.

As a result of this, my great granny was henceforth known as the Widow or Widaw. In Donegal, there are numerous people who have the same surname. In Inishowen the Donegal peninsula that lies between Lough Swilly and Lough Foyle, the McLaughlin surname like many others (Doherty, Bradley, McDaid) is very prevalent. As a result, most families have or are given a distinguishing nickname that often stays for generations. Today, more than one 120 years after that original drowning, the Widow / Widaw nickname still applies to my Dad's family who live in northern Inishowen.

In those days, fishermen went to sea in a traditional wooden boats called a Drontheim. This would be rowed or sailed as necessary. If that name sounds vaguely familiar, its because named comes from the place where these types of boats were first crafted - Trondheim in Norway.

LLOYDS OF LONDON

Before he died, my Dad's dad also ferried supplies from the mainland to the Lloyds of London signal station that had been established on the island in the late 1800s. And here we begin to see a direct connection between my Dad and his family to the world of business, international trade and commerce that I have spent most of the last 25 years of my career working in and around.

In the days before radio (or wireless as it was then called), Lloyds had a series of signal station connected by submarine cables to London. These allowed the prompt reporting of the passage of merchant ships back to the various underwriting syndicates situated in the streets surrounding Lloyds of London and allow for these movements to be published in Lloyd's List. Insurers would then know that the vessels and cargoes they had insured had at least made it around the northern tip and treacherous waters off the Irish coast. In the picture below from the Lloyds of London Archives, we see the men who manned the Inishtrahull Lloyds Signal Station in August 1912.

When Lloyds purchased the island from its English owner in the mid to late 1800s they also became the landlords to the community of people that were living on the island. The population of these Irish offshore islands had risen after the Great Famine as they were relatively protected from the spores that spread potato blight and people could subsist by fishing, a few cattle or goats and with a small plot of land to grow some crops.

The lease between Lloyds of London and my great grandmother Nelly, the Widow / Widaw is recorded in Lloyds Archives which are kept in the Guildhall Library in the City of London - it was signed in 1901. I looked through the records late last year.

Widowed, my grand mother and great grandmother must have been in dire financial straits. A generous group of benefactors however published a call for donations in the Derry Journal newspaper shortly after the loss. They collected a small sum which we think may have allowed the partly orphaned family to obtain a property onshore in Culdaff where my dad spent most of his later childhood years.

THE GREAT WAR

Why did this group of people come to the aid of my grandmother?

The answer lies in the greater tragedy that was the First World War. I found a report from the Derry Journal dated December 1914, which revealed that my grandad had skippered his boat to the rescue of a number of crewmen from the Donaldson Line steamer Tritonia which had been sunk by a German mine. The Admiralty censored reports of such losses and so there was no official search for survivors.

My grandad and his crew spotted a boat off the island, and recognised from the poor seamanship that these were people in trouble. They set out and rescued the survivors. It was for this act of remembered bravery, that some three years later, the fund was set up to support my grandmother.

THE YOUNG MAN

My dad apparently spent his early years looking after his widowed mum. This was something that would be natural for the youngest child. He also worked. He was an agricultural labourer for one of the big local Anglo-Irish land owners, the Youngs of Culdaff. Incidentally, one of the members of that family founded the first Ghurka Regiment serving the British Army around 1815.

As the clouds of war gathered, my dad also worked as a labourer on the programme to construct airfields in Northern Ireland for the RAF, Fleet Air Arm and then from 1942 for US forces - USAAF and US Navy.

As a kid, I would hear tales from my dad of Flying Fortresses, Mitchells, Corsairs and Spitfires flying around as he worked laying runways and taxiways at bases such as Maydown, Campsie, Eglinton, Ballykelly and Toome. The legacy of some of these bases remains with Maydown and Campsie now important industrial sites in Co Derry.

At Maydown for example, DuPont currently manufacture and test Kevlar. Eglinton is now better known as Derry City Airport. Ballykelly played an important role in WWII for RAF Coastal Command and in from the late 1940s onwards, its force of Shackleton Anti Submarine Patrol Aircraft hunted Russian submarines.

My dad also worked as a barman nicknamed "John the Jug"in Buncrana in Donegal. At that time, there was a healthy trade in Buncrana's many many pubs from the thousands of visiting service personnel enjoying a quick trip by L&LSWRly train across the "hard border" from Derry City into the Republic where they could enjoy a little R&R. It was in Buncrana that he met my mum.

TO SEA

Around 1946 my dad also went to sea. Joining a coastal tanker owned by FT Everard a UK based company then operating out of Greenhithe on the River Thames.

One of his ships was the MV Anonity, a former Shell Tanker built as the Empire Campden during the war.

In a ten year career at sea, he became a Second Engineer before final discharge in 1955 when he returned to Ireland to get married to my mum.

TO THE EAST END OF LONDON

After marrying in 1956 in Ireland, he and my mum joined that great post-war movement of people to Britain many of whom came from Ireland, to find jobs in that period of post-war rebuilding and recovery.

My dad worked for most of the time following his arrival for the Cooperative Wholesale Society as a warehouseman in the basement of their headquarters at Leman Street in Whitechapel. Situated less than 300 yards from the London Docks, this was literally working at the heart of Empire.

He worked for the Co-Op until they shut their offices in the late 1960s. After that, he worked for a time as a postman at Mount Pleasant doing sorting duties. He hated it mainly because (I remember him saying) of the oppressive surveillance of all the workers from cabins in the roof. This of course pre-dated CCTV. I guess there was good reason for such surveillance.

After the Post Office, he joined what was to be his final employer. This was another traditional immigrant job London Transport. Dad worked as a Railman at Monument Station on the District Line. It was always great for me, on my way to secondary school each day, to poke my head out of the carriage and say hello to my dad when he was on shift. And yeah, he was one of those who used to shout "mind the doors" before the automated voices on the trains themselves.

In latter years he became a Fireman on the Underground mainly checking fire appliances at stations and attending to overnight permanent way works. I think London Trasnport suited my dad and as a family, we were able to benefit from so-called "privvy tickets that allowed us to travel across the whole of the British rail network for a quarter of the fare. My dad eventually retired at 65. I'm not sure retirement was his thing and he died only three years later at age 68. I don't think he ever claimed the dole in his time in Britain and he didn't get to enjoy his pension for long either. He was someone who came to this country to work and provide for his family and I think he imposed no burden on it.

I reckon my dad didn't really get the sort of education he deserved. In fact it was the same for all the grandparents to our children. All Irish, all left school around 14, all came to Britain and all worked hard every day of their lives. My dad's earliest years were spent in one of the most rural parts of Ireland.

Despite all that, and like most of those who are forced, even today, to leave their native land because of poverty, lack of opportunity or conflict, my dad understood the importance of education.

He ensured that all us kids had loads of books and newspapers to read and study. Books were rarely new but they were well chosen encyclopedias, atlases, reference books, books about nature and about geography and science. He brought us to the London Museums regularly. We walked throughout the then still busy docklands of East London. We went on trips to the countryside - the Central Line would deposit us on the edge of Epping Forest.

Today we hear that poverty affects child development. People were pretty poor in the Whitechapel that dad and mum brought us up in. In relative terms its still one of the poorest places in Britain even today. But I don't think poverty is an excuse for not being able to learn and grow.

We grew up in flats without running water indoors and no heating other than a paraffin stove. We shared a toilet with five other flats. Mum boiled water in a kettle for a tin bath and in a "copper" in the washhouse for the weekly washing. We looked on in wonder at kids with bikes or who went to the cinema or whose dad had a car. Not for us. But we had knowledge!

The other things my Dad ensured was that every year of our childhood, his little group of Irish Cockneys got the chance to be Donegal farm kids for two weeks. There, there was no running water inside either, in fact there was only a spring up the hill. The toilet was chemical and there were few made-up roads and in the very early days, no electricity either.

It was totally fantastic though, because we had a chance to collect eggs from under hens, milk cows, build haystacks and stack turf in large open fields that were "ours" for two weeks. What better could your dad give you?

HIS LEGACY

He never saw any of his grandchildren. But my dad's love of the world, lives on in the generations that have followed him.

I would say his mission was accomplished and I hope that on the hundreth anniversary of my birth someone might feel moved to report I tried to do the same for my family.