This Turbulent Priest: The Life of Cardinal Winning

The location for the service was an old smithy in Skin-mill Yard, named after the nearby chamois factory that had been quietly purchased in 1849 for use as a church. Previously, Catholics in Pollokshaws had been forced to walk en masse into the city centre to attend Sunday services at St Andrew’s Church by the banks of the Clyde, a six-mile return trip that invariably involved being showered with stones by bigots aware of their destination. In 1840, the city council granted permission for Mass to be celebrated in Pollokshaws and an upstairs room on the village main street became the first venue. The converted smithy that opened nine years later was an improvement by comparison.

The marriage was conducted by Fr Adam Geddes, who at the age of twenty-five was just three years older than the couple clasping hands before him. He was privately furious at such a humble structure and had vowed to see an impressive church replace it. However, a fatal dose of typhus fever contracted the following year ensured that he would never live to see one built. Three close friends, Thomas McGovern, Charles Reilly and Ann MacManus, who took on the role of bridesmaid, witnessed the ceremony.

Patrick Win’s work on the railways was enough to pay the rent on a small one-room flat on Main Street for himself and his wife and three years later, on 3 October 1858, the couple’s only child, a boy called James, was born. Following his birth, a generous clerk called Will Sewell in the local Registrar’s office added an extra ‘n’ to the family name, a note of little consequence to his illiterate parents who spelt both their names with a humble ‘X’. The family name, in fact, was probably Wynne, but it was very likely rendered in the most remedial manner as they were unable to spell it themselves. Anxious that their child achieve a modicum of education, Patrick and Ann enrolled James in the local school. In 1868, by the time he was ten and could read and write, his mother had died. She was thirty-five, and had lived five years beyond the city’s average life expectancy, so teeming was Glasgow with tuberculosis, cholera and typhoid. Her husband Patrick lived a further seven years as a widower, looking after his son between long shifts in a variety of jobs including quarry labourer and coal pit roadsman. A nervous cough that began in 1874 developed over the next two years into phthisis, a wasting disease that attacks the lungs in a manner similar to tuberculosis. For his final few months, Patrick Win was bedridden in their tiny flat, tended by his son who would view his father’s passing on 14 October 1876 as a blessing.

The death of his father severed any ties that held James Winn to Glasgow, the city of his birth, at least for the next twenty years. At the age of seventeen, he headed to the town of Motherwell in the blasted landscape of Lanarkshire, and the life of the pit. The town lay twelve miles south-east of Glasgow, with the river Clyde to the west and the river Calder to the north, and while the town’s name may have been derived from the Celtic expression for ‘the level place above a river’, its modern identity was less romantic and came caked in soot and coal dust. Motherwell was a mighty industrial town at the heart of an extensive array of coalfields, and James Winn was to find employment at Parkhead colliery.

The work was brutal, back-breaking and extremely dangerous. Subsequently, the men took their brief pleasures where they could, primarily in the alehouses that lined Motherwell High Street. Winn, meanwhile, had an alternative form of recreation. In the spring of 1889, when he was thirty-one, he began a relationship with Mary Weir, a twenty-six-year-old domestic servant. Mary Weir discovered she was pregnant in the late autumn of 1889 and, faced with the prospect of being dismissed from her work and expelled from her home, as they were one and the same, she turned to her lover for support. In such circumstances, the most convenient solution was a swift marriage in front of a frowning priest before the bride’s condition began to show. The mother would be saved the shame of being labelled a ‘fallen woman’ and the baby would be spared the ignominy of being born a bastard. Why this did not occur is unknown, but James Winn’s subsequent behaviour in the years that followed intimate that he was a feeble character, unable or unwilling to take on the burden and responsibility of parenthood. Abortion, though available in the crudest of forms from midwives of dubious reputation, was not considered an option.

As a result of her lover’s initial reluctance to marry, Mary Weir had little choice but to abandon her job, leave her hometown and travel fifty miles to Edinburgh where in the anonymity of the capital her ‘disgrace’ was more tolerable. There, in a small rented room at 382 Lawnmarket, an anonymous tenement block a few hundred yards from Edinburgh Castle, she awaited her child’s birth. On 15 July 1890, the father of Cardinal Thomas Winning was born. He was named Thomas Weir after his mother, and marked by the registrar, as was the tradition, illegitimate.

Mother and child returned to Motherwell a few weeks after the birth to be greeted by a man transformed. James Winn, perhaps moved both by the sight of his infant son and guilt that the child’s mother had suffered as a result of his own unwillingness to wed, now attempted to mend Mary’s reputation. The couple were married on 10 September 1890 at Our Lady of Good Aid, the local Catholic Church. The ceremony was small, attended only by two close friends, Maggie Brown and Felix Mullan, who acted as the legal witnesses, and the bride’s mother, Agnes Weir. Her husband, a miner like her son-in-law, was long dead. By the following year, the couple had moved to 9 Camp Street, a solidly working-class area of Motherwell, and when the census collector visited, Thomas, now nine months old, finally received his father’s name. The illusion of a happy family was enhanced in 1892 by the birth of a daughter, Anne, but it was not to last: five years later, the death of Mary Weir robbed the children of their mother while James Winn’s fecklessness was to deprive them of their father. Shortly after burying his wife, Winn deposited Thomas, then seven, and Anne, five, into the care of his mother-in-law, departed for work, and never returned.

Why Winn chose to abandon his two children when they needed him most is not known. He was certainly a reluctant candidate for marriage and fatherhood, but it is unimaginable that a deep bond did not exist at some level between this insecure, dithering Irishman and his young children. Yet any such tie was severed for ever in 1897 when he abandoned his family in Motherwell and returned to Glasgow, the city of his youth. The next three generations of his family – his son, grandson and granddaughter, and great-grandson and great-granddaughter – all believed that he died shortly after his departure. When his own son Thomas finally wed in 1924, James Winn was listed as dead on the marriage papers.

There is evidence however, that Winn was alive and living under an assumed name in his native Glasgow. At some point after the abandonment of his family, he appears to have changed his name from Winn, a name that was uncommon and eminently traceable, to Mullan, an exceedingly common Irish name, and one he now shared with his former best friend. Fifteen years after the death of his first wife, his new name allowed him to marry for a second time, but as a bachelor, as opposed to a widower. This new identity spared him any awkward questions from Mary Wylie, the fifty-year-old woman he chose as his new wife. Winn subsequently spent the remainder of his life working as a labourer in a lace factory, and his true identity was only discovered long after his death at the age of seventy-five in 1933.

The childhood of Thomas and Anne Winn was fraught with death and change. The demise of their mother and departure of their father were followed by death once again when, a few years later, their grandmother passed away and they were passed, like inherited heirlooms, into the care of their mother’s two bachelor brothers, James and John Weir, with whom they grew to adulthood in relative contentment. The final element of change arrived courtesy of the classroom. Just as the family had seen their name mutate from ‘Win’ to ‘Winn’, it now reached its final apotheosis when, according to family tradition, an inattentive schoolteacher misheard young Thomas at primary school and wrote the corruption ‘Winning’ on the blackboard. The new name increased the distance between the children and the father who had abandoned them, as now they no longer even carried his name, but by now neither did he.

Thomas Winning grew into a young man who embraced his responsibilities where his father had shirked them. When his sister’s new husband died in a railway accident while working in Canada, leaving Anne without a pension, Thomas moved into their small room and kitchen in John Street, Craigneuk, and provided for her by working as a miner at the Camp Street Pit in Motherwell. It was during this time that he met Agnes Canning, a local girl who worked in the jam factory in nearby Carluke. Agnes was a quiet, shy girl whose introspective personality mirrored Thomas’s own but whose long dark hair, which she wore in an elegant velvet bow, ensured she attracted her share of admirers. The second youngest of thirteen children from an Irish Catholic family, Agnes had the distinction of being the daughter of one of the most successful Irish immigrants in the district.

Charles Canning was a handsome man who dressed in a dark three-piece suit; a white hankie sprang from his breast pocket, and the ensemble was completed by an elegant tie pin and silver watch and chain. He wore a full beard and walrus-style moustache that was draped long over his mouth like the ventriloquists of the day. He had every reason to take pride in his appearance for, despite the extreme prejudice prevalent at the time, he had attained the position of Bailie in the Wishaw Parish Council. The title accorded him the right to sit in judgement over those who came before the parish court on charges of drunkenness or debt. He also owned a popular pub on Dryborough Road in Wishaw, an irony not lost on the locals, who coined a saying. ‘Canning gets them drunk on a Friday night and sentences them on a Monday.’ His achievement was all the more impressive for his background. Canning had arrived in Scotland in the late 1870s after his family had lost their farm in Kilmacrenan, County Donegal. His father had paid his rent, but either failed to obtain a receipt or lost it on the walk home from the landlord’s. When the landlord appeared and demanded Canning repeat his payment, he refused, and so was forced from the home which had been in the family for generations. The eviction forced the family to pursue a new life in Scotland. In one of the Irish clubs in Glasgow, Canning met his future wife, Margaret Boyle, an immigrant from Ramelton, ten miles south of his parents’ former farm. Together the couple moved to Lanarkshire where Canning swiftly rose from miner to pit contractor and later a local councillor.

The Canning family home was tiny for such a large family, but it was located in an area of relative respectability. The Whitegates was named after the coloured gates that closed off the road to allow the trains laden with coal to crawl from the pits to the main connection line at Wishaw. The house sat at 515 Glasgow Road and this was where Thomas Winning would collect his intended before the pair would stroll down to the parish hall for a dance on a Saturday night. Agnes Canning’s weekday evenings were quietly taken up baking, knitting and embroidering table covers. It was from her home in 1914 that she bid farewell to the man who was now her fiancé as he embarked for the Great War.

The outbreak of World War One was viewed by Thomas Winning, as it was by so many of his generation, as an opportunity to exchange his soot-smeared clothes for the glamour of the military uniform – in his case, the pleated kilt and black tam-o’-shanter of the Gordon Highlanders. As the British government urged every able man to do his duty and defend his country, the call to arms was given a dramatic impetus across Scotland by the leaders of the Catholic community. The archbishops of both Glasgow and Edinburgh urged men to sign up for active duty, an attitude questioned by many for whom Scotland remained a nation that had so long treated their community with an intense disrespect, yet the hierarchy believed the war in Europe offered a wonderful opportunity to unite the country’s disparate groups and fuse them together. Catholic or Protestant would soon lose their distinctions in the muddy trenches of the Western Front.

Thomas Winning was to return unwounded and with little visible display of the mental trauma that comes with witnessing such carnage. For the duration of his military career, he kept in close contact with his fiancée through regular postcards from places such as Mons, the Somme and Ypres; locations that would become synonymous with the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of British soldiers but whose postcards arrived with a lace trim and cartoon effigies of moustached Germans, and caricatures of tanks and guns.

Winning did not drink, so he would accept the traditional ‘tot of rum’ given to the men before the officer’s whistle urged them over the top, and would exchange it for cigarettes or chocolate. During one military push along the trenches, Winning and a comrade crawled out into no man’s land to retrieve a wounded officer. Afterwards, both soldiers tossed a coin to see who would receive a decoration. His colleague won the toss but later lost his life in the Dardanelles, while Winning escaped bullets and bombings and the only injury he received was from an attack of mustard gas.

In later years, Thomas Winning senior never discussed the bleakness of his role in the war with his children. When they asked him to take down the old tin containing the dozens of postcards he told humorous tales of his fellow soldiers and their attempts to be discharged as shell-shocked – how they would unfurl their Balmoral hats, stare into space and blow on the ribbons that hung down. A silly tale to a young boy and girl unaware of the horrors their father had experienced. Even the darkest tale was very funny to a child, and it involved the soldiers marching down the line after a big push, past a dead German soldier lying with his hand outstretched, into which someone had wedged a tin of bully beef.

Thomas Winning was discharged after the war but despite his feelings for Agnes he felt unable to return directly and marry her. He regarded himself as unworthy. She was the daughter of a man of property and respect while his father existed in only the vaguest of memories, and despite his heroic labours in the trenches, he was now unemployed, and Lanarkshire had little to offer. Instead, he was determined to better himself so as to provide for his fiancée and set sail from the Glasgow docks to Chicago and the promise of the American dream. It was a strange and difficult time for Thomas. He spent four years travelling, from low-paid job to low-paid job, from the city of Chicago to Canada and Alberta and Winnipeg.

By the time he left, all he had accrued was a familiar nickname: Scottie. Fortunately, it was still enough to secure the hand of Agnes in marriage and so, on 17 July 1924, after more than twelve years of courtship, they were wed in a ceremony at St Patrick’s Church in Shieldmuir. After a decade of conflict, travel and broken dreams for Thomas Winning, the time had come to raise a family.

The couple moved into a small room and kitchen near the railway in the village of Craigneuk, and, in among the din of the trains, they were happy together. Thomas had secured himself a job as a miner and Agnes would prepare the tin bath for his arrival home after a twelve-hour shift. Eleven months later their son Thomas Joseph was born on 3 June 1925 and baptized two weeks later at St Patrick’s Church. The birth of their son was followed eighteen months later by the birth of a daughter, Margaret, by which time her father was already unemployed, a victim alongside thousands of others of the General Strike of 1926. He was to remain unemployed for more than twenty years.

A younger sister was to provide Winning’s earliest memories, for when he was just four, Margaret was stricken with scarlet fever: ‘My mother was sitting on a stool in the kitchen, cradling Margaret who was bawling, and I remember trying to console her, trying to stroke her little head.’ Around this time a photograph was taken of the pair of them and an older cousin, Lucy Canning. Margaret is propped up in a wooden armchair wearing a light-coloured woollen dress, and Lucy, at the age of eight, stands at the back with her hair in ringlets. But the most striking presence is Winning: just four years old and dressed in a dark-coloured Russian-style top, shorts, long woollen socks and polished black boots, he carries the confident stare of a little prince.

The young Thomas’s early confidence was tested a few months after the photograph was taken, when he began to suffer symptoms similar to Margaret, whose life had been saved by a visit to the local fever hospital. Winning spent a total of three weeks in isolation at the hospital as the scarlet fever ran its course. Every few days, his mother arrived at the hospital and would wave outside his bedroom window, but this was little comfort to a five-year-old who felt himself victimized by the nursing staff. A particular nurse had taken to sticking her tongue out at him, no doubt in an effort to make the child laugh, but with the opposite result. He began to believe she genuinely disliked him, an attitude confirmed in his young mind by the fact she fed him a disgusting daily diet of castor oil mixed with orange juice.

The house to which Winning returned after his hospitalization was slightly bigger than their previous accommodation. In 1928, the family moved a few hundred yards to Glasgow Road and a tenement house at number 511. The house offered little extra comfort, but had the benefit of being only two doors away from Agnes’s brother and sister who had never married and who had remained in the family home at 515. The house was a typical working-class property. The front door opened on to Glasgow Road, while inside a short lobby ran to the front room; behind this was the kitchen, while the toilet was outside in the dry green, the concrete area where the washing was hung. The kitchen also had two recessed alcoves in which the family slept, separated by a thin white curtain. Winning slept with his father in one bed, while in another Margaret slept with her mother.

The sleeping conditions were common for an ordinary family at this time but a search for the reticence that Winning junior would attach to sex, even within the confines of marriage, should begin on the thin mattress of his sleeping arrangements. Winning never minded sleeping with his father, irritated only by his steady snoring, but the lack of room and, more crucially, privacy meant he rarely saw his parents kiss or even embrace. It was a subject Winning was always reluctant to discuss; in his family, sexual intercourse was strictly for the services of procreation. ‘There is something in that,’ Winning was to explain later. ‘They never had a holiday. I would say they were in their thirties before they were married. Two kids were as much as they could manage. If you were unemployed, two kids were as much as you could afford.’

In spite of their poverty both children were always smartly dressed, with Agnes foregoing personal clothes or pleasures for the benefit of Thomas and Margaret. The lack of physical contact between husband and wife extended to their children. In the Winning family home, emotions were rarely physically expressed and instead love was illustrated by actions. Yet while Margaret reacted to her upbringing by becoming, as she believed, overly emotional, her brother followed his mother’s example and would grow up to keep his emotions tightly suppressed. Margaret explains.

None of them went in for hugging at all. Emotions and things like that were done with their actions. You could hug anybody, but they showed you more love through their actions than by hugging. My mother kept her emotions under rein – it seems to be a failing of the Cannings. They did not show emotion. Thomas was like that. He did worry about things, but he kept them to himself.

Winning could not miss what he had not received but when his mother did show great physical affection, he adored the experience. Unfortunately this came at a time of great personal peril. At the age of seven, Winning developed a case of pneumonia after sitting on wet grass while on an outing to the local park with his father. His mother returned from a religious talk organized by the Catholic Woman’s Guild to find her son sitting next to the fire, shivering violently. Over the next two days his condition worsened as he rolled under the heavy woollen sheets, drenching them in sweat. The condition was grave, dozens of children in the village had died of diphtheria, cholera and pneumonia, and both parents feared he might succumb. His mother, who had previously measured out her emotions as carefully as a ration-book recipe, was in turmoil, weeping at his condition.

A young neighbour, Mary Cromwell, who worked as a nurse, prepared a mustard poultice, which was tightly bound round the boy’s back in an attempt to reduce the inflammation. When he did not improve, the extended family of aunts and uncles organized a collection to pay for the services of a doctor, which, prior to the creation of the National Health Service, were billed per visit. After administering treatment, the doctor could not guarantee the boy’s survival, and so the parish priest was called for.

Father Bartholomew Atkinson arrived with a vial of holy water from Lourdes, blessed the boy, and left instructions that the contents be sipped, like any strong medicine, three times a day and that Winning was to direct his evening prayers to St Bernadette. That evening, after the priest’s departure, Agnes Winning was distraught and prayed in a manner that disturbed her daughter: ‘My mother prayed that he would not die, but that she would give him back to God if he wanted him,’ remembered Margaret. ‘At one point, she shouted aloud that if God wanted him, He could have him.’ The future priest, bishop, archbishop and cardinal was unaware of his mother’s pact. Thomas drifted in and out of consciousness, but that evening a corner was turned and he began to recover.

Winning’s memory of this time was not of pain or discomfort or fear of an early death, but of the transformation that he had witnessed taking place in his mother and the softness of her touch. ‘My mother showed me a great deal of affection then. I would lie in the dark, pretending to be asleep, and she would stroke my forehead and kiss me.’

The infancy and early childhood of Winning was spent in a contented state, cocooned in a strong family, loved – though in a distant manner – and protected from a poverty he did not see or yet understand. The task of raising two young children on the few coins provided by the State was a feat of miraculous ingenuity, but a feat made easier by a generous aunt and uncle. Agnes Canning’s brother and sister had no children of their own, and would lavish their attention and shillings on their niece and nephew, paying for treats their mother and father could not afford.

In order to increase the family’s allowance, Thomas Winning began to make and sell sweets, an idea suggested by his wife’s cousin, Bob Purdy, during a routine visit. At first the former soldier laughed off the idea as ridiculous, but Bob was persistent and insisted on giving a personal demonstration. In the kitchen the men’s jackets were thrown off, their sleeves rolled up and mixing bowls and bags of sugar were commandeered for an initial experiment with candy balls. In those few moments, Thomas Winning recognized a golden opportunity. Sweet aromas began to waft through the house as he developed recipes for tablet, candy balls and an array of boiled sweets. Sales were initially to children at tuppence a bag, but soon local shops had taken an interest and Mr Winning had generated enough money to buy a small piece of machinery. The gadget resembled a mangle with a roller impregnated with hollowed shapes such as stars, fish and cars, into which the boiling candy was poured. The most popular line was marzipan walnuts – so sweet, light and irresistible to the taste that the parish priest, Fr Bartholomew Atkinson, would send his housekeeper round to fetch a dozen at a time, in spite of his diabetic condition.