September 2015 article - a tribute to Val and Cilla

 

For those of us who grew up in the 1960s and early 1970s, the names Val and Cilla were synonymous with Saturday evening family television. Both Val and Cilla had Irish heritage and, sadly, we have lost them both this summer.

Try telling the young people of today that Val Doonican, the relaxed crooner with the friendly Waterford brogue sitting in a rocking chair with a cuddly cardigan and a glint in his eye singing about Paddy McGinty’s Goat and O’Rafferty’s Motor Car was once a massive star of popular entertainment. Yet at its peak the Val Doonican Show attracted audiences of 19 million viewers every week. Compare this with X-Factor which attracts an average of around 9 million viewers per show with only two blockbusting X-Factor final shows ever having equalled Val’s normal weekly figure. Or consider for a moment that Doonican’s third album, the truly inspired Val Doonican Rocks, But Gently actually knocked the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper off the top of the charts in 1968 and without even a hint of LSD!

Michael Valentine Doonican, born in Waterford in 1927, was the youngest child of eight. His family were very musical and young Val played in the local school band from the age of six. Tired of working in factories in Waterford he teamed up with his pal Bruce Clarke to form a singing duo and during the 1950s he toured England with a group called The Four Ramblers. Doonican’s career in popular entertainment really kicked off in 1963 when he appeared on Sunday Night at the Palladium and the rest, as they say, is history.

But if Saturday evening in front of the television was incomplete without Mr Doonican, exactly the same can be said of Cilla Black who also hosted her own variety show between 1968 and 1976, albeit without the jumper and rocking chair but still with those smiling Irish eyes. Cilla, born in Liverpool in 1943 of Irish roots, became Britain’s biggest selling female pop artist of the Sixties.

Those of us who watched the excellent 2014 drama, Cilla, featuring Sheridan Smith were no doubt fascinated by the story of her rise to fame from the poverty stricken Scotland Road area of Liverpool, and her relationship with Bobby Willis. In the drama, Bobby, who was from a working-class Protestant background, rejects his father’s sectarian prejudices about mixed relationships to follow his love for the effervescent Priscilla, whose great-grandparents were Roman Catholics from Ireland.

After working as a part-time cloakroom attendant at Liverpool’s Cavern Club, where she became friends with the Beatles, Cilla began performing as Swinging Cilla and was signed by Brian Epstein in September 1963, his only female act. Her second single, Anyone Who Had a Heart by Burt Bacharach and Hal David reached number 1 in Britain in February 1964 and sold 800,000 UK copies. In the recent television drama there is a great scene where Cilla has to wait by a telephone box near her Scotland Road home to receive the news about the success of her single from Epstein. A real ‘rags-to-riches’ tale.

But sadly, television in the Sixties wasn’t all glitzy young ladies in mini-skirts and charming old crooners in rocking chairs, as the evening news began to bring us the terrible images of sectarian and political violence on the streets of Northern Ireland. Black and white television was still the norm in working class homes in 1969, even so, the scenes of escalating violence on the 9 o-clock News were shocking and brutal in their bloodiest extreme.

For Irish people in England during this period, there was a well-documented tendency to ‘put their heads down and keep their mouths shut’, particularly when outside of the closely knit Irish neighbourhoods of British cities or when employed in an open workplace. Public opinion was largely formed by the popular press and British newspapers made certain that only one side of the story was ever told.

Amazingly, Irish role models still flourished in Britain, especially in sport and light entertainment. How many of us can recall the whole family whooping joyfully at the television set during that sublime moment when sweet-as-sugar Irish school girl Dana won the 1970 Eurovision Song Contest with All Kinds of Everything? Or every school boy in the land, attempting to emulate the legendary Georgie Best as they dribbled their caser-ball along the playground? Women of every creed and culture, religiously tuning their radios to BBC Radio 2 for Terry Wogan’s breakfast show and their husbands showing equal allegiance to Alex ‘The Hurricane’ Higgins as he won the World Snooker Championship in 1972. Frank Carson, Dave Allen, The Dubliners, Johnny Giles, Van Morrison, Rory Gallagher, Thin Lizzy …the list suddenly starts to fill up, I am certain that our readers can add many others.

So as we say a fond farewell and offer our prayer of thanks for Val and Cilla, let us also spare a thought for all of the great entertainers of Irish heritage who carried the torch of the diaspora during the 50s, 60s and 70s. For breaking down the barriers of pervasive prejudice and for letting those of us in the younger generations know, through those years of flickering and fuzzy black and white images, that being of Irish descent was something to celebrate not hide away.

Articles - July and August 2015 - The story of Mary Jane Payne

Article – July 2015

In the last edition of The Harp, Professor Carl Chinn wrote about the increase in the number of Irish people recorded in Birmingham in the early 19^th century and how, from the mid-1820s many of these travelled to England from Connacht and the counties west of the Shannon where social, political and economic pressures were becoming worse for the poorest class.

Elsewhere, Carl and other historians have written extensively about the wave of migrants who came to England in still greater numbers during the decade following the Great Hunger. Many modern citizens of Birmingham, Coventry and the Black Country can trace ancestors back to their arrival here in the 1850s. The census records of 1851 and 1861 are a very good starting point for finding those big families who came mainly from the western counties during this period, settling in poor neighbourhoods like Newtown in Birmingham and Caribee Island in Wolverhampton.

Unlike British cities like Liverpool and Glasgow, Irish communities in the West Midlands did not close ranks in sectarian based districts for very long and our local cities and towns (to our great credit) are characterised by mixed marriages, mixed workplaces and mixed communities. Having said this, Irish migrants in the West Midlands did often pass down their culture, heritage and values through the generations. In my family for instance, some of my 19^th century ancestors described to me by elders as having been Irish, I subsequently discovered from birth records were actually born here in Birmingham, but it shows that their Irish identity was so strong that their descendants presumed that they were the first generation to arrive even when some of them never even got to visit Ireland in their entire lives.

For many families, the Irish aspects of their identity became watered down through mixed marriage and eventually hidden almost completely. Sometimes all that remained after three or four generations was an Irish surname, sometimes not even that. There are many examples of English surnames taken to Ireland in Elizabethan and Cromwellian times which then, ironically, returned on the travel permits of those fleeing the ravages of the 1847 hunger. My point being that Irish ancestors weren’t always limited to having Irish surnames. 

As a keen genealogist I have discovered Irish ancestors for many of my friends and work colleagues which they had no idea they even had and on this basis I would speculate that many more West Midlanders have Irish ancestors they don’t know about. This may of course become more apparent following the recent promotion of DNA testing kits to reveal genealogical roots.

British boxing champion Bert Kirby

The Payne family of Aston, for example, might have looked on the surface like a typical English working class family - their 19^th century origins were in Stoke in Coventry and the father of the family, Fred Payne born in 1871, became a glass cutter by trade. In the late 1800s the family moved from Coventry to the Newtown area of Birmingham where Fred’s sister Mary Ann Payne married James Kirby of Southampton and this couple had 10 children – including 8 boys, of whom at least 3 became professional boxers. The Kirby family had a reputation for being tough men around Aston and Newtown and their youngest son, Bert Kirby, became the British Flyweight Boxing Champion in 1930.

Fred Payne married Mary Jane Finn, whose Irish parents had arrived in Birmingham from Galway in the early 1850s. A story passed down through the Payne family says that Mary’s father James Finn and his younger brother Thomas walked to Birmingham from Liverpool, which would have been a very common experience for Irish people arriving in the country at that time. But in spite of being brought up in harsh conditions in the courtyard housing of inner city Birmingham, Mary Jane and her sister-in-law, Rose Mary Payne (another of Fred’s sisters) became very wealthy when a relation in New York left them a large amount of money.

This incredible inheritance helped Mary Jane to set up various businesses in the Summer Lane area of the city, including the rental of houses to tenants. Mary Jane’s grandson, Leo Payne wrote in his memoirs how some of Mary’s nephews, the aforementioned Kirby brothers, helped to collect in the rents from those reluctant to pay up on time.

Mary Jane Payne, nee. Finn, also used her money to set up a coach company in Aston in the 1920s which she called Danny Boy Coaches, a name no doubt chosen for its Irish sentiments. In Leo Payne’s memoir, titled Back to Back and Beyond: Memories of a Birmingham childhood he tells how two of Mary Jane’s sons, Fred and Patrick inherited the coach company and eventually split it into two separate companies called Payne’s Comfort Luxury Coaches and Ashted Coaches.

Leo also writes about how his grandmother, Mary Jane Payne, in spite of becoming immersed in the cut and thrust of being a successful female Brummagem entrepreneur, never broke from the Irish culture and values of her parents.

In the next edition of The Harp I will tell more of the story of Mary Jane Payne and her family’s contribution to the Irish community of Birmingham as well as to wider working class life. Read how further research has built on Leo Payne’s memoirs with the discovery of how a Catholic parish in Weoley Castle benefitted indirectly from the New York inheritance.

Article – August 2015

In the last edition of The Harp, I wrote about a Birmingham family named Payne who ran a motor coach company in the city called Danny Boy Coaches. The owner of the company, Mary Jane Payne, nee. Finn, was the daughter of migrants who came to Birmingham from Galway in the 1850s. Like hundreds of other Irish families who came to the city at that time, the Finns had migrated to England to escape the poverty, disease and famine which swept through Ireland during the late 1840s. They settled in the back streets of Newtown close to St Chad’s cathedral, where conditions were harsh but opportunity for folk willing to graft was more plentiful than back home in rural Connaught.

Mary Jane married a Coventry born glass-cutter named Frederick Payne and the couple brought up a large family in Newtown in the 1890s and early 1900s. In the late 1890s the family’s fortunes changed when Mary apparently inherited a lot of money from a relative in America. In his memoirs Back To Back And Beyond, Mary Jane’s grandson Leo John Payne said that the inheritance money was left to Mary and her sister Rose who had to go to Rhode Island to substantiate their claim on the deceased person’s estate.

Leo said that “great generosity was shown by both sisters with regard to donations to the church (St Chad’s). Rose bought or had a house with a large amount of spare ground. She donated the ground to the Catholic church to build a church (a small one). She and my g

Laying the foundation stone of St Rose of Lima

randmother then helped to furnish it. When built, the church was called St Rose of Lima”.

During my subsequent research I discovered that on the website of St Rose of Lima church in Weoley Castle there are some copies of legal letters about the legacy of Rose Mary Smith who left £1000 in 1947 to benefit the church. Another letter from Arthur Gately solicitors to Rev F de Capitain refers to the purchase of 10,725 square yards of land at Gregory Avenue for use as the Weoley Castle School site. It seems likely that some of Rose Smith’s legacy went to these building projects, though the foundation stone for St Rose of Lima Church was not layed until July 1959.

Another interesting discovery in my research was that Rose Mary Smith was not Mary Jane’s sister after all, but her sister-in-law. Rose Mary was the sister of Mary Jane’s husband, Fred Payne, the glasscutter of Coventry.

With her part of the inheritance from the deceased relative on Rhode Island, Mary Jane became somewhat of a business woman in and around Newtown, establishing an early motor bus company. Her Irish roots were evident in her name for the company which she called Danny Boy Coaches. She would eventually leave the company to two of her sons, Frederick and Patrick, who split the business in two and each ran a new coach company which were called Ashted Coaches (due to its location) and Payne’s Coaches.

Like many working class women, Mary Jane was somewhat of a matriarch and as well as her commitment to the family and to the church, she ensured that the Irish traditions of her migrant parents were kept alive in her children. One of her sons, Michael Gerrard was blind and a talented musician. Michael played an astonishing array of instruments including the piano, accordion, bagpipes, organ, mouth organ, clavioline and flute. He played on the radio, at the Paramount (later the Odeon) and at the Queensbury Club in Hurst Street.

Fed and Patrick Payne with friends outside a Hockley pub

But Michael was not the only musical member of the Payne family. In 1935 his brothers Fred and Patrick formed an Irish pipe and drum band with two of their cousins, Jack and Mack. In his memoirs, Leo Payne remembered his grandmother funding the band by buying their instruments and magnificent bandsmen tunics and full regalia. Leo recalled how one March evening the men walked from Tower Street in Newtown to Birmingham city centre wearing their kilted uniforms and carrying their instruments for a St Patrick’s Day concert at the Town Hall.

It must have been a proud night for Mary Jane Payne, nee. Finn, the daughter of poor immigrants from western Ireland who had made her name as a business woman in the back streets of industrial Birmingham. The band played at the same concert a year later in 1936, but this time Mary Jane was too ill to attend and she died of diabetic related illness just one month later, in April that year.

The story of Mary Jane Payne is one of intrigue, endeavour, community spirit, piety and generosity. She was dedicated to her family, faithful to her Catholic beliefs and determined to build success in tough surroundings. Her personal good fortune might not have been typical of the thousands of Irish immigrants who settled the inner city areas of the West Midlands in the 19^th century, but her sense of pride in being Irish undoubtedly was.