Article in the May 2016 edition of The Harp - Pat Roach the Brummie Irish Giant

Pat Roach was a professional wrestler from Birmingham who was also well-known for his television and film career. First appearing in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange in 1971, Pat Roach’s film career involved parts in Clash of the Titans (1981), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Conan The Destroyer (1983), Superman III (1983), Never Say Never Again (1983), Willow (1988) and Robin Hood – Prince of Thieves (1991). He is also fondly remembered as the character Brian ‘Bomber’ Busbridge in 26 episodes of Auf Wiedersehen Pet alongside Jimmy Nail (Oz) and Tim Healy (Dennis).

At 6ft 5in, Roach was a towering man both in the wrestling ring and on screen, though in real life people remember him as being for the most part, a gentle giant. That was certainly the character of Bomber in Auf Wiedersehen Pet – a father figure in the midst of English builders behaving badly in West Germany.

 

I remember meeting Pat Roach on a number of occasions when I worked at Moseley Hall Hospital in the late 1980s and he would come into the Hillcrest Unit on a regular basis initially to support our fund raising efforts but subsequently because he wanted to personally support people with acquired disability such as brain injury by talking to and motivating them.

On a few occasions he arranged for the Moseley Hall patients to go and watch him wrestling. I remember seeing not just Pat but the likes of Giant Haystacks and Big Daddy at places like West Bromwich Town Hall and Cocksmoor Woods Leisure Centre in Kings Heath and when he wasn’t in the ring himself, Pat would keep us company in the audience. It was at the latter venue that Pat came out of the centre still attired in his wrestling garb to wave us off and on discovering that an insensitive motorist had blocked in the hospital bus on a cold winter night, he proceeded to physically move the offending vehicle, picking up one end then the other until he had nudged it out of the way. Had I not witnessed it with my own eyes I’m not sure I would have believed it possible!

Pat Roach was a dedicated Brummie, growing up in areas like Ladywood and Balsall Heath, his working life in the city included shovelling coal from barges at Hockley Brook, running a car sales business on Alum Rock Road and owning a Gymnasium & Health Club on New Street. He was also a boxer and one-time British Judo Champion. But with the real name Francis Patrick Roach and looking, with his red hair and beard, every bit the iconic Celtic giant, there just had to be some Irish blood in there somewhere?

Pat Roach’s autobiography, If - The Pat Roach Story, co-written with Shirley Thompson and published in 2002, two years before his death from cancer on 17 July 2004, gives only a few references to his Irish roots. This is probably because Pat’s childhood, in his own words had been “dis-jointed”. In the book Pat’s mother Dolly recalls that his father Frank Roach could be cruel and difficult. She soon left Frank, to bring up Pat as a single-mother. Moving from one part of the city to another, meaning that young Pat lived in many different houses and attended different schools. Pat Roach described how growing up in a single-parent family meant he experienced ‘several traumatic incidents, which were to have a profound effect upon him’.

There is one memory of Pat’s father, Frank, which suggests that the Celtic elements in his character were because “his ancestors were from the Ross Common and Galway Bay areas of Southern Ireland”. There are also several references to the Roach family attending Catholic churches and schools in the city such as St Chad’s. Shirley Thompson, well known for her meticulous research (she has also co-written biographies with Eddie Fewtrelll and Alton Douglas), provides a helpful family tree going back to Pat’s grandfather Walter Roach and grandmother Nellie, who lived at 3, back 90 Tower Street in Newtown in the early 20th century.

In these articles in the past I have researched other Irish Brummie families who also had their roots in the Newtown, Hockley and Ladywood areas of Birmingham. Whereas we might think of Sparkhill and Small Heath as the neighbourhoods where many Irish migrants settled in the 1950s and 1960s, a hundred years earlier they were more likely to settle in the back-to-back court houses of the inner city, especially those neighbourhoods close to Catholic churches – St Chad’s being a veritable magnet for poor people from the western counties of Ireland, fleeing the Great Hunger of the late 1840s.

The Roach family first appeared in Birmingham in the 1861 census, living in court housing at the back of 2a Hanley Street. Michael Roach is a 29 year old bricklayer from Galway and his wife Mary, aged 22, is also from Galway. They have a son of 5 months old, Peter, who was born in Birmingham. The couple also have four male lodgers, three of whom were Irish. All around them in Hanley Street are other Irish families, perhaps showing just how much this congested area was favoured by the new wave of migrants.

Michael and Mary were the great grandparents of wrestler Pat Roach. They appear again in subsequent census records, slowly building their family of nine children. One of those children, Pat’s grandfather Walter was born in 1874. He married Nellie Woodcock and they lived in Tower Street, not very far away from Hanley Street where the Roach family first settled. We have learnt from previous stories of the Newtown Irish of the 19th century that they fitted right in with their new working class English neighbours and within just a couple of generations were producing great Brummie icons like the gentle giant of a man that was Francis Patrick Roach.