This Turbulent Priest: The Life of Cardinal Winning

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This Turbulent Priest: The Life of Cardinal Winning
Stephen McGinty

The life of the spiritual pugilist and eminent Scottish Cardinal Thomas Winning, leader of Scotland’s Catholics until his death in June 2001.Stephen McGinty tells for the first time the full life story of Cardinal Thomas Winning, arguably the most controversial and pugnacious archbishop in recent British history.Cardinal Winning’s father was an unemployed miner in Lanarkshire, whose illegitimate birth remained a family secret Winning took to his grave. Raised in a crucible of anti-Catholicism, Winning – as priest, bishop and cardinal – set about moving the Catholic Church, by sheer force of his own personality, out of the ghetto and into the mainstream. His stated ambition was to build the City of God on the streets of Glasgow, but his pastoral plan for spiritual renewal fell on somewhat stony ground – partly because of problems with his priests, partly through his own impatience. As Archbishop of Glasgow, he almost bankrupted his diocese with a debt of £10 million, yet still found the funds to offer cash to dissuade women from having an abortion.Cardinal Winning never ceased to be an outspoken and unashamed champion of traditional Catholic values, fiercely anti-abortion and anti-homosexual acts. Too conservative for the Conservative Party yet too socialist for New Labour, he picked fights with both, while his sympathy for the poor remained constant.Before his death in 2001, Cardinal Winning gave dozens of hours of exclusive interviews to the author, who has also enjoyed the assistance of Winning’s family, friends and colleagues. In exploring the complicated and conflicting character of the cardinal, Stephen McGinty reveals the vulnerable, prejudiced and quietly spiritual man beneath the red hat and the new Scotland he helped to forge.

This Turbulent Priest

A LIFE OF CARDINAL WINNING

STEPHEN McGINTY

DEDICATION (#ulink_6d8e841f-3c70-50f2-80b8-cbeaffcc9f81)

For Lori, my ‘Elektra’

CONTENTS

Cover (#u835c5945-d569-5859-a477-17817ad098d6)

Title Page (#uca2a1bdd-a5a3-5697-8b5a-14b052686229)

Dedication (#ulink_57be2274-031e-566e-9109-21edfb226c79)

Introduction (#ulink_00a30e0d-3658-5fa8-b2c0-a1eee680ed81)

PART ONE THE PRIESTLY YEARS (#litres_trial_promo)

1 In the Beginning … (#ulink_5cba6bae-15b5-5fef-9ef5-faf021de8c7b)

2 Blairs Bound (#ulink_54812f42-efab-5f4d-8b6f-cbea39f63453)

3 To the City by the Tiber (#ulink_49f43241-7936-56be-9502-ee8b521f9aae)

4 A Curate’s Tale (#ulink_29a97500-1017-5106-b355-7de0ce75ec2c)

5 A Time to Die (#ulink_5bc1d742-618f-51a2-be35-a1098189870c)

6 No One is Far Away (#ulink_00d3365c-ae26-5b72-9ab3-c683ad07739a)

7 A Better World (#litres_trial_promo)

8 A Battered Mitre (#litres_trial_promo)

PART TWO THE ARCHBISHOP YEARS (#litres_trial_promo)

9 The New Archbishop (#litres_trial_promo)

10 Glasgow’s Miracle (#litres_trial_promo)

11 Tough Talking (#litres_trial_promo)

12 When Peter Met Andrew

13 The City of God

14 The Collection Plate

PART THREE THE CARDINAL YEARS (#litres_trial_promo)

15 The Red Hat (#litres_trial_promo)

16 The Affair of the Errant Bishop (#litres_trial_promo)

17 The Thorn on Labour’s Rose (#litres_trial_promo)

18 A Right to Life (#litres_trial_promo)

19 The Spin Doctor Who Came Unspun (#litres_trial_promo)

20 The Opinion that Dare Not Speak its Name (#litres_trial_promo)

21 A Twilight Moment (#litres_trial_promo)

22 A Good Fight Fought (#litres_trial_promo)

Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)

Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo)

Index (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)

Notes (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

INTRODUCTION (#ulink_e93e09a3-b92c-5cb1-b2a8-3bb09c12407c)

If ever an incident encapsulated the character of Cardinal Thomas Joseph Winning, it was a meeting with Derry Irvine, the Lord Chancellor. The Archbishop of Glasgow had travelled to London in 1999 to meet Britain’s most powerful lawmaker, in order to raise concerns over the issue of bioethics. After a long wait in the outer chambers of the Lord Chancellor’s office at the House of Lords, the Cardinal spotted Irvine striding towards him, woollen wig flowing, ruffled shirt tucked in place, breeches and silk stockings meeting neatly at the knee, and patent leather shoes buffed to a brilliant shine, offset by silver buckles. As Irvine breezed past, offering the Cardinal the briefest of nods, Winning nudged Ronnie Convery, his current affairs adviser, and said: ‘If that’s the Lord Chancellor, can you imagine what God looks like?’

So much of this anecdote gives a flavour of the man: he was a humorist who pricked pomposity with wit, he was an outsider, suspicious of the corridors of power, and he was a critic of the government, whether it came wrapped in the blue ribbon of the Conservative Party or wore the red rose of New Labour. As a Prince of the Church, Winning possessed a wardrobe of scarlet robes and red birettas capable of matching the Lord Chancellor stitch for embroidered stitch, but instead he preferred the anonymity of a dark suit and white collar, the garb of a common priest. Derry Irvine famously proclaimed himself in the mould of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, the Lord Chancellor under Henry VIII, whose power and pomp in the early sixteenth century was legendary. Winning, in comparison, was closer to St Thomas à Becket – ‘this turbulent priest’, as Henry II christened his Archbishop of Canterbury, so painful had he become to the government of the day.

Yet Cardinal Winning was no saint. He could be arrogant, a bully and a sexist. He disliked homosexuals, distrusted many politicians, and considered Donald Dewar, then First Minister of Scotland and ‘Father of the nation’, a ‘bigot’ – a charge to which he himself lay open. In financial matters, he was at best woefully uninterested, and at worst incompetent, and his tenure as Archbishop of Glasgow coincided with the creation of a £10 million debt that almost bankrupted the diocese. On the flip side of the coin, he was warm and personable. He cared deeply for his priests and his people and, throughout his career, he fought both poverty and social injustice. In a secular age, he managed to make the Church relevant. He battled against Prime Minister Tony Blair over the issue of abortion and startled the country by offering money to women in crisis pregnancies. This is the story of a miner’s son, raised in a crucible of anti-Catholicism, who went on to become arguably the most powerful religious leader of his day in Britain.

I was a six-week-old infant cradled in my mother’s arms when I first met Thomas Joseph Winning. He was then an auxiliary bishop in the archdiocese of Glasgow who had been sent, against his will, to the parish of Our Holy Redeemer in my hometown of Clydebank, the shipyard town that bequeathed the world the Singer sewing machine and the QE2. A reluctant parish priest, he appeared to spread the misery around by decreeing that all baptisms be carried out before nine o’clock Mass on a Sunday morning. I was born in the January of a bitter winter and my mother feared I would catch pneumonia if brought out at such an early hour. Winning never actually baptised me – he was too busy fighting a turf war with his fellow auxiliary bishop – but he did peer into my swaddling clothes and I repaid his interest by praying for him every Sunday until the day he died.

It was customary during the Eucharistic prayer of the Mass for Catholics in Glasgow to pray ‘for our bishop Thomas’, but I was unaware of him as public figure, looming larger than his five feet six inches. Later, as an altar boy, I served at Masses at which he concelebrated. My interest in him deepened once I had exchanged the soutane of an altar boy for a journalist’s mackintosh. I literally bumped into him on the Glasgow-Edinburgh train shortly after he had received the red hat of a cardinal, and I was surprised that he was travelling alone, without a bag carrier or assistant. We chatted for an hour and I marvelled at his approachability.

It was not until I returned to Scotland after eighteen months working for the Sunday Times in London that I began to consider him as a subject for a biography. The idea flowed from a profile of the cardinal I wrote for the Scottish edition of the paper in May 1998. I flew to Rome to speak with Cardinal Lopez Trujillo, the president of the Pontifical Council for the Family. The previous year, Winning had launched his pro-life initiative and became a cause célèbre, and I expected steady praise from the leader of the Vatican department on which he served. Instead I received nothing. In a strange, almost jealous turn the Colombian cardinal refused to discuss Winning at all, in spite of my varied attempts to lever him into the conversation. After a particularly blunt segue he simply stood up, offered me a chocolate from a box on his desk, kissed both my cheeks and showed me to the door. ‘Winning is one man,’ he said and shrugged.

True, Winning was one man, but a man rapidly growing in stature and influence. If Basil Hume, the Archbishop of Westminster, was for the Establishment the soft, pious face of Catholicism, then Winning was the hard man, a poster boy for the traditionalists who welcomed his fight back against a secular society. The Sunday Times profile left me nursing more questions than answers. Why did he provoke such extremes of emotions? What drove him on? Had he ever fallen in love? What did he think about when alone in the dark? I began to see his role less as a spiritual leader than as a minister in a world government, pushing through policy, dealing with egos and jealousies, juggling crises, attempting to keep the faith in an uninterested world. To touch his soul is too melodramatic a phrase; instead I wished to prise open the armour Thomas Winning had constructed around himself during a half a century as a priest.

When I first approached the late Mgr Tom Connelly, then press spokesman for the Catholic Church in Scotland, with the idea of a biography, he was enthusiastic. ‘It’s got to be warts and all,’ he explained over lunch at his favourite Italian restaurant. He viewed previous books on Scottish Church figures as anaemic hagiographies, well intentioned but principally the efforts of fans with typewriters. I planned a more robust and in-depth project and the idea was discussed with Ronnie Convery, Winning’s adviser, before being pushed up the line to ‘the Boss’. After both men prepared the way, I was invited to lunch in the Cardinal’s private dining room in the diocesan offices in Glasgow, overlooking the River Clyde. Winning sat at the head of the table, ladled out the spaghetti, and listened to my pitch. After five minutes he agreed: ‘I’d have no problem with that, Stephen,’ he told me, and once lunch was over, we walked to his office to inspect his diary and plan the first of over forty interview sessions which would spread out over the next two years.

The going was tough, the terrain unfamiliar. The Catholic Church in Scotland has for so long been ignored or reported simply at face value. Winning was a natural raconteur, an experienced interviewee, but the key was to strip away the tired and worn answers and somehow reach a deeper truth. It was not easy. Painful memories were shuttered behind ‘I can’t remember’, personal feelings required careful teasing out – and even then were swiftly converted into the third person and immediately generalized, so that ‘you would feel’ took the place of ‘I would feel’. Friends, family, politicians and old foes provided an alternative record and a process of checks and balances distilled the facts from fondly remembered fiction. I was the first journalist to enjoy access to Winning’s sister Margaret, who explained their childhood. His niece and nephew described the various visits, dinners and football matches that comprised their uncle’s only relaxation.

My interviews were regularly one hour long. I would arrive at The Oaks, the wonderful Arts and Crafts-style villa in the leafy suburb of Newlands on Glasgow’s south side, promptly at 9.25 in the morning. I discovered that arrival any earlier disturbed his daily recitation of the divine office, the prayers of a priest which he performed each morning in the small oratory just off the hall. Our discussions took place in the living room, he on the sofa, myself in an armchair, and the glass table that lay between us became the net over which questions and answers were batted. At ten-thirty, Mrs Mclnnes, Winning’s housekeeper of thirty years, would arrive with tea and biscuits and a further fifteen minutes would be idled away on current events or personal pleasantries.

We wrestled with the years from his birth in 1925 to the present day, arguing, me prodding and he resisting. For the majority of our sessions we were alone; only when we crossed into his years as a cardinal (1994–2001) was he joined by Ronnie Convery. Far from blocking or fielding questions, Convery sat, listened, and even assisted as we discussed Winning’s duels with the government, the launch of the pro-life initiative and the Roddy Wright affair, when the errant Bishop of Argyll and the Isles abandoned his post for a divorcee.

The rules for the book were clear from my first approach. I wished to enjoy the access of an ‘authorized’ biography but none of the controls or manipulations often inherent with ‘official’ status. I happily agreed that I would allow Winning to read the finished book before publication to allow the correction of factual errors. Any views, opinions and matters of interpretation were to be mine alone. I knew this would be difficult. Winning was a man unschooled in the acceptance of constructive criticism. He shared an attitude with Margaret Thatcher, his bête noire, during the 1980s for bracketing people either as ‘one of us’ or ‘one of them’. Those who were not for him, he felt, were against him. At one point our relationship skittered over an icy patch when I arrived for an appointed interview and was presented with a formal letter that insisted he receive a written document and be given the opportunity to read the work completed so far; the continuation of any further interviews hinged upon my acceptance. A compromise was reached when I wrote a letter, putting our previous oral agreement on paper. Winning was a clever manipulator. ‘Stephen,’ he said, smiling his crinkled Robert de Niro smile, ‘I want you to be as welcome in this house once the book is published as you are today.’ I knew this would be unlikely and steeled myself for the inevitable battle which would take place once the book was completed.

It was a battle never fought. Winning’s death on Sunday, 17 June 2001 closed our collaboration, but not our relationship. When the news editor of the Scotsman called me at home, alerting me to the announcement by the Press Association, I felt physically sick. The Cardinal had suffered a heart attack eight days previously but had returned home and was described as ‘recovering well’. A ‘get well’ card and a wrapped present rested on my kitchen table. That afternoon I sat in the Scotsman’s offices and wrote a lengthy appreciation with time spent in the toilet in tears. I was troubled by the turbulence of my emotions, and it took a few days to trace the source to the obvious: an obsessional analysis of a life now lost. As any man in a public and powerful position, Winning had a number of sides, one witnessed by family, another by friends; priests saw a third, brother bishops a fourth, and so on. For two years, I had attempted to meld these separate sides, like frames on a negative, into a single, moving picture. The early summer of 2001 was to be a curious time. His death had occurred during my sabbatical when I was finishing a first draft of the book. A strange sensation occurs when you witness a man in his coffin, then return to your study to re-animate him on the page.

When I first embarked on the writing of this biography, I was aware that a previous book by Vivienne Belton, a Glasgow school teacher, had been completed, but had as yet been unable to find a publisher. When in March 2000 the Daily Record first revealed that Winning’s life was to be the subject of a ‘controversial’ biography by myself, it had the fortunate effect of galvanizing Ms Belton into asking for Winning’s assistance in finding a publisher for her manuscript. Cardinal Thomas Winning: An Authorised Biography by Vivienne Belton was published by Columba Press in the autumn of 2000. The Cardinal: An Official Tribute, published by the Glasgow archdiocese and the Scottish Catholic Observer, joined it on the shelves a few months after Winning’s death, together with Always Winning, a book of tributes and photographs published by Mainstream. I have read all three books, yet the principal source for my account remains the hundred hours of interviews with Winning, his friends, family, colleagues, contemporaries, priests and politicians: all buttressed by newspaper reports, both secular and religious.

In the jargon of Hollywood, every story has an arc and progresses through ‘action beats’, dilemmas and troubles the hero overcomes which fuel him through the next phase of his development. Thomas Winning never overcame all of his troubles. He remained a poor judge of character and was let down by a number of close associates; his director of social work ran up large debts in highly ambitious but slackly managed projects, his spin doctor was unspun by a love affair, a court case and a bawdy limerick, while his beloved Pastoral Plan was at one point in the hands of a priest later revealed to be a drunk who hired a former topless model as a housekeeper and paid the inevitable price. The popular view propagated first by the Scottish media and latterly by the British media, was of Winning as the man of the people. This was a convenient pigeonhole, grounded in truth and weary with repetition, but one which ignored Winning’s inevitable loneliness. He was a man severed by the weight of position and responsibility from the people. As a young teenager, he had undergone a harsh transformation to become a priest when there was little room for the personal. What constituted Winning the priest and Winning the man was to be a dilemma with which he wrestled for the rest of his life. The garb of a priest was a suit of armour in which he clanked uncomfortably. He found the expression of love beyond the strict confines of his family to be difficult, afraid that the emotion might veer from the platonic.

If the suit of armour retarded his emotions, it lent him protection during his long campaign to drag Catholicism in Scotland out from under the parapet and into the mainstream. This was not to be achieved by ducking issues or diluting dogma. In his twenty-nine years as a bishop, Winning branded Britain a nation of ‘spiritual dwarfs’, accused Prince Charles of ‘woolly theology’, wrestled with the Conservative Party over nuclear weapons, condemned the Gulf War, and spent the last six years of his life staring over a ‘no man’s land’ littered with issues such as abortion, student fees and bioethics, at Tony Blair, the Labour leader and pseudo-Catholic who had the potential on paper to be his greatest ally.

The life of Thomas Joseph Winning, a journey from poverty to a position as a prince of the Church, is an inspirational tale of one man’s struggle with himself and his surroundings to achieve what he genuinely believed was God’s will, in an age when self-will has increasingly become the only currency which counts. At the height of his popularity Winning was to be touted as one of the papabile – a candidate for Pope. Although it was a ridiculous suggestion – he lacked both the intellect and standing in Rome – and he was already too old, he was flattered by the suggestion. On one occasion, when I accompanied him to Rome, we walked across St Peter’s Square late in the evening after dining in the Via Condotti. Winning was dressed in an anorak from C&A, while the Roman clergy were elegant in their long black frock coats. As we both looked up at the light burning from the papal apartment, I asked if he was not proud to have climbed up to be a candidate.

‘Sure,’ he said, before triggering another vintage moment. ‘I wouldn’t want to score the goal, but I’m glad I’ve made it to the penalty area.’

The Priestly Years (#ulink_7449fbb9-3e32-5417-ae79-37dde3337308)

ONE (#ulink_f4b5225b-1823-5fa2-9e71-c129ab8719b2)

In the Beginning … (#ulink_f4b5225b-1823-5fa2-9e71-c129ab8719b2)

‘The papists [are like a] rattlesnake, harmless when kept under proper restraints, but dangerous like it, when at full liberty; and ready to diffuse a baleful poison around.’

(#litres_trial_promo)

JOHN ANDERSON, PROFESSOR OF NATURAL PHILOSOPHY,

GLASGOW UNIVERSITY, 1770

It is not known exactly when Patrick Win arrived on the boat from Belfast at the docks of Glasgow in search of a better life and a fuller belly. Born in 1834 among the hills of Fermanagh in the counties of Ulster, he survived the terrible potato famine of the following decade that killed one million of his countrymen and emerged, like his father John, a hardy survivor and itinerant labourer. Ireland at the time was a ravaged country, where food was scarce and what little work there was offered scant prospect of betterment. Tired of farm work and the quiet desperation of his fellow workers, Patrick decided to strike out for a brighter future ‘across the water’. A lack of formal schooling had left him illiterate, a barrier which forced him to live on his wits and by the sweat of his brow.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, Scotland was a country in the grip of the Industrial Revolution. Railways, quarries, ironworks, mines, canals, docks and factories were consuming working men, women and children like so much coal in a furnace. The centres of heavy industry such as Glasgow and Dundee were drawing immigrant workers from Ireland at a tremendous rate. By 1851, Patrick Win was just one of over two hundred thousand first-generation Irish immigrants who had arrived in Scotland over the past fifty years, the majority bedding down along the west coast of the country. While most were Catholic, a proportion of the Irish visitors were Protestants from Ulster, whose ancestors had gone to Ireland to colonize the country in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Many had been tempted back by the notices placed in Belfast newspapers looking for skilled workers to replace those Scottish employees drawn away to Canada, America or Australia. The owners of steelworks, ironworks and coal mines offered them sweeteners such as comfortable accommodation and education for their children. The Irish Catholics could expect no such welcome.

Those who arrived in Scotland were quickly saddled with several unshakeable problems, namely poverty and Catholicism; Scotland may have been expanding its industries, but wages were low and the city of Glasgow offered an example of both boom and bust. Shipbuilding on the Clyde was the cornerstone of its prosperity and accounted for a third of all the world’s merchant fleet before 1912. The flourishing tobacco and cotton trades only added to its success. Yet the city had a tradition of high death rates eclipsed by even higher birth rates. The population explosion had been fuelled by the influx of immigrants and refugees fleeing the depopulation of the Scottish Highlands. In 1850, over 50 per cent of the population of 400,000 were born outside the city, resulting in severe overcrowding over a long period in pitiful accommodation which, on average, did not extend beyond one room. Outside the houses open sewers flowed freely and so disease was rampant.

The distress caused by low wages and poor, unhygienic living conditions was compounded by the attitude of locals to Catholicism. In Scotland in the middle of the nineteenth century, the Catholic faith was abhorrent to the Protestant population. For over two hundred years, since the Reformation of 1560, Catholicism had been illegal. Priests were prosecuted and celebration of the Mass was forbidden; the remaining small outcrops of believers who refused to convert were despised. A relaxation in the law came with the Catholic Relief Act of 1793, once again allowing freedom of worship, and the Emancipation Act which followed thirty years later loosened the bonds further still, but the attitude of the public remained fixed.

Catholics were viewed as a problem to be contained, an attitude encapsulated by John Anderson, Professor of Natural Philosophy at Glasgow University in 1770. While debating with a colleague the merits of repealing laws against Roman Catholics, he compared them to a rattlesnake: ‘harmless when kept under proper restraints, but dangerous like it, when at full liberty; and ready to diffuse a baleful poison around’.

The population of Glasgow had always kept a watchful eye on their Catholic neighbours. It was claimed that during the 1790s the city housed forty-three anti-Catholic organizations at a time when the total Catholic population was just thirty-nine. By 1850, the Catholic population in the city had risen to over seventy thousand. In response, anti-Catholic organizations such as the Scottish Protestant Association formed and printed journals such as the Bulwark and the Scottish Protestant. Members and readers were of a view that Scotland was under attack by an ‘inferior race’ threatening disease, crime and degradation.

In a short, hard life, Patrick Win witnessed them all. After arriving in the city he moved to the south side of the river Clyde and settled in the village of Pollokshaws. The construction of the Glasgow, Paisley and Johnstone Canal in 1808 had brought a large number of Irish Catholic labourers, or navvies as they were known, into the area and Win was just another to add to their number. Instead of finding work with the large cotton mills, the principal employers in the area, he succeeded in obtaining a job as a railway surfaceman. In such a hostile atmosphere the Catholics invariably spent time with their own countrymen and women at the Irish clubs whose music and dancing offered an opportunity to forget for a few hours the misery of their lives. Win was to meet a young woman by the name of Ann Maguire, a bleacher by profession and a fellow exile from Fermanagh, and on 19 October 1855, the couple wed.

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.