This Turbulent Priest: The Life of Cardinal Winning

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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.

The greatest indignity of Agnes Canning’s married life was the visits by the ‘Means Test Man’, the government official whose job it was to visit families on welfare with the purpose of checking whether or not they were living beyond their means, funded by illicit employment. Thomas Winning’s confectionery business had attracted their attention, even though he was scrupulous about earning only four shillings, the maximum sum permitted if he wished to retain his welfare aid. ‘My mother hated the indignity of those visits. She was house-proud and felt it was a form of invasion and yet there was nothing she could do,’ Margaret recalled. Agnes dreaded each visit and would always weep after the official had left.

The persistent unemployment of Thomas Winning had nothing to do with indolence; instead, his religious identity prevented him from walking through the factory gate. In the past, when work was plentiful, employers did not enjoy putting a Catholic on their payroll but strong backs were required. Now, in the Depression years of the 1930s, they could pick and choose. This was the era when an employer’s first question was: ‘What school did you go to?’ Those who had been educated at a Catholic school were told there was no work available. On numerous occasions, Thomas Winning would re-christen his school, but his background was always uncovered. While he accepted wave after wave of rejection with stoicism, forged in the knowledge that as a veteran of the Somme he was lucky to be alive, it ignited a burning resentment within his son. Winning was moulded in a crucible of anti-Catholicism, the consequences of which were a deep distrust and even dislike of Protestantism and an unswerving loyalty to the Catholic Church. He remembered: ‘It was a time that left its mark. My main memory was watching my father always on the look-out for work, always asking for a chance, but always being knocked back because of his religion. It ingrained something in you. It builds harshness, and so you always side with other Catholics.’

Winning’s earliest experience of hostility towards Catholics was on the small football field that lay at Shepherd’s Park, a few streets away from his home. Although his group of friends was mixed, it was not uncommon when picking sides for players to glare at him and declare: ‘I don’t want an Irishman on my side.’ He would insist he had never set foot in the country but ethnic subtleties did not matter, the equation was simple: a Catholic equalled an Irishman. On other occasions, Winning would deny he was even a Catholic when he was pounced upon by a teenage gang who often lurked along Glasgow Road and hauled up against a wall as they demanded to know if he was a ‘Fenian’.

The attitude was repeated by the Winnings’ neighbours, the Russells, who at least had the civility to restrict their behaviour to one day each year. On 12 July, the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne, when William of Orange vanquished his Irish enemies, protest songs would roar from the window and Mr Russell would refuse to speak to the Winnings. For the remainder of the year, the family was good natured and brought presents for the children from their annual holiday in Portobello, on the east coast. (The Winnings could not afford a holiday and when Thomas asked why, he was told that if he ate margarine instead of butter all year, they could afford a trip. Thomas said he would rather stick to butter.)

What the family experienced was common across the country as Winning’s formative years covered the most dynamic and difficult period of the twentieth century for the Catholic Church in Scotland. The Catholic population had almost doubled during the past forty years to over six hundred thousand and in 1918 the community had benefited from the Education Act that saw the government fund Catholic schools. Previously, they were funded by collections from among the parishioners. Flush with extra capital, the Church leaders embarked on an extensive building programme, yet outside the stone gables and away from the scent of incense, trouble was brewing.

The Education Act triggered a backlash as Protestants argued against what they saw as ‘Rome on the Rates’. The Church of Scotland, the country’s official Church, whose annual General Assembly was viewed as the conscience of the nation, increased the pressure when, in 1923, the Church and Nation Committee prepared a report entitled ‘The Menace of the Irish Race to our Scottish Nationality’. Their conclusion was that the immigrant Irish and their subsequent generations were stealing jobs from native Scots and dragging the country down into a gutter of crime, drunkenness and thriftlessness. The solution was the exclusive employment of Scots Protestants and the deportation of those Irish on poor relief or in prison.

The following decade saw the rise of two potent anti-Catholic groups. The Scottish Protestant League was based in Glasgow and led by Alexander Ratcliffe, a former railway clerk and son of a minister. He was an eloquent speaker who secured five seats for the League on Glasgow City Council by telling packed meetings salacious tales about renegade priests, vicious nuns and the true villainy of the Vatican. The problem had an uglier face in Edinburgh, where John Cormack, a Baptist and veteran of the First World War, formed Protestant Action in 1933, an organization that advocated the withdrawal of the vote for Catholics and their eventual expulsion from the country. Their campaign reached its height in the spring and summer of 1935, when they rallied ten thousand protestors to picket the City Chambers where a reception for the Catholic Young Men’s Society was in progress. A detachment of Gordon Highlanders was placed on standby to secure the CYMS’s safe departure. The treatment of Catholics attending a Eucharistic Congress, an assembly of devotion, in the city a few weeks later led the Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh, Joseph McDonald, to write to Stanley Baldwin, the Prime Minister, to complain:

Priests were savagely assaulted, elderly women attacked and kicked, bus-loads of children mercilessly stoned and inoffensive citizens abused and assailed in a manner that is almost unbelievable in any civilized community today. The disgraceful scenes have become known in every quarter of the globe, and have sullied the fair name of a city which once was justly regarded as a leader in all culture, thought and civilization.

(#litres_trial_promo)

Across the country, parishioners were in a state of readiness, organizing around the clock watches on their churches against what was considered the worst outbreak of anti-Catholic fervour since the Reformation. The summer of 1935 was to prove the zenith of violent anti-Catholicism, but the insidious boil remained and would take decades to lance.

The red sandstone church of St Patrick’s was the beating heart of the Catholic community in Craigneuk. Built in 1891, it was here under the high arches that an oppressed people came for spiritual succour, here they brought their newborn and recently dead, here they confessed their sins, pledged their love during marriage, prayed for the strength to cope with life in this world and for a better life in the next. In an environment hostile to their faith, life revolved around the church in ways unimaginable today. The church hall was a leisure centre, open in the evening and equipped with a library, games room and a tea bar to act as an alternative to the public house. Concerts and amateur productions were performed regularly, but the highlight was the weekly dance organized to introduce the young men and women of the parish under the watchful eye of the clergy. On a Sunday morning, all three Masses were packed, the wooden pews straining to contain the villagers in their smartest clothes. The parish supported a range of organizations popular enough to operate by invitation only. Thomas Winning was a member of the St Vincent de Paul Society, the Scottish branch of a French organization founded after the French Revolution by a Catholic lawyer to aid the poor.

Each Sunday, Thomas Winning would appear at Mass, wearing a bright yellow sash embroidered with the organization’s name, and work as an usher, supervise the collection, afterwards count the takings, and then decide on its distribution among the poor and elderly. Johnny Kelly, a burly Irishman who worked at the Etna Steel Plant and devoted his spare time to charity work, led the Shieldmuir conference of St Vincent de Paul. It was a generous act for which he was cruelly rewarded. He was the father of eight children and, with his wife, watched helpless as each one contracted tuberculosis and died, a tragic event he blamed on the great bundles of old clothes, probably contaminated, that he stored in the house, prior to distribution.

The young Winning was involved in the Church from the moment of his baptism. At home each evening the family gathered to say the rosary, with his father using a set of keys instead of beads. On the morning of his fifth birthday, he began classes at St Patrick’s primary school, a mile from his house, where the four Rs were taught instead of the usual three, religion being regarded as important as reading, writing and arithmetic. The Catholic faith was taught by rote before and after lunch using the penny catechism, a dark hardback book whose questions and answers were to be memorized. The idea was to provide Catholics with ready answers for anyone who might question their beliefs.

Winning was quick to display his intelligence. He memorized large chunks of a book on biblical history, and so was asked to visit the other classrooms to demonstrate his skill. When a new headmaster was appointed, he asked to speak to the brightest boy in the school and Winning was sent forward. Unfortunately, he panicked and answered every question put to him incorrectly. ‘I have never forgotten that day,’ he was to say later. ‘I felt ashamed. I felt that I had let everybody down and I felt humiliated.’

The primary school was a natural extension of the church, and three times each year both were united with the entire Catholic community for public processions. The largest procession was the feast of Corpus Christi, the Body of Christ, in June, when the consecrated host was carried aloft by the priest around the village. In preparation, the families in tenements which looked on to the church and school playing fields dressed their windows like altars, with lighted candles and statues of Our Lady. On two occasions, Winning was given the role of carrying a basket of rose petals for a classmate, Maureen Hoban, who scattered them like a carpet of flowers over which the gathered community processed while singing hymns and saying the rosary.

At the age of seven, Winning joined his class in preparing to receive the sacraments of Confession and Holy Communion. One night, Winning went home to his mother and asked if it was acceptable to inform the priest that he had disobeyed her five times. ‘Five times! Five times? Fifty times, more like,’ she replied. Winning was not a particularly naughty child, but he did enjoy teasing his younger sister to the point of tears by insisting on calling her ‘the Cat’s Auntie’ instead of by her name. Then there was the occasion when he climbed up on to the dresser to find football tickets and toppled the whole structure down. Winning made his confession, told the priest that he had disobeyed his mother fifty times, and was forgiven his sins. In the classroom, his teacher explained that the host, the little wafer of bread, would be transformed through the mystery of transubstantiation into the actual body of Jesus Christ; a concept that struck Winning as truly wondrous, but which built expectations the Catholic Church could not match. On the day of his first Holy Communion, neat in pressed trousers, white shirt and ironed tie, Winning stuck out his tongue and received the bread to a crushing disappointment: ‘I was so disillusioned by the host. I thought it would be much thicker, crunchier, and much more fleshy.’ Afterwards, he received a hot breakfast in the school and a penny from the parish priest, but even this could not make up for the earlier let-down.

While pennies were spent on gumballs, cinnamon sticks or twisted paper pokes of boiled sweets – unavailable in his father’s pantry – the week’s pocket money was spent on the cinema. Every Saturday morning, Winning would travel to Motherwell, to the Rex cinema. There, in the gloom of the cinema, he and his friends would watch Westerns and gangster films starring James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart. The local cinema was deemed too rough for Winning, who once had his hat stolen by some boisterous lads, and watched as his younger sister fought to retrieve it. Eventually the cinema was closed and renamed. ‘All the kids thought it was called the R 10, and couldn’t work out what it meant. Eventually we learned it was called the RIO. I loved the cinema, and the way every kid felt he could be a cowboy or Indian,’ said Winning. While the cinema provided the necessary escapism, the Church was to offer him a possible career.

As a teenager, Winning never glimpsed a burning bush, heard the voice of God, or walked a road to Damascus. Instead, he was quietly drawn towards the altar by the magnetic example of the parish priests. Before becoming eligible to be an altar boy, prospective candidates had to spend a period of penance in the choir loft. The ‘Lord of the Loft’ was Fr James Cuthbert Ward, a priest from Edinburgh, who had been banished to the west coast as two older brothers were already priests in the city and the Archbishop feared a cabal. Ward was a chubby man who wore thick glasses, the size and depth of lemonade bottles, and Winning initially considered him soft on account of his frequent homilies about his mother. It was a notion the priest quickly dispelled by regularly beating altar boys and choirboys for errors and cheek. If Ward meted out punishment and strict discipline, his devotion to the high hymns and Latin chants that made up the sung Mass redressed the balance. To Ward they were a reflection of God’s beauty and a way of softening the harshness of the parishioners’ lives. Winning was no nightingale, but the effort he exerted was appreciated by Ward and the choir loft offered him a better view of the panoply below.

The elevated role priests held in the Catholic community was never emphasized more than on a Sunday when they led the parishioners in prayer. Winning would watch in quiet awe as they paraded across the altar in rich, embroidered vestments of purple, gold, green, red and white. At the age of eleven, he was finally allowed to join the priests on the altar, carrying the large brass cross, swinging the long steel thurible, the elaborate holder for the incense that perfumed the air, and holding up the priest’s cope during weekly devotions. Winning was hard-working and diligent and his duties were expanded to include the sale of religious booklets door-to-door. Often people would take one out of pity and promise to pay later, a promise seldom kept, forcing Winning to contribute his pocket money to correct the balance. He also had to maintain a steady supply of religious pamphlets for display and sale at the back of the church. This involved taking the bus to Glasgow and the Renfrew Street offices of the Catholic Truth Society. It was while browsing amongst the lives of saints and booklets on personal morality that Winning picked up a copy of The Imitation of Christ by Thomas A Kempis, a text that was to deepen his faith to a greater degree than the shallows usually inhabited by schoolboys. The author was born in Kempen in the German Rhineland in 1380, and was responsible for the training of novices, but his posthumous work, published a century later, would became almost as widely read as the Bible. The book is constructed as a series of proverbs, designed to overcome vices, develop virtues and nurture a private prayer life, and Winning saw it as ‘a great précis on how you should live your life as a Catholic’. The enthusiasm other schoolboys reserved for football, Winning ploughed into the stern and demanding nature of the book, but kept the practice utterly private. Priests may have been admired and held up as pillars of the community, but anyone who wished to join them was a ‘Holy Joe’ fit to be pilloried by their young peers.

The only two people to whom Winning disclosed his interests were Fr James Ward and his superior, Fr Alex Hamilton, the parish priest of St Patrick’s. Alex Hamilton had arrived three years previously, in 1935, and was a quiet, reserved man whose mother had died when he was very young; the reason given for his emotional distance. When Winning first raised the idea of becoming a priest and the possibility that he might attend junior seminary at Blairs College in Aberdeen, Fr Hamilton had been surprisingly cautious. As a veteran of Blairs from the age of ten, he had no wish for Winning to suffer the poor food and intense homesickness that he himself had endured. Instead, he advised Winning to complete his secondary education and allow his true calling, if it was so, to deepen.

At no point did Winning discuss his thoughts with either his mother or father and it would be a further three years before the issue emerged into the open. In the intervening years, Winning continued his education at Our Lady’s High School, the local Catholic secondary school for boys, based two miles away in Motherwell. He had been accepted for the school after the successful completion of the Eleven-Pius, the examination designed to separate children with academic promise from those viewed as possessing a lesser ability, more suited to an early entry to the work place. The fact he passed one year earlier than most, and that many of the school friends he believed cleverer than himself should fail or be prohibited from sitting by parents anxious to secure another wage, seemed a great injustice. This feeling was later compounded by guilt when Winning did not fulfil his scholastic potential. ‘I did not feel that I fared particularly well at school,’ said Winning. ‘I have always felt it is a mistake to push kids on.’

At primary school Winning had been taken to the local swimming baths where he had stepped off the side, expecting to find steps, and sank. He spluttered to the surface, but it would be almost sixty years before he tried to swim again. After the familiar warmth and relative ease of primary school, secondary education was a shock and once again Winning felt he was drowning. The problem was understanding the art of studying; he was unfamiliar with the secret of dividing work into sections, organizing study timetables and structuring revision. His parents were supportive, offering the sitting room and dinner table for his books, and ensuring a silence suitable for study descended on the house, but, left on his own, Winning would panic. Maths was a particular chore. He missed numerous classes while serving as an altar boy at funeral services, and had a natural blind spot for numbers which was exacerbated by the maths master, John Bancewicz, whom he disliked intensely and viewed as a ‘bully’. On a number of occasions, Winning asked his father, who had taken a correspondence course in mathematics, to complete his homework, which he would then copy into his jotter and present as his own work. Trial and error in methods of revision finally paid off and the perseverance he would display during the course of his life began to take root. During those early years of secondary school, his vocation to the priesthood began to deepen, but it was not the contemplative or spiritual aspect of the job that he desired. ‘There was a glamour in the priesthood. I would imagine myself running for sick calls and looking after people in road accidents or during emergencies.’

The persecution of Catholic priests and nuns in Spain, upon the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 and over the next three years, galvanized Winning’s ambition to be a priest. What the astute observer viewed as the beginning of a titanic struggle between Fascism and Communism was reduced to the simplest level in Winning’s mind. The machinations of Franco and his coup against an elected government were immaterial to a young Catholic boy in Lanarkshire who saw the conflict in black and white: Godless Communists against the nobility of the Catholic Church. Each Sunday, Winning would lie in front of the coal fire in the family’s living room and read the Catholic Observer and the Universe for reports on the atrocities being carried out against priests and nuns in towns across Spain. He was riveted by a picture that appeared in the Universe of the execution of a Jesuit priest who, just before he was shot by a firing squad, called out ‘Viva Christo Rey!’ – ‘Long live Christ the King!’ The Scots Catholics who supported Franco were against the tide of public opinion that sided with the Republicans, sending men, money and supplies to support the International Brigade. The sight of the co-op store collecting money for the war in Spain sickened him, and he considered smashing the window, but fear of being caught and of his parents having to pay for the damage changed his mind.

I was a staunch Francophile. I felt great resentment at the way the British government supported the Republicans. The co-op store had a milk-for-Spain campaign, it involved milk bottle tops and the money was to go towards the International Brigade. It was the way they were treating the Church that coloured my attitude. They were anti-Catholic and so I hoped they would be defeated. I discussed it with my father. We all felt the same way. To me it was simple: it was murderers versus the rest.

Winning remembers hearing about the end of the siege of Madrid on the radio and the whole family cheering Franco’s victory. ‘It was a real joy and a pleasure for us to hear that the Republicans had been defeated.’

The annual retreat organized for the boys of Our Lady’s High School and St Aloysius Boys’ School, a private school based in Glasgow city centre, was a great influence on Winning. Each year the two schools would travel to Craighead Retreat Centre in Bothwell for an overnight retreat. Winning enjoyed the walks around the expansive gardens and the clandestine game of cards after light’s out, but he would return home with a personal mantra, a prayer written by St Ignatius, the founder of the Jesuits, which was said before each talk:

Lord, teach me to be generous, to serve you as you deserve.

To give and not to count the cost,

To fight and not to heed the wounds,

To toil and not to seek for rest,

To labour and not to ask for any reward

Save for knowing that I do God’s Holy Will.

On 3 September 1939, as Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain announced to the British nation that war had been declared on Germany, Winning was tossing balls at a coconut shy at Craigneuk fair with Patrick Macmillan, the son of the local doctor. World War Two was to bring mixed fortunes to the family. Rationing meant the closure of Thomas Winning’s confectionery sideline, but after twelve years of unemployment, he was given a job on the nearby Belhaven Estate. On the farm the unemployed men were put to work planting crops, tending sheep and milking cows for a set number of hours each day for which they were paid in farm produce.

Each ‘pay day’ Thomas Winning would return to his family laden with eggs, butter and buttermilk, prized possessions when the average family were entitled to just one egg a week. Conscious of the generosity of his in-laws over the past decade, he insisted on sharing the food around. The war effort also increased Winning’s responsibilities. As the fighting drained the parish of able-bodied men, sent to serve overseas in the various armed forces, Fr Ward set up a monthly newsletter to keep them informed of parish life. Winning was conscripted to update and log all the addresses on file index cards and spend one day each month churning out copies using an early version of the Xerox machine.

In his fifth and sixth years at school, Winning remained reluctant to reveal his ambitions for the priesthood. He brushed away questions about his future plans and when once asked by a teacher what he wanted to do after leaving school, his surly response was, ‘Get a job’, an attitude that was swiftly admonished as cheek. In truth, he remained embarrassed by his ambition. Despite his doubts and poor start, he passed higher qualifications in English, German, Latin, and, incredibly, Mathematics. He followed these up by taking the prospective teacher’s exam, a qualification similar to an A-level in religious studies and which acted as a convenient cloak for his true intent.

His choice of vocation had also clouded his relations with girls. In the 1930s and the early 1940s, very few boys of fifteen or sixteen had girlfriends but the prickly hormones of puberty meant the interest was there even if the contact was not. Winning was friendly with girls in the neighbourhood, pulled pigtails and even took to the floor when Our Lady’s High met up with its sister school for girls for monitored dances, but there remained a certain careful detachment. ‘He knew what he wanted to be and knew girls didn’t come into it,’ said Margaret.

When he was sixteen, Winning finally broke the news to his parents of his plan to study for the priesthood. Their response was quiet and subdued. They had expected this day to arrive. His role as an altar boy, his interest in Latin, his weekly chores for the church, were all part of a religious mosaic. His mother said very little, while his father asked only if he was sure of his plan and when Winning replied that he was the matter was closed.

Equipped with his parents’ permission and the blessing of his parish priest, Winning’s name was sent forward to the archdiocese of Glasgow and in early June 1942, Winning was invited for an interview. His father accompanied him on the bus trip to the large Victorian town house in the Park Circus area of Glasgow. Mr Winning waited outside while his son was questioned in the drawing room. The panel of five elderly priests charged with scrutinizing candidates asked him to read a passage of Latin prose by Cicero, the great Roman orator, and though they took exception to his pronunciation, it was deemed a pass. When asked why he wanted to become a priest, Winning replied sanctimoniously but effectively: he wished to leave the world a better place. Three weeks later he received a formal letter of acceptance and notification that his training would begin at St Mary’s College, Blairs, the following autumn.

Winning was delighted and as the summer weeks crawled by his dreams and ambitions expanded to fill those empty days. One evening towards the end of the holidays, he sat on the step of his house beside his young cousin of seven, Mary Canning, turned to her, and said with (as she recalled) ‘absolute certainty’: ‘I’m going to be the first Scottish pope.’

TWO (#ulink_acc7a15d-a8db-5393-97cd-f7daff4ecead)

Blairs Bound (#ulink_acc7a15d-a8db-5393-97cd-f7daff4ecead)

‘They drained my self-esteem. I simply didn’t have any.’

THOMAS WINNING

On the afternoon of 27 August 1942, Platform Two of Buchanan Street railway station in the centre of Glasgow resembled a convention of apprentice undertakers. Three dozen boys dressed in black suits, black coats and soft trilby hats stood waiting for the one o’clock train to Aberdeen. Ahead lay their first year at Blairs, as St Mary’s seminary was commonly known, and around them hung an air of acute trepidation. Thomas Winning had perhaps more to fear than his fellow students. This was his first trip away from home and the thought of leaving behind his family had left him quite sick. His aunts and uncles had paid for his new wardrobe, the highlight of which was his first pair of football boots; but only his immediate family had come to wave him off. Before arriving at the station, Fr James Ward had taken them to Luigi’s Fish and Chip Emporium as a final treat. The farewell on the platform was short and strained. Afterwards, the priest bought Winning’s mother, father and sister tickets to see the film How Green Was My Valley, a popular weepy about a Welsh mining disaster, and told Margaret: ‘You can get your tears out in the dark.’

On the train, Winning had the same emotions, but no such opportunity for release. Instead, he took a seat beside Maurice Taylor, a quiet boy one year younger than himself, with whom he had become friendly during his previous two years at Our Lady’s High School. The carriage was filled with boys who enjoyed the easy camaraderie that accompanied a secondary education at Blairs, a clique that left Taylor and Winning with the feeling of being outsiders. As the others talked, the pair mainly stared out of the window at the countryside’s blur of browns and greens.

At five o’clock in the afternoon, the party arrived at Aberdeen’s Central Station and spilled out for what was a Blairs’ tradition – a high tea of scones and cress sandwiches at Kenaway’s, the renowned delicatessen. A fleet of taxis was then organized to carry the boys and their trunks to the college, which sat five miles west of the city centre on the south Deeside Road. Rattling in the back of the black hackney, they crossed the bridge over the river Dee and, looking back, saw the spires of Aberdeen disappear into the distance. For many boys, the brief walk from the station to Kenaway’s would be as much as they would see of the Granite City during their northern education. The temptations of Aberdeen were strictly out of bounds.

Father Stephen McGill greeted the party at the doors of the college. A small man with a clipped and careful manner and a pious spirituality many found sickly sweet, McGill had trained as a priest in France with the Order of St Sulpice, a group dedicated to the formation of aspirant priests, and would boast of having escaped the German invasion with only his typewriter and a pair of socks. He ushered them inside for a tour and what would become their traditional supper: a sweet tea, bluish in colour, and slices of bread and jam. The customary strict decorum was suspended for that first evening as the party were shown around their new home. Each student was allocated a plywood cubicle, seven feet by five feet, each with a bed and a small wooden stool. There was no door and only a curtain for privacy. The centre of the room also acted as their main recreational area and this meant that throughout the year the boys slept in the smoke-filled atmosphere. Winning sat on his bed and listened as the ‘Decano’, a senior student, shouted over the tops of all the cubicles that the following day they would be expected to dress in Roman collars and soutanes. The lights were then suddenly switched off, leaving Winning and his fellow students to unpack in the dark. He felt utterly alone. ‘The first night was hellish,’ said Winning. ‘There was a certain harsh loneliness to the place.’

Winning and his fellow students were awoken at six o’clock by the morning bell and queued in silence for the ‘jakes’, as the toilets were called. Then, dressed in their black soutanes, they headed to the oratory for morning prayers and meditation, followed by Mass. Over a breakfast of porridge, tea and toast they were introduced to the Redemptorist priest who would lead them through their first few days. The priest, from a religious congregation founded in Naples in 1732, specialized in the administration of spiritual retreats, and each new intake of students began their formation at Blairs with a three-day silent retreat. As well as the traditional monastic vows of poverty, chastity and obedience the Redemptorists included a fourth, perseverance, an attribute they were keen to impress on the students at a time of confusion and doubt. Winning was reluctant to listen. ‘If there had been a correspondence course I would have taken it. I found those days an ordeal.’ The problem was the silence, a void that was quickly filled with doubts, unease and uncertainty. The long periods of contemplation and prayer were separated by a series of religious talks, opportunities for confession, and walks around the ‘bounds’ – a circuitous route through the attractive parkland in which the college sat. For Winning, it was the beginning of a long period of adjustment where he had to balance his desire to be a priest with the emotional rigours of the training.

Preparation for the priesthood at Blairs was run along monastic lines. Each day would begin and end enfolded within magnum silencium: the ‘Grand Silence’. This restful time, when students were freed from the tug and pull of daily life and were thought to be more open to God’s call, started with night prayers in the oratory and ran through until the beginning of breakfast. To break the silence was considered a grave error, one indicative of a lack of self-restraint, and grounds for the guilty student’s dismissal. The college’s regimented timetable was an attempt to ingrain discipline into the very hearts of the students.

Their days ran as follows:

At the time of Winning’s formation, the priesthood retained an exalted and highly respected position both within the Catholic Church and across mainstream society. Priests were untarnished by scandal, unquestioned and reverently deferred to. As a spiritual descendant of his leader, Jesus Christ, a priest was no longer of the world; he had moved beyond it. He enjoyed a unique position, able to straddle both the ordinary and the divine. The power to transform unleavened bread into the actual body of Christ, and to administer or retain God’s forgiveness at will was bestowed on him. A priest was not only in a position of patriarchal privilege, deferred to in society and enjoying great influence, sometimes even adoration, he was viewed as physically closer to God, and capable of wielding the supernatural. As Winning had read previously in The Imitation of Christ, ‘High is the ministry and great the dignity of priests, to whom is given that which is not granted to the angels.’ But such a privilege comes at a heavy price as Thomas A Kempis later explained: ‘You have not lightened your burden; you are now bound by a stricter bond of discipline, and are obliged to a greater perfection of sanctity.’

There was little place for the individual in the role of the priest; through their training, seminarians were to be melted down and re-cast in a uniform mould. Priestly celibacy was viewed as both a practical necessity for men who were, in essence, married to God and to the Church, as well as an opportunity to radiate purity. As Fr Ronald Knox, a popular contemporary author, wrote in The Priestly Life, a priest should not have:

the insensitivity of the bachelor who finds women a nuisance, not the furtive horror which tries to forget that sex exists, but something unapproachable, blinding, on a different plane from thoughts of evil. What a waste of God’s gift, when the life that’s pledged to celibacy is not a life irradiated by purity. What brooding regrets or cheap familiarities tarnish the surface of the mirror, which ought to reflect Christ?

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In the opinion of Fr Knox, the ground on which a priest’s feet trod should be ‘a part of the soil of heaven transplanted to earth’.

Before such a feat could be performed, seminarians would undergo a five-year course, two years of philosophy, followed by theology. Philosophy, it is said, is the handmaiden of theology, and before studying the latter, student priests were given a solid grounding in the former. At Blairs, the first-year class had four lecturers in the subject, led by Fr Philip Flanagan, who had spent two years until 1940 as vice-rector of the Scots College in Rome. Although the youngest of the lecturers, he was the most senior, taking lectures in ethics and cosmology. A second escapee from Europe was Fr Stephen McGill. He was assisted by Fr Hugh Cahill, lecturer in logic and psychology, a likeable man, nicknamed ‘Domine’ Cahill after his habit of addressing students by the Latin for ‘Mr’. The faculty was completed by Fr John Sheridan, a brilliant academic whose only complaint was that his typewriter would not keep pace with his constant flow of essays and articles. He was an erudite speaker who would often spend an entire lecture on areas of cosmology and natural philosophy which were beyond even the brightest boy. For the first few months, Winning found the classes wearisome and a distraction from what he had in mind (which was the active service of others), but over time, he appreciated the clarity that the discipline brought to his life.

When his class was taught the works of René Descartes, the seventeenth-century French philosopher who stated: ‘I think, therefore I am’, Winning and the other students began to counter-argue, using the rules of logic to prove that they did not exist. Discussions during meals or what little social time was available had previously been light and casual, but now they took on a competitive edge. Loose talk was scrutinized for philosophical faux pas and anyone coming to a conclusion greater than the evidence will support was accused of breaking the laws of minor logic. Winning’s teachers impressed upon him that a firm grasp of philosophy would allow him to discuss the deepest problems of human life with men and women of any (or no) religious persuasion. It also gently led to a clearer understanding of Catholic theology. Through the study of general metaphysics and ontology, Winning learned to probe below surface appearances and physical characteristics to the nature of being. He learned how to distinguish between matter and form and was able to explain the mystery of why the host, which after consecration becomes the body of Christ, doesn’t taste of flesh, but remains instead brittle bread: in the language of metaphysics the ‘accidents’, the taste, the shape and texture, remain the same while the ‘substance’ is transformed by the power of God, working through his priest.

Winning grew to enjoy his philosophy classes, but the same was not to be said of his spiritual studies under the tutelage of Fr McGill, the year’s spiritual director. ‘I didn’t particularly take to McGill as a spiritual director – he was just too sickly sweet for me. I didn’t like his manner and he seemed to have absolutely no sense of humour.’ McGill’s field was viewed as the ‘inner forum’, the cultivation of the spiritual life. Each day, for twenty minutes, he was responsible for a series of religious talks that quickly became known as the ‘starvation talks’ among the students. Prayers were often said for the bell that signalled the beginning of lunch and the end of McGill’s lecture.

Winning viewed McGill as a patron of popular psychology from their first meeting. Over later decades, the two men, as brother bishops, would become friends, in spite of their less than auspicious beginning.

Winning did not take easily to the more progressive methods of prayer. Although he experimented with both the Sulpician method which involved a rigid schedule of prayer, spiritual conferences and study, and the spiritual exercises of St Ignatius of Loyola, neither system truly matched his temperament. He found piety and overt holiness distasteful, almost insincere, and in many ways this was a throwback to his fear of being viewed as a ‘sissy’ or ‘Holy Joe’. Instead, the rosary, the Our Father, daily attendance at Mass and periods of quiet contemplation, became the cornerstones of his early spirituality.

After the exercise of both the mind and the soul, the body came third. Every pupil was encouraged to walk for one hour each day in the company of two other students, chosen at random to prevent the curse of ‘cronyism’. Wednesday and Saturday afternoons were set aside for football, and although Winning was delighted by his football boots, they were seldom worn, as he preferred the role of spectator to that of participant. He viewed the game of billiards as the sign of a misspent youth and would instead practise the piano while others played.

In Fr Flanagan’s view, an appreciation of the arts was an important element in the education of a priest. He also believed that the charisma required to attract young people to Jesus Christ and the ability to project one’s voice from the pulpit could best be nurtured on the stage. So each year the students were required to perform a play or musical from the canons of either Shakespeare or Gilbert and Sullivan. During Winning’s time at Blairs The Merchant of Venice was chosen and he was cast in the role of Portia, the intelligent heroine but calculating deceiver, a casting coup he attributed to his good looks. Frank Cullen, who was cast as his Antonio, said: ‘Tom wasn’t a great actor, he was like the rest of us – we managed to mug through.’

Not everyone was as successful as Winning at masking their initial unhappiness. One morning in the spring of 1943, Winning discovered at breakfast that a fellow student was to abandon his studies. The doubts that everyone developed and so often brushed away had dragged Hugh Heslin down and he announced his immediate departure by slamming a tin of syrup on to the breakfast table and declaring, ‘I’m off.’ Heslin’s departure had a shattering effect on Winning’s confidence. His decision had appeared as if from nowhere and Winning began to wonder how firm were the foundations of his own vocation. Hadn’t Hugh Heslin once thought the priesthood was his calling? Over the next few weeks, he grew increasingly concerned about the strength of his vocation.

The doubts coincided with the collapse of the water system at the college and the students returned to their homes for an unscheduled six-week break. The family house at Glasgow Road had been given up and Winning’s parents and sister had moved to a larger property in Stewart Crescent, a ten-minute walk away. The house had originally been built by the husband of Kate Canning, sister of Winning’s grandfather. While James Stewart and his wife lived in one section, the remainder had been rented out. For many years, Winning’s father had acted as handyman for the elderly couple, and upon their death, he was rewarded with joint ownership, along with his cousin Patrick Canning.

The move, though unsettling, had its benefits. Winning was given the front parlour as his own private room for the duration of his stay, which he largely spent in study and visiting his various relatives. He maintained the practice of daily attendance at Mass, but made his sister walk a few paces behind, lest gossips, unaware of their relationship, report his behaviour. He was grossly overreacting, but it was an action which illustrated his concerns and the need to tighten his grip against any possible lapse in his conduct.

The impromptu break was quickly followed by the summer holidays, and by the time of his return to Blairs at the end of August 1943, Winning had so long wrestled with his doubts that he had gained the upper hand. He returned to Blairs equipped with a new-found piety and determination, illustrated by his decision to start a diary. Throughout his life, Winning would regularly start a diary with the best of intentions only to abandon it after a few entries. A whole year would have only one or two entries, offering an odd isolated insight in a sea of empty pages.

A diary entry for 27 and 28 August 1943 contains the following: ‘The master has recalled me to another year of prayer and labour but one of sweetness, for what sweeter thing is there than the knowledge that one is carrying out the will of Jesus Christ.’

He continues in the purplish prose of the newly inspired:

Soon autumn will arrive, if it has not already done so. The trees will be stripped of their foliage and they will stand desolate and naked against the cold winter blasts till spring invites them to don their former robes of healthy green and ripening fruit. So also must I strip myself of all my little tendencies to things of earth, the master has invited me to do so by calling me back. Then I must let grace enter my soul freely without hindrance and in the summer of my spiritual life of 1943–44 I will bear the fruits of my mortifications, my prayers and my labours which, unworthy though they be, will store up treasures for me in the land of the living …

If Winning was dwelling on God’s infinite love, the rest of the world was engulfed by man’s hate. In the evening during their hour of leisure time, the students listened to the BBC News and devoured the local Aberdeen Press and Journal for reports on the success of Montgomery in North Africa as well as the Americans’ increased involvement. German bombers regularly flew on sorties from Norway, and although their principal targets were the shipyards of Glasgow and the west coast, they would regularly dump any remaining armaments on the northeast. When Aberdeen was targeted, the boys would retire to the bomb shelter built in the basement, while each student took it in turn to act as a fire watcher, staying up all night in order to keep track of enemy planes and report on any bombing close to the college.

For the first year and a half of Winning’s stay at Blairs, the war in Europe carried the added fear that he might yet be called up to fight. Under the terms of an agreement negotiated by the Catholic Church at the beginning of the conflict, student priests were placed on the list of reserve professions. However, this was dependent on each student having clearly demonstrated his desire for a vocation prior to the outbreak of war. Technically, Winning should have been protected from the prospect of being forced to follow in his father’s footsteps, but for the public-spirited contrariness of Archbishop Donald Mackintosh of Glasgow. He believed, in defiance of every other Scottish diocese, that only those admitted to the clerical state, following tonsure, the ceremonial cutting of hair after the third year of study, should be excused.

During Winning’s first year, Mackintosh made a visit to the college, raising hopes that he might have changed his position. However, during an inspection of the Glasgow students, where he paraded past them delicately carrying a hankie, he said: ‘I wish you joy’, before asking how many had been tonsured. When only a few raised their hands, he sighed and said: ‘The rest of you know the rules.’ In other words, on their eighteenth birthday, they would be eligible for conscription and were expected to do their duty and fight for their country. Winning had no desire to exchange his soutane for combat fatigues, his meditation and studies for armed combat and the likelihood of an early death. He was proud of his father’s contribution in the previous war, but had no desire to follow his lead. Winning turned eighteen in June 1943, but did not advertise the fact, on the grounds that if called up he would serve, but he would not volunteer his services. For six uncomfortable months he held his breath, then, in December 1943, Mackintosh died. With the unyielding archbishop removed, Fr James Ward was able to persuade the Diocesan Administrator that Winning should be exempt under the government’s agreement. Ward was backed by Fr Alex Hamilton and together both men explained that Winning had wanted to train for the priesthood since he was a schoolboy in 1937, but that this had been postponed on their advice.

Maurice Taylor was not so fortunate. His parish priest was unable to vouch for his vocation prior to 1939 and so, in 1944, Taylor received his commission. However, it was with the medical corps, and the war was over by the time he was sent to India. Instead of tramping across the beaches of northern Europe with kit and gun, Winning was rolling the clay tennis courts at the college when news broke of the Allied invasion of Europe, but an endurance test of another sort lay ahead.

In the autumn of 1944, Winning and his class switched the relative comfort of Blairs for the harsher, more ramshackle facilities at St Peter’s College in Bearsden, five miles to the north-east of Glasgow. After completing their two-year philosophy course, they were to begin their studies in theology. They had reached the Holy Land. Unfortunately, there was nothing virtuous about St Peter’s College, as Winning quickly discovered. The building was decrepit and the staff critical to the point of abuse. It was to be a miserable year, the repercussions of which unfurled far into the future.

After the striking architecture of Blairs, St Peter’s appeared rather bland by comparison. The college was approached off a main road, through a lodge gate, where it stood at the end of a long, curved drive. The atmosphere was set by the hill behind the college, branded the ‘Hungry Hill’ on account of its poor soil. The college was packed and rooms were scarce. The strict rule of seniority meant that older students enjoyed the luxury of rooms, while Winning and his friends studied in a disused cupboard. The actual sleeping quarters, or ‘slum clearance’ as they were known, had shaky walls, inadequate lighting and, along with the rest of the college, a feeling of decay. Dry rot was discovered in the refectory and so all meals were taken in the common room.

Tuberculosis had also begun to take grip. The stuffy atmosphere produced by the blackout conditions created a breeding ground for the bacillus, and a number of students fell seriously ill. In an attempt to combat the condition, the college gardener kept a goat and the sickest students were fed its milk. Frank Cullen secured his own room after the previous occupant died of the disease. As fresh air was the remedy recommended by staff, the students spent long hours out of doors working in the gardens or hiking along the ‘Khyber Pass’, the circuitous thirteen-mile walk along the foot of the Campsie Hills and back via the town of Milngavie.

Winning spent the time reflecting on his rapidly diminishing self-esteem. As a schoolboy on his front step, it had seemed impregnable, but any thought of achieving the papacy was replaced by the idea that at best he would be an inadequate priest. The cause of the crisis of confidence was that his education now took on a dismissive and caustic edge. At Blairs, the regime was rigorous and disciplined, but the lecturers remained friendly and encouraging. At Bearsden, there was a total separation of staff and students, they no longer joined each other at dinner, on the football field, or for a smoke over a game of billiards. The attitude of the staff was encapsulated by an incident later that winter when Winning returned from a walk in the snow and slipped in the corridor from ice on his heel just as he was passing a member of staff. Sprawled on the ground, he looked up just as the priest looked down, sneered, and walked away. ‘You were a worm. They were distant, unsympathetic, and they failed to offer any encouragement,’ said Winning.

Condemnation became standard teaching practice. The priest whom Winning found most ill-tempered and contemptuous was Fr John Conroy, a lecturer in moral theology, who viewed the world in terms of black and white. Frank Cullen described him as possessing a ‘sneering and supercilious manner’ and although he was tough on himself, the students believed he reserved his true bile for them. In classes, he dismissed them as lazy and ignorant. If the priesthood was already held in an exalted regard, Conroy cranked it a few notches higher. He inspired fear and conjured up a spectre of trouble. Winning felt that at any moment he could be branded an unsuitable candidate and sent home. Instead, he and the entire college were sent to London.

By the summer of 1945, the college in Bearsden was in such a state of disrepair that the hierarchy decided to close it down and allow the myriad faults to be tackled simultaneously. With space at a premium across Scotland, the students and teachers were forced to relocate to St Joseph’s Missionary College, close to Hendon aerodrome in the Mill Hill area of London, twelve miles from the city centre. The disconsolate air of Bearsden was unfortunately also packed up and shipped south.

The college was the principal centre of education for the Mill Hill Fathers, a religious order founded a hundred years earlier by Bishop (later Cardinal) Vaughan, and the Scots were blamed for the current overcrowding. The students were unpopular with their hosts. Talk during breakfast was banned and instead they were forced to listen in silence as a senior priest read out chunks of The Imitation of Christ in French, followed by an English translation, which was scarcely an aid to digestion.

Father Conroy, meanwhile, grew increasingly dictatorial; he launched a series of talks each Sunday evening, which Winning believed served no greater purpose than to censure the clergy. Each student was also expected to spend thirty minutes every day in manual labour. When given a choice, Winning opted for tailoring in the belief that he would be stitching ‘loin clothes for wee black kids’. Instead, he had to darn holes in trousers belonging to members of staff. Even visits to central London were prohibited, along with any visits to private homes. On one occasion, Winning broke the rule. Their daily constitutionals took Winning and his two colleagues to Edgware, close to the home of his mother’s cousin, William Canning. The three boys paid a visit, but Winning was unable to enjoy the reunion for fear that the visit would be discovered. On this occasion he was lucky. But three other friends who decided to sneak a visit to Madame Tussaud’s waxworks were less fortunate. Riding on the tube home, the trio were spotted by the vice-rector and promptly expelled.

On 13 May 1946, a workman, tackling repairs to the roof of St Peter’s College, accidentally set it alight. The fire quickly spread, gutting the main building but providing a spark of good fortune for the brighter students. In order to combat overcrowding, the decision was taken to reopen, as quickly as possible, the foreign colleges in Spain, France and Rome. Two weeks after the fire, Fr James Ward wrote to Winning with the promise of escape:

My Dear Tom,

By now you will have heard the sad news of the destruction of Bearsden College – to us here it was like the death of a dear friend. Fortunately no lives were lost, the chapel is saved – it is a strange affair, but God’s will [and] that is exactly how His Grace has accepted it. Now, let me whisper something in your ear (not for anybody else) – I’m glad you want to go to Rome because you are definitely going, along with seven others – you see, my undercover man has really been busy, eh? You do know that I would not joke about this, don’t you? I am thrilled that you have been chosen to go to Rome and am really proud of your success – thank the Good God for his kindness to you, thank him to keep you humble as you have always been – that virtue is the secret of your success. I am sure that Jack will be delighted when I tell him and will be able to give you some knowledge of the life there … Congratulations on your good fortune – don’t forget your dear pal! Best love and prayers, Jim

Winning was delighted. He was bound for the centre of the Catholic universe. Rome carried not only a reputation as the training ground for the brightest of students, but held out the promise of a wonderful cultural experience. The basilica of St Peter’s, the frescos of Michelangelo, the presence of the Pope – what he had previously only read about in the inky pages of the Catholic Observer he was about to witness for real. The question he continued to nurture in his mind, however, was: could he cope?

THREE (#ulink_39e36735-e618-5b4f-a119-bb3f9d516775)

To the City by the Tiber (#ulink_39e36735-e618-5b4f-a119-bb3f9d516775)

‘Perhaps the most intimate quality of Roman formation is the personal love and loyalty it nurtures for the Vicar of Christ and the Holy See.’

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THOMAS WINNING

When Pope Clement VIII founded the Scots College in Rome in the year 1600, his goal was more than just the provision of education for the sons of Catholic noblemen condemned to a strictly Protestant schooling since the Reformation forty years before. A leading pope of the Counter-Reformation, Clement VIII now wished for a foundry for casting Catholic agents whose ambition was to overthrow the might of Protestantism in Scotland and return the nation to the faith of their fathers and their fathers before them.