Father Bob

by Sue Williams

  Yet James had started out well enough. Born in 1883, he developed into a smart boy academically, and a talented musician, winning prizes both for English language and violin at his Marist Brothers school. He had a real flair for words, a love of literature and a gift for performance. Following in the footsteps of his father, he loved declaiming passages from his favourite Shakespeare plays – Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello – and also the works of Scotland’s national poet, Robert Burns. But when he left school at the turn of the century, he was unable to find work locally, and it seems it was then that he began his downhill slide. Again, he took his father’s lead. The old man had always liked a tipple, and his son soon developed a taste for it too.

  Finally, James chose the worst path possible for a man who liked to drink: he went to sea. Drinking had always been very much an occupational hazard of the seafaring culture, with many sailors binge-drinking whenever they hit shore, and James joined in with gusto. His problem was that he couldn’t stop. It began when he joined the merchant navy, serving on a ship transporting passengers between Glasgow, the US and Canada. It continued through the outbreak of war in 1914, when the ship was used as a troop ship, bringing men, guns and stores from Canada. And it didn’t even halt when he quit in 1916 and signed up to the Royal Navy. What’s more, throughout his years at sea, his family fondly believed he was training to be an engineer. He was, in fact, serving as a lowly assistant cook and then as an assistant storekeeper.

  By the time he was discharged from the Navy in 1918, having served on no fewer than six different ships in less than two years, he was drinking heavily and his family didn’t know what to do with him. When questioned, he said that one of his ships had been torpedoed at sea, and the trauma had driven him to drink. Many privately doubted that story was true and it was later discovered that none of the ships on which he’d sailed had any record of ever having been attacked. As he alienated more and more friends and members of the family, they finally arrived at a solution: he should start a new life in the former colonies. The Australian Government at that time was subsidising the passage of migrants it deemed suitable under its White Australia policy, so it was decided James should make the move there, along with a number of other Scots in search of a better life.

  James landed in Port Melbourne in 1922, at the age of thirty-nine. As soon as he arrived, he met up again with a local girl from back home in Springburn, Annie McLaughlin, who was six years younger. She was charmed by the handsome and charismatic ex-serviceman who recited poetry, quoted Shakespeare soliloquies, played the piano and sang in a beautiful, strong voice. She also loved the funny stories he told, although she could never be quite sure whether they were true or not. After a whirlwind romance, the couple married in November of the same year.

  Annie was a sweet, gentle, pious young Catholic, who’d come over to Australia the year before hoping to better herself. The third of six children – five of them girls – to a brickmaker father and a mother who worked as a domestic, she hadn’t had an easy life. Born in 1888, she was only twenty-six when her mother died of stomach cancer at the age of fifty. While her father by then had worked his way up to a job as a railway guard in Glasgow, there still wasn’t much money to go round. ‘But they would have had a bit of a working-class chip on the shoulder and the kind of bolshie attitude that comes from working in the brickworks,’ says a cousin of the family, another priest, Father Willy Slavin. ‘They would have been ambitious to get on in the world.’

  So when Annie’s younger brother Matthew announced he, his wife Grace and their new baby Molly were off for a new life in the promised land, Australia, she started thinking about migrating too. When they wrote back that things were going well, and her widowed father broke the news he’d decided to marry again, Annie, a dressmaker and milliner, and her older sister Margaret, known as Meg, realised they would no longer be needed to look after him, and decided to take the plunge. A year later, their younger sister Sadie joined them. ‘We’d all been very poor back there, and they thought life would be better in Australia,’ says Molly today. ‘They came over hoping life would be easier.’

  It was lonely starting off again in a new country, so it was only natural that Annie and her siblings socialised mostly with the people they’d known back home. James Maguire was on his own, so he similarly often sought out the company of Annie and her family. She would have been aware of his drinking but, flattered by his attention and enjoying his company, she’d already begun falling in love with him. Like generations of women before her, she doubtless ignored his bad habits in the fervent hope she’d manage to change him. In addition, Annie’s family wasn’t nearly as well off as James’s, and she may well have imagined she was marrying up in the world. It didn’t take long for her to realise that she’d actually done the exact opposite. On their wedding day, with her brother Matthew giving her away, James even turned up at the church half-cut.

  The couple rented a small cottage in Darebin Road, Thornbury, and James, always so good at English, managed to find a job as a proofreader with The Herald, Melbourne’s afternoon broadsheet newspaper, and wrote occasional sports reports for the twice-weekly Sporting Globe. For a while all seemed as if it would turn out well. The couple’s first child, a girl they called Eileen, was born in 1923, and their second child, Kathleen, came the next year. Their first son arrived in 1926 and was christened James, immediately known as Jim. Another daughter, Marguerite, came along in 1929 but died after only seven months, from meningococcal meningitis. Annie was understandably distraught. ‘That was very hard for her,’ says Molly. ‘Particularly on top of everything else.’

  Finally, in 1934, eleven years after their first baby and eight years after their youngest, Jim, Annie had her last child, Bobby. Fourteen-year-old Molly was chosen to be his godmother and, in accordance with old Scottish custom, she walked with him in her arms all the way from his parents’ home to the church for the christening, bravely trying not to notice the disapproving glances of passers-by who assumed she must be the under-age mother. ‘I cringed when I saw them staring,’ she says. But as the rest of the family gathered to mark Bobby’s debut in the church, his father, after a hard night’s drinking, didn’t even turn up.

  Young Bobby didn’t have the happiest of childhoods. By the time he came along, the family was really struggling. James’s drinking had been gradually growing worse, and the newspaper’s hours didn’t help. Back then, people in his position would generally start at 5 a.m. and have a break at about 10.30 a.m., when they’d head over to the Phoenix Hotel close by on Flinders Street for a ‘heart-starter’ before returning to the office. They’d then work through until 2 p.m. when the final edition came out, and adjourn back to the pub for the serious drinking of the day, up to the six o’clock swill – the last-minute heavy drinking until closing time. ‘And when he had to write his sports stories, he did that mostly in the pub,’ says Molly. ‘He spent a lot of time in there. He was quite good when he wasn’t drinking, but that wasn’t very often.’

  On payday, Annie often took her oldest child, Eileen, along with her to meet James as he left work to see if they could intercept him and take some of his wages before he spent it all on drink. ‘Sometimes they’d manage it, but often they wouldn’t,’ says Eileen’s daughter Peta Knights. ‘As the oldest, Eileen had a pretty hard time. They were so short of money, she had to leave school at fourteen to go to work to earn a wage, when she’d won a scholarship to stay on, and dearly wanted to be a journalist. But it just wasn’t possible.’

  In the weeks where there was money, there’d be enough food to go round, and occasionally new clothes. But that was the exception. ‘He often spent all his wages in the pub on grog and smokes when he left work, so he’d have nothing left by the time he came home,’ says Jim. ‘He was just a weak bludger. There often wasn’t much food, but Mum would do her best and give us what there was, and only have something herself if there was anything left. And if there was nothing, then it was just bad luck.’

  Desp
ite trying to make ends meet and having an errant husband and four children to look after, Annie was also taking in mending from neighbours and friends, and picking up some machining work at home to try to raise extra funds to pay the bills. Often, it still wasn’t enough, and the family was forced to move house a number of times when the rent fell due and they didn’t have the money to pay.

  One time, they went to live in a weatherboard shack at bayside Black Rock, a particularly poor area where most families lived on credit with tradesmen and shopkeepers, according to local parish historians, scavenging wood from the foreshore scrub to provide heat in the winter. For the kids, though, that scrub was a delight. They’d revel in running down to the beach, and playing cowboys and Indians among the bushes. But with James now coming home drunk every day of the week, that wasn’t to last. A number of times neighbours would knock on the family’s door to let them know he was lying, drunk, in the gutter somewhere – from beer, wine or sometimes, even more desperately, Bay Rum, an oil used in the preparation of men’s cologne and toiletries. It often fell to Jim to go out to find him, pick him up and half-carry, half-drag him back home.

  ‘The neighbours there were probably twenty paces away, so they wouldn’t have heard the violence indoors when he’d been drinking and made it home,’ says Jim. Sometimes, he’d vent his rage on Eileen, too. ‘She got the brunt of her father’s anger, a lot,’ says Peta. ‘Much of the time it would be directed at her mum, but she had it tough too.’

  James chose his victims carefully. He did hit Jim at first but when Jim grew in height and strength and stood up to him, he backed off. ‘While he picked on Mum, I don’t remember him attacking us so much,’ says Jim. ‘If he had, I think Mother would have stabbed him with a kitchen knife. She wouldn’t have let him do that. We only survived because of her. She was a saint.’

  And, of course, she couldn’t leave her husband. A devout Catholic, she’d married for better or for worse, and she would never have dreamt of breaking her vows. Besides, how could she possibly survive on her own with four kids, and no form of social security whatsoever in those days? ‘She would have gone from nothing to minus nothing,’ says Jim, bluntly. ‘And even with him, God knows how many houses we were kicked out of. He buggered it up each time.’

  Already, this was all having a profound effect on Bobby’s psyche. Living in such grinding poverty, he came to know intimately the desperation of having no money, of being constantly hungry, of going without, and of not having anywhere to turn for help. He had cousins and uncles and aunts, but they all gave the family a wide berth; they didn’t want to know. His father often said he wanted to return home to Scotland, but the family back there didn’t respond when he wrote begging for the money for a ticket. Instead, they all stayed on in Australia, living on the most meagre of rations, with few possessions, and even fewer friends.

  Bobby made do the best he could, often borrowing his brother’s old services overcoat to wear to school, to hide the holes in his hand-me-down pants and the fact that he rarely had socks. It was a grim, exhausting way to live, and it was an experience that would end up colouring the rest of his life. ‘You did whatever you had to do to survive,’ he says.

  Throughout it all, however, he looked up to his long-suffering mum and saw her, as Jim did, as a saint, a model of Christian piety, patience and forgiveness. He only wished he could be more like her. And with his brother and sisters so much older, at times too, he felt she was his only real ally. One of his happiest memories was when she took him away for a weekend, just the two of them, to a guesthouse at Daylesford, the spa town 100 kilometres north-west of Melbourne. He still has a photo of himself sitting on the side of a hill, in shorts, an old jumper and worn shoes, grinning.

  Bobby in Daylesford.

  ‘Lord knows where she found the money from for that,’ he says. ‘I think she was worried that I was going under in the emotional cauldron of home so she scraped together anything she could just to get me away for a few days.’ Kathleen, the sister just ten years older, also tried to help. She took him to the movies a couple of times and to football games at Essendon.

  As for his father, Bobby was by turn afraid of and confused by him. ‘I couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t stop drinking, even though he could see how much his family was suffering,’ he says today. ‘It didn’t make sense to me. I couldn’t work him out at all.’

  Bobby was fast becoming a bit of a loner. Looking on, others could see he was having trouble coping and took a kindly interest in him. One of those was the first parish priest of St Joseph’s at Black Rock, Father John Gorry. Another was a nun, Sister Claude, from the nearby convent in Sandringham opened by the Presentation Sisters, an order that had come over from Ireland. Sister Claude had become close to Annie and considered her a wonderful Catholic woman, and agreed to keep a close eye on her youngest son at the little local church school. ‘I think she also thought Mum was a saint and felt she could maybe mould Bobby into a saint as well,’ says Jim. ‘I was more interested in fishing and pinching eggs, but the Church got its hands on him early.’

  James was eventually sacked from The Herald – no mean feat in those days of hard-drinking journalism – and he went back to sea, finding another job on the cargo steamer Kowhai, which sailed regularly between Melbourne and Tasmania. The money worries continued, however, and there were yet more times when the rent was owing and couldn’t be paid, and the family would hurriedly move on to the next place. Once, they lived in two different run-down old houses on different sides of the same narrow street in Prahran, and another time in East St Kilda. Annie was frequently seen walking purposefully down to the local pawnshop in an attempt to borrow some cash to make ends meet. Sometimes, she’d be carrying something from the house, like a faded old painting in a frame, hoping the pawnbroker would be sympathetic enough to accept it and lend her five shillings.

  Back then, life was always a battle, and one that helped form Bobby’s attitudes, opinions and direction forever. It’s not that there was even much opportunity to rail against his family’s circumstances. When times got particularly tough, the last resort for his mum was always to write home to the couple’s families in Scotland to ask for help. If they ever agreed to send anything, they’d send it directly to her rather than risk her husband drinking it before she saw it. Two or three times, a hundred pounds would arrive, which felt like a king’s ransom to the ragged little family.

  At other times, she’d simply take Bobby by the hand, and the pair of them would make the journey by tram into town to pawn her wedding ring.

  Perhaps it’s not so surprising that Bobby would later choose to lead a celibate life as a priest over a secular one with marriage and children, drank alcohol only sparingly and had such tremendous empathy with victims of addictions, whether that be alcohol, drugs or gambling. He’d learnt from his own childhood exactly what it was like to be a kid with little joy in his life, or hope for the future. The old Jesuit saying ‘Give me the child until he is seven, and I will show you the man’ has rarely ever been so true.

  3

  BYO and DIY

  School for young Bobby Maguire offered little respite from the battles going on at home.

  He started at the small Catholic primary school Our Lady of Lourdes in Armadale in January 1940, just four months after Prime Minister Robert Menzies announced Australia’s entry into World War II. With troops going over to fight in Europe, North Africa and South-East Asia, the fear of a Japanese invasion at home loomed large. As a result, the school held regular drills during which the children had to race to the nearby park, where trenches had been dug for emergency shelter from air raids. Everyone had black rubber plugs to put in their mouths in the event of an attack.

  ‘The idea was that the ground all around would shake if a bomb hit, a bit like an earthquake,’ says Bob. ‘So having this in your mouth would help protect your teeth and stop you breaking your jaw. We were ready at any time for the Japanese to arrive, and we’d often play in the trenches
, pretending we were fighting them.’

  His best mate Brian Harman, who lived around the corner from him, remembers the hours they used to spend in those trenches with their war games, taking it in turns to play the heroic Australian soldiers and the dastardly Japanese enemy. With Brian six months younger, Bobby relished playing the captain in charge. ‘He was good at giving orders, even back then,’ says Brian. ‘But apart from playing a bit of football and cricket in the park, we didn’t really see him that much. I think he spent a lot of time at home, helping his mum. We all played out in the street a lot together, and lived in each other’s houses, but I don’t remember ever going to his. We didn’t see so much of him. He seemed a bit of a lonely boy.’

  Most of the time at school, he was still quite introverted, quiet and conscientious. ‘As a boy, he was always a bit shy, but then when he was relaxed, he could be very talkative,’ says his aunt Molly Langman. ‘It was a question of confidence, really.’ It had also become a habit to keep his head down, doing his work with the minimum of fuss, and avoiding attracting too much attention from the teachers. He’d learnt that trick at home, making sure his father didn’t notice him. He wasn’t particularly sociable or adventurous. ‘There wasn’t room for that in my life,’ he says. ‘I wasn’t particularly interested in trying new things or changing the world. I was too busy just trying to survive.’