It’s now over two years since my mother’s funeral, her body returned to the church in Coventry where she had worshipped for so long. Born and brought up in Ireland, she died in a coastal care home close to me. Yet for eighty years Frances Smith had lived in her adopted city, much of that time in the same house. Taken together, Frances’s close identification with Coventry and her increasingly relaxed view of Catholicism revealed much about who she was and how she viewed the world.
St John Fisher is a bright, spacious, generously furnished building, light on guilt-inducing statuary, intimidating confessionals and ill-lit side chapels. Mid-century modernism and the second Vatican Council meant Catholic parish churches differed little in design from the Anglican outstations of Coventry’s stunning new cathedral, consecrated in 1962. Within a young, fast-growing congregation were families where the main wage earner was ‘making good money on the track.’ Coventry was a vibrant and prosperous car city, its citizens’ keen sense of collective identity and civic pride forged by the Blitz and consolidated by an ambitious programme of reconstruction. However real its achievements postwar Coventry had obvious flaws, witness a thinly veiled suspicion of first-generation Afro-Caribbean and south Asian migrants. Concentrated in the city’s poorest areas, these recent arrivals challenged the model of cultural assimilation promoted by local churches and the city council.
Labour’s thirty-year control of ‘The Corporation’ saw local leaders become household names. They cultivated long resident working-class families – Coventry had a long history of nonconformity and organised labour – and they embraced successive waves of migration. The Depression hit the Midlands hard, but ‘sunrise industries’ like cars and machine tools attracted workers from areas ravaged by mass unemployment: migrants from south Wales reinforced Coventry’s reputation as a city where rugby union cut across class barriers. The Welsh were mostly nonconformist, but not so other incomers.
The 1930s saw Irish men start to settle in the city. Large families and limited work opportunities in the Irish Free State meant increased migration to England. Recent arrivals either married local girls (alienating in-laws given the Catholic Church’s insistence on conversion) or in due course brought young wives from home. More men arrived during the Second World War, most of them working in local factories but a sizeable number joining the British Army. Coventry’s hospitals already employed Irish-trained nurses, but the onset of the National Health Service saw freshly qualified doctors and dentists leave Ireland to set up GP practices and dental surgeries in the city. Cultivated by the local clergy, this fledgling professional middle class acquired a privileged place within local parishes, their patients and fellow worshippers suitably deferential. St John Fisher was an exception, not least as the church had only two parish priests in half a century, both proudly proletarian.
These days worshippers at St John Fisher come from across the world, many of them working in social care or the NHS, but in its early decades the congregation was almost wholly white and European. Religion, reinforced by faith-based schools, remained at the core of respective Irish, Polish and Italian heritages – for second and third generations family ties and traditions prevailed in the face of aggressive secularism, even when mass attendance every Sunday and holy day was no longer the norm. Among the early worshippers the presence of so many Poles was a story of betrayal and exile; the presence of so many Italians a consequence of early-century enterprise and mid-century defeat. The shadow of the Second World War loomed large for everyone, not just survivors of the Blitz.
The Spanish and Portuguese enjoyed a token presence, as indeed did the English – unlike Lancashire, the west Midlands had no tradition of working-class recusancy. By weight of numbers the Irish dominated the parish, including the school. Built in the mid-fifties to an open-plan design, the classrooms of St John Fisher RC Primary School embodied a fresh progressive environment. In theory the curriculum acknowledged these new ideas, but in practice the first teachers appointed were almost all Irish and instructed to inculcate an ultramontane belief system little changed in a hundred years. This was an undisguised process of indoctrination rooted in rote-learning of the Catechism. Few parents challenged an approach so radically different from the education that non-Catholic primary schoolchildren enjoyed at this time. Someone who did was my mother.
Frances Margaret Reid was born in 1920, and like her elder sister was well over a hundred when she died. Good genes meant their three brothers might have enjoyed similar longevity had they not lived lives of long hours and arduous labour. The children of a Galway tenant farmer and his wife (another centenarian), my mum and her siblings had few material possessions growing up, but they did benefit from plentiful exercise and a nutritious diet; with an abundance of vegetables, fresh milk and poultry, plus a salmon poached from the local stream every Sunday, it’s no wonder the girls enjoyed such good health. Both mother and aunt were bright, but in different ways. The younger resourceful and receptive to change, the older scholarly and respectful of tradition; one saw no point in learning Irish and looked to the wider world, the other enthusiastically embraced a convent education and sought to continue her studies.
Harsh reality ended my aunt’s ambition of going to university, and she moved to Dublin. My mother soon followed, intending to join her sister in a dress shop. Frances left Galway for Dublin in late May 1936, but via England. The intention was to stay just a week with her brother in Coventry, but when she saw a haberdashery advertising a job my mum applied. To secure the position she lied about her age, advancing her sixteenth birthday several weeks to 26th May. Henceforth she celebrated her birthday in late May not mid-June. When twenty years ago I found her birth certificate and queried the inconsistency my mum claimed her father’s poor command of the Irish language had left him confused when registering the date of birth. In due course I worked out what had happened, but I’m sure my father never knew. In the eyes of the British state my mother’s DOB was 26/5/20, and this de facto creation of a new persona symbolised the future Frances Smith’s wholehearted embrace of England, and of her beloved Coventry. In every sense of the term, my mum started a new life.
Frances found digs with Emily and Charlie Butler, becoming the daughter that they never had. She looked after the couple in old age, with ‘Auntie Pem’ like a grandmother to me. This was unsurprising as I scarcely saw my Irish grandma, the visits to Ireland tailing off early in my life. As a still relatively young woman my mum would go years without returning home; an absence I scarcely considered as a child and as a young man, but which when older astonished me. This reluctance to return home wasn’t because she lacked the means. In fact, the very opposite applied.
My mother’s reinvention started with her voice. Unless you listened closely you would never guess she was Irish, but neither would you assume she came from Coventry. She never took elocution lessons, but it was as if she had. When my mum put on airs and graces she could sound comically posh; but her default voice was that of lower middle-class England, unidentifiable, anonymous, and slightly flawed (the odd grammatical error that no-one, least of all me, would ever pick her up on). I know no-one from Ireland who has lost their accent, but my mother did. She had an incentive given the backlash in Coventry when in August 1939 the IRA planted a bomb in the city centre, killing five people and injuring seventy. Meeting my father, with his low church anti-Papist parents, gave Frances a further reason to downplay her Irish roots.
An accomplished cricketer and ballroom dancer, and a keen motorcyclist, Alf Smith worked in an aircraft factory. Unsurprisingly, my mum passed on cricket catering but she quickly proved the ideal dance partner and the perfect pillion passenger. In autumn 1940 she proved her credentials as a partner for life, when on the terrible night of 14 November dad was temporarily blinded by a phosphorous explosion. My mum tracked him down to a Black Country asylum requisitioned as an emergency hospital. Imagine my father’s feelings when in darkness he heard, ‘Alf, it’s Frances…’. Relieved and grateful my grandparents lost their prejudices in an instant, and yet they still refused to enter a Catholic church when Alf and Frances married in March 1945.
There’s no doubt my mother had guts. She served in the East End as a St John Ambulance nurse at the height of the Blitz, and back in Coventry she crossed a devastated city on the morning of 15 November 1940 to report for work – a stupefied gateman sent her straight home. She worked at the Standard in the wages department. This was the ideal job for Frances who, though never mean, was singularly astute when it came to cash. When the war ended she borrowed the money for a house deposit, and thereafter although she never scrimped she always saved; helped by an inheritance from her oldest friend my mother died a modestly wealthy woman. Not that she was ever hard up, having married a man whose future circumstances – and whose view of the world – were transformed by his having secured a commission. Blooded in Normandy, Captain Alf Smith, Royal Warwickshire Regiment, held a series of staff appointments in Brussels and Berlin before being demobbed in December 1947. There followed a horrendous winter in the newly built, barely furnished house before a rapid promotion at Armstrong Whitworth Aviation saw my dad’s impressive administrative and managerial skills properly recognised. From overseeing AWA’s vehicle fleet he rose steadily through the factory hierarchy of Hawker Siddeley to retire as a senior manager at British Aerospace. From the shopfloor to the boardroom no one ever had a word to say against Alf Smith, a true gentleman, generous in spirit and in kind.
My parents never left their neat terraced house. Ironically this reluctance to move up the property market consolidated their place within the aspirational middle class. My father never forgot his working-class roots; it wasn’t in his nature, and anyway his family were an ever-present reminder. For my mother, however, her family were the other side of the Irish Sea. On balance friends counted more than relatives, with social activities focused on personal relationships developed within the workplace. My father and his peers were the last generation within British manufacturing industry where workplace qualifications and wartime experience counted as much if not more than a university degree. Only late in his career did dad have regular contact with graduates, and as a transport manager in the 1950s his drivers looked on him as the strict but kindly company commander they’d responded well to in North Africa or Burma (my father and his fellow managers ate in The Mess and always answered the phone with their surnames: ‘Smith speaking…’).
My dad, his colleagues and their wives were first-generation middle class, all too evident across Britain as the years of austerity turned into the years of relative affluence. Generous salaries and workplace perks ensured ever-increasing disposable income, and disproportionately so for my parents given their modest mortgage repayments. As early as 1963 they took me to France, as early as 1960 they installed central heating and extended the house, and as early as 1959 they sent me to a fee-paying school – a non-Catholic fee-paying school.
My parents were married seven years before I was born; a long time to wait for a first child. This may explain why my mother reacted so badly to two unexpected pregnancies in our extended family, each thirty years apart. She always gave the impression of a relaxed view towards sex outside of marriage, but her behaviour was frankly appalling when faced with the unplanned consequences. To be fair she redeemed herself in due course. How would she have behaved had a daughter revealed that she was pregnant prior to getting married? We’ll never know as I was an only child. An only child raised as a Catholic, in accordance with the Church’s dictat, and with my father’s acquiescence.
My mum made sure I could read and write before starting at St John Fisher. Despite an inauspicious start (on day one a belated arrival in reception left me drawing a disturbingly violent battle scene while the rest of the class depicted ‘Our Lady of Lourdes appearing to St Bernadette.’), I effortlessly accommodated a teaching environment in which the Holy Family and the Pope loomed a lot larger than Janet and John and the Queen. In time I became dimly aware that my home background was different from that of my peers. As an altar server my cotta and cassock were new not hand-me-downs, the costume for Hiawatha was bought not made, none of my classmates read Knowledge magazine or a twelve-volume encyclopaedia, and above all, the inside of our house did not look like that of a cottage in rural Ireland: downstairs there was no Marian iconography, no ‘Sacred Heart of Jesus’ and no statues of the saints. Nor was there was much of this stuff upstairs. My mother did not surround herself with Catholic statuary partly because hers was ‘a mixed marriage’ but primarily because she nurtured a domestic environment no different from that of her – universally Protestant – friends.
To be fair, my mum was genuinely ecumenical: she often accompanied my dad to the local Anglican church, she was a guide in the Cathedral’s Chapel of Unity, she saw no sense in celibacy, and she scorned Rome’s insistence on ‘The One True Faith.’ Because – with me reluctantly in tow – she always attended mass on Sundays and days of obligation and in Holy Week, my mother displayed her credentials as a ‘good Catholic.’ Only later, when such devotion became less visible, did I realise that her engagement was minimal (no benediction, no stations of the cross other than Good Friday, and confession once or twice a year); and that as the years passed this shrank to solely mass on Sunday. Mum had clearly felt a need to fulfil her parental requirement and set an example, especially when she decided that my education was best served in a non-Catholic school.  My father made the financial commitment, but it was Frances who confronted an angry headmaster, informing Mr Hume that I was leaving from St John Fisher for King Henry VIII – anyone familiar with martyrdom in the Henrician Reformation must surely appreciate the irony.
King Henry VIII Junior School was/is on the south side of the city in the heartland of the local bourgeoisie. Previously I walked to school, but now I relied on car and bus to get me to and from Warwick Road. The master plan saw my parents pay what then were quite modest fees until I passed my eleven-plus and moved into the senior school. King Henry VIII is today independent, coeducational and expensive to attend, but from 1945 to the mid-1970s it received central funding (‘direct grant’) and was one of Coventry’s two grammar schools for boys. In the final year of junior school my class sat a mock eleven-plus every week; in due course all but one pupil passed the real exam, most of us being placed in the top two streams when we moved up. I later learnt that only one child in my old class at St John Fisher passed the eleven-plus and progressed to Bishop Ullathorne, the city’s Catholic grammar school. Had my mother known this then she would have felt fully vindicated.
Each year at King Henry VIII was organised on a system of strict streaming, with pupils moved up or down at the end of every academic year; an incentive for remaining in the A and Alpha forms was sitting O-levels and thus A-levels a year early. Unsurprisingly, once I found myself struggling in a survival of the fittest based on aggregate performance my mum had no problem with my not opting out of Religious Education – here was a subject like History so I could anticipate high marks. In due course I started attending assembly so I could sing the hymns and not wait silent and bored outside with all the other ‘RCs and Jews.’ Once more my mother had no objection, quietly approving of a son acquainted with both Catholic and Anglican modes of worship.
Half a century later, kneeling beside my mother’s coffin in St John Fisher, I knew that all was in accordance with her wishes. She had received the last rites, and now she was back in her own church for a short service of thanksgiving and farewell. A requiem mass was out of the question given that everyone in the church was either non-Catholic or lapsed; and the first to point this out would have been my mum. A harsh critic would see her as an unprincipled embodiment of upward social mobilisation, dismissing her country and compromising her religion. The reality, however, was that she immersed herself in her adopted city, always grateful for the opportunities it gave her, not least as a wife and a mother. The Galway girl became the Coventry kid, but her affection for Ireland was evident to all. Similarly, her relaxed view of Roman Catholicism, for so long adroitly disguised, demonstrated a strength of personality and a refusal to accept without question dogma, tradition and accepted practice. She had no time for blind obedience, her healthy scepticism reflective of how contemporary Catholics mainly view their faith and their relationship with the Church establishment. Frances Smith was very much her own woman; someone who knew what she wanted and what she believed in. Someone who, like so many women of that generation, across her long life was a force for good – we salute her, and we salute them all.
