FM Conway - Going the Extra Mile

Early Days 1

M y father, Frank – full name Francis Michael Conway – was born on April 11 th 1921 on a small family farm in Broughderg, a hamlet deep in the countryside between Omagh and Cookstown in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland. He was the youngest of seven children, with five brothers – Daniel (1909), Barney (1910), Patrick (1911), Bartholomew (1914), John (1915) – and a sister, Mary (1918). Frank never knew his father, Joseph Conway, who died at the age of fifty, shortly before Frank was born. And he wasn’t destined to spend much time with his mother either. A few months after Joseph’s death, Mary Anne Conway (née Gillen), who was only thirty-seven years old, married again – to a local man called Patrick McGuigan. She moved into his house and started another family. They had two children of their own, and they left the Conway children to look after the farm pretty much by themselves. Life was desperately tough for the young Conways, and so, as was only to be expected, the family gradually split up. The farm wasn’t large enough to support them all, and so they began to look further afield. The eldest brother, Daniel, set off for Canada, and was never heard of again. Barney went to Glasgow to look for work. Bartholomew (Bart) went to join him a few years later. John worked on the railways for a while, and then found a job at a factory in Leeds making road rollers with Thomas Green & Son. Mary married a man who worked at the Docks, Patrick Collins, and shortly afterwards they moved to Sydenham. Frank stayed on at the farm during the war years. Then, in 1948, he decided to join his brothers Barney and Bart in Glasgow. The trouble was that Frank didn’t have any money, and certainly not enough to pay the boat passage across to Scotland. Life on the farm was very hard, and there was no cash to spare for anything. The

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