FM Conway - Going the Extra Mile

Going the Extra Mile

day, we don’t know the full story, and he himself must have told several versions of it. What we do know is this: when Frank arrived at the port, he had a sheep tucked under his arm. He sold the sheep, then and there, at the port to pay for his ticket on the boat. It’s not entirely clear where the sheep came from. In one version of the story, he kept the sheep hidden in a secret field away from the farm, fattening it up until he was ready to go. In another version, he ‘borrowed’ the sheep from a field somewhere along the way to the port. Whatever the truth of the matter, at some point in 1948, with the help of the sheep, Frank arrived in Glasgow. We know very little about his life in Glasgow. He had come in search of work. Perhaps, like many others before him, he had come over for the annual potato picking on the big farms in Scotland. But whatever work he did find, it was clearly not what he was looking for, and after a couple of years, he decided to move south. Both he and his brother Bart, whose young wife had died very suddenly of a weak heart, went down to Sydenham, and moved in with their sister, Mary, and her husband, Patrick. Bart was an excellent kerb layer, and worked with Frank in the early days of the company. There is still some of his work over in Wallington, where he laid some sets by the railway bridge. He was a hard worker, and was said by his friends to be ‘a heavy man on the beer’. Frank was a hard worker, too, and a quick learner. And he knew his own mind. Soon after he had moved south, he found the first of the things he had been looking for. In June 1951, Frank spent the evening at ‘The Harp’, an Irish club in New Cross. There he met a girl

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