Dad's Grandparents

My Grandfather was an Irishman who had joined the Lancashire Constabulary and was at the time of his death, in 1907, a Station Sergeant, which was quite an important position in those days as he allocated all the rounds for the various policemen on the beat. Anyone who has seen the American series' of police procedural scenes will know how they still allocate in America very similarly to how we did years ago. It's surprising how these habits keep on. In America you'll find that it seems to work very well there. You've got the various precincts, if you remember the series in LA, California.

Now, my Grandfather met my Grandmother whilst living in Glasgow. He was staying there with his Uncle who was an Inspector in the Scottish police. Having been seconded at some stage from the Royal Irish Constabulary in relation to the Irish menace of the Finnians?. The story is that my Grandfather was banished to Glasgow by his Father, who at the time was the Station Sergeant, similar to the position my Grandfather got himself, in Wexford. Now it appeared that young Mr Collins at that time was very fond of playing the game Hurley, the Irish game. His Father was a staunch Presbyterian and didn't really care for Irish games, especially Hurley.

Anyway, there was this important match and he had to get off early to play. So he decided that the only way to do it, if he wanted his dinner before he went, was to alter the Station clock. Now, of course this was a very serious offence because it meant that all the bookings in and out were all wrong. When it came to light, and it did quite quickly, his Father was so annoyed, and it was such a serious thing, that he was shipped off, forthwith, without much ado really to be sorted out by his Uncle in Glasgow, which was well away from any silly Hurley games!

So my Grandfather as a young man there, before he could join any police force or anything, met this young lady who was from the Scottish Hebridian Islands, or the Western Islands. Her name was Máiréad (or Margaret in English). She was a Gaelic speaker and didn't really learn English until she met my Grandfather, or she was just in the process of learning it when she met him. All her life from all accounts she spoke with that beautiful lilting Western Isles tongue in English, which sounds so very nice and you can hear it sometimes on Scottish programmes. It's a beautiful form of the English language. Now, the strange thing about my Grandmother and her Irish connections was she wasn't at all worried about anything. But she was very worried about anything Scottish, and she would never go back to Scotland, and disliked the Scots most intensely. Narrow minded bigoted fools in her opinion, and she would never ever go back, not for funerals, not for anything. Grandpa apparently had to stand in, and other relatives if she was supposed to go, she wouldn't go.

So there we are, there's the Collins family in Ireland. A quite large family and they were all either in the Irish Customs or the police.

One of my Great Grandfather's brothers had gone to the police force in England, again in Lancashire. He was again recruited because of the Finnian menace in England and Scotland at that time, so that when my Grandfather became able to think about a new job, he didn't join the Scottish police but went to his Uncle in Accrington where he was in the police force. He became a policeman in the Lancashire constabulary and served in various positions all aroud Lancashire before ending in Rawtenstall, and when he was nearly 47 he died. So that was the short sort of life that he led. My Aunties always said that it was because he had been very badly cold and suffered a great deal, including a bout of pneumonia about 10 years before he died on the moors around Bolton where he was in action against a large poaching gang. The weather was vile and cold, it was winter, anyway it hastened his death at an early age.