The Underworld Captain: From Gangland Goodfella To Army Officer Read online

  From time to time, my parents would talk about Jimmy Boyle. A small-time crook with a vicious streak, Boyle was relatively unknown even after he was jailed for life in 1967 for the murder of ‘Babs’ Rooney. Murder was a crime so frequent in Glasgow that it usually rated merely a few paragraphs in the local media. It was only after he took umbrage at the violent behaviour of prison officers that he achieved near cult status. Boyle’s so-called ‘dirty’ protests at the beatings, cruel treatment and hard conditions inside regularly led to rioting, which brought on headlines and stories about the things he was supposed to have done on the outside before he was sent to prison. Some of these were incredible and made Mum and Dad laugh. Boyle never encouraged anyone to follow his example of violent lawlessness, but the fact was many did.

  I never knew Boyle, but he had stayed with Mum and Dad for a spell when they lived in London. My sister Roseanne, six years older than me, was born while he lodged with my parents and not long after that they all returned to Glasgow.

  I think most people in Springburn knew somebody who was in jail, but then we were so young the word ‘gangster’ meant nothing to us. It was really only when I became a teenager that I came to understand the meaning of the word. Mum and Dad used to tell us a funny story about William ‘Tank’ McGuinness, whose killing in 1976 led to Patrick ‘Paddy’ Meehan being cleared of a murder in Ayr for which he had been jailed. He was given a Royal Pardon and compensation.

  McGuinness used to run about with my uncle Sonny, who was only about five feet tall. The story goes that they would start at one end of Cumberland Street, each on one side of the road, and run to the other end having a competition to see how many people they could slash on the way. I don’t know if there was much truth in this, but that’s what I heard, and it was known that the pair did a lot of bad things together.

  During this early period, our summer holidays were spent in Blairgowrie, in Perthshire, where we stayed for up to seven weeks, picking berries for local market gardens. It was the only time we got to meet our relations, who came from all over Glasgow. Every fortnight Dad or Mum would disappear back to Glasgow. We didn’t know why then, but would later work out they had gone back to sign on, so they could continue picking up the social security handouts on which the whole family had to survive.

  It was a great time, but I remember there seemed to be more drinking and fighting than berry picking. Everyone stayed in camps, with a camp for those from Glasgow, another for the Dundee pickers, a separate one for the Edinburgh crowd, and so on. The camps were very territorial and you were not really meant to stray, but we often found ourselves kicked out of one camp because of the trouble and looking for another that would allow us in. Often we would not be welcome anywhere and on a couple of occasions fortunately managed to find an empty building in the town centre where we would cuddle up next to Mum and Dad until morning and the warmth it brought with it. Even though it was summer, the memory of how cold those nights were remains vivid. We’d wake up shivering and damp, and then head round the pubs to look for other friendly pickers to see if we could get into any of the other camps. Normally we did, but then the whole cycle of drinking and fighting would start again.

  Dad was an alcoholic, and my mum Ellen was a very young and attractive woman who had five kids early in life. A year after Roseanne came James (Jamie), followed by Thomas (Tam), me and then the youngest, John, who, from the day he was born, was known as Pawny. Even he doesn’t know the reason why he got that tag. Looking back, Mum was probably stupid and naive, and I don’t mean that in any cruel sense. Her own dad had been in the forces and she was brought up in an army camp at Carmunnock, on the outskirts of Glasgow. Until her early 20s, she neither smoked nor drank. So often she was on the receiving end of the violence dished out by Dad. He died in December 2009 from cancer and other related illnesses and it was only in later years that I came to realise the reason he lifted his hands to Mum was jealousy. She was attractive to other men, who often looked admiringly at her, although she did nothing to encourage this. It was inevitable that they would split up and lead their separate lives, but after he and Mum parted Dad never remarried. I know he loved Mum more than she could ever understand, but you don’t show someone how fond of them you are by taking your hands to them. That’s what your head and heart are for. Long before he died, Dad knew where he had gone wrong, but of course by then it was too late.

  I was aged five when we went berry picking for the last time. Soon after we returned home, Dad left Mum. As a result of the stress of everything, she had a nervous breakdown and ended up receiving treatment in Woodilee Hospital in the north-east of Glasgow. It meant we children were taken into care. It was our first experience of being split up.

  Pawny went into a nursery, while the rest of us trooped off to Dunoon, on the Cowal Peninsula in Argyll. It had developed as a holiday resort for wealthy Glasgow merchants and many of the beautiful and imposing homes are now hotels and guesthouses. Jamie, Tam and I found ourselves in Dunclutha Children’s Unit, while Roseanne was sent to another school in the town. I actually enjoyed my time here – for the first time, I was warm at night and was being fed three times a day. I had numerous friends and it was a welcome relief to discover there was no bullying or fighting. Even from an early age in Springburn I had constantly had to fight to prove myself. The majority of the time the battles were against the McGoverns. It was the way of life then.

  When social services realised that they had split us up, they saw to it that we were reunited, and so Roseanne and Pawny both came to Dunclutha. They had to move Pawny next to me in my dormitory, as often when staff came in to get us up in the morning I was not in my bed. They soon worked out where I would be: in the nursery, in bed with Pawny. However, the nursery wasn’t next door – reaching it meant leaving my building and crossing the grounds, about 100 metres. I was only five at the time. I still remember that feeling of being so sad and lonely without my sister and brothers right next to me at the beginning of my time in Dunclutha.

  I was enrolled at St Munn’s primary school in Dunoon and fitted in really well. The school had a policy of zero tolerance to bullying, so I did not have to prove myself as much as I had done in Glasgow. And I made a lot of friends, some of whom were the children of serving American sailors based at nearby Holy Loch, where, following the start of the Cold War, the United States Navy based submarines carrying Polaris nuclear weapons. The American kids introduced me to peanut butter and jam pieces, so I would often swap these for my packed lunches. I was delighted at this – especially because they were only too happy to take my spam sandwiches from me.

  At Dunclutha, we all wore the same uniform, which made us all equal; however, it was here that I became aware of a difference existing between Roman Catholics and Protestants. I had wondered why some of my friends went to a different school to me, and someone explained it was because they were Protestant. My mum and dad were Catholic and that’s how we were raised, but there was never any bitterness between us children.

  I don’t know how it came about, but Tam, Pawny and I all became supporters of Glasgow Rangers, while Roseanne and Jamie were Celtic fans. Looking back all these years later, I believe it must have been a case of us going against the grain, or maybe it was because when we went into Dunclutha, we had come from a tough background where confrontation was almost a way of life and so we simply decided to try rubbing the others up the wrong way. If that was the reason, it didn’t work. I recall watching an Old Firm game on television in Dunclutha in the early 1970s and shouting with the Rangers supporters even though I went to the same school as the Celtic fans. Maybe it was that game that sparked my interest in football, but I soon discovered I was pretty good at it.

  Of course there were the odd times when I felt sad, especially when, every now and again, we would have to go to the gymnasium and sit in a big square while prospective foster parents came in and walked around us, more or less pointing to the kids they wanted. The Shannons were never chosen – I honestly tho
ught the reason was because I had bright ginger hair! It was only much later that I realised others were being picked because they didn’t have parents, whereas we were only there because our mum had suffered a breakdown and we would eventually be reunited with her. Despite enjoying Dunclutha and the kindness we were shown there, we longed for the day we would be back with Mum.

  In the meantime, of course, there were consolations. It was during this time that I first came across the game Doctors and Nurses. We all played it, every day and at every opportunity. It was a case of no-holds-barred, and I came to believe it was normal for a boy of six or seven to be behind a shed or under a bed with a girl, even two girls, of the same age playing the game. The occasion I had doubts and wondered if something was wrong was when I went down to the water with a couple of older girls and they disappeared into a hut with an elderly man. I knew they were going inside to play the game with him, and in any case they used to tell me about it. Maybe the reason the girls were at Dunclutha was because they had been the victims of sexual abuse at home. I would never know. I stayed friends with one of them for the next five or six years until we lost contact. I sometimes think about them and hope they ended up happy and settled with someone who took good care of them.

  One of the nurses who worked at Dunclutha took a real shine to me and on odd weekends she would take me to stay with her in Glasgow. She was engaged to be married, probably to an American sailor because she was planning to move there after the wedding. They wanted to take me along, but it never came off, presumably because my mum wouldn’t agree. In any case, there was no way I would have been parted from my sister and brother.

  We stayed at the children’s unit for about two years and during that time Mum only came to visit us once. Dad turned up twice. I put the lack of visits down to Glasgow being a million miles away, as it seemed to us, never realising it took only a ferry and a bus ride to reach Dunoon. Mum’s second visit, however, would change our lives.

  Early in 1974, Mum came to see us, this time to take us away. She had a new partner, James Lafferty, and told us we were all going to live together in a new home she had found. It was new only in the sense that it was different from where we had been previously. Leaving the warmth and cleanliness of Dunclutha, we discovered our new life would centre on a flat at the very top of an old tenement in Kelvinhaugh Street, Anderston. It still had an old communal toilet in the stairs and the place was infested by rats.

  Instead of enjoying three meals a day, a warm bed and people around us who showed their feelings, we were thrown into a world of wooden floorboards and generally all of us sharing one bed with our jackets for blankets. Usually, we would get one meal a day and sometimes that consisted of just a tin of soup among five children and two adults. For a long time, we were drinking our tea from jam jars because we hardly ever seemed to have cups. It was as if I had stepped back in time. Mum may have honestly believed she was doing the best for us, but from the beginning she was struggling with life and found it hard to cope with having all five of us back in the house. For much of the time, it was left to Roseanne to look after us, while we experienced a return to the miserable old days of adults drinking and fighting and us children enduring hunger and cold. We were sometimes going for days with a constant pain brought on by hunger, but there was nothing we could do.

  Eventually, by the age of eight, as a lot of children do when they have problems at home, I decided the time had come for me to move on. Luckily, something happened that made me put the plan on hold.

  Even at that age I knew I had to do things for myself, and that included finding food. One day, when she had some money, Mum bought potatoes, peas and a steak pie for the seven of us for our dinner. I’d seen all this food and the pie made my mouth water. I was hungry, remember, and thought to myself, ‘I’ll just have a wee taste of that.’ Before I knew it, I’d eaten the whole of the inside of the steak pie. Then I ran away from the house. Needless to say, after a process of elimination as to my whereabouts, I was caught out by Mum. By God, what a hiding I took that night. I’ve remembered it ever since because it taught me a harsh lesson; never steal from family and friends, especially food. What hurt most was not the beating, but seeing my sister and brothers go another day without a meal because of my selfishness and greed.

  It is amazing how your mind can come up with ideas for putting money in your pockets to buy food, even when you are young. Just below our home was a very popular pub called Barney’s and the guy who owned it – Barney – was great with all the kids. I think he felt sorry for us and was always giving us crisps and drinks. Soon we started to notice there were a lot of trucks that would park on the street overnight, as there were a few bed and breakfasts around. We were quick to realise the potential here. Along with children from another big neighbouring family, we would ask every driver if they would like their vehicle watched for a few hours or during the night. If they said yes, and gave us a couple of pounds, all was well. If they turned down the offer, then the goods inside became fair game and usually disappeared. It was a protection racket and a profitable one.

  Just down the road was a busy ferry to Ibrox and at times there must have been almost a mile-long queue of lorries parked nose-to-tail. Inside these giant vehicles were cargoes of almost everything imaginable, but we’d pick and choose which loads were likely to be useful. Electrical goods were a real favourite.

  Sometimes a driver who had lost his load would ask around to see if he could find likely culprits and then come to us and buy his equipment back. This was a real starting point for my brothers and me because we soon learned a valuable lesson: if you want something, then go and get it – even if it does not belong to you. At that young age, we had learned that everything had a value. If you could not use it, then sell it and use the proceeds to buy food.

  The reason for all of this was simply hunger. We stole to eat.

  One evening a Mr Kipling van drove up and parked, the driver making off in the direction of a lodging house. We knew he wouldn’t return until the next morning. Cakes were a real luxury for us and we were sure the vehicle was packed full of them. In those days, padlocks on wagons or vans were not as sophisticated or secure as today, and for experienced robbers like us it was only a matter of minutes before we had the doors open.

  It is hard for someone who hasn’t known hunger to understand just how desperate it feels. When you are starving, you eat whatever appears in front of you, and in this case it was cakes. Big, fancy wedding cakes. I hate marzipan and under the icing these cakes were coated with it, but I threw it down my throat as quickly as possible. They were exceedingly good wedding cakes.

  We ate with such desperation it was as though we feared someone was going to come along and take the food from us. Within minutes, we were full of dry cake, coughing and choking, but with bloated stomachs. We then had to think what to do with the uneaten cakes. There was no way we’d throw them away. We decided to save them for later, so we stored them in the stairwell of our tenement. When we went back to check on them, just a few minutes later, the cakes were literally teeming with rats. They were everywhere. Soon, not a crumb was left.

  Sometimes our money-making schemes would go wrong. One night, we broke into a new factory at the bottom of our street, thinking it was a clothing unit. Imagine our horror when we found that all it contained were nuts and bolts! The sensible thing would have been to leave. Instead, in our anger and frustration, we foolishly set about wrecking the place. In the course of throwing boxes of nuts and bolts around, we obviously made too much noise and as a result the police came and caught us.

  I learned a lot of lessons that day. One in particular was that if ever something happened in our area, the police automatically assumed the Shannon family was to blame. I tried to keep out of trouble and away from the police, yet we were constantly being picked up for one thing or another. This added to the strain on Mum, who was already struggling to cope with us. These difficulties at home affected our schooling; teachers found us di
fficult to control and were unsure as to how we should be dealt with.

  My teacher at Anderston primary used to make me use a desk in the corner away from everyone. She didn’t realise I was happy with this arrangement; most of the other pupils were Indian, Pakistani or Chinese and, as I hadn’t come across anyone from these countries before, I felt apprehensive about mixing with them and was convinced it was better to be stand-offish than to get to know some of them.

  Still, life wasn’t bad. Some of my fondest memories of Kelvinhaugh Street are of getting the ferry across the Clyde to Ibrox so I could watch my beloved Rangers. When I had been at Dunclutha, one of the nurses, a staunch Catholic, was horrified that I was a Rangers fan and would tell me: ‘Alexander, you’ll never get to heaven if you carry on supporting that team.’ But every time I walked into Ibrox I thought I was already in heaven.

  Then there were school dinners. Once we were on the register, it meant we were at least guaranteed one good meal a day, while during the summer holidays we would all march down to another school for our free meal. It was a lovely, warm feeling having a full stomach.

  Things picked up even more when I got myself a part-time job cleaning in the Lorne Hotel on Sauchiehall Street. Admittedly, it was a bit of a joke because there wasn’t a lot I could do, but the other workers took pity on me and used to give me money at the end of each week for the work I had done for them. Gripping my pay tightly in my pocket, I would run home and split it with my mum, so she could go down to the pub for a few drinks. Sadly, my prized job did not last long.

  The hotel had organised a sale of jewellery and clothes, and one day a huge van packed with these items pulled up outside. I walked over to the driver and told him my brothers and I would help him unload for a small fee. He agreed, but when we were caught helping ourselves to some watches, I was promptly barred from entering the Lorne again.