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While pennies were spent on gumballs, cinnamon sticks or twisted paper pokes of boiled sweets – unavailable in his father’s pantry – the week’s pocket money was spent on the cinema. Every Saturday morning, Winning would travel to Motherwell, to the Rex cinema. There, in the gloom of the cinema, he and his friends would watch Westerns and gangster films starring James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart. The local cinema was deemed too rough for Winning, who once had his hat stolen by some boisterous lads, and watched as his younger sister fought to retrieve it. Eventually the cinema was closed and renamed. ‘All the kids thought it was called the R 10, and couldn’t work out what it meant. Eventually we learned it was called the RIO. I loved the cinema, and the way every kid felt he could be a cowboy or Indian,’ said Winning. While the cinema provided the necessary escapism, the Church was to offer him a possible career.

As a teenager, Winning never glimpsed a burning bush, heard the voice of God, or walked a road to Damascus. Instead, he was quietly drawn towards the altar by the magnetic example of the parish priests. Before becoming eligible to be an altar boy, prospective candidates had to spend a period of penance in the choir loft. The ‘Lord of the Loft’ was Fr James Cuthbert Ward, a priest from Edinburgh, who had been banished to the west coast as two older brothers were already priests in the city and the Archbishop feared a cabal. Ward was a chubby man who wore thick glasses, the size and depth of lemonade bottles, and Winning initially considered him soft on account of his frequent homilies about his mother. It was a notion the priest quickly dispelled by regularly beating altar boys and choirboys for errors and cheek. If Ward meted out punishment and strict discipline, his devotion to the high hymns and Latin chants that made up the sung Mass redressed the balance. To Ward they were a reflection of God’s beauty and a way of softening the harshness of the parishioners’ lives. Winning was no nightingale, but the effort he exerted was appreciated by Ward and the choir loft offered him a better view of the panoply below.

The elevated role priests held in the Catholic community was never emphasized more than on a Sunday when they led the parishioners in prayer. Winning would watch in quiet awe as they paraded across the altar in rich, embroidered vestments of purple, gold, green, red and white. At the age of eleven, he was finally allowed to join the priests on the altar, carrying the large brass cross, swinging the long steel thurible, the elaborate holder for the incense that perfumed the air, and holding up the priest’s cope during weekly devotions. Winning was hard-working and diligent and his duties were expanded to include the sale of religious booklets door-to-door. Often people would take one out of pity and promise to pay later, a promise seldom kept, forcing Winning to contribute his pocket money to correct the balance. He also had to maintain a steady supply of religious pamphlets for display and sale at the back of the church. This involved taking the bus to Glasgow and the Renfrew Street offices of the Catholic Truth Society. It was while browsing amongst the lives of saints and booklets on personal morality that Winning picked up a copy of The Imitation of Christ by Thomas A Kempis, a text that was to deepen his faith to a greater degree than the shallows usually inhabited by schoolboys. The author was born in Kempen in the German Rhineland in 1380, and was responsible for the training of novices, but his posthumous work, published a century later, would became almost as widely read as the Bible. The book is constructed as a series of proverbs, designed to overcome vices, develop virtues and nurture a private prayer life, and Winning saw it as ‘a great précis on how you should live your life as a Catholic’. The enthusiasm other schoolboys reserved for football, Winning ploughed into the stern and demanding nature of the book, but kept the practice utterly private. Priests may have been admired and held up as pillars of the community, but anyone who wished to join them was a ‘Holy Joe’ fit to be pilloried by their young peers.

The only two people to whom Winning disclosed his interests were Fr James Ward and his superior, Fr Alex Hamilton, the parish priest of St Patrick’s. Alex Hamilton had arrived three years previously, in 1935, and was a quiet, reserved man whose mother had died when he was very young; the reason given for his emotional distance. When Winning first raised the idea of becoming a priest and the possibility that he might attend junior seminary at Blairs College in Aberdeen, Fr Hamilton had been surprisingly cautious. As a veteran of Blairs from the age of ten, he had no wish for Winning to suffer the poor food and intense homesickness that he himself had endured. Instead, he advised Winning to complete his secondary education and allow his true calling, if it was so, to deepen.

At no point did Winning discuss his thoughts with either his mother or father and it would be a further three years before the issue emerged into the open. In the intervening years, Winning continued his education at Our Lady’s High School, the local Catholic secondary school for boys, based two miles away in Motherwell. He had been accepted for the school after the successful completion of the Eleven-Pius, the examination designed to separate children with academic promise from those viewed as possessing a lesser ability, more suited to an early entry to the work place. The fact he passed one year earlier than most, and that many of the school friends he believed cleverer than himself should fail or be prohibited from sitting by parents anxious to secure another wage, seemed a great injustice. This feeling was later compounded by guilt when Winning did not fulfil his scholastic potential. ‘I did not feel that I fared particularly well at school,’ said Winning. ‘I have always felt it is a mistake to push kids on.’

At primary school Winning had been taken to the local swimming baths where he had stepped off the side, expecting to find steps, and sank. He spluttered to the surface, but it would be almost sixty years before he tried to swim again. After the familiar warmth and relative ease of primary school, secondary education was a shock and once again Winning felt he was drowning. The problem was understanding the art of studying; he was unfamiliar with the secret of dividing work into sections, organizing study timetables and structuring revision. His parents were supportive, offering the sitting room and dinner table for his books, and ensuring a silence suitable for study descended on the house, but, left on his own, Winning would panic. Maths was a particular chore. He missed numerous classes while serving as an altar boy at funeral services, and had a natural blind spot for numbers which was exacerbated by the maths master, John Bancewicz, whom he disliked intensely and viewed as a ‘bully’. On a number of occasions, Winning asked his father, who had taken a correspondence course in mathematics, to complete his homework, which he would then copy into his jotter and present as his own work. Trial and error in methods of revision finally paid off and the perseverance he would display during the course of his life began to take root. During those early years of secondary school, his vocation to the priesthood began to deepen, but it was not the contemplative or spiritual aspect of the job that he desired. ‘There was a glamour in the priesthood. I would imagine myself running for sick calls and looking after people in road accidents or during emergencies.’

The persecution of Catholic priests and nuns in Spain, upon the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 and over the next three years, galvanized Winning’s ambition to be a priest. What the astute observer viewed as the beginning of a titanic struggle between Fascism and Communism was reduced to the simplest level in Winning’s mind. The machinations of Franco and his coup against an elected government were immaterial to a young Catholic boy in Lanarkshire who saw the conflict in black and white: Godless Communists against the nobility of the Catholic Church. Each Sunday, Winning would lie in front of the coal fire in the family’s living room and read the Catholic Observer and the Universe for reports on the atrocities being carried out against priests and nuns in towns across Spain. He was riveted by a picture that appeared in the Universe of the execution of a Jesuit priest who, just before he was shot by a firing squad, called out ‘Viva Christo Rey!’ – ‘Long live Christ the King!’ The Scots Catholics who supported Franco were against the tide of public opinion that sided with the Republicans, sending men, money and supplies to support the International Brigade. The sight of the co-op store collecting money for the war in Spain sickened him, and he considered smashing the window, but fear of being caught and of his parents having to pay for the damage changed his mind.

I was a staunch Francophile. I felt great resentment at the way the British government supported the Republicans. The co-op store had a milk-for-Spain campaign, it involved milk bottle tops and the money was to go towards the International Brigade. It was the way they were treating the Church that coloured my attitude. They were anti-Catholic and so I hoped they would be defeated. I discussed it with my father. We all felt the same way. To me it was simple: it was murderers versus the rest.

Winning remembers hearing about the end of the siege of Madrid on the radio and the whole family cheering Franco’s victory. ‘It was a real joy and a pleasure for us to hear that the Republicans had been defeated.’

The annual retreat organized for the boys of Our Lady’s High School and St Aloysius Boys’ School, a private school based in Glasgow city centre, was a great influence on Winning. Each year the two schools would travel to Craighead Retreat Centre in Bothwell for an overnight retreat. Winning enjoyed the walks around the expansive gardens and the clandestine game of cards after light’s out, but he would return home with a personal mantra, a prayer written by St Ignatius, the founder of the Jesuits, which was said before each talk:

Lord, teach me to be generous, to serve you as you deserve.

To give and not to count the cost,

To fight and not to heed the wounds,

To toil and not to seek for rest,

To labour and not to ask for any reward

Save for knowing that I do God’s Holy Will.

On 3 September 1939, as Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain announced to the British nation that war had been declared on Germany, Winning was tossing balls at a coconut shy at Craigneuk fair with Patrick Macmillan, the son of the local doctor. World War Two was to bring mixed fortunes to the family. Rationing meant the closure of Thomas Winning’s confectionery sideline, but after twelve years of unemployment, he was given a job on the nearby Belhaven Estate. On the farm the unemployed men were put to work planting crops, tending sheep and milking cows for a set number of hours each day for which they were paid in farm produce.

Each ‘pay day’ Thomas Winning would return to his family laden with eggs, butter and buttermilk, prized possessions when the average family were entitled to just one egg a week. Conscious of the generosity of his in-laws over the past decade, he insisted on sharing the food around. The war effort also increased Winning’s responsibilities. As the fighting drained the parish of able-bodied men, sent to serve overseas in the various armed forces, Fr Ward set up a monthly newsletter to keep them informed of parish life. Winning was conscripted to update and log all the addresses on file index cards and spend one day each month churning out copies using an early version of the Xerox machine.

In his fifth and sixth years at school, Winning remained reluctant to reveal his ambitions for the priesthood. He brushed away questions about his future plans and when once asked by a teacher what he wanted to do after leaving school, his surly response was, ‘Get a job’, an attitude that was swiftly admonished as cheek. In truth, he remained embarrassed by his ambition. Despite his doubts and poor start, he passed higher qualifications in English, German, Latin, and, incredibly, Mathematics. He followed these up by taking the prospective teacher’s exam, a qualification similar to an A-level in religious studies and which acted as a convenient cloak for his true intent.

His choice of vocation had also clouded his relations with girls. In the 1930s and the early 1940s, very few boys of fifteen or sixteen had girlfriends but the prickly hormones of puberty meant the interest was there even if the contact was not. Winning was friendly with girls in the neighbourhood, pulled pigtails and even took to the floor when Our Lady’s High met up with its sister school for girls for monitored dances, but there remained a certain careful detachment. ‘He knew what he wanted to be and knew girls didn’t come into it,’ said Margaret.

When he was sixteen, Winning finally broke the news to his parents of his plan to study for the priesthood. Their response was quiet and subdued. They had expected this day to arrive. His role as an altar boy, his interest in Latin, his weekly chores for the church, were all part of a religious mosaic. His mother said very little, while his father asked only if he was sure of his plan and when Winning replied that he was the matter was closed.

Equipped with his parents’ permission and the blessing of his parish priest, Winning’s name was sent forward to the archdiocese of Glasgow and in early June 1942, Winning was invited for an interview. His father accompanied him on the bus trip to the large Victorian town house in the Park Circus area of Glasgow. Mr Winning waited outside while his son was questioned in the drawing room. The panel of five elderly priests charged with scrutinizing candidates asked him to read a passage of Latin prose by Cicero, the great Roman orator, and though they took exception to his pronunciation, it was deemed a pass. When asked why he wanted to become a priest, Winning replied sanctimoniously but effectively: he wished to leave the world a better place. Three weeks later he received a formal letter of acceptance and notification that his training would begin at St Mary’s College, Blairs, the following autumn.

Winning was delighted and as the summer weeks crawled by his dreams and ambitions expanded to fill those empty days. One evening towards the end of the holidays, he sat on the step of his house beside his young cousin of seven, Mary Canning, turned to her, and said with (as she recalled) ‘absolute certainty’: ‘I’m going to be the first Scottish pope.’

TWO
Blairs Bound

‘They drained my self-esteem. I simply didn’t have any.’

THOMAS WINNING

On the afternoon of 27 August 1942, Platform Two of Buchanan Street railway station in the centre of Glasgow resembled a convention of apprentice undertakers. Three dozen boys dressed in black suits, black coats and soft trilby hats stood waiting for the one o’clock train to Aberdeen. Ahead lay their first year at Blairs, as St Mary’s seminary was commonly known, and around them hung an air of acute trepidation. Thomas Winning had perhaps more to fear than his fellow students. This was his first trip away from home and the thought of leaving behind his family had left him quite sick. His aunts and uncles had paid for his new wardrobe, the highlight of which was his first pair of football boots; but only his immediate family had come to wave him off. Before arriving at the station, Fr James Ward had taken them to Luigi’s Fish and Chip Emporium as a final treat. The farewell on the platform was short and strained. Afterwards, the priest bought Winning’s mother, father and sister tickets to see the film How Green Was My Valley, a popular weepy about a Welsh mining disaster, and told Margaret: ‘You can get your tears out in the dark.’

On the train, Winning had the same emotions, but no such opportunity for release. Instead, he took a seat beside Maurice Taylor, a quiet boy one year younger than himself, with whom he had become friendly during his previous two years at Our Lady’s High School. The carriage was filled with boys who enjoyed the easy camaraderie that accompanied a secondary education at Blairs, a clique that left Taylor and Winning with the feeling of being outsiders. As the others talked, the pair mainly stared out of the window at the countryside’s blur of browns and greens.

At five o’clock in the afternoon, the party arrived at Aberdeen’s Central Station and spilled out for what was a Blairs’ tradition – a high tea of scones and cress sandwiches at Kenaway’s, the renowned delicatessen. A fleet of taxis was then organized to carry the boys and their trunks to the college, which sat five miles west of the city centre on the south Deeside Road. Rattling in the back of the black hackney, they crossed the bridge over the river Dee and, looking back, saw the spires of Aberdeen disappear into the distance. For many boys, the brief walk from the station to Kenaway’s would be as much as they would see of the Granite City during their northern education. The temptations of Aberdeen were strictly out of bounds.

Father Stephen McGill greeted the party at the doors of the college. A small man with a clipped and careful manner and a pious spirituality many found sickly sweet, McGill had trained as a priest in France with the Order of St Sulpice, a group dedicated to the formation of aspirant priests, and would boast of having escaped the German invasion with only his typewriter and a pair of socks. He ushered them inside for a tour and what would become their traditional supper: a sweet tea, bluish in colour, and slices of bread and jam. The customary strict decorum was suspended for that first evening as the party were shown around their new home. Each student was allocated a plywood cubicle, seven feet by five feet, each with a bed and a small wooden stool. There was no door and only a curtain for privacy. The centre of the room also acted as their main recreational area and this meant that throughout the year the boys slept in the smoke-filled atmosphere. Winning sat on his bed and listened as the ‘Decano’, a senior student, shouted over the tops of all the cubicles that the following day they would be expected to dress in Roman collars and soutanes. The lights were then suddenly switched off, leaving Winning and his fellow students to unpack in the dark. He felt utterly alone. ‘The first night was hellish,’ said Winning. ‘There was a certain harsh loneliness to the place.’

Winning and his fellow students were awoken at six o’clock by the morning bell and queued in silence for the ‘jakes’, as the toilets were called. Then, dressed in their black soutanes, they headed to the oratory for morning prayers and meditation, followed by Mass. Over a breakfast of porridge, tea and toast they were introduced to the Redemptorist priest who would lead them through their first few days. The priest, from a religious congregation founded in Naples in 1732, specialized in the administration of spiritual retreats, and each new intake of students began their formation at Blairs with a three-day silent retreat. As well as the traditional monastic vows of poverty, chastity and obedience the Redemptorists included a fourth, perseverance, an attribute they were keen to impress on the students at a time of confusion and doubt. Winning was reluctant to listen. ‘If there had been a correspondence course I would have taken it. I found those days an ordeal.’ The problem was the silence, a void that was quickly filled with doubts, unease and uncertainty. The long periods of contemplation and prayer were separated by a series of religious talks, opportunities for confession, and walks around the ‘bounds’ – a circuitous route through the attractive parkland in which the college sat. For Winning, it was the beginning of a long period of adjustment where he had to balance his desire to be a priest with the emotional rigours of the training.

Preparation for the priesthood at Blairs was run along monastic lines. Each day would begin and end enfolded within magnum silencium: the ‘Grand Silence’. This restful time, when students were freed from the tug and pull of daily life and were thought to be more open to God’s call, started with night prayers in the oratory and ran through until the beginning of breakfast. To break the silence was considered a grave error, one indicative of a lack of self-restraint, and grounds for the guilty student’s dismissal. The college’s regimented timetable was an attempt to ingrain discipline into the very hearts of the students.

Their days ran as follows:

6 a.m.	Rise, wash and bathe
6.30 a.m.	Morning prayer and meditation
6.55 a.m.	Mass
8 a.m.	Breakfast
9 a.m.	Lessons
12.40 p.m.	Spiritual talk
1 p.m.	Lunch
1.45 p.m.	Recreation
3 p.m.	Lessons
4.45 p.m.	Tea
5.30 p.m.	Private study
7.30 p.m.	Rosary
8 p.m.	Supper
8.30 p.m.	Free time
9.30 p.m.	Night prayers
10 p.m.	Lights out

At the time of Winning’s formation, the priesthood retained an exalted and highly respected position both within the Catholic Church and across mainstream society. Priests were untarnished by scandal, unquestioned and reverently deferred to. As a spiritual descendant of his leader, Jesus Christ, a priest was no longer of the world; he had moved beyond it. He enjoyed a unique position, able to straddle both the ordinary and the divine. The power to transform unleavened bread into the actual body of Christ, and to administer or retain God’s forgiveness at will was bestowed on him. A priest was not only in a position of patriarchal privilege, deferred to in society and enjoying great influence, sometimes even adoration, he was viewed as physically closer to God, and capable of wielding the supernatural. As Winning had read previously in The Imitation of Christ, ‘High is the ministry and great the dignity of priests, to whom is given that which is not granted to the angels.’ But such a privilege comes at a heavy price as Thomas A Kempis later explained: ‘You have not lightened your burden; you are now bound by a stricter bond of discipline, and are obliged to a greater perfection of sanctity.’

There was little place for the individual in the role of the priest; through their training, seminarians were to be melted down and re-cast in a uniform mould. Priestly celibacy was viewed as both a practical necessity for men who were, in essence, married to God and to the Church, as well as an opportunity to radiate purity. As Fr Ronald Knox, a popular contemporary author, wrote in The Priestly Life, a priest should not have:

the insensitivity of the bachelor who finds women a nuisance, not the furtive horror which tries to forget that sex exists, but something unapproachable, blinding, on a different plane from thoughts of evil. What a waste of God’s gift, when the life that’s pledged to celibacy is not a life irradiated by purity. What brooding regrets or cheap familiarities tarnish the surface of the mirror, which ought to reflect Christ?¹

In the opinion of Fr Knox, the ground on which a priest’s feet trod should be ‘a part of the soil of heaven transplanted to earth’.

Before such a feat could be performed, seminarians would undergo a five-year course, two years of philosophy, followed by theology. Philosophy, it is said, is the handmaiden of theology, and before studying the latter, student priests were given a solid grounding in the former. At Blairs, the first-year class had four lecturers in the subject, led by Fr Philip Flanagan, who had spent two years until 1940 as vice-rector of the Scots College in Rome. Although the youngest of the lecturers, he was the most senior, taking lectures in ethics and cosmology. A second escapee from Europe was Fr Stephen McGill. He was assisted by Fr Hugh Cahill, lecturer in logic and psychology, a likeable man, nicknamed ‘Domine’ Cahill after his habit of addressing students by the Latin for ‘Mr’. The faculty was completed by Fr John Sheridan, a brilliant academic whose only complaint was that his typewriter would not keep pace with his constant flow of essays and articles. He was an erudite speaker who would often spend an entire lecture on areas of cosmology and natural philosophy which were beyond even the brightest boy. For the first few months, Winning found the classes wearisome and a distraction from what he had in mind (which was the active service of others), but over time, he appreciated the clarity that the discipline brought to his life.

When his class was taught the works of René Descartes, the seventeenth-century French philosopher who stated: ‘I think, therefore I am’, Winning and the other students began to counter-argue, using the rules of logic to prove that they did not exist. Discussions during meals or what little social time was available had previously been light and casual, but now they took on a competitive edge. Loose talk was scrutinized for philosophical faux pas and anyone coming to a conclusion greater than the evidence will support was accused of breaking the laws of minor logic. Winning’s teachers impressed upon him that a firm grasp of philosophy would allow him to discuss the deepest problems of human life with men and women of any (or no) religious persuasion. It also gently led to a clearer understanding of Catholic theology. Through the study of general metaphysics and ontology, Winning learned to probe below surface appearances and physical characteristics to the nature of being. He learned how to distinguish between matter and form and was able to explain the mystery of why the host, which after consecration becomes the body of Christ, doesn’t taste of flesh, but remains instead brittle bread: in the language of metaphysics the ‘accidents’, the taste, the shape and texture, remain the same while the ‘substance’ is transformed by the power of God, working through his priest.

Winning grew to enjoy his philosophy classes, but the same was not to be said of his spiritual studies under the tutelage of Fr McGill, the year’s spiritual director. ‘I didn’t particularly take to McGill as a spiritual director – he was just too sickly sweet for me. I didn’t like his manner and he seemed to have absolutely no sense of humour.’ McGill’s field was viewed as the ‘inner forum’, the cultivation of the spiritual life. Each day, for twenty minutes, he was responsible for a series of religious talks that quickly became known as the ‘starvation talks’ among the students. Prayers were often said for the bell that signalled the beginning of lunch and the end of McGill’s lecture.

Winning viewed McGill as a patron of popular psychology from their first meeting. Over later decades, the two men, as brother bishops, would become friends, in spite of their less than auspicious beginning.

Winning did not take easily to the more progressive methods of prayer. Although he experimented with both the Sulpician method which involved a rigid schedule of prayer, spiritual conferences and study, and the spiritual exercises of St Ignatius of Loyola, neither system truly matched his temperament. He found piety and overt holiness distasteful, almost insincere, and in many ways this was a throwback to his fear of being viewed as a ‘sissy’ or ‘Holy Joe’. Instead, the rosary, the Our Father, daily attendance at Mass and periods of quiet contemplation, became the cornerstones of his early spirituality.

After the exercise of both the mind and the soul, the body came third. Every pupil was encouraged to walk for one hour each day in the company of two other students, chosen at random to prevent the curse of ‘cronyism’. Wednesday and Saturday afternoons were set aside for football, and although Winning was delighted by his football boots, they were seldom worn, as he preferred the role of spectator to that of participant. He viewed the game of billiards as the sign of a misspent youth and would instead practise the piano while others played.

In Fr Flanagan’s view, an appreciation of the arts was an important element in the education of a priest. He also believed that the charisma required to attract young people to Jesus Christ and the ability to project one’s voice from the pulpit could best be nurtured on the stage. So each year the students were required to perform a play or musical from the canons of either Shakespeare or Gilbert and Sullivan. During Winning’s time at Blairs The Merchant of Venice was chosen and he was cast in the role of Portia, the intelligent heroine but calculating deceiver, a casting coup he attributed to his good looks. Frank Cullen, who was cast as his Antonio, said: ‘Tom wasn’t a great actor, he was like the rest of us – we managed to mug through.’