One Valentine to remember

Today is Valentine’s Day and I remember all the fun we had with it in my school days – covering every inch of the cards with home-made rhymes and writing SWALK (sealed with a loving kiss) on the back of the envelopes before sending them off to whoever it was you used to fancy on the school bus at the time. The anonymity of it all made you bold. There were always the older boys who you would dare to send a Valentine’s card – usually the ones who were good at sport – but who you would never dream of speaking to.

I loved Latin and especially Roman history at school and the story of St Valentine is a cracker. I bet there are a lot people who have no idea why we call it Valentine’s Day. Saint Valentine was a Christian priest who lived in Rome in the 3rd Century under the pagan Emperor Claudius II. He hated that Romans were converting to Christianity and believed his soldiers should be devoted to Rome, so he made a law against them marrying.

Valentine married them in secret Christian ceremonies and when Claudius found out, he sent him to prison. But even that couldn’t prevent the love he had for others and he cured his jailer’s daughter of blindness. His last act of love before his life ended was to send her letter signed “from your Valentine”.

He was executed on February 14th.

Dubbed “the well-travelled criminal”, Ann was born in Ireland and moved to Scotland. Records show that in 1851 she was living in Edinburgh’s Cowgate, unmarried and making hats and caps for a living. By 1861, she was wed and living near Trongate, Glasgow, where her husband John Mcgovern worked as a “scavenger”. Ann popped up again in local newspaper in Huntly, Aberdeenshire, in April 1868: “Ann Mcgovern is not unknown to our readers, having been convicted at a Justice of the Peace Court, Huntly, on August 26, 1865, and sentenced to 30 days’ imprisonment for stealing a pair of ladies’ boots from the shop of Mr Yule. She now goes ‘over the water’ for a theft committed in the city of Aberdeen.”

The Granite City crime landed her a seven-year jail term and she was released, aged 51, from Perth Prison on Christmas Day 1872 and she took a lodging in Aberdeen’s Guestrow. But a year later she was sentenced to eight years’ penal servitude for theft. She continues to yo-yo in and out of prison the rest of her life and, aged 70, is back behind bars.