my charmed life
It’s still hard to believe he’s gone – the life enhancer millions saw as their friend. Starting today, Terry Wogan’s warm-hearted, mischievous and VERY revealing memoirs . . .
Every Sunday afternoon, my father would take us fishing — my little brother Brian perched on t he Da’s crossbar, and me with my own trusty two-wheeler. There was no getting my mother up on a bike: rose Wogan had a highly developed sense of her own dignity, and felt that the bicycle was for people in trousers. Also, it got her husband and two sons out of the way on a Sunday. We didn’t have a car. Dammit, this was the Forties and we didn’t have a phone; Tv had barely been invented. We had a wireless, thank goodness, that helped mould me into the eejit I am today.
Not having a car was a drawback, though I don’t remember any of our neighbours in elm Park, ennis road, Limerick, having one either. But my father’s colleague Gordon Wood — a titan of the rugby field, who went on to play for the British and Irish Lions — did buy one, which the Da thought a foolish extravagance.
Still, we accepted Gordon’s offer of a trip to the seaside most summer weekends, and my mother came with us. We went picnicking in the sand dunes on the Atlantic coast of County Clare, with its miles of beach where we hurled our fishing lines into the breakers while Mum doled out the tea and sandwiches.
I’ve never been able to resist a sandwich since, and I’ve been left with a lifelong passion for corned beef.
The Da, Michael T. Wogan, had run away from home at 14 after a fight with his father over the old fellow’s boorish, drunken, bullying ways. This was around the beginning of World War I, in enniskerry, County Wicklow: enniskerry was widely regarded as I reland’s prettiest village, and Wicklow the garden of Ireland, but unfortunately you cannot eat the scenery.
The Da used to say that, after he ran away, he got himself ‘ apprenticed’ to a grocer in Bray, on the coast about ten miles from his home. I’m sure it was no more than a roof over his head, by dint of living in the cellars beside the wine vats, but he learned enough to go on and get a job behind the counter of the finest grocery s t ory in Dublin — Leverette & Frye, in Grafton Street.
In that shop, he met rose, who worked in the cash office. Shortly
I think I was the first Irishman to hear Elvis
after their marriage in 1936, he was made manager of the firm’s Limerick branch, which is where I came along two years later.
Limerick was a very roman Catholic town, more Catholic than the vatican. Not a lot of Christianity, if by that you mean love and tolerance of your fellow man, but plenty of religion. It was not just priest-ridden, but under the thumb of the lay organisation, the Arch Confraternity — a sort of freemasonry, except there was no secret because, if you got in, you let the whole of Limerick know about it. you had arrived, you were a pillar of the community, and people bought you drinks and paid your bus fare.
The Da never joined. He wasn’t exactly big on religion. Neither was my mother. I think she had too much of a sense of humour for it. The Arch Confraternity held itself responsible for the morals and behaviour of the town’s citizens. It was the power behind the mayor’s throne, and that power was never more ardent than in the midForties, when Limerick was enjoying a bonanza.
The runway at nearby Shannon, as a staging post between America and newly liberated europe, had become the most important international airport in the western hemisphere. Americans came and lived in our midst, chewing gum and drinking Coke, and throwing parties.
For a town that had been wrapped up in itself for hundreds of years, this was extraordinary. There was a thriving black market: men would hop on a plane in Shannon with a side of ham, and return from Stuttgart with a bag of Leica cameras.
The Americans were tolerated, for they had money if not the town’s affection. But there were limits. At one party, a yank made the mistake of asking the mayor’s wife to dance. The dignatory was across the table like an avenging angel, his hands around the unfortunate’s throat.
If there was money in Limerick, there was poverty, too. A few hundred yards from our house in lowermiddle-class elm Park was the workhouse. yes, in Forties Ireland, a workhouse in the Dickensian tradition.
There were other places just as disturbing: the Blue School, from which issued the occasional small crocodile of pale little children. I didn’t know whether they were orphans, abandoned or illegitimate, but they weren’t like us.
There was something sad about them, something pitiful. Stark poverty and squalor were endemic in the Ireland I grew up in, from the Thirties to the Seventies. The lot of the Irish working man was pretty desperate, and there is consolation in oblivion.
But drink was not the problem of the Irish middle class: they were too busy scrimping and saving to waste their money. If some food fell off the kitchen table during a meal, your mother would pick it up off the floor, wipe it with her apron and stick it back on your plate.
Nobody bothered doctors with minor ailments: your father would lance that boil, mother would slap a red-hot poultice on that wounded knee. Dr Collis Browne’s Chlorodyne syrup cured coughs, fevers and probably malaria, since the active ingredient was morphine. They gave it to children — I remember a not unpleasant feeling of drowsiness.
Morphine in your medicine was one thing, but I never saw my father drink more than a half-pint of stout, and I certainly never saw him drunk. My mother never touched a drop.
More often than not, the tipple in our household was a glass of water, with the admonition: ‘Let the tap run!’ This was an in-joke at the expense of the two Nellies — my mother’s oldest sister, Auntie Nellie, and her bosom friend, Nellie Nolan.
‘ Let the tap run,’ was Nellie Nolan’s watchword. Her notion was that it cleansed lead from the pipes. In the hungry Forties, there wasn’t a lot of trust in the public utilities such as the water board or gas board — all had Gaelic names and you couldn’t get a job at any of them unless you were educated by the Christian Brothers who had beaten the native tongue into you.
Auntie Nellie was in charge of curtains at Clerys department store in Dublin. Nellie Nolan was a formidable battleship of a woman, never without a hat, and the two of them went everywhere together.
These days, people would speculate about the true nature of their friendship, but homosexuality did not exist in Ireland in the Forties. Nor the Fifties, nor the Sixties. I have a vague recollection of a priest grabbing me by the arm and telling me I was his favourite, but the clearer memory is of the same priest trying to knock my hand off with a leather strap.
My education began at Ferrybank preparatory school, run by kindly nuns, down the road from Cleeve’s toffee factory, which filled the air with the very scent of heaven.
Then, aged eight, I moved to the gentle ministrations of the holy Jesuit Fathers at Crescent College. This was the end of innocence. The Jesuits dressed in black and had wings — panels in their black coats that flew back as they walked, making them look like black angels.
We got beaten for everything: bad homework, wrong homework, inattention, misbehaviour, anything. Corporal punishment was the way forward, and they had a most peculiarly sadistic way of dealing it out: every error or transgression was rewarded with a chit from a docketbook, and that chit would be good for three or six heavy welts across the hand with a strap, administered by the cheery, burly Father Bates.
Here was a man who took real pleasure in his work. The sadism lay in that this was no instant, spur-ofthe-moment leathering. No, you had to wait until lunchtime to join a queue of other unfortunates and watch them get their hands knocked off, until it came to your turn.
I was there for six years, before we moved to Dublin in 1952. The Da had masterminded the conversion of the Leverette & Frye chain into Peter Dominic wine shops, and was now general manager. When people compliment me on my career, I think of my father’s extraordinary rise from teenage runaway to head
We poured a jug of water over the radio announcer
of the firm. Compared to the Da, I’m only in the ha’penny place.
With his new, exalted position came a car. A Ford Consul. I can still see it, big, black and shiny. I sat in it for hours, behind the steering wheel, parked in front of the gates of 64 Ballymun Avenue, Dublin. I was enrolled at Belvedere College, also a Jesuit establishment, and made the rugby team. We embarked on tours, to play english public schools such as Marlborough, and on to Scotland and edinburgh to take on the boys of George Heriot’s.
That meant being billeted on an opposition player’s family, which gave me my first taste of oatcakes, haggis — and alcohol. As a boy, I had been a member of the ‘pioneers’, a temperance movement that wore an enamel pin on the lapel.
There wasn’t a single boy in my class who didn’t enrol: it would be an independent soul indeed who refused to denounce the devil and his right-hand man, the Demon Drink. But here I was, aged 17, on a rugby tour, drinking a glass of cider. What a scapegrace!
We had a record player now at home, and I had been buying records — first trad jazz, then early rock ’n’ roll by Bill Haley and Johnny ray. But walking down Princes Street in edinburgh, I saw in a shop window a record I had heard a few days earlier, beaming out of the American Forces Network radio . . . a record by elvis Presley.
I think I was the first person in Ireland to hear of him. I wish I could say elvis inspired me to become a radio broadcaster. But I had no clue what I wanted to do, when out of the blue came the offer of a job.
The royal Bank of Ireland was l ooking f or clean- l i ving, wellbrought-up, middle- class young men who could add up. Why not? Might as well. And my parents were delighted.
We assembled, humble trainees, at the Anglesey Bridge branch, just down the road from my granny’s. every day we studied the sealing of used banknotes, the adding up of long columns of figures and, most difficult of all, the counting of notes with the left hand.
After a month, we started work. I say work — I can’t remember doing anything that resembled it. The
ff our years I spent tatttht her roy all were an unmitigated joy.
The atmosphere resembled a Saturday night hop, a lucky conjunction of a few like-minded young men and women thrown together by fate. One favourite game was the flinging of the sponges. We all had them, to facilitate the arcane art of counting notes.
There you would be, chatting urbanely with some attractive secretary sent to pay in the firm’s takings, and a wet sponge would come whistling across the counter and hit you between the eyes.
Then the sponges would fly in all directions, the carnage ceasing only with a rasping cry of ‘Quiet!’ from the manager’s office.
another ingenious way to pass the idle hour was to sneak into the teller’s box while he was dealing with a customer, and shove the bank broom handle up his backside. rough, manly fun. I was earning £5 a week and giving my mother half. I can’t believe I lived a life of drinking, dancing, the pictures, and coffee at theth rainbowib cafe,f allll on £2 10 10s a week. The world was my Dublin Bay prawn.
But after four years of fun, my eye alighted on an ad in the Irish Independent: radio eireann was seeking newsreaders. Only those fluent in Gaelic as well as english need apply. Familiarity with French, Italian, Spanish and German an advantage, as was a pleasing voice.
how did I imagine that a junior bank clerk, with no languages and undistinguished exam results, had a prayer for this plum job? all I can say is that I have always been an optimist, according to the old Irish definition of the word: an optimist is a fellow who has no idea how bad the situation really is.
Much later, I heard there were almost 10,000 applicants. I’ll never fathom why they gave it to me. I had a month of training, every day, in how to speak on the radio: intonation, pronunciation, inflection, emphasis and expression. My reward was a salary of £14 7s 2d a week, rising by annual increments of pitiable amounts. I wasn’t wealthy, but I was a trained broadcaster.
I’m sure they used to do it that way in the BBC, too, and I’m equally sure they don’t do it that way now. Journalism has become more important than presentation, and that’s the wrong way round, lads.
now the truth is, I have never been a great talker outside of the job. My inability to do any more than exchange basic information on the phone is legendary in the family. So my aunts looked at me blankly when I told them what I was doing and, when I first informed my branch manager of my ambitions, he put it down to boyish whim.
he couldn’t conceive that anyone would be foolish enough to give up the permanent pensionable security of the bank for the gypsy existence of a radio newsreader. he was wrong. In October 1961, aged 23, I resigned from the bank.
I’ve never forgotten the thrill of my first days at the radio station: driving through the deserted streets before dawn, and walking down the dark corridor towards the lights of the continuity suite, and my studio. Just the engineer and me, and a million listeners.
The wonderment wears off, of course, and a good job. Otherwise, you would end up a basket case, thinking that what you have to say is important. Japes were the order of the day here, too. It was as nothing to slowly pour a carafe of water over an announcer’s head as he was reading the one o’clock news, or to slowly unbutton a
presenter’s blouse while she was giving a long continuity announcement her all.
If work was one big party, good parties in the outside world were a rarity. I only went to one, and that was good only because I met the future Mrs Wogan there. There she was, the most beautiful woman in Ireland, with blinding Titian hair, looking about 6ft tall and utterly unapproachable. How did I ever pluck up the courage to cross that room and ask her if she would like to dance?
I took her home in my car, a Morris Minor with a broken seat. We had another passenger, my friend Mick, who passed out in the back. Helen and I left him lying there peacefully, and shared our first meal together at Dublin’s most fashionable late-night wateringhole of the era, Scotty’s.
The menu was spare: ham and cheese sandwiches, chicken or lentil soup. A soup-and-sandwich bar at 1am, the most beautiful woman in Ireland, and me? I still wonder at i t. And the most amazing thing of all . . . three years later we were married.
eXtrACteD from Mustn’t Grumble (Orion, £9.99) and Is It Me? (BBC, £7.99) by terry Wogan. the fee for this extract will be donated to the rennie Grove hospice, which specialises in end-of-life cancer care (renniegrove.org), and Children In Need. Both books also available in ebook and audiobook. to order copies at the special price of £7.99 and £5.99 respectively (offer valid to February 20), call 0808 272 0808 or visit mailbookshop.co.uk P&P free on orders over £12.