Lord Hattersley: How my married mother ran off with a priest
Nottingham – had met my mother after he agreed to ‘instruct’ her for admission to the Catholic Church in anticipation of her marriage to a young collier.
“Father Hattersley had performed the wedding ceremony. Two weeks later the priest and the bride ran away together. For the next 45 years they lived in bliss – married after my mother’s first husband died in 1956.”
O’Hara, wishing to avoid being at the centre of the scandal, also moved on. He died intestate over 20 years later in Mansfield in July 1956. His estate, valued at £373 12s 10d, was left to his former wife, suggesting he never remarried nor had children.
Frederick and Enid Hattersley finally married a few months later, prompting his excommunication because in the Church’s eyes he was still a priest and forbidden to marry.
Lord Hattersley was only told the true story after a meeting with the Bishop of Nottingham, which he had arranged as part of his research for a novel loosely based around his father’s life story as he then understood it. Lord Hattersley, 84, told
“My parents met when he was instructing her to join the Catholic Church. They fell in love and decided nothing could be done about it. He officiated at the wedding ceremony and they ran away two to three weeks later.
“My father and I were very close. It was a very hard act for him to walk away from the Church and I was very proud of him for doing that.”
Lord Hattersley has alluded to the extraordinary affair before, writing a new introduction to his 1983 autobiography as long ago as 2001 following the death of his mother in May that year.
When Enid died in 2001 at the age of 96, obituaries recorded the slightly more sanitised version of events. “She [Enid] kept house for her invalid mother, although she had by then married a miner called John O’Hara,” wrote
“When she was 27, however, Fr Frederick Hattersley (always known as Roy, his second name) called to order winter coal for his presbytery. After a brief courtship conducted perforce in secret, they decided to marry.”