Nothing But Bad Times: Chapter Ten, Part One
Mary Ann now had three surviving children from her marriage to Michael Hughes. The eldest of these, Maggie, had turned twenty the same the war that killed her brother had ended. Shortly afterwards, she met a man called James (Jimmy) O'Hara, who was born in County Antrim and was one year her junior. The two of them married on June 4 1920 at Carfin, and soon began producing children. However, Maggie was a descendant of the Owens'. She wasn't going to have an easy ride.
Maggie gave birth to a baby boy five months after marriage. He was named Cornelius (Con), after Jimmy's father, who was a slaughter man. Maggie and Jimmy did not have a good ride in life at all. Soon after marriage, Jimmy (who in his spare time played for New Stevenston United and later became a linesman), would come home from work drunk and in violent tempers. He was a very well known man in Holytown and had a very sizeable friend circle. What he earned was precious little, and it seems he drank almost every penny of it. There was no food on the table, and this took a terrible toll on the O'Hara family. Maggie and Jimmy had the following children, and as one can see, most died very young indeed. Given Jimmy's fondness for drink and wasting his wages, this is no coincidence. I have seen these children's death certificates. The cause of death on two of them was “malnutrition”
Cornelius O'Hara 1920-1991, Mary Ann Owens O'Hara 1922-1925, James O'Hara 1924-1924, Michael O'Hara 1926-1927, Letitia Theresa 1928-2008, Bernard O'Hara 1929-1936, Rose O'Hara 19** (still alive).
I think that's quite clear enough. Maggie and Jimmy lived an extremely poor life. There children would walk around in shoes barely thick enough to last a week.
The O'Hara's struggled through life and life wasn't full of any light relief or happy times. Another premature death transpired in the family as Jimmy O'Hara died in 1949 after receiving a “jerk” at his workplace. On going home he collapsed, and died, aged 50. After this, Maggie moved to Edinburgh, where she died in 1965 in the Women's Salvation Army hostel in Vennel, Edinburgh.
Whilst Maggie and Jimmy watched their children die, another tragic accident occurred in Glasgow. On the morning of December 28 1923, the wife of Mary Ann's brother John Owens, Rose Ann McCann, was walking in Maitland Street, Glasgow, when she stepped onto the road in the path of a moving lorry. She was almost blind, and also partly deaf, and as the lorry swerved and sounded a horn to warn her of it's approach, it startled a nearby horse, which bolted and ran straight into Rose Ann, trampling on top of her and crushing her to death. It was, a complete shock, the second of Mary Ann's in law's to be killed in a sudden tragic accident. Rose Ann was 54 years old.
Maggie was arguably more worse off than her mother was, or even her grandmother. In the 1920's and 1930's she suffered immensely after losing four of her seven children, and having her husband go off the rails for a period of time. She died a pauper in the Vennel, her final years are a mystery to the whole family. Her life was much of a contrast to that of her younger brother Bernard...
Copyright © Matthew Reay, 2008
