Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth. Albert Einstein
I don’t know Paddy Cullen. I never met Paddy Cullen to my knowledge although it’s not ruled out as a child or young man I may have. He grew up on Dominick Street in Dublin my dad told me. He might have been with the old soldiers that used to drink with dad sometimes up at the TA Centre in Hornsey where he was a caretaker and ran the bar. Sometimes as a teenager I would sit with them and I remember there was one guy there who had a wooden leg, Dick was his name. He was the only veteran from World War 1 and he’d tease the others, who were mostly veterans of WW11 about how easy they had it compared to, as they say in the UK, being, “up to your neck in muck and bullets in the trenches.” I was told that he never got drunk because the beer went down in to that leg.
I spoke to my cousin the other day and her dad, my uncle George, and my dad served in the army together, that’s how my dad met my mum, she was uncle George’s sister. My uncle George was in bomb disposal and stepped on a land mine in Anzio I think it was, and it blew half his foot off. It always gave him a lot of pain though I never saw it. He was a lovely man my uncle George.
I thought of Paddy Cullen as I was talking to my dear friend
Dolores in Derry and related a story to her. She had grown up in the midst of a
war herself, the Battle
of the Bogside when the Catholics in Derry occupied their community.
My dad was captured in Hong Kong. The Japanese invaded this island in 1941 with
overwhelming superior forces and the British surrendered. To the best of my recollection, he spent some time in prison in Hong
Kong then three years and nine months working for Mitsubishi on the docks in
Tokio (that’s how my dad spelled it).
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| 1941 Japanese Invade Hong Kong |
When the war ended, my dad found himself on a US ship that took him to Manila, and I assume Paddy Cullen was with him as they were both prisoners of war together. He was also held with Americans and even came to the US many years later to find some of them. But he was grateful to the American forces for the treatment he got on that journey to the Philippines.
He was not so happy with the boat trip from Manila to Vancouver Washington on a British ship. According to him, he was thrown in the brig for refusing to work. He felt he had already worked for four years without pay and was not going to work. He once told me how angry he was that the Yanks treated him better than his own and when he was unsure of his shoe size, they just gave him two pairs. Of course, he would not have thought too deeply about the financial state of the two nations at that time.; the US had not had its cities bombed and its productive forces were unscathed. When they arrived in Vancouver, Washington, dad and Paddy Cullen went AWOL. They traveled from Canada’s west coast all the way to Halifax Nova Scotia by trains.
I took my friend John Throne (Sean O’ Torain) to my dad’s house in Enfield some 20 years ago and my dad told us both of that trip and Paddy Cullen and his exploits were central to it. John was Irish and my father’s mother was Irish, we had lots of Irish relatives I never met.
My dad loved his liquor, alcoholism, we call it, and was once caught bribing the orderly at the home he ended up in to smuggle in bottles of scotch. That night in Enfield he had Sean and I in fits describing Paddy Cullen’s antics.
Paddy was a hard man he told us. As a prisoner he was repeatedly punished or beaten for attacks on his hosts. Not only that, he was a little light fingered and often things that were not his found their way in to his possession. He had principles mind you being a bit Robin Hoodish. He wouldn’t steal from friends or average folks. Like the legendary Lieutenant Carruthers who allegedly absconded with the silver from the officers mess in Puna, he liberated the possessions of those who he figured had too much that they never really worked for anyway.
When they finally made it back to the UK my dad was sent to Burma where I was born and he lost touch with Paddy Cullen. It was a bit sad my dad said, last time he saw Paddy he got some job painting Zebra Crossings on the Edgeware Road.
Apparently Paddy had tried to re-enlist but was determined to be too unstable for such a proud institution as the British Army in peace time.
Richard Mellor
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