Cowboy Song

by Graeme Thomson

  An already challenging start in life was complicated further when Philomena became pregnant again. Now living in Liverpool, she gave birth to a daughter, Jeanette, in Sefton Park hospital in Liverpool in April 1951. Cecil Parris is listed as the father on her birth certificate – the baby was named after his Guyanese mother and ‘Parris’ was once again conferred as a middle name. He and Philomena appear to have maintained an irregular relationship in the time since Philip had been born, but each lived unsettled and transitory lives. In reality, Jeanette’s father was not Cecil Parris but a white US serviceman, who had already departed the scene.

  Shortly afterwards, Parris moved on, too. He settled permanently in London, where one of his brothers, Alan Parris, was now living and working as a policeman. More family members would subsequently make the trip over from British Guiana. It would be another twenty-five years before he re-entered his son’s life. ‘Cecil was always very upset about [leaving] because he was a very strong family man,’ says Irene Parris. ‘It was taken out of his hands … He wasn’t able to be a father to Philip.’

  Shortly after Parris had left, Philomena was living in Manchester, where she met a black American G.I. she called Jimmy Angel. He paid the rent for her flat at 96 Everton Road, a run-down street in the district of Chorlton-on-Medlock, later demolished as part of the inner-city slum clearance. Once again, she became pregnant, giving birth to a third child, James Arthur Lynott, at North Manchester General Hospital on 27 June 1952. The father provided basic support but soon he was heading back to the United States. Lynott, now three years old, ‘took his absence very badly’.1

  Having given birth to three children by three different fathers – none of whom assumed the role of parent or provider – before she had passed the age of twenty-one, Philomena was faced with impossible choices. In early 1953, when Jeanette was still not quite two, her mother gave the child up for adoption. The same pattern occurred with Lynott’s half-brother, James, who was given up for adoption in 1954, at the age of two.

  The trauma was both profound and heart-breaking; that Philomena didn’t merely survive but flourish is testament to her remarkable fortitude. The impact on her son remains harder to discern.

  By 1957, Lynott was attending Princess Road Junior School in Moss Side. On his report card, Conduct is graded D, Attendance C, Punctuality E. ‘Philip must be helped to form a regular habit of punctuality,’ writes the teacher, pointedly. ‘Rather disappointing,’ adds the principal, who attaches an accompanying note upbraiding the pupil for being ‘deliberately careless’ for losing the report in the street on his way home. It does not require much reading between the lines to identify the outline of an erratic home life; years later Lynott recalled that nobody was ever there to collect him from school.

  It is not possible to know what he witnessed or felt during the first few years of his life. He simply didn’t talk about it. ‘I never remember a word from him about that [time],’ says Jim Fitzpatrick, the Irish artist who became one of Lynott’s closest friends. ‘I think his life began in his head when he was seven or eight. Maybe that’s a way of psychologically adjusting for a child. He never went into any negative stuff. I tried to talk to him about it a couple of times and it was like pulling teeth.’

  There are mysteries and secrets at the heart of his childhood. The pieces don’t quite fit. There are parts missing. Time slips and bends. The absolute truth remains elusive to outside observers and family members alike – much as it was to Lynott himself. He made no indication as an adult that he possessed any knowledge of having a younger brother and sister. He was very young when they were born, and perhaps they faded quickly from his memory and existed only as a hazy outline, a dream that never quite connected to his own reality. It is not inconceivable that circumstances dictated that he was elsewhere at the time they were born, that his care in England was provided by someone other than his mother. In time Lynott grew extremely close to Philomena, and came to understand her vibrant spirit and to love her unconditionally, but there were still things about her past that he didn’t know, and perhaps didn’t want to.

  Shortly before he died, in the autumn of 1985 Lynott learned conclusively of the existence of his half-sister, Jeanette, who had recently traced her birth mother and had made contact with her. (Philomena Lynott’s other son, James, now known as Leslie, did not make contact until 1996, ten years after Lynott’s death.) Re-christened Philomena by her adoptive parents, Jeanette was now a teacher, living in Derby in the East Midlands of England. Lynott showed no indication that he was being given information which he already knew, although his reaction to the news was subdued. Troubled as he was at that time in his personal and professional life, confirmation that he had a sibling was a further complication he did not necessarily welcome. Within three months he would be dead, without ever meeting the ‘other’ Philomena.

  His mother’s resilience saved Lynott from the fate of numerous other children, including his siblings, born in similarly testing circumstances. He was not snatched away by the Catholic Church, sold to the highest bidder or farmed out for adoption in the United States or Australia. The price of maintaining the blood ties of family, however, was an undoubtedly harrowing start in life. Full of ‘fear and paranoia’,2 Philomena eventually ran out of options. In the summer of 1957, Lynott was sent to live with her parents at 85 Leighlin Road in Crumlin. He was almost eight. The solid anchor of Ireland awaited him.

  2

  Lynott wrote two songs called ‘Sarah’. The second, and most famous, appeared on Black Rose: A Rock Legend and was released as a Thin Lizzy single in 1979. It was written for his daughter, born at the end of the previous year.

  The first was for the woman who had saved him from an uncertain fate. Recorded in 1972 on Thin Lizzy’s second album, Shades of a Blue Orphanage, ‘Sarah’ is a tender piano ballad, which pays poetic homage to the grandmother he adored. His characteristically romantic imagining of Sarah Finn as an impassioned young woman, snaring the heart of Frank Lynott, contains a pun on the family name: ‘Schoolboy eyes would stare in innocent fun / Never told no lies’. This was Lynott’s traditional means of advising people how to correctly pronounce his name. ‘It’s Lie-not,’ he would say, ‘cos I tell no lies,’1 a definition that deliberately tested the boundaries of credibility.

  Born in north Dublin in 1898, Sarah Lynott was a typical Irish ‘mammy’, a tough, can-do, unsentimental rock of reliability for a child who had previously known only turbulent waters. Lynott would quote her no-nonsense aphorisms to friends and until the day he died afforded her the utmost respect. Frank Lynott was a more distant figure. He enjoyed a drink, could be taciturn and did not always see eye-to-eye with his own children, but he was idolized by Lynott as the first real father figure he had known who hadn’t vanished. When he did leave, dead from a heart attack on 20 May 1964, his fourteen-year-old grandson was crushed.

  Lynott arrived in Crumlin at the beginning of the summer holidays in 1957, accompanied by his mother and a long-forgotten school friend from Manchester. Within a few weeks he was at the centre of a conventional Irish Catholic family: hardworking, durable and absolutely steeped in the idea of their own Irishness.

  Though the Lynotts weren’t fully aware of all the facts – they knew nothing of Philomena’s two adopted children – they exhibited a degree of disapproval over the manner in which she was managing her life. For the next few years she focused on building a more solid existence for herself in Manchester. There were letters to and fro – ‘Dear Mammy, I hope that you are well, I think of you all the time’ – but close contact between mother and son was minimal. Lynott made the transition from boy to man in a two-up two-down in Leighlin Road, under the supervision of his grandmother.

  Give or take a splash of colour, the proliferation of satellite dishes and the number of cars lining the pavement, Leighlin Road – pronounced Leg-lin – was much the same in the late 1950s as it is now. It is a long, gently curving street of featureless pre-war constructions, clustered in g
roups of fours and fives. ‘These little boxes,’ as Lynott later described them. ‘Every house looked the same.’2 The area was certainly too pedestrian for the Republican poet, playwright and wild man Brendan Behan, whose family grew restive when moved to Crumlin in 1937 from Russell Street in central Dublin. Behan went further than Lynott in regarding the homes as ‘dolls’ houses’. In his autobiographical play Moving Out, he refers to Dublin’s new housing developments as ‘Siberia’, likening life in Crumlin to enforced exile from the beating heart of the city.

  No. 85 Leighlin Road was tiny. ‘You couldn’t swing a cat in the kitchen,’ recalls Michael O’Flanagan, who befriended Lynott in the 1960s while filming and photographing many local bands. ‘It was a very small house.’ There was a small patch of greenery at the front set back from the road, while a larger garden at the rear was designed to encourage families to grow their own produce and become self-sufficient. The Lynotts were not persuaded.

  The family lived on the section of Leighlin Road where the street grows increasingly narrow, giving the impression almost of a country lane that has been gripped and squeezed by the hand of modernity. ‘That end of Leighlin Road was the rough end,’ says Martin Duffy, a Crumlin native who went on to become a successful editor, film-maker and writer. ‘I hated going down it as a kid because there were a lot of tough kids there.’ Although Duffy was a couple of years younger than Lynott, and a self-confessed ‘nerd’, the pair became teenage friends.

  In common with most families in the area, the house had been overrun with offspring, raised and then shooed out into the wider world. By the time Lynott arrived only three children remained – his aunt Irene and his two youngest uncles. He came to regard the older of the two, Timothy, as a cross between an adult big brother and a surrogate father; Peter, the last in line, and only 14 months his elder, was closer to a sibling. It was the kind of set-up not unfamiliar in large families. Brothers could seem more like fathers; uncles like brothers.

  Relationships and roles were fluid, which suited Lynott. He arrived in Crumlin without an accompanying explanation. There was no identifying label attached. Timothy, Irene and Peter were not told that this was their nephew, Philomena’s boy. ‘My mother and father knew the full story,’ said Timothy Lynott, ‘But we didn’t because we were young and it wasn’t explained to us.’3 As much as a decade later, there still existed members of the Lynott family who did not know that Philip was Philomena’s son. The neighbours, meanwhile, assumed that he had been adopted, a story which the family had little appetite to correct. The taking-in of children born into extreme hardship or what was then regarded as ‘disgrace’ was not uncommon in Catholic Ireland. Within that cultural context, the arrival of a ‘poor black baby’ was unusual but not entirely implausible.

  In the absence of absolutes, alternative narratives were constructed for the sake of convenience and propriety. Misunderstandings were allowed to stand. ‘We had hidden it from a lot of people,’ Philomena Lynott told me. ‘I remember taking him to the shops and an old woman put her hand on his head and said, “Oh God bless him and protect him and take him back to Africa to them that own him.” She was a real old Irish lady. That’s how it was then. Nobody would have believed that I was his mother, no matter what.’

  Eventually, those who needed to came to recognize the truth without ever asking – day-to-day life was so frantic, no one seemed to care much one way or the other. ‘When I think about Crumlin now it’s almost like a Monty Python sketch, all these kids falling out of these tiny little houses,’ says Martin Duffy. ‘My mother had fifteen children, and we weren’t the biggest family. The Butlers had a family of twenty kids. There was a huge amount of kids. Too many kids, not enough work. Tough times and tough people. Everybody was accepted for what they were if they measured up. I didn’t register Philip’s family situation. I didn’t even notice it. At that time, with so many kids around, we weren’t analysing things like that.’

  ‘Philip was accepted,’ says Frank Murray, one of Lynott’s closest friends and Thin Lizzy’s road manager for much of the 1970s. Murray grew up next door to Crumlin, in Walkinstown. ‘It was a working-class district, we accepted lots of things. We accepted poverty, fashion sense, families – it didn’t matter. It was that kind of community. You just didn’t go up to a guy and say, “Look, you’re living with this all-white family, you’re a black guy – what the fuck happened?” People would say, “Isn’t that guy great?” but they didn’t mention his colour.’

  In Moss Side, by the late 1950s non-Caucasian children were a not unfamiliar sight. There was a vibrant Afro-Caribbean population and a sizeable Sikh community was forming. In Ireland, Lynott belonged to a world few people recognized or even understood. There were precisely four indigenous black children in a city of more than 600,000 souls. Dublin was home to a tiny and transient group of African students, enrolled at the College of Surgeons at Trinity College, but for the vast majority of those who encountered him in the first years following his arrival from England, Lynott was – symbolically, if not literally – the First Black Irishman.

  In August 1957, during his first days as a pupil at the Scoil Colm Christian Brothers’ School (CBS) on Armagh Road, Lynott stood in the playground while his fellow pupils clamoured to touch his hair. ‘We were envious, because one of our nightmares was our mothers untangling our hair with a comb, and we reckoned he wouldn’t have had to comb his hair at all,’ says his classmate Liam O’Connor. ‘We were only babies. There wasn’t any racism. We weren’t sophisticated enough to be threatened.’

  At Catholic schools across the country, including Lynott’s own, each week pupils would collect money for the ‘Black Babies’. The proceeds were spent on sending missionaries to Africa and elsewhere to deliver aid, establish charitable work and spread the gospels. ‘If your parents paid 2/6 [two shillings and six pence] you could “buy” your own black baby for life,’ says O’Connor. ‘We just assumed someone had paid their 2/6 and they had sent Philip over from Africa. That was the logic of a child.’

  Ireland had many problems at that time, but immigration was not one of them. Human traffic invariably travelled in the other direction, and the default reaction to Lynott was a kind of benign incomprehension rather than the kneejerk hostility of those who feel threatened or invaded. Only rarely did cultural confusion spill over into physical altercations. His uncle Peter, in the year above Lynott at CBS, was assigned the role of brother protector. He recalls taking Lynott to school and running the gauntlet of astonished children, some of whom registered their shock with mocking shouts of ‘Blackie!’ and ‘Baluba!’

  Future Thin Lizzy drummer Brian Downey, also a fellow pupil at CBS, recalls ‘one occasion when some guy called him “Sambo”, and Philip took exception to that. He called the guy into the schoolyard, and there was an arrangement for later that day to have a bit of a scrap outside the school gates. I was on Phil’s side, there was a couple of guys on the other guy’s side, but we all just stood off and let them have it – and Phil won hands down. Phil was pretty tough. It was only a five-minute skirmish, but Phil had him pinned to the ground and could have beat this guy to a pulp. Nobody was going to intervene, but he just let him up and said, “If you say that again I really will hurt you.” That was a typical example of what Phil was like. He was a fair guy.’

  Like many whose roots might be open to question before they even open their mouths, Lynott quickly seemed to become more Irish, more Dublin, more Southside than those who had been born and raised there. He quickly developed, says Duffy, ‘a perfect Dublin accent’, which he deployed quietly but effectively, folding in the local idioms, rhythms and sly wordplay.

  His colour was simply there, as he put it, like having ‘big ears’,4 but he recognized that it afforded him a certain status. He rarely had to shout to get attention. The world came to him. Once he understood this, he used it.

  He was already a budding hustler. For obvious – if dubious – reasons, the teachers at CBS often sent him out to collect
for the Black Babies. ‘He told me that he used to rob the box at night time because he was one of the black babies,’ Philomena Lynott told me. ‘He used to turn the box upside down and slip a knife up and let some of the pennies slip down.’

  On the bus in Dublin, children would point and say, ‘Mummy, Mummy, there’s a black man!’ ‘He thought that was hilarious,’ says Michael O’Flanagan. A budding cineaste, O’Flanagan wanted to make a short film of Lynott’s first band, the Black Eagles. Lynott asked whether it would be shot in colour or black and white. ‘Oh, colour,’ said O’Flanagan proudly. ‘I come out better in black and white,’ came the reply.

  He would make jokes about having a ‘beauty spot all over’, and about the size of his ‘mickey’. During taxi journeys Lynott would often pretend that he was a Nigerian medical student at Trinity College, and converse with the driver in stilted pidgin English. During one trip in April 1968, when he arrived home the driver told him the fare would be ten shillings.

  ‘Suddenly Philip reverted back to his broad Dublin accent and said it wasn’t ten shillings but only seven-and-six, as it had been every other night,’ recalls O’Flanagan, taking up the tale. ‘The taxi driver still insisted that it was ten shillings. Philip said, “You’d better take me around to the cop shop, then, and we’ll see what it is.” The taxi driver relented and slid a half-crown across the seat to Philip, who took the money, pocketed it, got out of the taxi and walked away. The driver jumped out of the taxi and shouted after Philip, “I’m glad they shot Martin Luther King!” which indeed they had that very day. He told me that story with such zest and humour, still laughing at the idea of the taxi guy shouting that at him.’

  Into adulthood there were still occasional flashpoints. He would sometimes be referred to around Dublin, ignorantly, if not deliberately unkindly, as ‘the spade singer’. He once went to the Revolution Club with his friend Tom Collins and was told, ‘Sorry, no blacks.’