Boxing's Forgotten Hero: John McNally

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[from the Appletree Press title John McNally - Boxing's Forgotten Hero published by Appletree Press]

Early Days in the Pound Loney - Part 2

On the afternoon of the attack, spectators at an Irish League game involving Linfield and Distillery noticed a Junkers plane circling high over Windsor Park. It was in fact a German scouting plane, making a final check on the city in advance of the firestorm that would visit that night. Later, two hundred bombers left their bases in Northern France and in the Low Countries bound for Belfast. By 10.30 that night, the city’s air-raid sirens were signalling approaching danger, but this time it was not to be a false alarm.
Under a full moon, wave after wave of unchallenged bombers dropped their incendiaries, high explosives and landmines on the defenceless city. The citizens of Belfast thought that Armageddon had arrived as the onslaught increased in ferocity. By early morning the entire area seemed to be in flames, as a request for assistance to put out the fires was sent to the southern authorities. By the time the attack had ended, almost 1,000 lives had been lost as well as mass swathes of terraced houses in the devastated city. Temporary morgues were established to prepare the dead and mass graves were dug in both the Milltown and City Cemeteries, where the unclaimed bodies were buried. As John McNally recalled, the population of Belfast did not know whether to run to the hills or stay in their beds.
“There was talk that the Germans would get to Belfast but it never really was something that you worried about. On the night of the attack, I remember that there was great excitement, and my mother and father woke us out of bed and took us under the stairs, where we clung together with a mattress over us for protection. We heard the explosions in the distance but there was not really any sense of panic that I recall. It was only when Percy Street on the other side of the Falls Road took a direct hit did we really get frightened.
“The following night saw a mass evacuation from Belfast and we went up to the Falls Park, where there were literally thousands of people sleeping out in the open. I remember that our family slept in a bus in the nearby depot and sure enough there was a second attack. For many nights after that we slept in the open until it was felt safe enough to return to the Loney. I always remember the scenes of devastation in and around the city after that, and knowing that an awful lot of people had been tragically killed. As we were kids we just couldn’t understand the whole thing and it was just another part of growing up, but it was horrific looking back on it now.”

One of the outcomes of the German onslaught on Belfast saw the authorities introduce a policy of evacuating children from the city to more secure areas in the country. John McNally and his beloved mother Maisie, together with his brother and five sisters, were given lodgings in a farmhouse on land owned by the Graham family in Glenarriff, one of the nine famous Glens of Antrim. The escape from Belfast to one of Ireland’s most beautiful areas was a great experience for the McNallys and John’s schooling continued in the local town of Waterfoot.
“All it did was rain,” he recalled. “It was a truly lovely place to escape to and every Friday was special, as my father used to come to stay with us, and the farm was just an excellent place for a young lad like me to be at that time.”

As the threat from the Luftwaffe receded, the McNallys eventually returned to Belfast where now the Spitfires could now be seen on daily manoeuvres over the city. However, John McNally soon had other difficulties to face as he entered his teenage years in the Pound Loney.
The McNally family was one where the females held sway and where the menfolk knew their place. John McNally had five sisters, one devoted grandmother, and his mother Maisie looking after him. Sometimes he could play one off against the other, and if he had a disagreement with his mother he ‘ran away’ to his grandmother’s house in the next street and she was able to provide a comforting shoulder. Life was simple, and having his mother and grandmother close provided security in uncertain times.
In early 1945, Maisie McNally travelled the short distance to the Mater Hospital where she gave birth to a third son, who was to be christened Tomás. However, all was not well as the medical staff discovered that Maisie had cancer of the womb. She was transferred to the cancer ward while the infant Tomás was brought home a couple of days later, to be looked after initially by John’s aunt, Mary Draine. Maisie McNally’s condition worsened, but the children were kept in the dark when they asked about their mother’s whereabouts. For John it was nothing to get upset about, as he was assured constantly that she would be home ‘in a few days’. Days became weeks and George McNally was a constant visitor to his wife’s bedside as she fought to regain health.
Up until quite recently, in most areas of Ireland, there was always a family in a neighbourhood who undertook the duties associated with washing and preparing the dead for a traditional wake. In the Pound Loney area this ritual of ‘laying out a body’ fell to a woman by the name of Maggie Wright. One morning in August 1945, she knocked on the McNallys’ door in Cinnamond Street as the bearer of bad news. John answered the door to be asked whether his mother was home from the hospital and, if not, at what time she was expected to return. A mood of joyful expectation was soon shattered when it was explained to John that his mother’s return was not going to be a happy occasion, as she had passed away that morning.
“I was stunned into silence, as I still believed that she wasn’t really ill and would be home any day. I just couldn’t understand what had happened and then my sisters started to cry and wail as it was related to us that she died of cancer, but I was too young to understand such things. All I knew was that my mother had died, and I just felt so lonely and full of despair. Times were different back then and people were just expected to cope, but I remember in the weeks after her death that I could hear my father cry himself to sleep, and this continued for many months. We were all shattered by the experience but nobody wanted to talk about it, and we were just expected to survive. We were no different to other families in the district as death was a way of life, but when it hit us, it hit us bad. My mother was a beautiful woman with long red hair. It left an awful void in my life and it was my granny who in some ways filled that emptiness, even though she was suffering also.”

Soon after the death of John’s mother, a distraught Mary Draine visited the home of Granny Rose in Crane Street. She was inconsolable as she related to John’s grandmother a terrible dream she had had where Maisie McNally returned from the dead to speak with her. Still shaken, she told Rose of how Maisie had told her that she was broken hearted and longed to have youngest child Tomás back with her. Mary was consoled and told to go home to look after the child as he needed her.
The infant Tomás took a chest infection and died soon after, aged only five months. For John McNally, it was then that sport became the escape that helped him cope in difficult times. Sadly, neither Maisie nor young Tomás McNally would witness the glory that lay ahead for John. Opening of Chapter 1: here

From the Appletree Press title: John McNally - Boxing's Forgotten Hero by Barry Flynn.

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