Occasionally you meet someone who seems to ignore all known bounds of acceptable behaviour. Sometimes these can be amusing, ‘devil may care’ types whose charm can overcome their obvious social short comings. Patrick Murphy was not one of those. His name came from the tune made popular at the time by Val Doonican, a song about Paddy McGinty’s goat.
The first incident that I recall was when he dropped his payslip which was found by our FOC, Charlie Penny. Apparently his rate of pay was more than anyone else’s as he had blagged that he was a foreman at his previous place of work. The resentment at the time was stoked because this had been a non-union printers which later was taken in by the union and the workers there granted union cards – a valuable commodity in those days of closed shop union membership. Within a short period of time it was became apparent that McGinty was pretty useless at the job and would lie his way out of any incident that occurred by shamelessly blaming the other party involved.
Machine Madness
There was one occasion when he had to go down to the machine room in the basement of Percy Brothers to make some corrections to the type as it lay on the machine bed. In order to do this, clips known as quoins had to be loosened and raised so that the page became loose enough to insert individual letters where a spelling mistake had been made. Once this was done, the standard procedure was to put the clips back, tighten them again and then get the machine manager to run one paper sheet off to check that the newly altered type had been corrected. This is what McGinty did with the exception of altering the quoins to lay flat and tighten. When the machine minder ran the machine the quoins were still upright. There was an enormous bang and the a section of the machine disintegrated. Murphy immediately denied that he had asked the minder to run the machine even though it had been witnessed. This probably led him to be banished to the reading room where he could do much less damage.
Toilet Trouble
One day Ron Choularton decide to play a trick on the unsuspecting McGinty. The composing room toilets had five or six wc’s. Ron had seen McGinty enter one and lock the door. Ron waited until Murphy had settled down to read and do his business. He entered the adjacent stall, stood on the seat and flushed the toilet in McGinty’s cubicle by pulling the lever attached to the box containing the ball cock. What fun! Murphy’s rear end was soaked, he ran out holding his trousers up with one hand and took a swing at Ron. At which point his trousers fell down leaving all witnesses with a traumatic sight never to be forgotten.
Car Trouble
McGinty’s son was a second hand car salesman somewhere in Parrs Wood. For some reason he took me and a co-worker there one afternoon. His son was eating fish and chips at the time and he managed to deposit some of the fish and spit on my jacket whilst I was talking to him about one of the cars he was selling – not the most enjoyable ways to spend my lunch time. Murphy ended up getting a Sunbeam Rapier off his son, no doubt at a bargain price. I was quite jealous as I had one too but mine was much older and nowhere near as good. To rub my nose in it, McGinty took me for a spin which included a trip up the Mancunian Way which was very close to the Hotspur Press. However, he decided he would turn off down a slip road which was, in fact, a one way junction onto the road! We were going down the way up. I closed my eyes and hoped for the best.
It was McGinty who managed to blow up the tin of beans and sausage that was heating up on the water heater in the washroom by the simple omission of opening the tin first. This resulted in all the comp room being banned from the practice – one of the earliest manifestations of ‘Elf and Safety’. This made an already unpopular member of staff even more so.