Patrick Duggan
The Duggans and the Baileys Patrick with a portrait of Ellen in the background (Oral history) © Patrick Duggan  Patrick's mother (seated on the left at the front) with her mother immediately behind and other relatives, taken around 1925 © Patrick Duggan  A truck belonging to Bailey's haulage business, undated. behind and other relatives, taken around 1925 © Patrick Duggan Both my mother's and father's families have connections to Burngreave. My father and grandfather Duggan were both furnace men at Firth Brown, originally of Irish Catholic stock. My father used to joke about how my grandfather had swum across the Channel with my grandmother on his back! On my mother's side, the Bailey family ran a haulage firm on Earsham Street in the late 1800s and early 1900s. I have a birth certificate for my maternal grandmother, Ellen Bailey. She was born in 1868 in Ecclesall Bierlow to parents William and Eliza (nee Twigger). By the time the next two children were born, they had moved to 26 Gower Street in Pitsmoor, some time in the 1870s. Ellen married a man called Arthur Lakin but he died shortly after they had a son, Harold. In a strange twist of fate, Ellen got her maiden name back as she remarried Arnold Bailey, my grandfather. He and his brother Lawrence had the haulage business, I have some photographs of horses and old trucks with the Bailey emblem on the side from this time. When I was a small boy, I remember that my grandmother lived with us. I recall her as an old lady, always wearing a pinafore and with her hair tied back in a bun. I've got a portrait of her, painted when she was a young woman. Curiously I don't think the family were as well off as you might suppose from having paintings done. It just seems to have been a family habit as my mother had her portrait painted when she became 21. |