GLASGOW (SCOTLAND)
The Sunday Post
March 15, 2020
by Gordon Blackstock
For years he didn’t think about him. Now he can’t stop.
Every night Eddie McColl, 75, says he remembers his kid brother Francis, who died at the age of 13. Both siblings, along with older brothers John and Willie, were taken from their widowed mother, Ellen, in the early ’50s. After coalman dad John died from tuberculosis, the family had been left on its uppers.
Eddie remembers being so poor, he would raid bins for clothes to wear to school in the tough area of Maryhill in Glasgow. Soon, the three younger brothers were taken to Smyllum Park orphanage in Lanarkshire to be protected and cared for. Or so they hoped.
In 2018, the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry heard evidence that the orphanage – run by the religious order of nuns, the Daughters of Charity – was rife with physical and sexual abuse suffered by many of the children taken there.
John, a streetwise teenager, escaped life at Smyllum, originally running away before being allowed to live with an aunt. Francis, the youngest and not yet at school, was kept away from his brothers in the nursery wing.
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