| Billy Connolly made his grand entrance to the world on the 24th
November 1942. His mother, Mary, gave birth to him on the kitchen floor
of their tenemant flat at 65 Dover Street, Anderston, Glasgow, a building
which has since been demolished. His father, William, was the son of an
Irish immigrant, and worked as an optical instrument technician.
 After the birth
of another child, Billy's little sister Florence, William senior went off
to serve in the RAF, and the trials of separation caused the marriage to
break up in 1946, leaving William to bring up Billy and Flo. The time being
what it was, the task of looking after the two youngsters fells to William's
two sisters, Mona and Margaret. These two aunts were to be the major female
figures in Billy's young life.
William and the two children moved in with the aunts in their
red sandstone tenemant in White Street, Partick, a more upmarket area to
the north of the Clyde. Billy has opened up about these formative years
recently, and admits that it was not a happy time for him. |
| 'I didn't enjoy it at all, it was awful because my aunts began to
regret it. They were both single and in their twenties, I guess, then,
and one was just out of the Wrens in Portsmouth and the other one was a
career nurse, and I think they deeply regretted it. Especially the older
one who took a real mother place in my life - Mona. She deeply regretted
it because it kind of cost her marriage and happiness and stuff, and she
kind of took it out on me. I don't blame the woman, it's just the whole
thing was uncomfortable and awful and dreadful. I didn't like my childhood
at all.' |
| Billy started at St. Peter's Primary School in 1947, where he formed
a schoolboy gang called The Connollys who used to fight with The Sinclairs
from round the corner. Billy's first kiss was from Gracie McLintock, and
he still holds that memory dear to him. Although he began as a promising
student, a succession of horrible teachers turned his agile mind away from
schoolwork. St. Peter's was just a few yards up the road from Billy's house,
and Billy admits that it was here that he first encountered toilet humour
and learned his first swear words, and his first joke : |
"Pat and Mick went up a stick
An couldnae get doon for skelfs" |
| 'I thought it was hysterical. What it means, I'll never know, but
it was my first joke and I was very proud of it.' |
 Mary, his
mother, had moved 30 miles away to Dunoon, where she worked in a hospital
canteen, and had four children with her new husband William Adams. Billy
never saw her during his childhood, but held no ill thoughts about her,
understanding her circumstances - a young mother living in a slum during
the war, not knowing whether she was a widow or not from one moment to
the next.
Later, when the Glasgow papers 'rediscovered' Mary still living
in her rented terraced house, they ran a distasteful series of articles
which shocked many of Billy's fans, and turned Billy forever from the Scottish
press.
At the time, though, there appeared to be little rancour in the
separation, and Billy plays down the effect it had on him : |
| 'It was very odd when my mother left, but not a shock. It was very
strange and very exciting, I thought at the time. My sister Florence was
more shocked by it, because I think she knew more about it, because I was
only four.' |
Later, the Connolly household moved from the red sandstone of city-centre
Partick, to the new housing scheme of Drumchapel, to the north west of
the city.
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