From Westmeath and Silesia to the National Concert Hall

When English opera singer Anna Patalong makes her National Concert Hall debut next month, there will be more than a few Westmeath faces in the audience to watch their illustrious relative perform.

Although born and raised in Coventry, Anna has strong links to the Lake County courtesy of her grandmother, Bracklyn native Jane Geoghegan.

Like so many young Irish people in the late 1940s, Jane Doyle emigrated to England in search of work and settled in Coventry, as two of her sisters had already set up base there.

One of her fellow lodgers in the hostel she was staying in was a young Polish man named Alojzy (Aloysius) Patalong, and the young emigrants quickly took a shine to each other.

Jane’s soon to be husband’s journey from his Silesian homeland to the English midlands would not be out of a place in a novel.

When Poland was annexed by Germany in 1939, Alojzy and his compatriots became citizens of the Third Reich.

This meant that when he turned 18 in 1944 he was conscripted into the Germany army.

His and Jane’s son Stephen, who is also Anna’s father, says that absconding wasn’t an option for his father due to the inevitable repercussions for his family.

Alojzy’s time in the German army lasted around six months. With the Allies’ victory only months away, he was taken prisoner in December 1944. His military career, however, wasn’t over.

“He was held in a prisoner of war camp and eventually the American Third Army filtered all the people to try to ascertain who were genuine Germans and who wanted to change sides,” Stephen told the Westmeath Examiner.

“My father, along with other Poles and other nationalities, opted to change sides. He went from being in the Germany army to induction into the Polish Division of the British Eighth Army in Italy.”

After being told by his father that he would best serve his family by finding a job in the West and sending home money to war-ravaged Poland, Alojzy ended up in the Coventry hostel, where he met Jane.

As the saying goes, for the Patalong family the rest is history.

Given the fact that his mother was Irish and his father was Polish, it is no surprise that Stephen says he was brought up in a “very good Catholic household”.

Jane brought her family home on a number of occasions during their childhoods and while his memories are hazy, Stephen remembers that the contrast between rural Westmeath and the industrialised English midlands wasn’t lost on his young self.

“My mother took me and my brother to Ireland for the summer when I was three.

“Because my father worked in a car factory, I don’t even think he had two weeks off, but he did manage to come over.

“Apparently when I saw my father, the first thing I said to him was, ‘Daddy, show me a lorry’. I don’t know if it is apocryphal or true, but that is the story that’s told.”

Although Stephen’s mother has lived in Coventry for more than 70 of her 90 ninety years, Stephen says that when relatives from Ireland visit “it takes about five minutes before she drops into the Mullingar or Bracklyn accent”.

Jane is proud of granddaughter Anna’s achievement’s on the stage, Stephen says – as she is of all of her grandchildren.

One of England’s most highly regarded young opera singers, Anna’s musical talent was spotted at an early age and she made her stage debut at the age of seven in a production of the Sound of Music in her home town.

After majoring in piano during her music degree at Leeds university, she was advised by a lecturer to take voice lessons after he was bowled over by her turn as Maria in a student production of West Side Story. On completion of her degree, she studied at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, where she won a number of prestigious awards.

Since then Anna has established herself as one of British opera’s brightest stars, performing all over the world, including in Galway and Belfast where, dad Stephen says, she was greeted by a “coachload of cousins and second cousins”.

In addition to her upcoming performance in Nessun Dorma: The Life and Music of Luciano Pavarotti in the National Concert Hall on May 13, Anna will be returning to Ireland in the autumn to play the lead role in Callas: The Life and Music of Maria Callas in the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre on September 14.

Speaking to the Irish Independent recently about her upcoming shows in Ireland, Anna said that performing in the land of her grandmother has an added resonance.

“For me being back in Ireland is also something I really look forward to. My grandmother is Irish, so we spent a lot of time here as children. She had come over from Mullingar to Coventry after the war. She introduced me to Irish music and really gave me a love of music generally.”