From the Rhondda Valley to the Hammer

Thomas Winstone was born in the small coal mining town of Tylorstown in the historic Rhondda Valley, South Wales. When Winstone was old enough to work he became a coal miner like so many other men in his town; and like so many of those same working-class men, he later enlisted to fight in the Second World War. Winstone was later captured by the Germans and held in Crete as a prisoner of war. On returning to the UK he met Elizabeth ‘Lil’ Bothwell, who was working in a munitions factory in Coventry at the time. The two fell in love and were married. They moved to Northern Ireland and settled in Matlock Street in the ‘Hammer’ area of Belfast's Lower Shankill, where Lil was originally from. Winstone was a keen amateur boxer, which was perhaps no surprise given that one famous son of Tylorstown was Jimmy Wilde, a notable flyweight who earned nicknames like ‘Ghost with the Hammer in his Hand’ and the more obvious ‘the Tylorstown Terror’. Winstone also coached Floyd ‘Klutei’ Robertson, the famous Ghanaian featherweight boxer.

As well as coaching other keen boxers in the West Belfast area and further afield, Winstone worked for James Mackie & Sons, a large textile machinery plant on the Springfield Road which provided employment to many of the city's Protestant workers. The Winstones had two children, a girl and a boy. Thomas, or ‘Tom’, was born in 1955 and was encouraged from a young age to take his education seriously, but was also fully expected to leave at 15 and undertake employment in Mackie's factory on the Springfield Road like his father; or perhaps work in the Harland and Wolff shipyard in the east of the city.