Norah Shaw

Norah Shaw was abandoned. Her parents were mired in drunkenness and poverty, and she was handed to St. Bandass children’s home as a toddler. The early years were cruel, and an introduction to The home’s benefactors led to the abuse that found her pregnant at a tender age.

While at St. Bandass, she mentored a much younger boy, Dougie Glenn, who was abandoned similarly to herself, so, assuming the role of an older sister, using a gritty determination to keep him safe, they built a sincere, enduringly close relationship.

Leaving St. Bandass’s so-called protective confines brought many challenges for a young woman with a child, and early recourses into prostitution brought sufficient funds to survive. Her daughter, Connie, grew into a beautiful woman, and Norah was distraught to witness the girl absorbed into a life defined by circumstances.

Meeting a businessman with a conscience and close family contact with the child’s father was an opportunity not to be missed and resulted in a fund to provide for them both and arrangements for an apartment to be established in a building he’d recently acquired with the lease fixed at a peppercorn rate in the life of the building. Withdrawing to a more acceptable lifestyle, they took residence on the first floor of the Co-operative building that would eventually become Percy’s Pawnshop.