An Unconsidered People E-Book

Catherine Dunne

• Herausgeber: New Island
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

New updated edition of the seminal work by Catherine Dunne, which charted the multifarious lives of the London Irish, in all their variety and colour, now with a brand new foreword by Diarmaid Ferriter. Before the 'Ryanair Generation', leaving home was for good. Half a million Irish men and women left these shores in the nineteen-fifties, forced by decades of economic stagnation to make their lives elsewhere. For many of these emigrants, mostly young and unskilled, Britain was their only hope of survival. Abandoned by the Irish state, this forgotten generation went in search of employment and security, the dignity of a future that was denied them at home. For many of these youthful emigrants, exile held the promise of adventure and excitement, freedom from the oppressions of De Valera's Ireland. Yet no two emigrant experiences were the same. In a series of compelling interviews, 'honest, angry, and funny', these vibrant voices reflect the diversity of lives lived away from the homeland, An Unconsidered People's struggle to plant new lives in an alien soil.

Leseprobe

An Unconsidered People

The Irish in London

AN UNCONSIDERED PEOPLE

First published in 2003, this edition first published in 2021

New Island Books

Glenshesk House

10 Richview Office Park

Clonskeagh

Dublin D14V8C4

Republic of Ireland

www.newisland.ie

Copyright © Catherine Dunne, 2003, 2021

The right of Catherine Dunne to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright and Related Rights Act, 2000.

Print ISBN: 978-1-84840-822-7

eBook ISBN: 978-1-84840-826-5

All rights reserved.The material in this publication is protected by copy- right law. Except as may be permitted by law, no part of the material may be reproduced (including by storage in a retrieval system) or transmitted in any form or by any means; adapted; rented or lent without the written permission of the copyright owners.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

New Island Books is a member of Publishing Ireland.

To Phyllis Izzard, for starting all of this on a boat to Venice seventeen years ago.And to James Izzard, for showing me how the original Roman road – now the A5 – passes through Watling Street, Kilburn, Cricklewood, Burnt Oak, Edgware and Stanmore. It then makes its way across country through Milton Keynes, Stratford, Oswestry and Llangollen. Finally, the same road ends up – after 239 miles – in Holyhead, which is where this journey begins.

Contents

Foreword

Introduction:‘There was no Back Door, Nothing to go Back to’

‘There was Nothing Else to do apart from Take the Boat’

‘Every Time I Leave Ennis a bit of Me Dies’

‘I Didn’t Come Over at First with the Intention of Staying’

‘Kilburn and Cricklewood were Bursting at the Seams with Irish’

‘’Tis a Savage Love, this Native Shore’

‘The Only Sin, it Seemed, was Breaking the Sixth or the Ninth Commandment’

‘Helping those Young Pregnant Girls became My Mission in Life’

‘In Those Days, You Followed the Work’

‘Still Collecting Tickets for London Underground after Forty Years!’

‘What am I Doing Here?’

‘Home is Always Somewhere Else because, in Effect, it Ceases to Exist’

Last One to Leave Ireland, Please Switch Off the Lights

Acknowledgements

Foreword

As a history undergraduate in UCD thirty years ago, I spent considerable time studying Anglo-Irish relations. The main focus was on high politics and diplomacy and one of our professors, Ronan Fanning, was quick to remind us of the observation of the Irish Free State’s first Minister for External Affairs, Desmond FitzGerald, who maintained, ‘England is our most important external affair.’ Fanning added that for the first twenty years of the state’s existence ‘England was not so much our most important external affair, as Ireland’s only important external affair.’

As I developed my own research interests in subsequent years, it struck me that the politics of Anglo-Irish relations was only one part of a complex story. Anglo-Irish conundrums, ties, distances, absorptions, rejections and misunderstandings have never just been political but also economic, social, cultural, personal and profoundly emotional. Looming over all those connections is emigration and all the entwinements it signifies. The historic Irish forays to Britain have been remarkable in their volume; over 3 million Irish-born people have emigrated to Britain since 1600; in the twentieth century alone, 1.6 million Irish left for Britain, more than twice as many as went to North America. One in three people under the age of thirty in 1946 had left the Irish Republic by 1971. Over 400,000 left Ireland in the 1950s while later, gross emigration for the period 1983–1993 amounted to 472,300, with 70,600 emigrating in 1989 alone, the year I left school. With the last economic crash came another exodus; the Central Statistics Office estimated 89,000 people left Ireland between April 2012 and March 2013.

There was too much silence about those people and their experiences. For something so pervasive and such an obvious safety valve, there was a reluctance to speak about it. In February 1946, Fine Gael leader Richard Mulcahy, then leading the opposition, was accused by the governing Fianna Fáil party of being ‘an emigrating agent or recruiting sergeant for another country’ because he had dared to describe some of the attractions England offered to Irish citizens. The use of such loaded and militaristic language harked back to the traditional nationalist response to emigration and was regarded by an editorial writer for The Irish Times as an indication that there were members of the government ‘who resent any public mention of emigration. That attitude is both wrong and unhelpful. The labourers and the unemployed of this country know perfectly what Great Britain has to offer them and there is no point in any effort to conceal the facts.’

The dislocation nonetheless caused considerable pain; in the words of Irish writer and 1950s emigrant Donal Foley, many who left Ireland that decade had to cling to ‘the comradeship of adversity’. But many others did well; the hierarchy of the London-Irish always created conflict and frustration, partly because the Irish were just as capable of exploiting and ill-treating their fellow natives as the English, and partly because of the belief that the term ‘Paddies’ was a liability. These fault lines were brought out strongly in Jimmy Murphy’s raw play The Kings of the Kilburn High Road (2000).

In 1956, Ireland’s Commission on Emigration, which had convened in 1948, stated that emigration had become ‘a part of the generally accepted pattern of life’. That did not make it any easier; consider, for example, John Healy’s book Death of an Irish Town (1968) in which he wrote of the emigrant train leaving Mayo in the 1950s: ‘The Guard’s door slamming shut was the breaking point: like the first clatter of stones and sand on a coffin, it signalled the finality of the old life. The young girls clutched and clung and wept in a frenzy.’ The Commission’s report also suggested that emigration weakened ‘national confidence and pride’ but was also a conservative influence, as the scale of the exodus diluted the need for ‘drastic action’. In providing the remaining population ‘with a reasonably satisfying standard of living’, emigration, the report argued, made people apathetic about domestic underdevelopment. It is estimated that Irish emigrants in Britain sent the contemporary equivalent of €5.7 billion back to Irish families between 1940 and 1970.

While many of those who left Ireland thrived, the loneliness or sense of banishment crushed others. An Irish psychiatric nurse working with some of the older Irish in Britain in 2004 commented ‘we’re finding deep wells of sadness in ordinary human lives.’ At the Irish Centre in Hammersmith in 2016 I interviewed different generations of Irish emigrants, including a ninety-two-year-old man from Killarney, who emigrated in 1946 and was still angry about his forced exile. Another emigrant I spoke to was a seventy-year-old woman reared in an orphanage in Cork who was sent over to London at the age of sixteen and had only recently told her large family about her childhood.

London, it seemed, was both refuge and punishment, providing anonymity and jobs but also a feeling of displacement. There was one song in particular I thought of that day, ‘Missing You’, written by Jimmy McCarthy and sung by Christy Moore in the 1980s. Evocative and raw, it captures the anger, regret and loneliness associated with some of the Irish in ‘London in the nobody zone’ and the baggage carried by emigrants who often wondered about a return to Ireland but realised that going back might be as difficult as staying. It finishes with the line ‘And I’ll never go home now because of the shame of a misfit’s reflection in a shop window pane.’ The Irish in Britain are now the oldest ethnic group there and the most likely to live alone.

The power and value of Catherine Dunne’s book is that it gives a voice to those men and women (more Irish women than men emigrated from 1946–51) who moved through places like Cricklewood and Kilburn in the 1950s and 1960s. Catherine is attuned to the emotional and psychological impacts of emigration and a history associated with it that is knotty, multi-layered and contradictory, encompassing guilt, shame, mobility, progress, dislocation, tragedy, separation and adjustment.

Although many did not mean to stay long-term, the reality, as succinctly said by one of the women Catherine interviewed, was that ‘there was nothing to return to’. The ambiguity towards the emigrants left some feeling they did not belong in either country, and they were sometimes depicted as disloyal and self-seeking. Dunne’s interviews with the emigrants about their experiences highlight the importance of community bonds and the social networks provided by recreation such as the dances in the Hammersmith Palais, and for some, feelings of freedom from prying eyes and moral suffocation in Ireland.

Some women were keen to escape Ireland and, as Dunne points out, to avoid the destiny of their mothers. This reminded me of Irish novelist Seán Ó Faoláin’s contribution to The Vanishing Irish, a controversial book about Irish emigration published in 1954. He referred to a conversation he had with a young woman who explained why she did not wish to marry, and why so many women emigrated from Ireland in the 1940s and 1950s: ‘I saw what my mother went through – not for me, thank you.’ Her response should serve as a reminder that the historian should not look to the late 1960s and early 1970s for the birth of female opposition to, or anger with, the status quo. Many Irish women were questioning the roles prescribed for them in a paternalistic Irish state during earlier decades, but this book is also of great relevance to the wider history of Ireland’s treatment of vulnerable women and the reliance on institutions, with pregnant girls arriving on the morning mail train with babies then born and adopted.

The personal testimony offered by Dunne’s interviewees also includes accounts of racism and exploitation (sometimes by their fellow Irish, who could also be unscrupulous landlords), alcoholism and the pub as a place of wage transfer.

The Catholic Church was often the only institution providing support, but this book also reveals divergence in faith and devotion and the challenge of maintaining piety and religious observance in a more materialistic and secular culture. These interviewees are largely devoid of self-pity, despite the pressures created by the Troubles in Northern Ireland and its ramifications in the wider UK, but there is also much positivity about the emigrants’ relationship with their host country. Some of the children of the emigrants embraced their Irish heritage; others wanted nothing to do with it.

As Dunne sees it, ‘the necessity to understand the experience’ of that generation of emigrants is paramount, especially as research in the late 1990s revealed the Irish in England fared poorly in relation to physical and mental health and homelessness compared to other ethnic minorities. Those Irish who came after the 1950s and 1960s – in the 1980s or early 2000s – tended to be better educated, but there were still plenty of ‘old-wave’-type emigrants who were semi-skilled or unskilled.

Dunne’s return to Kilburn and Cricklewood in 2008 underlined that the ethnicity of the area had altered: ‘The Irish had moved on; the next immigrants’ families had moved in, in search of better lives, just as those before them had done.’ The situation in Ireland during that era had changed profoundly with the population of non-Irish nationals increasing roughly eight-fold from 50,000 in 1998 to 420,000 in 2006, which Dunne’s describes as ‘a strange reversal of our history’. Ireland’s population had become much more diverse and one of the lessons of this book is that we had and continue to have a duty to welcome new arrivals. We also have an obligation to remember those who left Ireland. That we have a writer as humane, lyrical, honest and insightful as Catherine Dunne to assist in that remembrance makes it a very rewarding task.

Diarmaid Ferriter

Professor of Modern Irish History

University College Dublin

September 2021

Introduction

‘There was no Back Door,Nothing to go Back to’

‘In no other European country was emigration so essential a prerequisite for the preservation of the society.’

– J. J. Lee, Ireland 1912–1985: Politics and society

It is Saturday night at the Galtymore Dance Club in Cricklewood. The mirrored globe above us revolves slowly, showering the sedate dancers below with multicoloured shards of light. Couples, from the barely middle-aged to the frankly elderly, waltz or quickstep to the strains of Declan Nerney. They make smooth, stately progress around the polished floor. There are no collisions: there’s still plenty of room. The tables at the side are filling up quickly, the bar is doing brisk business, but it’s early yet. From beyond the not-quite- soundproof partition comes the muffled beat of Bagatelle – for the younger people.

This is the last remaining Irish dancehall in London. The Round Tower, the Estate, the Garryowen, the Hammersmith Palais, the Gresham, the Blarney – all major community centres for the Irish in London in the 1950s and 1960s – they’re all gone now. But the Galtymore hangs on – a little frayed and faded at the edges, to be sure, but nevertheless still there – a busy and buzzing focus for the Irish still living in Kilburn and Cricklewood and beyond.

For the half-million Irish people who left these shores in the 1950s, places like the Galtymore were much more than somewhere to go at the weekend. They were part of a vital network of friendly faces and accents, an island of familiarity in what was, at least initially, an urban ocean of strangeness and isolation. According to Kathleen Morrissey, ‘It [the Galtymore] was a great big network, really. For me, in so many ways, it was the most significant place in my life in London.’

All through the 1950s, as the stream of emigrants swelled, Irish communities throughout Britain pulled ever tighter and closer together. There was no shortage of company: four out of every five children born in Ireland between 1931 and 1941 ended up ‘taking the boat’, with eighty per cent of them destined for Britain.1

Many who took the short, uncomfortable journey on the cattle-boat hoped that the economic imperative would be a short-lived one. ‘We never meant to stay,’ is a constant refrain among many of the London Irish, some of them well into their fifth decade away from home. Their intention was to soon save up enough money to come back to Ireland – as indeed, some of them did. Others realised that there was nothing to come back for: that they were gone for good. And still others went with a sense of adventure, feeling the need to escape the mundane and impoverished reality that was Ireland in the 1950s. Mary Walker says that she went to London for ‘something different’, just for a year, but that ‘one year’s experience… somehow ended up being forty-one years of experience’. Whatever the hopes and aspirations, no two emigrant experiences were the same.

This book borrows the stories of ten people who left Ireland roughly fifty years ago. It is an attempt to feel the texture of ordinary lives in the 1950s; to celebrate extraordinary feats of survival and endurance; and to understand a little more of what happened to those who became lost, falling between the boundaries of family and state. In short, these are stories of ordinary lives, stories which take centre stage without apology. The narrators belong to that generation which it most conveniently served official Ireland to forget. Yet in their leaving, the half-million emigrants of the 1950s simultaneously prevented social revolt by providing a safety valve for Ireland’s growing economic pressures and laid the foundations for what would later become Ireland’s ‘economic miracle’.

As early as 1953, it was obvious that the attitude of official Ireland towards these emigrants was a deeply ambiguous one. On the one hand, the deepening economic crisis meant that the departure of over forty thousand people each year was a relief – those jobs, at least, did not have to be found: ‘If emigration were to be stopped tomorrow, conditions favourable to social revolution might easily arise.’2

On the other hand, those who left were often portrayed as disloyal and self-seeking in some way. To leave de Valera’s Ireland in search of a reasonable living elsewhere was somehow an obscurely selfish act. Ignoring the economic realities, de Valera neatly sidestepped pressures to help ease the plight of the emigrants in Britain by claiming:

work is available at home, and in conditions infinitely better from the point of both health and morals… There is no doubt that many of those who emigrate could find employment at home at as good, or better, wages – and with living conditions far better – than they find in Britain.3

The stories included in this book, and the many, many more not included due to restrictions of space, give the lie to this astonishing statement. In one form or another, the reality that there was nothing at home – nothing to stay for, nothing to come back to – was expressed by everyone I met. Resignation and acceptance of that fact were always the keynotes; there is a remarkable absence of bitterness among those who succeeded in making a new life for themselves, often under difficult conditions. As Phyllis Izzard says: ‘There was nothing else to do apart from take the boat.’

Thus a whole generation of Irish people did just that: they took the boat, unskilled, unprepared and unconsidered. They managed to become doubly invisible: victims of the ‘diplomatic blind eye – [the] catalogue of neglect’4 within their own country, and invisible in their host community, too, where their white skin and ability to speak English masked the urgency of their needs. Nevertheless, their legacy is, ironically, a highly visible one:

In the 1940s and 1950s hundreds and thousands of young men and women left Ireland… [They] contributed so much to the Irish economy when times were hard. In today’s figures Irish emigrants were sending back £500–£750 million [€635–€952 million] each year. It is because of those remittances that we now have the Celtic Tiger economy.5

Kilburn and Cricklewood: ‘Another Irish County’

The Irish in Britain had been granted immunity from immigration control since 1941. However, those travelling between Ireland and Britain in the fifties had to have their Travel Identity Card (Cárta Aitheantais Taistil) with them, so it is reasonable to assume that some official registration of the numbers arriving was ongoing. In the fifties, North London was the site of already well-established Irish communities. ‘Bursting at the seams with Irish’ as Mary Walker says, it was also bursting with factories and employment opportunities for newly arriving immigrants. These areas were typical examples of ‘chain migration’ – the phenomenon where one settled family member pulled the next one after him or her and so on until whole families made new homes in areas such as Kilburn, Cricklewood, Camden, Edgware and Brent. Cricklewood, even today, has the highest concentration of Irish in Britain.6

Working on the principle that the particular can help to illustrate the general, I decided to focus for the most part on the experiences of people who had lived and worked in these established Irish communities during the 1950s. Kilburn and Cricklewood, according to Catherine Morris (formerly of the London Irish Centre), were known as ‘another Irish county’. Maybe it was because the area was close to Euston, she says – just about ‘as far as you could carry a suitcase’. Huge Irish family networks developed there as a result.

However, I was also very conscious of the phenomenon of casual Irish labour, wherein the men who worked in the construction industry ‘on the lump’ had had to ‘follow the work’, moving from place to place, sometimes for years, overnighting in Salvation Army hostels or Rowton Houses for as long as a job lasted. Some of those construction industry workers, like Tony Maher, settled, often in new towns which were under construction as part of the post-war boom. They progressed from the insecurity and invisibility of ‘the lump’ into the tax and social insurance net – in most cases once they married and had families.

And so I went myself to Harlow, some forty miles north-east of London. Like many other ‘new’ towns throughout Britain at that time, Harlow provided both secure employment and housing to those prepared to work there. Joe Dunne recalls the phone call from the Council telling him to ‘pick your house’. His wife, Marie, marvels at the standard of accommodation available to them: ‘You could choose your house – a two-bedroomed or a three-bedroomed house.’ However, others were not so fortunate. Years of ‘following the work’ somehow became decades. Men caught in the trap of casual labour had no opportunity to participate in the settled lives of any community, Irish or otherwise. Like Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, they felt ‘kind of temporary’, temporary about themselves in Britain, and were oriented towards that day, somewhere in the future, when they would go back to Ireland. And so they continued to live and work on the margins, accepting cash-in-hand payments, rejecting a tax and insurance system which they fundamentally mistrusted. For their entire working lives, they remained on the outskirts of comfort and security. Often cheated and lied to by those they trusted most, they led lives of increasing isolation. From having been ‘doubly invisible’ as young men, they now feel ‘doubly marginalised’ in their older years: they feel that the British state doesn’t want them and, even if they could make it home, it would appear that the Irish state doesn’t want them either. Despite years and years of sending home the weekly postal order – the so-called emigrant remittances – they now rightly feel that their contribution is unconsidered:

Irish citizens returning home from Britain have no more rights than other EU nationals, a senior Irish Government official has confirmed. The Government has responded to the tide of emigrants returning to Ireland by reiterating that EU laws prevented them giving any special status. This means that Irish people returning home will have difficulties joining housing waiting lists or getting on hospital waiting lists for operations.7

It became very clear to me early on in this undertaking that there is no such thing as a ‘typical’ emigrant – or immigrant. Writing of the Jewish experience of involuntary migration, Michael Prior suggests that there are, in fact, no typical diaspora conditions: ‘they exhibit a wide spectrum, from total assimilation to new total isolation,’ reflecting the different social level of each individual as well as their personal preferences.8

It also became clear that the most significant difficulty inherent in this project was going to be what to leave out, rather than what to include. As it was, this series of interviews developed more or less organically – rather like chain migration itself. Phyllis Izzard insisted I record Kathleen Morrissey’s story, who then insisted I listen to Sheila Dillon, who insisted I met with Fr Seamus Fullam, and so on. And for my part, I had no agenda, other than acting as midwife to the many stories I was told openly, honestly and often with a great deal of humour despite obvious hardships.

I am aware that these ten interviews reflect what are commonly regarded as the ‘success stories’. For every happy ending, or at least a contented and accepting one, there is a myriad of other stories – of isolation, deprivation, prejudice. However, I took the decision very early on to explore the plight of the marginalised Irish through the experienced eyes of those already working in the field – to do so at second remove, as it were. The London Irish Centre in Camden and the Emigrant Liaison Committee in Co. Mayo were both extremely helpful in this regard. Besides, it seemed wrong to seek out people who had already suffered enough: one of the phenomena of ageing is the increasing acuteness of long-term memory. Asking people to recall the trajectory of their lives several decades later – people who, by their own definition, had led lives of failure – was, I felt, no business of mine.

‘Snagging Turnips for Three Ha’pence a Drill’9

Driving through the countryside in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland, it’s clear that the past is indeed ‘another country’. What makes it even more unfamiliar is that in this case the past is not that distant at all – a mere fifty years or so. Tidy towns and villages, hanging baskets, arts centres are all very far removed from the rural Ireland that still lives on in the memories of those who were forced to leave it. For Tony Maher, the impetus to leave Kildare was supplied by the realisation that ‘snagging turnips for three ha’pence a drill didn’t appeal to me’.

For Stephen Croghan, who worked in London on and off during the fifties and sixties, a sense of place and home are tangible. His story is a central one in that it illustrates starkly what drove people to Britain in the first place: that is, it focuses on what people left behind – rather than what faced them in London on their arrival. The picture he paints of rural Ireland in the forties and fifties is as vivid as it is distressing. Despite the pious aspirations of de Valera, who longed for a country populated by those ‘who valued material wealth only as the basis for right living… who were satisfied with frugal comfort’ and who lived in a country ‘bright with cosy homesteads … [with] the romping of sturdy children… the contests of athletic youths and the laughter of comely maidens’,10 the reality was very different.

Stephen remembers the exodus from Roscommon to Britain that started in the forties: ‘It was that or starvation.’ He recalls the typical working week for those on the land: ‘six o’clock in the morning until six o’clock in the evening … living in an outhouse. That’s the way it was.’

And so men queued for the train to take them to the boat and on to the construction jobs which were so plentiful all over Britain. They waited at the station, with a tag on their coat ‘same as you’d tie a parcel’. On each tag was the man’s destination and the name of the builder employing him. According to Stephen, ‘hundreds went out… like that, hundreds’. It’s a memory shared by Kevin Casey from Ennis. As well as the queues at the station, he remembers the agent who got a commission for each man he delivered to McAlpine. Kevin says ‘There was a lot of misery left behind in those days. Perhaps we’re not as angry as we could be because we did well ourselves.’

Anne O’Neill’s recollections of rural Roscommon are similarly bleak, in contrast to the ‘cosy homesteads’ and ‘frugal comfort’ envisaged by de Valera: ‘We had no electric, no toilet, nothing like that… We had to bring the water in from outside. The toilet was wherever you could find a space.’

She remembers her elderly grandmother, when the day’s work was done. ‘She’d just sit by the fire, looking into it, rocking her head up and down, up and down.’

It is no wonder that people fled the Irish countryside in droves; the wonder is that there was anybody left behind.

‘Culture Shock’

Fr Seamus Fullam has worked among the Irish in London for close on five decades now. He identifies ‘culture shock’ as the main difficulty facing young Irish immigrants on their arrival in Britain. ‘Everything was so completely different,’ he says. The sense of isolation was acute, the longing for community intense. Young men, in particular, seemed to suffer from extreme loneliness. It seems that young women had a better network of family, church and friends to which they clung on arrival – or perhaps they simply accessed that network more readily. The London Irish Centre in Camden played a pivotal role in this regard in the 1950s. It provided a welcome for the newly arrived and offered a wealth of information on accommodation, work opportunities, churches and social clubs. Many new arrivals landed, like Joe Dunne, with just a fiver in their pocket. They needed to find work at once – there was no hand outstretched to help, and the landlady needed her money. It was quite a shock to the system; among all those who spoke to me of their initial experiences, there was general agreement that ‘you had to grow up very quickly’.

It’s worth remembering that the Irish did qualify for Social Welfare payments in 1950s Britain – and had done so since an agreement was signed between the two governments in 1921. But, according to Fr Jerry Kivlehan of the London Irish Centre in Camden, many Irish were refused their social welfare entitlements due to ‘ignorance on the part of British civil servants’. It was not uncommon for those working in the social welfare system in the UK to be unaware of the 1921 agreement and they treated Irish workers with hostility. Often, people were unable to fight for what was due to them and, like Stephen Croghan, believed that the Irish were entitled to nothing, unlike those from the Commonwealth, for example, who were deemed to have a natural right to live and work in the ‘mother country’.

Inevitably, with what seems to have been an official attitude of intolerance towards the huge numbers of Irish men and women arriving every year, many of the most vulnerable were to slip through the net of the social security system and, to all intents and purposes, they simply disappeared, some never contacting their families again.

‘The Pub Became a Community of Sorts’

On various occasions over the past three years, everyone I spoke to – both those who frequented pubs themselves and took a drink, and those who still had their Pioneer pin – agreed that huge numbers of young Irish men developed alcohol-related problems after their arrival in Britain. Alcoholism developed in many cases as a response to the sense of loneliness and isolation that many experienced. Drinking temporarily deadened the pain of grief and loss. Thus alcohol became valued as an anaesthetic, rather than as part of social interaction.

Kevin Casey, who managed a five-bar business in London, says that many of the Irish, particularly those involved in casual labour, had nowhere else to go but to the pub: ‘These men used to stay in digs, but digs didn’t want you there in the evenings… That’s why the pub became a ghetto system… a community of sorts.’

But there was an altogether more sinister reason for long, alcohol-filled nights in the pub. Those who worked in the construction industry were often paid weekly by cheque. Deeply mistrustful of banks and official agencies of any sort, they were forced to cash their cheques in the pub. According to Catherine Morris, ‘although the cheque would be handed in to be cashed at six, the money was not handed over until midnight. You had to drink all night to get your money.’

To add insult to injury, many of the firms which carried out this practice were Irish. Fr Fullam makes the point that there were indeed Irish firms ‘that got rich on the back of exploiting their own’. Catherine Morris agrees. She says that there are many elderly Irish construction workers who are angry and bitter at the level of exploitation they endured. Now suffering from the health problems that inevitably follow years of harsh and unsafe working conditions, they find themselves with no financial cushion.

‘The Irish companies did it to their own,’ she explains. ‘These men worked all their lives in the belief that they were paying their stamps. The money was deducted from their wages, but no contributions were ever paid on their behalf.’

Such companies are among those now being fêted as Irish ‘success stories’.

Anecdotes abound about the Irish being the ‘hardest on their own people’, as Kevin Casey puts it. Long queues would form every morning at London Road in Elephant and Castle, Camden Tube station and the Crown pub on Cricklewood Broadway. The Irish ganger-men had the power to decide who got work that day and who didn’t. Those men depending on each day’s casual labour were, literally, at their foremen’s mercy:

Sometimes, a man would be taken out on a job, and the ganger-men took a dislike to him. They’d just dump him in the street and tell him to ‘find your own so-and-so way home’… If you didn’t buy your drink, you wouldn’t be picked up the following day either.

Fr Fullam, recounting the experience of his parishioners over the years, agrees. He says that ‘the Irish… made the worst foremen. Some of them… were tyrants. Many of the men I met through the Catholic club told me they were delighted when they got an Englishman as their foreman.’

‘No Cats, No Dogs, No Children, No Irish, No Blacks’11

Signs such as this, advertising accommodation, were common in shop windows all over 1950s London. I think it’s reasonable to speculate that there is a close relationship between one’s standard of employment and the quality of housing one enjoys. That being the case, the accommodation on offer to casual labourers was often very poor indeed. The picture of ‘one room in Cricklewood or Kilburn’, sometimes shared by several men with ‘mattresses on the floor’, is a recurring one. As the Irish moved up in the world, they often became landlords themselves, owning large houses which they then rented out to their countrymen. Fellow-feeling was not part of the transaction. According to Anne O’Neill, ‘the Irish exploited their own’ by offering appalling living conditions to those who had no choice but to endure them. Men working ‘on the lump’ with no security, often subsisting on a day-to-day basis, could not afford the luxury of choice.

And, of course, there were those who could access no form of housing at all, for various complex and interrelated reasons. Homelessness often accompanied alcoholism and/or mental health-related problems. According to Catherine Morris, those men and women who had mental health problems co-existing with alcohol-related problems found themselves in a catch–22 situation. They couldn’t access social services unless they detoxed first, and they couldn’t detox ‘because they didn’t have the mental resources to do so’.

Research reveals that problems of inadequate housing and homelessness are associated

with a disproportionate number of Irish people in Britain today… The Irish also represent a quarter of homeless day centre users… [yet the Irish represent] only 3.8% of the population of Greater London… A report by CARA found that many local authorities and Housing Associations do not keep the necessary data to monitor Irish applicants. In fact, only 8 out of 60 Housing Associations provide accurate analysis of Irish applications.12

It would appear that even in this most basic of human requirements – the need for shelter – the difficulties of the marginalised Irish are once again invisible or, simply, unconsidered. Figures show that as many as two in three, or sixty per cent, of London’s homeless are Irish,13 and that ‘Irish born people are more strongly clustered in social class V, the lowest grouping, than any other major ethnic group in Britain.’14

On the other hand, Fr Fullam remarks gratefully that there are countless cases where English landladies ‘mothered’ the young men who came to them for lodgings, treating them very kindly and looking after them as they would look after their own. This was the experience of Tony Maher and Joe Dunne, both of whom remember their own landladies with great fondness.

Anne O’Neill agrees that she was one of the fortunate ones, able to move eventually from rented rooms to owning her own home. She tells of some of the pettier restrictions often imposed on tenants. She and her husband Harry once lived in the home of an Irish landlady in Cricklewood:

We had to make an appointment to have a bath. We had to be in by a certain time at night, too, even though we were married. Doors were locked at eleven o’clock… It was often difficult to find accommodation.

Kathleen Morrissey remembers one occasion when she had to keep her mouth firmly closed so as not to reveal her identity. She and her husband, Philip, went for an interview for a flat. But her accent, she says, was much too Irish. ‘We had to manage that very carefully,’ she says. And indeed, success at getting that flat in Wendover Court in Enfield, North London, was balanced on a knife-edge. By pure coincidence, an Irish neighbour was working on the road just outside where the couple’s interview was to take place. Kathleen was terrified. If anyone had seen the friendly exchange between them, ‘that’, she says, ‘would have been that’.

There were those for whom the house came with the job, an incalculable benefit for people such as Joe Dunne, Kevin Casey and Tony Maher in Harlow. Anne O’Neill and her husband Harry, living in West Hendon (between Cricklewood and Edgware), needed considerable input from family to keep a decent roof over their heads. Anne has always worked full time, ‘even with five children’, and it was with the assistance of her mother- and sister-in-law that she and Harry kept all the domestic wheels turning. This, she says, was common practice.

It was also common to find yourself without a home once the first baby was born. ‘Lots of places wouldn’t accept children,’ Sheila Dillon remembers. One solution was to send the baby back to relatives in Ireland until the couple could afford to get a place of their own. This was what Máire Graham, Sheila’s lifelong friend, was forced to do. The effects of that separation on parents and children must have been deeply painful: yet another sense of dislocation and loss for those trying to forge a living in circumstances not of their own choosing.

Mary Walker remembers her ‘palace in Kilburn’ – to this day, she still has ‘nightmares about that room’: sparse, grey, backing onto the railway, with a gas ring that pulled out of the wall. She remembers it all without self-pity: ‘That’s the way it was.’ After she married, a good job in the building society enabled her and her husband eventually to own their own house in Edgware, where she lived for over thirty years.

Phyllis Izzard went as a young bride to Huntington and endured thirteen years there. It was then ‘a brand new town, just in the process of being built’. The house came with her husband Larry’s new job. She hated every minute of her time there. There were virtually no Irish living in Huntington at the time, to be Catholic was to be the outsider and she remembers asking her husband if ‘he’d taken me there to bury me’.

‘The Catholic Social Clubs were a Tremendous Asset’15

Once work and accommodation are secured, social interaction is, for most people, pretty high on their agenda. In the young Irish immigrants’ early years in London, social life tended to revolve around dancing for women and the pub for men. Most Catholic parish churches, too, had a social club attached to them in the 1950s. Fr Seamus Fullam believes that these clubs had a most important social and religious role: ‘After work and… at weekends, the men could come and play cards or darts and socialise with other people… The clubs also kept them in contact with the Church and their duties.’

Men and women met future spouses there, and in later years they brought their children to events hosted by their local club. In that way, the clubs also became a meeting-point for second-generation Irish, a further reinforcement of community and belonging. Kevin Casey agrees that ‘they were marvellous places, great social centres… If anybody was sick, or needed a couple of hundred pounds to go back to Ireland or to bury somebody, it was there.’

However, Joe and Marie Dunne feel that the clubs encouraged the culture of drinking among lonely people and don’t understand why every centre ‘had to have a bar’. For Mary Walker, working among friendly faces in the Edgware social club was a new lease of life after her marriage broke up and helped her, she says, to rediscover ‘my sense of humour’.

While the Catholic social clubs were thriving in the fifties and sixties, their role has diminished significantly in recent years and many of them have now closed. The needs of second-generation Irish are different. In some cases, their closure created bad feeling.