OLD CAMPAIGNERS

In the coming months I will be recording the memories of people who worked on a number of landmark post-war civil engineering projects across Britain. If you know anyone, of any nationality and across all skills levels, who would like to put their experiences on record, get in touch...

The five decades following the end of World War Two saw building and civil engineering projects undertaken in housing, transport, energy, and communications on a scale not seen in Britain since the pioneering days of the Railway Age. Fuelled by a major capital injection from the Marshall Plan enthusiasm compensated for lack of experience and at every level the construction industry’s labour force demonstrated an unprecedented degree of commitment and consensus. This resulted in the completion of a series of strategic infrastructural projects which completely transformed Britain. The men who built them – the engineers, architects, construction managers, and operatives, are now elderly and, like many of their major works - such as the first generation of nuclear power stations, are unlikely to be with us for very much longer.

It is imperative that we catalogue these works and record the memories of the men who executed them without further delay.

This is a unique opportunity to put on public record, in a form accessible to all, the voices of The Men who built Britain. It may not come again...

Camaraderie of Pain: Excerpt from Joe McGarry interview

This is an excerpt from a recorded interview I conducted ten years ago in Camden Town with Joe McGarry, an Irish recovering alcoholic, survivor of homelessness, and veteran of the British construction industry who has since become instrumental in helping many men with similar experiences to reassess their lives and recover (even discover) their sense of self.

Joe is perceptive, poetic, straight-talking and self-aware, to an enviable degree. I publish this short piece to demonstrate the depth and complexity of difficult lives which are often dismissed by others as wilfully wasted and unworthy of serious consideration...To such I say, Listen to this - and Think Again!

Click here for the mp3. If your web browser doesn't play it for you, you can right click on the link to bring up a menu that includes the option to save the mp3 to your computer.

MULTIMEDIA PERFORMANCES

Performed at the following at the following venues around St. Patrick's Festival Week 2009:

BIRMINGHAM IRISH FESTIVAL MONDAY MARCH 16th

LONDON IRISH CENTRE SUNDAY MARCH 15TH

PITSHANGER MANOR GALLERY FRIDAY MARCH 20th (Quiet Men Exhibition)

CELTIC & IRISH CULTURAL SOCIETY (CRAWLEY) SATURDAY MARCH21st

PLACELESS PEOPLE: ASPECTS OF EXILE

Placeless People: Aspects
of Exile

‘We are finding deep wells of sadness in ordinary human lives’, Sr. Teresa Gallagher, Director, Irish Counselling and Psychotherapy, London.

There is some degree of sadness in every human life but the lives to which Teresa Gallagher was referring are those of elderly Irish emigrants in Britain. Half a million Irish migrated to Britain in the Nineteen Fifties while the Republic’s population reached an all-time low of 2.8 million. Roughly 80% of those emigrants had left school before the age of fifteen. In the words of one female emigrant: ‘They taught us to hate England - and then they sent us over here!’

‘Emigration has allowed those who remained at home to enjoy a standard of living which is not justified by the volume of their production. If it ended suddenly…life would become much more competitive, and much less remunerative’.

A number returned to Ireland but the majority did not. Living often amongst to their own, many tended to mix sparingly with the British, harbouring the belief that ‘some day’ they would return ‘home’ - even while their children progressed through the British education system and into the workplace.

The experience of novelist and navvy Domhnall MacAuligh, who emigrated to England in 1951, is typical. His successful Irish-language memoir, Dialann Deorai (Diary of an Exile) was published in 1964 and translated into English under the title, An Irish Navvy. Throughout his life he regularly wrote for Irish newspapers and magazines while continuing to work full-time in construction.

MacAuligh, though happily married, never reconciled himself to life in England.
Asked by an Irish journalist in 1966 what troubled him most, he responded:

‘Bringing up a family in Northampton; the children speaking with Northampton accents…apart from that, I’ve never felt settled in this place. I still feel like an outsider – that I don’t belong. There was a free-ness about expatriation once; you told yourself it would be over sooner or later…But that’s no longer true; all that’s ahead of you is the time you have left on Earth – spend it here in loneliness and desolation. I came here in 1951 and I’ve never felt at home here in all that time’.

Clearly it was no accident that MacAuligh, a fluent Gaelic speaker, should have chosen the word Deorai for his title. Deorai, Gaelic for exile, translates literally as Placelessness or Banishment. Placelessness – not belonging, traumatises many rural Irish for whom community is everything, while the corrosive sense of banishment – of leaving because Ireland had no place for them, carries implications for those at home as well as for those abroad which have yet to be faced up to fully.

I have encountered this perception amongst many emigrants in Britain but I
regarded the emigrant experience in the United States as significantly different. In that country, since the early 20^th century, Irish emigrants seemed well regarded whilst those at home appeared to take a degree of pride in them not often shown towards their countrymen in Britain.

Consequently I made a sharp distinction between ‘emigration’, as typified by the American experience, and ‘exile’ as defining the experience of many of the Irish in Britain. It has however surprised me to learn that there are many Irish in America
who also share this sense of placelessness and banishment. Amongst these are many former Religious. Often those of Irish descent also experience problems around issues of place and belonging – not least when in Ireland.

Born into an independent nation, which could no longer legitimately blame Britain for its social and economic ills, many older emigrants have avoided questioning the actions and attitudes of those who may have influenced their decision to emigrate – whether within the Church, the State, or the Family. Criticism of these sacred institutions was considered disloyal, especially abroad, and provoked uncomfortable feelings of guilt.

I believe these issues have yet to be fully acknowledged, explored, and understood. This book is intended to provide a forum for Irish emigrants and their descendants to express their personal feelings about the causes and consequences of emigration.

Official Ireland, while acknowledging the protracted trauma of emigration, now
regards it as a part of the past to be consigned to history. However, unlike the dead generations whose thoughts and feelings are recorded only in archived fragments of personal correspondence, there is still time for many 20^th century emigrants to speak for themselves - and perhaps demand answers from others.

I welcome contributions and comments from members of other emigrant ethnic minorities also. It is my hope that this work will broaden understanding and perhaps even bring healing in its wake...

Copy of KINLOCHLEVEN MEMORIAL CARD

The Grave of the Unknown Navvy

The humanist philosopher Paul Ricoeur wrote that, to be forgotten, and written out of History, is to die again. Here at this anonymous labourer’s final resting-place, and on the one hundredth anniversary of his death, we the undersigned declare this the place where all those nameless men who lost their lives on Britain’s building sites and civil engineering works may henceforth be
remembered always.

Stretches the future before them

Clouded and bleak as their past

These are our Serfs – and our Brothers

Slighted, forsaken, outcast

Songs of the Dead End, Patrick MacGill, 1914

PATRICK PRENDERGAST:

ULTAN COWLEY:

December 2008