Ultan Cowley: December 2013

Sunday 1 December 2013

Great support once more from John Bowman, on his evocative show 'Bowman's Sunday', for my Audio Documentary. His choice of extracts over the past three weeks has been both insightful and beautifully balanced. The only 'public intellectual' in this country to demonstrate a true understanding of the issues around the 'Fifties generation of emigrants and their expungement from the national narrative. Others seem to think the subject beneath consideration...

The story so far...

'Paddy and the Big Ditch: Irish Labour on the Manchester Ship Canal, 1887-1893, was commissioned by the Irish World Heritage Centre, Manchester, in 1993 to mark the first centenary of the opening of the Ship Canal.

It was followed by The Men who built Britain: A History of the Irish Navvy, in 2001. This book was researched in Britain over three years, from 1994 to 1997, and writen over the following two years in Ireland. I amassed over sixty hours' of recorded interviews with labourers, tradesmen, middle management and family members. The black and white illustrations, many never previously published, were collected from public archives, company records, and private individuals.

It puts the history of Irish male migrant labour in Britain's contruction industry in the 19th and 20th centuries in the contexts of Irish emigratiion and British civil engineering, in the written histories of which the navvy had been no more than a footnote.

I still collect first-hand accounts of that way of life on an on-going basis and, as the older veterans get fewer, men from the 'Eighties exodus come into greater prominence and a new chapter takes shape.

At the same time musician Joe Giltrap and I continue to tour our Show, The Craic was good in Cricklewood: Songs & Stories of the men who built Britain.

This features songs and poems of the navvy life, together with first-hand accounts of life on site and in the dancehalls, pubs, and bed-sits of Camden Town, Cricklewood, and elsewhere.

Pages

Thursday 5 December 2013

Full House for Joe Giltrap & myself in Luton Library Theatre last October - Pure Magic!!!

Sunday 1 December 2013