Builders Remembered - July 2013 edition of The Harp

A BBC Panorama programme of November 1961 reported that 47 out of 50 men performing the most dangerous work on a building site in London were Irish. A BBC interviewer asked Irish builders on the site what they thought of the proposed Commonwealth Immigrants Act which was being discussed in response to a perceived influx of immigrants. The Act would place a limit on those who could migrate to the UK and the responses of the interviewees included one man who said:

“Well seeing it’s the English man’s country, one must give him a great deal of latitude in deciding who he admits or bars”.

This gentleman’s eloquence and diplomacy may have knocked the wind out of the sails of our man from the BBC who went on to ask the same man whether tales of “hooliganism amongst the Irish” were justified. The reply was just as eloquent “well that’s something I have often felt strongly about, everyone notices the drunken Irish man who picks a row outside a pub, but the dozen fellows who walk quietly along the street? Nobody says ‘he’s an Irishman’ ”.

In more recent times, the massive contribution of Irish labour in constructing Britain’s roads and cities is finally being acknowledged officially, especially at the local authority level, going beyond the traditional stereotypes of the hard working though wildly behaving navvy with his shovel in one hand and pint of stout in the other. But the full extent of this contribution may probably remain hidden or best explored through personal anecdote and community history.

Whilst sociologists such as E.P. Thompson in his esteemed study The Making of the English Working Class describes how 19^th century bosses preferred to use Irish labourers in places like the Liverpool docks as they worked twice as hard as their English peers and for half the pay, there are contemporary studies which suggest that it is a misconception to suggest that the navvies who constructed our railways, roads and canals during the past two hundred years were predominantly Irish and therefore Irish workers were often wrongly blamed in the public consciousness for ‘disturbances and minor-riots’ when the blame actually lay with the wider navvy community.

In 1831 a railway engineer named Peter Lecount said of navvies: 'These banditti, known in some parts of England by the name of "Navvies" or "Navigators", and in others that of "Bankers", are generally the terror of the surrounding country: they are as complete a class by themselves as the Gipsies. Possessed of all the daring recklessness of the Smuggler, without any of his redeeming qualities, their ferocious behaviour can only be equalled by the brutality of their language. It may be truly said, their hand is against every man, and before they have been long located, every man's hand is against them.”  

There is also a suggestion that immeasurable numbers of Irish labourers weren’t always keen to register themselves in official UK registration records, such as employment, census or polling records. A frustrating tendency for government officials and social historians alike, though for different reasons.

Many readers of The Harp will be personally acquainted with the lot of the Irish labourer and construction worker in the West Midlands. My grandfather James Lawlor arrived in England from Dublin in the late 1930s and headed to the docks in Kent where he had heard there was work. James spent many months sleeping in the open and recalled, like so many others, the proverbial signs on lodging houses at that time reading “No Irish or dogs”. He eventually came to Birmingham where he found permanent employment as a foreman in a foundry.

In a local history book written in 1984 by Brendan Ward, Builders Remembered, the author provides a wealth of memories and anecdotes about his life on building sites in England and the men he worked alongside. In his book Brendan Ward wrote:

“Building in England is carried out mainly by Irishmen. It is a very strenuous occupation. Most Englishmen and other nationalities shun it like a plague. Men work out in all weathers. They are not deterred by a drop of rain, a fall of snow or a skiff of frost. They earn very high wages in comparison with people in other industries. They have no effective trade union, neither do they seek one. They drink heavily. They come from every walk of life. They all had one thing in common and that was home. Despite the fact they spent forty years in England, each yearned to return for good. To most it was a dream, to a few it was a reality”.

Apart from such rare gems as Brendan Ward’s delightful book of anecdotes and the valuable oral history work of our own Professor Carl Chinn, the story of the Irish builder in Britain remains largely untapped. As always I would encourage all readers of The Harp to start putting pen to paper and fingers to keyboard. Record those memories and send them in to us at The Harp.

What do you think Irishness means to people in the West Midlands? Tell us your story in The Harp.

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