Dorothy’s family connection to Wexford history

History is never far below the surface in Ireland and ordinary conversations will often reveal extraordinary connections with notable people and important events of the past. This is what happened when Wexford resident Dorothy Kenny (nee. Walsh) told me recently about her ancestor Father John Murphy.

Dorothy and husband Seamus are Wexford born and bred; they have raised their five children, Aoife, Doireann, Sinead, Conor and Sarah-Jo at Monamolin near Gorey. Both played for Wexford based GAA teams, Dorothy told me:

“Both of us played for Buffers Alley. Seamus played both hurling and football for 'The Alley' and was Chairman for 10 years steering the club through a major building development project. I played camogie for Senior Wexford and won an All-Ireland in 1975.”

Like many from the ‘model county’, both Seamus and Dorothy have family connections going back to the 1798 rebellion. Whilst this event took place over 200 years ago, it had a profound effect on an otherwise peaceable and very rural county and every Wexford family was affected, often in very traumatic and brutal ways. It is therefore not surprising that there is still a strong tradition of oral history dating back to 1798 in the county.

Dorothy told me that her family were descended from the sister of Fr John Murphy who played a leadership role in the 1798 rebellion. We therefore attempted a search to discover the connections between Dorothy’s family and John Murphy. This is a slightly unusual way of doing family history research, as one normally starts at the current generation and slowly works backwards, discovering ancestors along the way. However, in this situation we started at two different points in time and set out to fill in the gaps in between.

John Murphy was a Roman Catholic priest born at Tincurry, Wexford in 1753. He was executed by British soldiers at Tullow, County Carlow on 2 July 1798. John was a tenant farmer’s son from a big family, his brother Patrick was also killed in the 1798 Rebellion at Vinegar Hill. He also had a sister, Katherine, who married John Patrick Walsh. The parents of John Murphy were Thomas Murphy and Johanna Whitty.

John Murphy was educated in a hedge school by a local parish priest and grew up speaking Irish and English. He was described as a splendid horseman, excelling in athletics and handball. Following his ordination, Fr John Murphy went away to study at a Dominican college in southern Spain in the 1770s. Returning home five years later, Fr Murphy was made curate in Kilcormuck, better known as Boolavogue, where he had a thatched chapel.

Fr Murphy was initially against rebellion and actively encouraged his parishioners to give up their arms and sign an oath of allegiance to the British Crown. However, on 26 May 1798 he gathered with a group of local men to decide how to defend themselves against the brutality of yeomanry patrols. That night Murphy’s group encountered the burning down of a local family’s cabin and a confrontation took place which ended with the killing of two of the yeomen. That night the Wexford Rebellion started with Fr John Murphy leading it alongside other local United Irishmen leaders.

Through the next month, Fr John Murphy led a growing army of poor Wexford tenant farmers against the might of the English army. Initially armed only with pikes and pitchforks, Murphy’s ragged army of rebels defeated well-armed militia and yeoman with cavalry at Oulart Hill, Enniscorthy, Wexford town and Gorey. From a few hundred men with pikes, the rebel army grew quickly to a force of 10,000. But with reinforcements from England, including German mercenaries, the rebels were badly defeated at Arklow and at Vinegar Hill outside Enniscorthy. English retaliation was brutal, wounded rebels were shot or worse and more than 30,000 Wexford people were killed in the five week uprising. Father Murphy and a man named James Gallagher were captured in the Blackstairs Mountains and taken to Tullow where they were summarily tried, found guilty of being rebels and sentenced to death. Both were hanged in the market square in Tullow. The yeomen cut off Fr Murphy’s head, put it on display on a spike and burned his body in a barrel of pitch. Fr John Murphy is remembered in the Irish ballad Boolavogue.

Our search to discover Dorothy’s line of ancestry back to Fr John Murphy began by identifying her father Edmond Walsh’s family in the 1911 census living at house 12, Effenorge, Tinnacross, Wexford. The family included Edmond’s parents Aidan and Mary Walsh (Dorothy’s grandparents). The family were also recorded at Effernoge in the 1901 census. It is well known that Irish census records become more difficult to find for the 19^th century, but increasingly we find church baptismal records for that period are available to view online. Using these records we could identify the baptism of Dorothy’s grandfather Aidan at Ferns in 1853 and the baptisms of his siblings. The beauty of a baptismal record is that it also names the parents, therefore taking us back another generation.

Another useful source of records is the Griffith’s Valuation of the 1850s which tells us that a farmer named William Walsh was occupying 70 acres of land at Effernoge at that time. Finally the Tithe Applotment books of 1824 show two separate tithe payers named William Walsh residing at Effernoge. It would be fair to speculate that they may be a father and son. The Tithe Applotment books move us much closer to the generation of Fr John Murphy and the 1798 rebellion. William Walsh senior of the Applotment books could feasibly be the same generation as Father Murphy or, more likely, his mother may have been Katherine, the sister of John Murphy who married John Patrick Walsh. Incidentally, Effernoge is close to both Boolavogue and Tincurry and there was also a farmer named Michael Murphy recorded at Effernoge in the Tithe books of 1824. Whilst we need more information to confirm these connections, I can’t help feeling that we are there or thereabouts in plotting the line between Dorothy and her 2 x great grandmother Katherine Walsh (nee. Murphy).

Thank you Dorothy Kenny for sharing this interesting family connection to the momentous events of 1798. If any of our readers have further information to offer, we would be very interested to hear from you.

Carrie’s rural memories have a certain Irish lilt



Robbie McMahon



 

The great thing about people’s memories of the past is how they often open the doors to further research. This is what happened when I received an email from Carrie Browne-Carey whose memories of a rural childhood in the townland of Lurgan in County Offaly recalled a celebrated Irish ‘lilter’ named Robbie McMahon.

Carrie began by recalling her childhood in the 1950s in the hilly townland of Lurgan which lies near the border of Offaly and Westmeath, close to Clara and Moate:

“In a small townland like Lurgan, everyone knew each other very well and we visited one another’s houses regularly. I spent a lot of my life in the house of the Conways and also with the Stone family. When my brother and I were small children our Dad went to work in Dublin and our Mother would sometimes go and stay with him. During this time we stayed with the Stone family.”

“I was very young but I do remember enjoying my stay and loving a dog they had called Lucy. Mrs Stone baked her own bread as did her daughters, but there was one cake that I can almost taste yet. They called it a sweet cake but it was just like a white soda cake with sugar in it and it was gorgeous.”

“Another thing I enjoyed was, they nearly always had a pet pig and I always made sure to be there in the evening while it was small to feed it with a bottle and then sit with it on my lap for ages.”

Carrie also remembered that very often local people would have musicians and singers performing in their own homes, especially if there was a special occasion.   

“Mrs Stone had three daughters and two of them, Kitty and Liz went to work in Dublin. It seemed a long way away at that time.  Liz only got home every summer for two weeks holidays and I looked forward to that time so much.  Liz was such a lovely girl. I then remember Kitty got married to Eddie in Dublin and when they came back from their honeymoon, there was a big dance as I remember in their barn in Lurgan.  It was such an exciting thing for me as a small child. There was music, dancing, singing and I remember doing Irish dancing, though it was simple as I was very young.  Everyone went across the yard to the house for the tea.”

“As I got older I remember a musical family by the name of O'Reilly came to our house and also to the Stone residence and there would be a sing-song and dancing instantly. I remember on one occasion Liz was home on holiday and friends of hers called, I happened by chance to call in. I was very glad I did as one of the men was called Bobby McMahon from Spancil Hill in County Clare. Bobby was a man we heard singing very often on radio and of course his special song was Spancil Hill. He was also a great lilter. He would lilt Irish dance tunes and make it sound like a musical instrument, one tune that is still in my head is the Mason's Apron, he did a great job on that one. Anyway on that evening of course we got him to lilt and that started the dancing. We were doing a half set and I was dancing with him. Now I was only about 9 or 10 years of age so when it came to the basket swing, my feet were lifted off the ground and I kicked the lid off a skillet pot and it broke in two halves! I nearly died but Mrs Stone said “go on dancing, never mind it”. She had bad arthritis so she loved people to go in and party!”

Carrie’s wonderful recollection of live music in the farmhouses of rural Ireland are both reminiscent and captivating. Whilst many of us today are familiar with the musicians who entertain us in bars and clubs, the idea that this tradition was preceded by musicians performing in the humble parlors and barns of people’s rural homes is evocative of days-gone-by. Carrie has also educated me for one on the Irish tradition of lilting through her real-life memory of one of its greatest exponents, Bobby (aka Robbie) McMahon.

I have often heard the expression ‘the lilt of the Irish’ which refers to the characteristic rising and falling of the voice when speaking, the pleasant and gentle accent of many parts of Ireland. It is also used to describe the good humor of Irish people, or a certain cheery outlook I am certain we are all familiar with. But I had never heard of the traditional singing form of lilting, apparently most common in the Gaelic speaking areas of both Ireland and Scotland.

Lilting is music made by the human voice which creates the rhythm and tone of musical instruments with much diddling and jigging - if lyrics exist they are often nonsensical. Lilting may have originated in tough times when musical instruments were not available – though many dispute this theory because it did not develop in other peasant cultures under similar constraints. Whatever its origins, the energetic and compelling rhythms of lilting, accompanied by hand clapping, foot stomping and drumming of the table made it ideal for Irish dancing.

Robbie (or Bobbie) McMahon was born in County Clare on 11 December 1926 and became well known as an entertainer on Irish radio. McMahon composed his own songs as well as singing traditional favorites. As Carrie pointed out, he is best known for his rendition of the beautiful ballad Spancil Hill which earned him the title of King of Spancil Hill. Robbie first sung the ballad at age 16 in the cottage of Moira Keane and in the presence of the nephew of the song’s author Michael Considine.

Robbie McMahon lived all of his life at Spancil Hill where he continued to farm and also continued to entertain in pubs, bars and, yes, rural cottages right up until his sad death in 2012. A film was made about his life called Last night As I Lay Dreaming.

Thank you to Carrie Browne-Carey for her enlightening email and for sharing her memories. 

Sorcha Nic Diarmada and the role of women in 1916

Sorcha Nic Diarmada

Something which has always interested me about Irish history is the prominent role of women in areas including literature and the arts, religious life, science, political leadership and, specifically, the early 20th century struggle for Irish independence.

Such is the influence of women in Irish history that the country itself has from ancient times been personified as female with names such as Erin, Roisin Dubh and Kathleen Ni Houlihan. Poets from Yeats to Heaney have developed the idea so successfully that it seems more powerful than being merely a traditional metaphorical representation and speaks of deeply rooted cultural and spiritual values.

Countess Markievicz was undoubtedly the most celebrated female leader of the 1916 Rising, described as a charismatic revolutionary, a politician, suffragette and socialist. Markievicz was one of the first women in the world to hold a cabinet position, as Minister for Labour in the Irish Republic from 1919-1922.

But we should not overlook the fact that Markievicz was the best known of many thousands of Irish (and Anglo-Irish) women who were active in the 1916 Rising and the subsequent War of Independence. I was reminded of this fact recently by a correspondent on Ancestry, a gentleman named Mike McDermott whose family settled in Yorkshire in the 1860s because Mike’s great grandfather, also Michael McDermott, had to leave Ireland under suspicion for his “Fenian activities”.

Mike’s grandfather Patrick McDermott married his grandmother Annie McCluskey in Dublin in 1907. The connection with my own ancestors was through the McCluskey family, Annie’s father Nicholas McCluskey was a close friend and political ally of my great-great grandfather John McDonnell, a blind basket maker and founding member of the League of the Blind (a trade union of blind people). McDonnell and McCluskey were both elected Poor Law Guardians in the North Dublin Union and used their position to campaign for better conditions for poor and disabled people in Dublin. Fresh information from Mike indicates that Nicholas and John were more than just lifelong friends and co-conspirators, but relatives - as there were a number of cousins named McDonnell on the wedding photograph of his grandparents, Patrick and Annie.

But how does this connect to the role of women in the 1916 Rising? The McDermott family originated from Leitrim and Mike’s family share ancestors with Sean MacDiarmada (McDermott), a signatory of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic read by Patrick Pearse outside the General Post Office in Dublin. But a much closer link to this momentous period of Irish history was through a sister of Mike’s grandfather, Sarah McDermott (Sorcha Nic Diarmada), a teacher born at Normanton in West Yorkshire in 1878.

Sarah was one of the ten children of Michael and Mary McDermott from Glenkeel in Leitrim. Her father had settled in the north of England shortly after the unsuccessful Fenian Rising of 1867. Neighbouring Lancashire had become a hotbed of Fenian activity in the 1860s with the infamous prison van attack in Manchester in 1867, which was followed by a prison bombing in London. The Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) was formed in1858 and it was reported that within a few years every city in England had IRB units. Sarah and her siblings may therefore have grown up in an area of Fenian support but also within the wider trade union culture of the industrial north of England.

After training as a teacher in Leeds, Sarah went to live and work in London where she became active in the Irish community and in the movement for Ireland’s independence. Many years later, in 1954, she provided a witness statement to the Bureau of Military History about her involvement in the Cumman na mBan, the Irish republican women’s paramilitary organisation formed in 1914 and led by Countess Markievicz.

The archive of the Bureau of Military History (http://www.bureauofmilitaryhistory.ie/) is a rich online source of personal testimonies from people who were directly involved in the history of the fight for Irish independence from 1913 to 1921. The great thing about this archive is that it is not just about ‘the usual culprits’, but includes detailed memories from ordinary citizens – the lesser known foot soldiers and activists.

Sarah McDermott’s testimony follows her involvement in cultural activities, such as organising concerts and cèilidh dances as Social Secretary of the Gaelic League in London to purchasing and smuggling arms to Ireland in preparation for the 1916 Rising. She also describes the activities of groups like the Irish Ladies’ Distress Committee who were widely involved in sewing and collecting garments for people in Ireland affected by the War of Independence.

What these memories highlight is the huge involvement in Irish independence of people in England and in particular of women. Sarah was eventually arrested in London by British detectives working in collaboration with the Government of the Irish Free State on doubtful charges of conspiracy. She was transported to Mountjoy Prison in Dublin in a group of 10 female and 90 male prisoners arrested in England, most of whom were later released. During her confinement Sarah was ill-treated and assaulted by prison staff and soldiers and after her release in 1923 she was indemnified by the British Government to the figure of £600, the highest amount paid to a woman in this group of prisoners.

I wish to thank Mike McDermott for telling us about his ancestor Sarah McDermott, the radical teacher from West Yorkshire.

The importance of being Ernest

Article for September 2016

Fellow genealogy enthusiasts amongst our readership will no doubt be aware of the pitfalls of online research, especially using the popular commercial websites such as Ancestry, Find My Past or The Genealogist where members post up their family trees and then cross-reference them with others, sometimes adding whole generations of newly discovered ancestors from someone else’s tree to their own at two clicks of the keyboard. The risk of this otherwise fantastic facility is when an inaccurate connection or piece of information is replicated by many other amateur researchers and we accept something as a given-truth simply on the basis of the volume of other people publishing a particular fact. Some of those so-called facts will also come from other sources, such as Wikipedia or seemingly authoritative websites.    

I’m pleased to say I served my apprenticeship in the years before the explosion of online data, when research required endless viewing of scratchy old microfilm reels on the 6^th floor of the old Birmingham Central Library. The records were more scarce, even random and took a sharper focus to transcribe, but it did therefore make you more discerning as to what you accepted as relevant fact. It can be both frustrating and demoralising to discover you have been following the wrong branch of your family tree, but one has to be always open to the possibility of red herrings and wishful thinking. The prospect of having to delete three or four generations and dozens of earnestly adopted ancestors can be initially devastating when you suddenly discover you’ve been barking up someone else’s tree, though genealogy, like history generally, is an objective science and our responsibility is to seek the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth (the embellishment can come later).            

Back in the November 2015 edition of The Harp I wrote about an Aston Villa player named Ernie “Mush” Callaghan who won a bravery medal in WW2 for rescuing trapped workers from a Birmingham factory which had been bombed in a German air raid. I also wrote in my article that Ernie held the record of being Villa’s oldest player until his record was taken by Brad Friedel in 2011 and I attempted some research into his Irish heritage.  

I wish to thank John Vaughan for responding to my article, pointing out that I had quoted the wrong year of birth for Ernie which had therefore led me to researching the wrong age, marriage and general ancestry of the Villa hero. In my defense (no pun intended as Ernie was a defender), I had obtained his birth year of 1907 from other sources including Aston Villa themselves who based their (now superseded) player record on 1907 instead of his actual birth date of 1910.

John explained that there were two men named Ernest Callaghan born in the Newtown area in the early 1900s, one being Ernest Henry Callaghan (1907-1972) who married Edith Partridge in 1937. The other was Ernie Callaghan (1910-1972) who married Winifred Alice Thorne in 1934. The two men were second cousins, the older Ernest became a transport engineer, found living at 27 Church Vale in the 1939 Register, whilst the slightly younger Ernest (or Ernie) was the Aston Villa defender nicknamed Mush.

I am relieved to say that the main points of our story are still factual, Ernie Mush Callaghan was the man awarded the British Empire medal for his rescue efforts as a volunteer police officer in WW2 and he also became the groundsman at Villa Park on his retirement as a football player …and lived in a cottage in the ground!

John told me: “I've written to the club, as they have used Ernest Henry's dates. This may make the oldest player record incorrect, although Brad Friedel now holds that! Ernie’s brother Henry Victor played at least one game for Villa reserves and another brother Arthur used to help with the Holte End scoreboard. Ernie's father was Thomas Callaghan a canal boatman who was in Upper Sutton Street as was Ernie in 1939.”

“Thomas' father was also Thomas and his father was James who was both Ernie's and Ernest Henry's great grandfather. Coincidently my 2x great uncle was Thomas Callaghan (Ernie's first cousin x1 removed) and he was also a professional footballer who after a season at Manchester City moved to Scotland and enjoyed some success with Partick Thistle and St Mirren. He was killed near Ypres in 1917.”      

As for the Irish heritage of both Ernest Henry and Ernie Mush Callaghan, John filled in the family tree for us:

“James Callaghan the tailor who was born about 1806 in Navan and married at St Bartholomew's, Edgbaston in 1835 started quite a dynasty. Another great grandson of his, William George Callaghan, was a boy sailor who died on HMS Indefatigable at the Battle of Jutland.”

I wish to thank John Vaughan for his help in sorting out the story for us and for flagging-up the difference between Ernest and Ernie. If you have a story concerning the Callaghan dynasty or any other great Irish families of the West Midlands, do get in touch and we will make every earnest effort to publish your tale.

Who were the Scotch Irish?

Article in the August 2016 edition of The Harp

In the last edition of The Harp I looked into whether the city of Birmingham had ever had a history of serious sectarian division and was both pleased and relieved to find that generally, or at least in modern times, it had not.

As a born and bred Brummie with strong Irish genes but a love of the culture and heritage of the whole of the British Isles, I would personally be reluctant to entrench myself behind any culturally and certainly not religiously based barricade at the expense of diversity and community cohesion. I would but wish that this disposition was shared by all inhabitants of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland.

In the West Midlands, Irish Catholic families have always lived happily next door to C of E, Methodist, Quaker and Pentecostal worshipping neighbours, as well as a rich abundance of other faiths. The story in parts of Scotland and Northern Ireland however has been different with communities divided along sectarian grounds for many generations.

My own understanding of Protestant culture in Northern Ireland is admittedly based largely on my reading of Irish history from the perspective of the oppressed majority (Catholic) attempting to gain equality and self-determination from an enforced establishment (Protestant). My view is also influenced by decades of seeing confrontational Orange parades on television, which seem to intransigently and triumphantly march around the north of Ireland reminding their Catholic neighbours, through the beat of very large drums, of their historical position at the bottom of the pile.

 

But is this a fair view of Northern Irish Protestant culture? Are my own prejudices giving me a distorted, stereotypical or incomplete understanding? To find out more about the culture of Protestants in Northern Ireland, especially the loyal institutions such as the Apprentice Boys and the Orange Order, I recently bought a large book titled The Faithful Tribe – An Intimate Portrait of the Loyal Institutions by Ruth Dudley Edwards. A well-known southern Irish journalist, historian and author from a Catholic background, Ruth Dudley Edwards has also been a noted advocate for the right of northern Protestants to hold their parades. Her book is a fascinating exploration of Ulster loyalist heritage.

Ruth Dudley Edwards gives voice to the working class people beneath the ceremonial regalia – the farmers and labourers, teachers and businessmen, ministers and pensioners. “Many of whom” she says “speak wistfully of the days when their Roman Catholic neighbours would come out to enjoy the parade”.

My only issue with this is not so much the right of anybody to have such an innocuous thing as a parade, but that the theme of Orange Order parades (unless Ruth Dudley Edwards reveals differently) is strongly linked to sectarian themes of the Protestant ascendancy over their Catholic enemy.

In this restricted context it does become difficult to then have an open mind about the wider heritage and culture of the Protestant Scotch-Irish, to have a starting point not clouded by pre-conceived prejudice, justly founded or not. However, this was recently challenged when my new American brother-in-law Mike asked me to research his family tree and I discovered a branch of Scotch-Irish frontier families who had originated from Ulster in the 1700s.

My starting point on Mike’s research was that his father’s family were from Italian migrants into New York in the early 1900s - impoverished southern-Italian farmers seeking a better life in the tenements of Brooklyn. This was comfortable ground for me given the well-documented parallels between the experience of the southern-Italian farmers of the 1890s and 1900s and the western-Irish migrants fleeing post-famine conditions of the 1850s and 60s. As well as escaping similar conditions of poverty and prejudice, both communities shared the Roman Catholic faith which also bonded them to some degree in New York.

Another branch of Mike’s tree were Polish Jews who, again, went to the States to escape terrible persecution and dispossession under Russian occupation of Warsaw in the 1880s and 1890s, many going to the States via London. It was on Mike’s mother’s side that I discovered a branch of original settlers in the 1700s with the surname Elliott. A 4 x great grandfather of Mike, named George Elliott was a frontiersman who had fought in the Revolutionary War of 1775 and then become a rebel in an armed uprising called Shays’ Rebellion where local farmers from Massachusetts, many of whom were former soldiers from the Revolutionary War, rose up against heavy taxation from Boston.

 

Further research showed that the core group of rebels in Shays’ rebellion, including the leader Daniel Shays himself, were Presbyterian Ulster Scots from an American town called Pelham. George Elliott was himself a member of this community, renowned for being the frontiersmen who built the first stockade-towns at the boundaries of colonised America. The surname Elliot is from a Scottish clan, many of whom went to Ulster in the 1600s where an additional letter T was added to the end of their surname. As dissenters, the Scotch Presbyterian community suffered their own discrimination in Ulster which led to a migration to America during the early 1700s.

Suddenly I was feeling a sense of admiration for the Ulster Scots as brave, resilient, visionary and faithful people taking on the huge adventure of travelling into the wild-west, establishing their new communities in difficult environments, whilst also standing up for rights and justice during Shay’s Rebellion and similar local conflicts.  

It’s always good to shine a new light on one’s pre-conceived views!

Was Birmingham ever a sectarian divided town?

Unlike many other British cities, Birmingham is generally not known for having a significant history of sectarian division along the lines of English Protestants against Irish descended Catholics. There were of course a number of events and incidents in the late 19^th century which gained infamy, such as the Murphy Riots of June 1867 in which gangs of English ‘roughs’ attacked the residents of Park Street, an area of central Birmingham with a high Irish population.

The brutal disturbances were largely caused by the presence in the town at that time of William Murphy, a bigoted anti-Catholic orator whose antagonistic rants about the Catholic Church quickly gained him a following of local supporters.

In his book Birmingham Irish Making Our Mark Carl Chinn writes of the Murphy Riots:

Park Street was so devastated that almost all the houses ‘were wrecked, every window broken, the frames generally torn out, the contents of the shops thrown out amongst the mob, and the furniture taken and destroyed’.

 No protection was given by the police who reportedly joined the robbers in breaking into Irish houses, beating women, children, old men and old women, stealing their clothes and food and driving people into the streets almost naked.

It seems that ethnicity based tensions may well have continued for some years after the Murphy Riots, in his book The Gangs of Birmingham, Philip Gooderson suggests:

Ethnicity seems to have been one of the bases of the slogging gangs of the early 1870s, at least in the Digbeth area, although it receded as the Irish were assimilated. The lingering echoes of Murphy were heard in continued vendettas and street-fights.

Gooderson describes an occasion in August 1872 when the annual excursion by St Chad’s Roman Catholic School to Shustoke in rural Warwickshire, turned to violence after a local gamekeeper began shooting at unruly youngsters. Whether intended or not, the gamekeeper named Thomas Booton shot a sixteen-year-old boy named James Carter in his arm.

A mob of some 200 people including pupils, family members and assorted friends became infuriated by the shooting and pursued Booton as he ran back to his cottage. Booton was badly beaten and several weeks later a Saltley iron-worker named Patrick Cunningham was charged with assault and intent to murder the gamekeeper. Cunningham had allegedly struck Booton over the head with the gamekeeper's own gun, fracturing his skull. The ironworker was eventually acquitted when the judge was told that Booton had fired his gun into a crowd of youngsters.

Whilst Irish men, women, boys and girls continued to appear in front of 19^th century Birmingham courts, their misdemeanours were generally no different from their working class English peers and neighbours – slogging (stone throwing and street fighting), brawling in public houses, passing counterfeit coins, burglary and robbery. If there was a higher proportion of Irish criminals being convicted, it could be explained by the fact they lived in the poorest areas of the city with the least opportunities.  

Philip Gooderson writes extensively about the ‘slogging gangs’ of Birmingham in the 1860s and 1870s. These were huge local gangs of mainly youths who caused mayhem in the narrow, impoverished streets of Birmingham, fighting one another, menacing shop keepers, fighting the police and assaulting innocent passers-by. Slogging was an epidemic of street violence. Irish boys and men were frequently in court for slogging, sometimes they were even the gang leaders, but the gangs were more likely to be comprised of members on the basis of their local district or even their trade rather than on ethnic or sectarian grounds.

Carl Chinn endorses this impression: “In such disorder, some second generation Irish Brummies were involved, but it would seem they were alongside English troublemakers and not part of Irish gangs”.

Birmingham’s overall lack of historical sectarian tensions between Protestants and Catholics is different from the experience of other major cities in the UK. Glasgow is well-known for the sectarian division existing between its citizens which, mainly though not exclusively, takes the form of the fierce rivalry between supporters of Celtic F.C. and Rangers F.C. Where deaths and serious assaults have been directly linked to sectarian tensions in Glasgow, many of these have occurred after Old Firm football matches. Liverpool has also had its share of sectarian violence, though its worst outbreak was back in 1909 when the city was dubbed ‘the Belfast of England’ following a riot between Catholics and Protestants. In spite of theories which suggest that Everton is a Protestant club whilst Liverpool is Catholic, many modern day fans of both clubs say that this is nonsense.

Whilst a fierce rivalry exists between the football clubs of the city of Birmingham, this could never have been described as sectarian. Aston Villa were founded by members of the Villa Cross Wesleyan Chapel with several Scots taking a prominent role in the early days, whilst Birmingham City were founded by a group of cricketers from Holy Trinity C of E Church in Bordesley. However, both clubs have historically attracted supporters from their respective local Irish communities, Villa from the old Irish of Newtown and Aston, Blues from the more contemporary Irish districts of Sparkhill and Small Heath.

As Birmingham became a more diverse city in the second half of the 20^th century and as new waves of Irish migrants continued to contribute to the infrastructure, social economy and cultural vibrancy of the region, the Irish community have gradually become more confident and increasingly proud of their dual-heritage of being Irish and Brummie. Long may the city’s reputation for tolerance and diversity flourish.  

Article in the June 2016 edition of The Harp - William Mulready : The Irish man who invented the envelope

“Did you hear about the Irish fellah who invented the envelope?” might sound suspiciously like the start of a Frank Carson joke, but actually it’s a true story and, ironically, one which once again challenges negative, historical stereotypes of Irish people in Britain.

A former work colleague of mine, Deborah Slater who now works as a fundraiser for Acorns Children’s Hospice told me about an ancestor of her mother named William Mulready whom Debbie told me ‘invented the envelope’. Any claim like this just had to be worth investigating further!

William Mulready was born in Ennis, County Clare on 1 April 1786 and before anyone jumps to any conclusions his date of birth has no relevance to the story. When William was a child his family moved to London where his gift for drawing and painting was spotted and encouraged. At just 14 years old William was accepted at the Royal Academy School where he developed into a brilliant artist.


In 1802 William Mulready married Elizabeth Varley, who was a landscape painter and their three sons, Paul Augustus, William and Michael also became artists. Mulready became a very popular painter of landscapes, but then started to build a reputation as a genre painter from 1808 on, painting mostly everyday scenes from rural life. Mulready also began to illustrate books, including the first edition of Charles and Mary Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare in 1807 and a poetry book for children by Catherine Ann Dorset. The book was very popular as it was a sequel to The Butterfly's Ball, and the Grasshopper's Feast by William Roscoe.
Mulready became a hugely popular painter from the early 19th century into the Victorian period. His first painting of importance, Returning from the Ale House, now in the Tate Gallery, London, under the title Fair Time, appeared in 1809.

In 1815 William Mulready became an Associate of the Royal Academy (A.R.A.) and R.A. in 1816. In the same year, he was also awarded the French "Légion d'honneur".

His most important pictures are in the Victoria and Albert Museum and in the Tate Gallery. In the former are 33, among them Hampstead Heath (1806); Giving a Bite (1836); First Love (1839); The Sonnet (1839); Choosing the Wedding Gown (1846); and The Butt (Shooting a Cherry) (1848). In the latter are five, including a Snow Scene. In the National Gallery, Dublin, are Young Brother and The Toy Seller. His Wolf and the Lamb is in Royal possession.

But what of the claim that William Mulready invented the envelope?

There are a few histories online concerning the origins of the envelope. Obviously people had been writing letters for centuries, especially the upper classes, but the main method used for sending a letter was a piece of paper containing the message on one side, that was then folded and sealed, probably with wax and a personalized stamp, then hand delivered by a messenger. This was called a letter-sheet.



In 1840 the British Government introduced important reforms to the postal system, led by Sir Rowland Hill. The first postage stamp, also introduced in 1840, was the famous Penny Black. The Government also commissioned William Mulready to design a standard letter sheet to go with the new stamp. It seems that Mulready was commissioned more for his artistic skills than his inventiveness and he went about designing a lozenge-shaped letter-sheet with beautiful artwork of Britannia and a reclining lion amongst other figures. Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II still owns the copyright to his original design.

The innovative thing about Mulready’s letter-sheet was that even though it followed the age-old design of a single piece of paper which contained the message on the inside and when folded allowed the outer side to be used for an address and of course the new Penny Black stamp, his new design allowed the paper to be completely sealed on all sides, thus creating an envelope into which additional sheets could be placed. This became known as Mulready stationary, or even as ‘a Mulready’ as opposed to being called an envelope. 

Unfortunately for William Mulready, his beautiful illustrations were widely lampooned by newspapers and satirists who scoffed at their ornamental extravagance. Stationery manufacturers, whose livelihood was threatened by the new letter sheet, complained to the Government and only six days after their introduction, on May 12, Rowland Hill wrote that; I fear we shall have to substitute some other stamp for that design by Mulready ... the public have shown their disregard and even distaste for beauty, and within two months a decision had been made to replace the Mulready designed stationery.

William Mulready’s paintings continue to attract acclaim and reverence from professional art scholars and the viewing public alike and he joins a long-line of Irish men and women who excelled in the creative arts. But in answer to the question “did you hear about the Irish fellah who invented the envelope?” we can give the resounding answer “yes, it was William Mulready!”

Article in the May 2016 edition of The Harp - Pat Roach the Brummie Irish Giant

Pat Roach was a professional wrestler from Birmingham who was also well-known for his television and film career. First appearing in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange in 1971, Pat Roach’s film career involved parts in Clash of the Titans (1981), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Conan The Destroyer (1983), Superman III (1983), Never Say Never Again (1983), Willow (1988) and Robin Hood – Prince of Thieves (1991). He is also fondly remembered as the character Brian ‘Bomber’ Busbridge in 26 episodes of Auf Wiedersehen Pet alongside Jimmy Nail (Oz) and Tim Healy (Dennis).

At 6ft 5in, Roach was a towering man both in the wrestling ring and on screen, though in real life people remember him as being for the most part, a gentle giant. That was certainly the character of Bomber in Auf Wiedersehen Pet – a father figure in the midst of English builders behaving badly in West Germany.

 

I remember meeting Pat Roach on a number of occasions when I worked at Moseley Hall Hospital in the late 1980s and he would come into the Hillcrest Unit on a regular basis initially to support our fund raising efforts but subsequently because he wanted to personally support people with acquired disability such as brain injury by talking to and motivating them.

On a few occasions he arranged for the Moseley Hall patients to go and watch him wrestling. I remember seeing not just Pat but the likes of Giant Haystacks and Big Daddy at places like West Bromwich Town Hall and Cocksmoor Woods Leisure Centre in Kings Heath and when he wasn’t in the ring himself, Pat would keep us company in the audience. It was at the latter venue that Pat came out of the centre still attired in his wrestling garb to wave us off and on discovering that an insensitive motorist had blocked in the hospital bus on a cold winter night, he proceeded to physically move the offending vehicle, picking up one end then the other until he had nudged it out of the way. Had I not witnessed it with my own eyes I’m not sure I would have believed it possible!

Pat Roach was a dedicated Brummie, growing up in areas like Ladywood and Balsall Heath, his working life in the city included shovelling coal from barges at Hockley Brook, running a car sales business on Alum Rock Road and owning a Gymnasium & Health Club on New Street. He was also a boxer and one-time British Judo Champion. But with the real name Francis Patrick Roach and looking, with his red hair and beard, every bit the iconic Celtic giant, there just had to be some Irish blood in there somewhere?

Pat Roach’s autobiography, If - The Pat Roach Story, co-written with Shirley Thompson and published in 2002, two years before his death from cancer on 17 July 2004, gives only a few references to his Irish roots. This is probably because Pat’s childhood, in his own words had been “dis-jointed”. In the book Pat’s mother Dolly recalls that his father Frank Roach could be cruel and difficult. She soon left Frank, to bring up Pat as a single-mother. Moving from one part of the city to another, meaning that young Pat lived in many different houses and attended different schools. Pat Roach described how growing up in a single-parent family meant he experienced ‘several traumatic incidents, which were to have a profound effect upon him’.

There is one memory of Pat’s father, Frank, which suggests that the Celtic elements in his character were because “his ancestors were from the Ross Common and Galway Bay areas of Southern Ireland”. There are also several references to the Roach family attending Catholic churches and schools in the city such as St Chad’s. Shirley Thompson, well known for her meticulous research (she has also co-written biographies with Eddie Fewtrelll and Alton Douglas), provides a helpful family tree going back to Pat’s grandfather Walter Roach and grandmother Nellie, who lived at 3, back 90 Tower Street in Newtown in the early 20th century.

In these articles in the past I have researched other Irish Brummie families who also had their roots in the Newtown, Hockley and Ladywood areas of Birmingham. Whereas we might think of Sparkhill and Small Heath as the neighbourhoods where many Irish migrants settled in the 1950s and 1960s, a hundred years earlier they were more likely to settle in the back-to-back court houses of the inner city, especially those neighbourhoods close to Catholic churches – St Chad’s being a veritable magnet for poor people from the western counties of Ireland, fleeing the Great Hunger of the late 1840s.

The Roach family first appeared in Birmingham in the 1861 census, living in court housing at the back of 2a Hanley Street. Michael Roach is a 29 year old bricklayer from Galway and his wife Mary, aged 22, is also from Galway. They have a son of 5 months old, Peter, who was born in Birmingham. The couple also have four male lodgers, three of whom were Irish. All around them in Hanley Street are other Irish families, perhaps showing just how much this congested area was favoured by the new wave of migrants.

Michael and Mary were the great grandparents of wrestler Pat Roach. They appear again in subsequent census records, slowly building their family of nine children. One of those children, Pat’s grandfather Walter was born in 1874. He married Nellie Woodcock and they lived in Tower Street, not very far away from Hanley Street where the Roach family first settled. We have learnt from previous stories of the Newtown Irish of the 19th century that they fitted right in with their new working class English neighbours and within just a couple of generations were producing great Brummie icons like the gentle giant of a man that was Francis Patrick Roach.

Luke Kelly - The Brummie Dubliner

Luke Kelly was known as one of Ireland’s greatest folk singers. Born in 1940 into a working-class family living in a one-room cottage on Sheriff Street, close to the Docklands area of Dublin near the River Liffey and the banks of the Royal Canal, Kelly had a typical tough upbringing on the streets of Ireland’s capital. His father worked at Jacob’s biscuit factory but the family were surrounded by high unemployment, emigration and poverty. Luke left school at the age of just 12 to bring home a wage. He did a variety of jobs before coming to England with his brother Paddy to work on building sites.

In 1962 Kelly returned to Dublin where he met Ronnie Drew and Barney McKenna in O’Donoghue’s Pub and they formed the band which would later become known as The Dubliners. During and between his long stints with The Dubliners Kelly became known as the man with the big mop of red hair and the even bigger soulful voice, a rebel voice delivering songs that were often protesting against injustice and poverty. He was described by Shane McGowan “as a pop star amongst folk musicians” and by Gerry Adams as “a champion of the downtrodden”.

But how many know that this great legend of Irish folk music actually cut his singing teeth here in Birmingham in the late 1950s and early 1960s? That the roots of his passion and revolutionary spirit were in some large part formed right here in Brum?

Luke was a big music fan before he came to England, like many young people of his generation he loved Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Perry Como and Duke Ellington’s big band sounds. He also joined the Marian Arts Society in Dublin where he acted, danced and sang.

In 1957 Luke Kelly left Ireland and came to England, like so many emigrants of that period he probably never expected to return home again. He lived the navvy lifestyle in cities like Manchester and Newcastle, working on the roads and building sites. In a 1962 interview he said he had about 50 different jobs in England which included cleaning lavatories, railways and windows. In Newcastle he discovered the jazz and folk club scene.

But it was in Birmingham that Kelly really discovered a radical new identity. He moved into the home of a Dublin born teacher named Sean Mulready, a communist with strong musical links in Birmingham whose sister Kathleen Moynihan was a founder member of Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann. Luke lived with Sean and his wife Molly on Howard Road East in Kings Heath.

Luke brought a five stringed banjo and began busking, playing in the style of Pete Seeger and Tommy Makem. Luke decided to settle for a while in Birmingham and became involved in the Jug O’Punch Folk Club run by Ian Campbell. He formed a musical partnership with Dominic Behan and they began performing at folk clubs and Irish pubs all over England and Scotland. He also became good friends with Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger, often appearing at their Singer Club in London.   

In 1999, Mary Maher a journalist with The Irish Times described Luke Kelly’s time in Birmingham as “a massive educational process”. Through Sean Mulready, he joined the socialist Birmingham Clarion Singers Choir and also became active in the Connolly Association, a left-wing group of Irish exiles in England.

Luke began to read and study at night school in Birmingham and to associate with left wing academics at the city’s university. The Mulready family were a big influence on Luke Kelly’s socialist thinking and also George Thomson,   professor of classics at Birmingham University and a member of the executive committee of the Communist Party. The tough former itinerant Irish navvy from the Dublin dockland was now reading Jack Kerouac and Jean-Paul Satre amongst the socialist intelligentsia of the English Midlands.

Luke became active in CND and the Young Communist League. Ian Campbell once recalled that Luke was known locally as Luke ‘Sun is Burning’ Kelly because of his love for the anti-nuclear campaign anthem of that name. In Easter 1962 he joined the Aldermaston anti-nuclear march.

Later that year, his mentor George Thomson offered Luke a place at Prague University. Luke had two choices, either go to Prague or to return to Ireland to pursue a career as a ballad singer. He chose the latter but not before completing a musical apprenticeship under Ewan MacColl in London. Kelly would later say that MacColl was his greatest musical influence.  

Not long afterwards, Luke Kelly met up with Ronnie Drew and Barney McKenna in O’Donoghue’s Pub back home in Ireland and The Dubliners were born. From the beginning of their relationship, Drew was keen to exorcise Kelly of his love and fascination with the English folk scene, saying “that was the first row I had with Luke. The English folkies used to drive me mad with the way everything was so precious”.

In her book Irish Music Abroad: Diasporic Sounds in Birmingham however, author Angela Moran presents the paradox that ‘the analogous musical ideas and singing techniques Kelly took from city centre folk clubs in Birmingham, his lodgings in Kings Heath and the seminar rooms at Birmingham University, helped to create what became his and his contemporaries’ recognisably Irish sounds’. She concludes “rather than belonging to Irish Dublin, Luke Kelly belongs to the diasporic space of Irish Birmingham”.

 

Forging a future - the lot of the Irish immigrant in 19th century Wolverhampton

Caribee Island, Wolverhampton in the 19th century

Migration is a big topic at the moment and for Irish people and people of Irish heritage and ancestry, it has been a feature of our society and our culture for hundreds of years.

According to figures from the last UK census published by the Office of National Statistics, there were 630,000 foreign-born residents of the West Midlands region in 2011. This is about 11% of the resident population. People born in the Republic of Ireland were ranked 7th on a list of the countries of birth of all residents, though bear in mind that in front of them on the list are people born in England, Wales and Scotland. 42 thousand West Midland residents in 2011 were born in the Republic of Ireland (0.8% of the population) and a further 19 thousand were born in Northern Ireland (0.3% of the population). The overall UK figures of Irish born residents declined from the 2001 census, perhaps showing that migration from Ireland into the UK had slowed or even reversed.
  
If cities like Liverpool, London, Glasgow and Manchester were better known as destinations for Irish migrants in the 19th century, today it is estimated that Birmingham has one of the largest Irish born populations per capita in the UK. Every year Birmingham hosts the UK’s largest St Patrick’s Day Parade (the world’s third biggest) and has Britain’s only officially nominated ‘Irish Quarter’, defined in commercial and cultural terms with many traditional Irish pubs and community services radiating around the Birmingham Irish Centre in Digbeth.

Irish people began arriving in the West Midlands region in large numbers from the mid-1800s, moving here for work in the construction, public service and manufacturing industries. Apart from Birmingham, other local destinations of settlement for Irish migrants included Coventry which attracted labourers to its factories, first making silk ribbon and then employed in the motor industry. Following the devastation of the city during World War II, there was an active recruitment campaign in Ireland, inviting people to work in Coventry’s hospitals, on public transport and in the construction industry. During the 19th century the areas of Caldicotts Yard, Gosford Street and Jordan became Irish neighbourhoods. In the 1950s and 1960s Irish communities formed in Coundon, Radford and Earlsdon.

Like Birmingham, Coventry has a rich Irish culture today with dance halls, clubs, pubs, dancing schools, theatre groups, language teachers and musicians in abundance. It also has a long standing Irish Festival which takes place around St Patrick’s Day.

The Black Country was another big destination for Irish migrants in the 19th century. An Irish community formed in Wolverhampton around the alleyways of Stafford Street and Canal Street in an area which became synonymous with poverty and over-crowding. An area known as Caribee Island became established as the most densely concentrated Irish community in the town and unfortunately the community attracted hostility and prejudice, fuelled by the press who referred to Wolverhampton as ‘Little Rome’ because of its proliferation of Catholic churches. But in spite of all of this, Irish people worked alongside their Black Country neighbours in the factories and foundries, for the most part successfully.

The Higgins family followed a typical pattern of settlement into the Black Country. In the 1861 census James and Honnor Higgins, both born in Ireland, were living at 81 Stafford Street, right in the middle of the new Irish community and surrounded by poverty. Like many Irish people around him, James was working as an agricultural labourer. Living on the same street were James’ brothers Patrick and Thomas, and just like James both men and their sons were working as agricultural labourers.

A black country puddling furnace

Within a decade, James Higgins had died and his widow Honora had moved with her family to Bilston. In the 1871 census their daughter Bridget was employed as a labourer in a forge. By 1881 Honora had remarried at Holy Trinity Church in Bilston and her children continued to work in the nearby factories and foundries of the industrial Black Country. One of her sons, named James after his father, was working as a puddler at the local ironworks, a job he continued to do for at least 20 years.

The job of a puddler was skilled work in hot and demanding conditions. His job involved putting pig iron which had been produced by blast furnaces through a secondary smelting process to remove impurities and make higher quality wrought iron. The puddler’s job was to carefully control factors such as heat, fuel and air supply and involved a lot of experience to produce oblong blocks of high quality iron.

By the time of the 1901 census James and his family were living in Smethwick near the M&B brewery where he now worked as a labourer. His family had close associations with St Patrick’s church on Dudley Road. James died in 1909 but many years later his grandson, John Higgins, with help from the archivist at St Chad’s Cathedral in Birmingham, traced the family tree back to the village of Elphin in Roscommon. The story of the Higgins family is probably quite typical of many of the migrants who left Ireland around the time of the famine of the 1840s and came to the West Midlands. Their families lived in poor conditions but worked hard and eventually thrived through their own labours.