The Gathering article - August 2013

 

Family history research can be a very consuming interest and anyone with an obsessive amateur genealogist like me in the family will bear testimony to the hours that can be spent plotting the tree online or occasionally doing very odd and to all others, irritating things, like suddenly reversing the car down a lane in the middle of the family holiday in rural Ireland declaring with great excitement “Look everyone! A graveyard!”

For the most part, and I am certain that this will apply to many readers of The Harp, the majority of the ancestors whose names and occupations we painstakingly discover will be ordinary working class people living in very basic conditions either in the famine beset countryside of mid-19^th century Ireland, or in the tenement and back-to-back poverty of industrialising cities like Dublin, Birmingham, Belfast and Liverpool.

Identifying the microcosmic part played by your very own ancestors in the rich history of working class life, discovering your very own Black Country nail maker, Wexford farmer or poor migrant family taking steerage from Cork to New York as part of the great Irish diaspora is always rewarding. Even so, as the family tree becomes increasingly populated by a growing list of labourers named Patrick and Michael, or their Brummie counterparts William and Frederick, with an equally sized list of wives named Bridget and Mary, Phoebe and Hilda, discerning the individual human stories behind the names on a census index or a ship’s manifest can seem an impossible task.

Occasionally there are gems to be found, especially through the oral transmission of family stories and also those spine-tingling coincidences which come completely out-of-the-blue to suggest synchronicity between past and present or highlighting a unique family trait that appears to have skipped generations. Twilight zone incidences of nature over nurture.

Viewers of the BBC television series Who do you think you are? may have been struck by just how common it is for people to discover for the first time a long forgotten ancestor who lived a parallel life to their own. A comedian or variety performer discovering that great-great-grandfather was also a black sheep of the family who rejected the family business or jumped naval service in order to play musical hall dame at Blackpool Winter Gardens. The modern sports personality finding that g-g-g-granny was the first female to swim back-stroke across the channel. I’m using poetic license here and could go on, but I’m sure the reader will be familiar with the scenario.

One such strange coincidence happened in my own research only relatively recently. Having worked for disability rights based organisations in the West Midlands since 1990 and prior to that being a nurse at Moseley Hall Hospital working with disabled people, I have for a long time been interested in the history of disability and in 2010 even wrote a book about the history of Birmingham’s Disability Resource Centre, published with support from the Heritage Lottery Fund. In recent years I have also been a member of the London based steering group organising UK Disability History Month. 

During all this time I had no idea that one of my own ancestors, John McDonnell of Bolton Street, Dublin was a blind man who co-founded an organisation called the League of the Blind Great Britain and Ireland and was chair of its Dublin branch for over a decade during the early 1900s.

The discovery came about when I made contact with cousins of my mother, the Whelan family of Dublin. Connections with my grandmother’s side of the family had diminished over many decades, largely because my grandparents had seemingly eloped to Birmingham in the late 1930s. As sadly happens in these situations, my great grandfather’s singular disapproval of his daughter’s chosen partner was translated into a wider sense of rejection which became over accentuated through subsequent generations. To an obsessed genealogist, making contact with a very large section of my mother’s family whom I had never spoken to, met or written to (and didn’t even know the names of many of them) was as close to anorak heaven as its possible to experience. Long lost relations, who had been made distant not just by the great stretch of land and sea between Birmingham and Dublin, but by the fall-out from a specific father-daughter bust-up of some 80 years ago, I am pleased to say are now Facebook friends and regular email pals.

My consequent research into the life and times of John McDonnell has been a complete revelation. Growing up in 19^th century blind institutions around Dublin, he learnt the skill of basket weaving and became a wealthy entrepreneur, running his own basket making factory in north Dublin and then becoming involved in running the said League of the Blind, a radical disability organisation even by today’s standards who rejected charity and instead became aligned to the trade union movement, campaigning for fair pay for blind and deaf workers. If readers of The Harp will allow me the indulgence I would like to tell more of John McDonnell’s story in a future article.

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

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The Gathering article - June 2013

 

In my last article in The Harp I pondered on the importance of the spoken word in passing down community and family history. When I started researching my own family history back in the early 1990s, both the English and Irish roots of our tree, I was most definitely inspired by my Aunty Kath.   

Kath Robinson and her husband Harry were two of life’s truly decent, salt-of-the-earth working class people – proud hardworking Brummies who had both grown up in the cobbled inner city streets of Ladywood, romancing and courting through the uncertain Blitz years of the 1940s and marrying at St Peter’s RC church near Broad Street in 1942. True and lasting love not only blossomed for K and H, but the happiest days of their lives were fulfilled in spite of the constant threat of Herr Hitler’s bombs, raining down on the factories and streets of Britain’s industrial heartland.   Kath was my dad’s second oldest sister. She was born in the far away city of Ahmedabad in the northern Indian region of Gujarat in 1922, when my grandfather William was a young soldier in the Worcestershire Regiment. In those days a long-term posting to the other side of the world meant that young British privates were unlikely to come home for years as opposed to months, so their wives were given the unique opportunity of following on to join them in India. To my grandmother Florence, this was a chance in a lifetime for a young working class woman from the back-streets of Birmingham.   The couple were Catholics, both having Irish roots, so their baby daughter Kathleen was baptised at the church of Our Lady of Carmel in Ahmedabad. My grandparent’s address was recorded simply as ‘camp’. The sights and sounds of 1920s India stayed with my grandmother all of her life and I remember when I was a child listening to her Kippling-esque tales of long-ago India. The images of elephants, monkeys and mamsaabs that she conjured up have stayed with me all of my life. If Aunty Kath had also inherited the story telling gene from her mother Florence, then in turn Florence it seems had inherited it from her own mother, Mary Finn, the daughter of Irish immigrants whose families had fled from Galway in the post-famine decade of the 1850s.   Whilst my Aunty Kath never had the opportunity to visit Ireland in her own life, she had inherited a profound dedication to the Catholic tradition and the Irish culture of previous generations. Through the stories that had been passed down to her by her mother and grandmother she was able to paint a rich picture of the Irish community in inner city Birmingham in the late 1800s and early 1900s. She recalled to me that some members of the Finn dynasty of old Newtown and Hockley had left Birmingham to live in Cleveland, Ohio and in her top drawer she kept a very old and cherished photograph of a nun, whom she had never met but believed to be an American relative of the family.   Following my Aunty Kath’s death in 2000, I decided to see if I could trace our family nun and try to discover the story of the people who left Birmingham for Ohio in the early 1900s. My research eventually led to a family of sisters from the Finn line of my grandmother’s ancestors, with married names including Robinson, McKiernan, Ratchford and Duffey, who migrated to Cleveland together in Edwardian times.   The research even identified the nun, Sister Marie Nativa McKiernan. Sister Joanne of the Sisters of the Humility of Mary in Cleveland, Ohio emailed:      “Yes, the photo very much resembles Sr. Marie Nativa McKiernan whom I recall in her elder years. Since the habit is definitely that of the Sisters of the Humility of Mary, I would be 99.9% certain that this is Sr. Marie Nativa. She was born in 1906 in Birmingham, England to Thomas McKiernan [born in Ireland ] and Anna Finn McKiernan [born in England ]. Her baptism was at St. Chad Cathedral in Birmingham on November 18, 1906. She entered this religious congregation on January 23, 1925 from St. Edward Church in Cleveland, Ohio.”   It is quite incredible to have traced Sister Marie Nativa on the basis of just an old photograph and a family story and I am only sad that my Aunty Kath was no longer alive to hear the results of my research. Whether this little miracle is down to the power of the internet or, I’d like to think, some higher force at work, it does go to show the importance of keeping stories alive from one generation to another and my message to old and young Harp readers alike is, get talking to each other, put pen to paper and fingers to keyboard and …write your history down!

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

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The Gathering article - May 2013

In the days before television, video and computer technology, the arts of conversation and story-telling were of much greater value to working class people in Britain and Ireland than they are today. Of course, other forms of mass communication were obviously around before the IT boom of the last two decades of the 1900s; live theatre dates back for centuries; books and newspapers have also been available for a long time - although the mass of common people were not literate until the start of the 20th century; early cinema developed from the 1920s and similarly radio became a popular form of media in the 1930s and 1940s. But prior to these important developments, most working class people used story-telling and the oral tradition as the main means through which to pass on local and family history, customs and culture to future generations.

The recording of oral history in Britain was made popular by George Ewart Evans in a series of books published between 1956 and 1987. Evans’s first book was called Ask the Fellows Who Cut the Hay which centred on the memories of people born in the Suffolk village of Blaxhall in the last part of the 19th century. Evans showed that personal memories and testimonies should be treated just as seriously by historians as other types of evidence. In 1976 Melvyn Bragg produced a community history of his Cumbrian birthplace called Speak for England and from the mid-1980s Brummie historian Carl Chinn has continued the oral approach through a series of books about the history of the urban West Midlands.

In rural Ireland, the tradition of oral history has always been particularly prevalent and powerful, possibly because formal education and the means to literacy were denied to the Catholic majority of the country for very long periods, but also due to the well-established Bardic traditions of poetry and tale telling. The transmission of wisdom, legend and folk-lore through story was known as glefisa or ‘the bright knowledge’. Researchers John and Caitlin Matthews, internationally renowned writers on the Celtic Tradition describe how “the importance of story to the Celts can scarcely be overestimated. Story was literally the stuff of life, providing information and wisdom as well as entertainment for the long dark nights, in ways that would otherwise have been lost forever”.

Even today the tradition of the seanchai or local rural storyteller is alive in many parts of Ireland. For example there is a gentleman who lives near the town of Moate in Westmeath named James J Hackett who is renowned as the local Culchie King - a story teller, poet, philosopher and self-educated man – the son of a saddler who rides around the country lanes on his push bike sporting Wellington boots and a donkey jacket – unlikely garb for a man who recites Yeats and Shakespeare with the fluency of a seasoned thespian whilst also being a primary authority on local folk-lore and community history.

My wife Theresa and I first became acquainted with James in the early 1990s whilst visiting her mother Kitty Dwyer at Tubber, a tiny village on the Clara Road out of Moate. One memorable Christmas Eve we drank bountiful pints of the ‘nut-brown liquid’ with James and his neighbours until the early hours of Christmas Day, as he entertained and enthralled the packed bar of the Cat and Bagpipes with tales of local saints and of the Viking raiders who sailed up the Shannon to plunder the early monastic community of Clonmacnoise (35 times between 834 and 1163), which lies some 10 miles to the south west of Moate.

A favoured local tale told by James J Hackett is that of a wake held by a local man from Ballydrown for his greyhound in 1905. As a final farewell to his noble canine companion, the gentleman placed his dead dog in a scoured out pigs trough placed in the centre of his kitchen floor. He then invited all of his friends from the Tubber hunters who between them brought 22 hunting dogs to the wake. The craic was great that night in Ballydrown and according to James J the assembled dogs began to moan and howl in the early hours of the morning and the sound was heard for miles around. In his book Days Gone By, James J Hackett writes ‘And now dear readers you may think that the story of the Dog in Ballydrown is a fable, no, that is not so. Another elderly man named Joe, who died in the 1980s aged 93 told me the story’.

In Britain we are only beginning to wake up to the importance of keeping the art of story alive. Not just story in the sense of publishing great or acclaimed works of literature, but story in terms of recording and passing on memories and anecdotes connected to simple human experience. In setting out on making a study of my own family roots, starting from the present day family based largely in Birmingham in England, my starting point was to begin recording the wealth of knowledge and family story available from my older relatives. Instead of switching-off with raised eyebrows every time an elderly aunt or uncle began to ramble down memory lane, instead I reached for a biro and notepad and began to scribble down names and dates in my own form of shorthand - notes that would later act as memory aides when it came to the process of making chronological sense of this mine of personal anecdote.

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

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Please send your stories and photos to Pete Millington at spaghetti.editorial@yahoo.com

The Gathering article April 2013 edition

 

One chilly evening last month I braved the freezing cold conditions to venture out from our warm homestead in Quinton in search of the fabled Kitchen Garden Café, an intimate and charming entertainment venue in York Road, Kings Heath. The recommendation came from a longstanding friend, Paul Murphy, well known musician and writer (amongst his many other talents) who is well acquainted with my personal interest in all-things Irish and suggested that I may therefore find the evening’s performances worth checking out.

As always Paul’s recommendation was a good one as the main entertainer that evening was Rich McMahon performing his show ‘The Imagined Nation: Inventing Ireland Through Words, Images and Songs'. Born in Coventry but raised and educated in Ireland, Rich’s show very much reflects the issues of Anglo-Irish identity which many of us in the West Midlands can relate to. Rich McMahon is a witty, accomplished and engaging entertainer but also a very insightful thinker and writer whose show captures many pertinent themes affecting those of us who  would (in the words of W.B. Yeats and Tim Pat Coogan) “wear green” but don’t always feel fully convinced as to why it is relevant or important to do so.

Watching Rich McMahon’s show was particularly timely, coinciding with the well-publicised Year of The Gathering, with my personal exploration of Irish roots through these articles in The Harp and taking place one week before St Patrick’s Day. Clearly a marketing genius. What I liked about his show was that he didn’t set out to give us any definitive answers or to wrestle down, kicking and screaming, the meaning of Irishness - especially for those of us of the oft maligned second, third and even fourth generations. Those whom even the Census designers still haven’t quite fathomed out where to place, how to describe or whether it even matters.

One of the themes which Rich explored, and from different viewpoints I should add, was the term (or even the concept) of the poor old Plastic Paddy. It’s a term I came across a couple of decades ago now, originally coined I believe by the Irish media to caricature the distant descendants of Irish migrants who are, shall we say, prone to over exuberant acting-out of certain stereotypes.

Whilst acknowledging where the critique is coming from and also recognising the behaviours it might be aimed at, as someone with a love, pride and if nothing else an interest in my own Irish heritage, I don’t always feel it’s a useful or constructive generalisation. So it was very interesting to hear Rich McMahon taking this one on and throwing out some challenges to our own perceptions.   

Just on the ‘Plastic Paddy’ issue, I recently had an email communication with someone in Ireland around family history information and he wrote to me “I’ve never spoken to a Plastic Paddy before” which was a slightly unexpected comment to say the least though I decided to reply with the same humour which I hoped had been intended and replied “I was so shocked by your inference that I was a Plastic Paddy that I spilt my Guinness all over my Pogues t-shirt”. Unfortunately he did not respond specifically to this clever and ironic retort of mine (well I thought so anyway), so I was left pondering its intention though my lesson being, if in doubt then broad shoulders, a sense of humour and a general resolve to be happy with one’s own greenness, whatever the shade, is probably the best way forward.

A few days after the Rich McMahon show in Kings Heath I had the pleasure to meet him again when Paul Murphy and I went along to a St Patrick’s Day celebration at Amesbury Road Day Centre for people with learning disability in Moseley. The event was organised by social worker Mick Lynch and both Paul and Rich provided songs and music a-plenty to entertain the service users and staff. In this sort of situation the stereotypes go completely out of the window and we get on with enjoying great music and that other thing Irish people of any generation generate so well, the craic!

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

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Please send your stories and photos to Pete Millington at spaghetti.editorial@yahoo.com

September 2013 article in The Harp



The river dancing scarecrows of County Laois

Gathering Your Stories Through The Harp

Pete Millington has launched a new family and community history feature in The Harp with an invitation to get involved online

Having written these articles around the theme of The Gathering since January, my credibility may have been at risk had I not actually visited the Emerald Isle during this apparently momentous year. Fortunately my wife Theresa and I don’t need the impetus of an international publicity campaign to draw us back to the glowing turf-loaded hearth on a regular basis as her mother Kitty lives out in the beautiful bog-land between Moate and Tullamore. We have therefore been able to enrich the lives of our three children for the past 16 years with almost annual visits to visit Granny, whilst enjoying the proverbial childhood Irish holiday experience at the same time. Gathering or no Gathering, this year was no exception.         

I was however intrigued to observe the impact of the great call from the motherland to her far-away children of the diaspora on Ireland itself and if there was going to be a good time to do this, then the August bank holiday just had to be that moment.

From the outset, there was nothing remarkably different this summer about the late Sunday afternoon procession from the ferry through the proverbial dirty old town landscape of Dublin port, the routine ‘dad gets completely lost in North Dublin’ before driving straight into the homeward bound GAA football crowd, followed eventually by the frantic search for Euros to resentfully appease the motorway toll ladies and the liberating stretch of virtually clear road in the general direction of Galway.

It is this last point which continues to cheerfully epitomise our Irish holidays, the comparatively empty stretch of road cut adeptly across the great Bog of Allen, taking us quickly and unhindered by snarl-ups, shunts or gridlocks, towards that other place called home. A non-Irish relation in Birmingham recently offered me his opinion of the Irish Midlands, pronouncing it to be devoid of interest to the visitor “there’s nothing there for bloody miles” he groaned at the memory of his reluctant visit some thirty years ago. I recall thinking to myself that, ironically, his reasons for abhorring the place were exactly the same as mine are for loving it; peace, tranquillity and unpretentious people at one with their environment and getting on with it with one hard-headed eye on the seasons and a friendly twinkle in the other.

Apart from the odd mention on local radio, between ‘the removals’ and the laid back call-in shows, there was very little mention of The Gathering. In fact during two weeks, the closest we came to anyone celebrating the Irish tourist board’s show of the Millennium was a field filled with some 200 scarecrows down at the infamous Durrow Scarecrow Festival. But somehow the fact that our only experience of anything approaching a significant gathering was that of a couple of hundred straw people, seemed strangely reassuring rather than disappointing. This was the Ireland we love, largely unspoilt by camera clicking tourists (myself excepted) and unappreciative strangers even in the year of The Gathering.

Aston Villa take on Shamrock Rovers - craic rather than classic 

 

The midway mark of our fortnight was marked by a drive to Tallaght stadium on the outskirts of Dublin to watch our beloved Aston Villa do battle with the boys in green, Shamrock Rovers. Again, an interesting experience, our first impression being that the whole of Tallaght had been taken over by Brummies in claret and blue soccer shirts. On closer examination it seemed that the hordes of Villa fans were mainly locals, or Irish Lions. I knew that Villa had a big following in Ireland, a legacy of the club’s more than significant contribution to the Ireland team over past decades no doubt, but hadn’t appreciated the true extent of that following. We even spotted the Villa legend Paul McGrath sat in what clearly passed as the Tallaght VIP area, an area of plastic seats at the top of one stand cordoned off with rope.

My advice to the Irish government wishing to boost the economy on this basis in the future, might be to follow-up the initiative of The Gathering with more pre-season visits of Premiership football teams.

Incidentally, to appease the GAA devotees, another memorable event of our Irish holiday was watching a live Gaelic footie match between local teams Tubber and Tullamore. Apart from the fact Theresa’s cousin’s son, the awesome Brian Kelly was playing for Tubber, the entire spectacle was a revelation. Having only ever half-committedly watched the game on television, I can hand-on-heart state it is one of the most exciting and passionate sports I have ever seen and the whole Millington family are now converts.

Our second week was spent in a delightful cottage on the tranquil Temple House estate in Sligo. Once again, far-from-the madding crowds of The Gathering, wherever it was taking place! A personal pilgrimage for me was therefore to drive off one evening in search of the mythical grave of the great poet W.B.Yeats. I’m not sure what I was expecting to find, a thriving town full of American and Japanese tourists on the scale of Stratford-upon-Avon? One-Euro only nicknack shops packed full of Crazy Jane tea towels and Leda and the Swan mouse mats? Or perhaps an impromptu and lively graveside jam session featuring The Cranberries, Sinead O’Connor and The Waterboys?

Yeat's grave in the tranquil shadow of Benbulben - my solitary gathering in the
company of the bones of Ireland's greatest poet

In the event, apart from a suspiciously hippy-looking camper van on the church car park, to my continuing relief I found myself in the solitary company of the bones of the great man, lots of birds and trees and the dusk-cloaked silhouette of the distant Benbulben mountain. Ahh! My kind of gathering.

Perhaps the words on the grave of the poet have a wider poignancy in this notable year of The Gathering, “Cast a cold Eye on Life, on Death. Horseman pass by”.    

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

Readers are invited to join our Facebook page and visit our blog:

Visit the blog at

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Please send your stories and photos to Pete Millington at spaghetti.editorial@yahoo.com

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.

Readers are invited to join our Facebook page and visit our blog:

Visit the blog at

http://harp-gathering.blogspot.co.uk/

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Please send your stories and photos to Pete Millington at spaghetti.editorial@yahoo.com

The consequencies of the famine - the influence of the Irish in America

From Ireland - a Concise History by Maire and Conor Cruise O'Brien
Thames & Hudson, 1972

The famine is the great dividing-line in modern Irish history. Before it, Ireland had been a country of notably early marriages; after it, late marriages are the rule, and the most conspicuous social feature of contemporary Ireland. The only method of birth control practicable in Catholic Ireland was being applied. There was a change in language also. Before the famine Ireland was to a great extent Irish-speaking; after it, English was soon spoken almost everywhere, except in some parts of the western seaboard. One may also feel that there was a certain change in the character of the people. The picture of a happy-go-lucky Irishman may well have been partly mythical - like its Negro equivalent - but seems to contain some truth for, say, the contemporaries of O'Connell. After the famine one senses a new quality , something grimmer and tougher, among the survivors and their children, the Irish of the later nineteenth century.

The political consequences of this were not to e felt in full for another generation: until the children who experienced the famine and immediate post-famine years had reached maturity, in Ireland and in America. The great new factor in Irish politics was to be the growth of this Irish community in America - for a long time it remained more Irish than American. Poor as it remained by American standards, by Irish standards it was soon rich and it was generous in support of any movement for Irish independence that looked at all promising. This new factor was to bring about a great weakening of England's control over Ireland. From now on, as an English Home secretary was to complain in the stormy 1880s, an important section of the perennially rebellious Irish nation was 'out of reach'.

With the increase of the relative importance of America in world politics, the Irish in America, with their well-organized voting strength, could begin to apply pressure on Britain through their own government. By the 1920s, the government of Lloyd George could no more afford to ignore the Irish in New York, in relation to implementation of its policy in Ireland than Ernest Bevin at a later date could ignore the reaction of the Jews of New York to his policy in Palestine.

The famine may not have been a threat to the security of England, but it carried within itself the seeds of the destruction of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.

The early Irish monks

Lindisfarne - photo credit National Trust Images

The Irish have a habit of leaving Ireland, and the early monks were no exception: in the sixth century the country's chief export seems to have been saints. Their itching feet took them trudging farther and farther from home, until soon they were founding Celtic monasteries as far away as Switzerland and Italy. The first step had been across the Irish sea to Iona, an island off the west coast of Scotland, where St Columba settled in about 563 with twelve monks, echoing the twelve disciples. An island near to the land was still their ideal choice for a monastery, and when Celtic monks later came down from Scotland into Northumbria they found somewhere which seemed perfect - Lindisfarne, also known because of the monks as Holy Island. At high tide it is an island. At low tide you can walk ashore. What would be better for a monk who is both in and out of the world?

Even before Lindisfarne was founded, Irish monks had spread deep into Europe, far from the sea and the safety of islands. In about 590 another party of twelve set sail from Ireland to France. They landed not knowing what was ahead of them, and offering a brand of Christianity that was singularly strict. Yet their success was astonishing. One of the party, Gall or Gallus, reached what is now Switzerland before he found a cave that suited him. A flourishing Swiss town now stands at the place and bears his name: St Gall. The leader of the group, St Columban, went even farther and crossed the Alps. An Italian place-name, Mezzano Scotti, still commemorates the distant time when the Irish were there - and when, to the eternal confusion of schoolboys, the people who lived in Ireland were called Scots. It is near Bobbio, where St Columban established his final monastery. Nothing remains of the monastery today, and even in its own time it was something of an impertinence. Bobbio was only a few hundred miles north of Rome. And the pope in Rome had already launched a counter-offensive, sending monks of his own north and west as the Irishmen moved south and east.

The Christians / Bamber Gascoigne / Book Club Associates 1977
 

The Irish Americans

There are some forty million Irish Americans in the United States of America, descendants of those who, over the past four centuries, crossed the Atlantic in successive waves of emigrations.

Life in America was rarely easy and many of the new immigrants fell by the wayside; but eventually they achieved a standard of living unimaginable in the world they had left behind. Over the generations they rose to the highest positions in politics, the labour movement, the professions, industry, commerce and the arts, and their very numbers made them a powerful political force.

Yet more than any other ethnic group, the Irish nurture a great nostalgia for the 'Emerald Isle', their ancestral homeland.

From the Introduction to The Irish Americans - The Pitkin Guide with Irish American Heritage Trail in Ireland

The Ulster Scots

During the first half of the 1700s, over 250,000 people from Ulster settled in the English colonies of America. The new immigrants from Ulster found the land around the ports already densely populated and, of necessity, had to press on inland into the difficult territory of the Appalachian back country.

The Ulster Scots, as Presbyterians, were dissenters, who sailed from Ireland following the introduction of Penal Laws by the Protestant Irish parliament established after the victory of William of Orange in 1690. 

Dissenters, like Catholics, were ruthlessly oppressed in Ireland during this period, so in their thousands they sold their leases and their stock and set sail for America.

By the 1770s there were 123 Ulster settlements in America. The Ulster Presbyterians were known for their skill of linen production.

The Declaration of Independence on 4 July 1776 was signed by five men of Ulster stock and their descendants were to produce ten Presidents of the United States.

Builders Remembered

Part of the introduction to a book written by Brendan Ward in 1984

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. I met men who were teachers, priests, accountants, who had forsaken their professions in Ireland and gone to England to work on the buildings. I met men who could not write their names. I met men who were gentle as lambs and those who surpassed a pig for ignorance. There were gentle giants and small cranky men. There were those who became rich and those who never had a bob. A man had to be hard to fit into the gang. There was much respect for the one who drank beer by the gallon - the one who did not was treated as the exception and classified as inferior. There were men who were masters of their craft and those who never will be. There were men who improved their lot and those who never will. The categories are legion. I worked with them, argued with them, annoyed them. I played cards and replyed matches with them.

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. Their big earnings were oftentimes squandered at weekends. The gambler never learned, the heavy drinker seldom laid off. Learning was scoffed at. Arguments were many and some would accept any type of illogic as gospel, even though it was shit to the highest degree. There were men from all parts of Ireland. The one from Connemara was famous for his use of the scian, his counterpart from Dublin was fond of gang warfare. The men from Kerry were all supposed to be tall because they craned their necks as young lads to get a look into Cork over the Magillicuddy reeks. The men from the Midlands were all mad about horses because, it was said, some of them were born on their way to hospital on a nag's back. The men from Donegal were reputed to be the best tunnellers in the world because land was so scarce they had to burrow into the ground to hide themselves and the poitin from the cops.
    
In a discussion one night with my very good friend and mentor, Brendan Murphy, we came to the conclusion that a book could written about them all. I decided there and then to do just that.

About the Irish census

The census is the closest thing we have to stepping into our ancestors' homes

Most (but not quite all) material from the earlier Irish censuses has been destroyed, some accidentally by fire, while others were pulped during the First World War. Some were deliberately destroyed shortly after they were taken, possibly to preserve privacy once the necessary statistics had been extracted. However, the 1901 and 1911 censuses survive almost in their entirety and are now available to view online on the National Archives of Ireland website (www.census.nationalarchives.ie).

The 1901 Irish census recorded address; name; relationship to head of household; religion; whether each person could read and write; age; occupation; marital status; place of birth and whether English or Irish was spoken. Questions were also asked about the house itself: the materials from which the house and the roof were built, the number of rooms and windows, whether there were outhouses, and the overall class of the property. Researchers can build a clear picture of the domestic situation and relative wealth or poverty of their ancestors, as well as spot any change for better or worse.

The 1911 census additionally asked married women to declare the number of years of the current marriage, the number of children born alive within the marriage and the number of these children still living.

Watch out!

Don't be distracted by crossings out on your census returns and discount potentially crucial details. These were made as data was counted and do not mean that the information is wrong.        

19th Century Navvies in Britain - Irish or English?

This is an excerpt from an article titled The Navvy by Neil Storey in April's Family Tree Magazine:

Irish or English?

A popular misconception is that the navvies were predominantly of Irish stock but a study of 19th-century British railway contracts, which coincided with census returns (The Railway Navvy: 'That Despicable Race of Men'. by David Brooke, David & Charles, 1983), suggests the majority of navvies working in Britain were actually English. This may have been true, but Irish workers were never keen on any type of official registration or records, so the actual numbers at work in Britain cannot be accurately asecrtained. I think Brooke's remark that 'only the ubiquitous Irish can be regarded as a truly international force in railway constrcution' is true and is one of the few certain statements we can make about these workers.

Also Irish workers tended to stand out - Irish voices could be heard wherever navvies were found and, because they were more noticeable, they were oftenb blamed for disturbances and minor riots. Mix this with anti-Irish feelings and fears among the British populace throughout the 19th century and it's hardly surprising that navvies were all tarred with the same brush.

Railway engineer Peter Lecount said of navvies in 1831: '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.'

www.family-tree.co.uk

March article in The Harp

Gathering Your Stories Through The Harp

Pete Millington has launched a new family and community history feature in The Harp with an invitation to get involved online

Even before the Great Famine of the late 1840s there had been Irish migration to Wales, Scotland and England for many generations, if not centuries.

In my own family research I came across a family named O’Hagan who came to the West Midlands from Newry, County Down in the early 1800s. I discovered that my g-g-grandmother, Alice O’Hagan, was born in Bromsgrove in 1845, which suggests that the family were on the road in England before the famine years in Ireland. Studies on Irish migration suggest that many Irish people travelled all around Wales and England in particular, participating in seasonal agricultural labour. There are descriptions of people walking from western Ireland to places like Suffolk and Norfolk in East Anglia during this period, often travelling amongst cattle on the voyage across the Irish sea.

In various old census records, Alice O’Hagan’s father Patrick describes his trade alternatively as a ‘traveller’ and also a ‘salt hawker’. Further research informed me that the area of Droitwich in Worcestershire was a major salt producing area in the 19^th century, so Alice’s birth in Bromsgrove seems to fit well into my personal theory that the O’Hagan family might have been drawn to the salt industry and travelled from north Worcestershire to Birmingham where they settled close to the canal basin in Lee Bank.

One of the things I enjoy about family history is tracing the records, a task which has become easier in the last few years with several subscription or pay-as-you-go websites such as Ancestry or Genes Reunited. But more enjoyable is filling in the gaps around the records with family anecdotes, photographs or even one’s own imagination. Alice O’Hagan, for instance, married John Millington from Salop (Shropshire) whose father was a shoe maker. In my imagination I have created a scenario where I see Alice going to the shoe maker with her father’s boots for repair on their arrival in Birmingham. I am sure to be completely wrong about that ever being reality, but the idea adds colour to my picture of these poor ragged people making a life for themselves in a new country.

The marriage between Alice and John took place at St Mathew’s Church in Nechells in 1870. St Matthew’s is a protestant church although family anecdote suggests that Alice O’Hagan’s catholic faith was later to become dominant in her family. Her son (my great grandfather) Terence’s funeral took place at St Peter’s RC in Ladywood and her sister Mary O’Hagan, a spinster of William Street in Lee Bank, was involved in St Patrick’s church on Dudley Road.

A common theme of Brummie historian Professor Carl Chinn is the ease with which the early Irish community (and indeed other migrant communities) mixed with the wider population of the expanding city. Whilst there may have been localised populations of Irish immigrants around the main Catholic churches, there are also many stories of Irish families well and truly mixed in with their English neighbours and other racial and cultural groups. Something which should be continually celebrated in my opinion.

Did your ancestors arrive in Birmingham in the 19^th century or was your Brummie Irish family part of a more recent wave of arrivals to the city? Let us know your family history stories for future editions of The Harp.

Readers are invited to join our Facebook page and visit our blog:

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Join our Facebook group at

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Please send your stories and photos to Pete Millington at spaghetti.editorial@yahoo.com

 

February article in The Harp

Gathering Your Stories Through The Harp

Pete Millington has launched a new family and community history feature in The Harp with an invitation to get involved online

According to official figures reported in the Index of the Irish Census of 1861, there had been a decrease in the population of Ireland of 4.2 per cent between 1851 and 1861. The largest decrease was amongst the Irish speaking population of Connaught who had been most adversely affected by the Great Hunger of the late 1840s.

On the other side of the Irish Sea, the General Report of the 1861 Census for England and Wales shows us that 601,634 people recorded in that Census said that they had been born in Ireland. The highest number were recorded in the counties of Lancashire (217,320 or 8.9% of the total population), followed by Middlesex (80,499 or 3.6%) and then Yorkshire (50,664 or 2.5%). Other counties close to London had high Irish populations (Kent 21,671 and Surrey 22,467), as did Staffordshire (19,176), Cheshire (28,613), Durham (27,719) and Northumberland (15,034). Warwickshire was 9^th highest with 14,297 residents of Irish birth in 1861 (2.5% of the total population).       

Some of my own ancestors were among those fourteen thousand Irish born residents of Warwickshire in 1861. My three times great grandmother Mary Flynn from Galway was a widow living with her seven children at Northwood Street in Birmingham in 1861. Their ages ranging from 6 to 24. The same family were living at Smith Street, Newtown in 1871. Another branch of my father’s Irish ancestors were the Finns who can also be found living in the Newtown area during the middle to late 19^th century.

But whilst many Irish people came to live in the West Midlands following the post-Famine decades, many also settled here before then. Thousands of Irish people came to England in search of agricultural work in the first half of the 19^th century and a lot of these people put down their roots in urban areas like Birmingham, Coventry and the Black Country which were expanding due to industrialisation. In my own family research I discovered a great, great grandmother named Alice O’Hagan who was born in Bromsgrove in 1847. Her father was variously listed as a ‘traveller’ and on another occasion also a salt hawker. The O’Hagan family settled in the Lee Bank district in the late 1800s, on Wharf Street in Birmingham’s thriving canal area.

This sort of evidence can not only help us to learn about our own ancestors but also helps us to create an early history of the Irish and Irish-descended communities of the region and I hope that readers of The Harp will contribute to the rich collective story as this new feature evolves throughout the year of The Gathering in 2013 and beyond.

I wish to thank Frank Callery of Piltown, Co. Kilkenny who has already contributed an enquiry for our new feature. Frank is hoping to trace descendants of his mother’s uncle, James Halpin, who settled in Birmingham with his wife. The couple may have had two daughters and a son.

Frank told me “James was born in 1905 and lived at Dominick Street and 183 Parnell Street in Dublin. My mother remembers that he worked in a rubber or tyre factory in Birmingham, which may have been Dunlop.

“Two of the Halpin brothers were fighting for Irish freedom in 1916, another brother Christy, was fighting out in France; my mother remembers that he was wounded. Certificates have just been issued by the Irish Government for John and Francis Halpin, for their service in 1916 and the War or Independence in 1922. If there are Halpins still in Birmingham, we would like to send them copies.

If you can help to trace the Halpin family in the West Midlands, please get in touch with me, Pete Millington. Frank Callery would like to get in touch as these family history documents may be of interest to them.    

Readers are invited to join our Facebook page and visit our blog:

Visit the blog at

http://harp-gathering.blogspot.co.uk/

Join our Facebook group at

http://www.facebook.com/groups/420135884725856/

Please send your stories and photos to Pete Millington at spaghetti.editorial@yahoo.com