The Irish in Post-War Britain

THE IRISH IN POST-WAR BRITAIN

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The Irish in Post-War Britain ENDA DEL ANEY

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Enda Delaney 2007

The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Delaney, Enda, 1971The Irish in post-war Britain / Enda Delaney. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-19-927667-7 (acid-free paper) 1. Irish—Great Britain— History—20th century. 2. Ireland—Emigration and immigration— History—20th century. 3. Great Britain—Emigration and immigration— History—20th century. 4. Great Britain—Ethnic relations—History— 20th century. I. title. DA125 . I7D45 2007 941 . 00491’62—dc22 2007028207 Typeset by Laserwords Private Limited, Chennai, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 978–0–19–927667–7 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

For J. T. N. D.

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Contents Acknowledgements Abbreviations

viii x

Introduction

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1. Leaving Home

10

2. In a Strange Land

45

3. People and Places

86

4. Cultures of Adjustment

127

5. A Sense of Self

176

Select Bibliography Index

210 223

Acknowledgements Many friends and colleagues have contributed in different ways to this book. After completing my postgraduate work at Queen’s University Belfast, under the expert tutelage of Liam Kennedy, I was fortunate to secure a research fellowship at the Institute of Irish Studies, and then subsequently a lectureship in the School of History in 1999. At this time Queen’s Belfast was an exciting place to be for an Irish historian. Discussions and debates with such talented scholars as Tim Bowman, Sean Connolly, Peter Hart, Alvin Jackson, Liam Kennedy, Patrick Maume, and Fearghal McGarry have profoundly influenced my approach to writing the history of the Irish abroad. Other people who offered encouragement and guidance included Bruce Campbell, Ian Green, and the late Martin Lynn. From 2000 until 2005 I was involved with the first phase of the Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. During this period the Diaspora project, under the leadership of Tom Devine, established Aberdeen as the UK’s leading centre for diaspora and migration history, and brought me into direct contact with a number of the leading international figures in this field. In 2004 I moved to Aberdeen for a post in the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies and the School of Divinity, History and Philosophy, and I would like to thank the following individuals for sharing ideas and offering support during my time there: Nathan Abrams, Andrew Blaikie, Nick Evans, the late Janet Hendry, Allan Macinnes, Andrew Mackillop, Angela McCarthy, Esther Mijers, Micheál Ó Siochrú and David Worthington. Since joining the School of History and Classics in Edinburgh University in late 2006, I have been reunited with a senior figure in the profession who has helped shape my career over the last decade. Since I first met Tom Devine in 1998, I have never ceased to be impressed by his energy, vigour, and intellectual leadership. From my undergraduate days at National University of Ireland Maynooth, Vincent Comerford has been a source of inspiration and a much-valued mentor and friend, who always makes time to offer wise advice. Don MacRaild, perhaps more so than anyone else, has helped shape my thinking about the Irish in modern Britain and equally urged me to

Acknowledgements

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think critically about the scope, purpose, and objectives of this project, as well as being a good friend and pioneering co-worker in this field. Kevin Kenny, who, through his own pioneering work on transatlantic approaches to studying the American Irish, has established new ways of looking at the history of the Irish overseas offered sharp insights and constructive criticism on my earlier work. Marianne Elliott kindly took time away from her own writing to read and comment on a draft chapter and offered much encouragement and a number of incisive suggestions. Other friends, colleagues, and professional archivists have offered advice, provided references, or identified relevant source materials. My thanks go to John Belchem, Mary E. Daly, Revd Ian Dickie (Westminster Diocesan Archives), Canon Anthony Dolan (Nottingham Catholic Archives), Diarmaid Ferriter, Liam Harte, Micheal Kennedy, Siobhan Kirrane (Luton Museum Service), Tina Morton (Brent Archive), Noirin Moynihan (National University of Ireland), Sean O’Connell, Louise Ryan, Revd Dr John Sharp (Birmingham Archdiocesan Archives), David C. Sheehy (Dublin Diocesan Archives), and A. E. C. W. Spencer. The research on which this book is based was supported by the Research and Conferences Fund, Queen’s University Belfast, the AHRC Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen, and a Small Research Grant from the British Academy. This financial support for my work enabled me to consult materials held in archives throughout Britain and Ireland, for which I am very grateful. Anne Gelling at Oxford University Press originally accepted my proposal to write on this subject. Her successor as commissioning editor, Rupert Cousens, has dealt with this project in a similarly professional and efficient manner. Zoe Washford and Rachel Woodforde guided me through the production process and Dorothy McCarthy did a superb job of copy-editing the original text. The dedication reflects a debt of gratitude to my father, who insisted that conventional wisdom should always be questioned and challenged. He, together with my dearly missed mother, created the environment where discussions about politics and history were part and parcel of everyday conversations. Thanks to my wife, Kathryn, for her constant support which sustained me during the inevitable dark days that accompany any writing project. E. D. Edinburgh November 2006

Abbreviations Archives AAW ADA BDA BL DDA LM LRO NAI NSA PRO TCD

Westminster Archdiocesan Archives Armagh Diocesan Archives Birmingham Archdiocesan Archives British Library Dublin Diocesan Archives Luton Museum Liverpool Record Office National Archives of Ireland National Sound Archive National Archives, Kew Manuscripts Department, Trinity College Dublin

Records CAB DFA DO DT HO LAB

Cabinet Papers Department of Foreign Affairs Dominions Office Department of the Taoiseach Home Office Ministry of Labour

Introduction As a first-year history undergraduate frantically preparing an essay on what was then the standard question on the causes of the Industrial Revolution in Britain, I came across on the library shelves Eric Hobsbawn’s pioneering survey of British economic and social history, Industry and Empire, published in 1968. I was quite taken by the engaging style of writing, and set about incorporating his compelling interpretation of the origins of the Industrial Revolution into an essay, which prior to this discovery was based on a number of dull and, it must be said, rather uninspiring standard textbooks on economic history. After extracting the relevant arguments and completing the essay, I flicked through the index to check if anything about Ireland or the Irish was listed there. Much to my surprise the Irish did feature, and not just in the seemingly obligatory references to the Great Famine of the 1840s, political violence in the early part of the twentieth century, or the ‘Irish Question’, as is still the norm for most general works on modern Britain. They were part of what he perceptively identified as ‘the other Britain’.¹ Unusually for an ambitious work of such breadth, Hobsbawn detailed the significant role of the Irish in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain. In Hobsbawn’s view the contribution of the Irish was ‘capital’.² He also warned against making unproven assumptions about the extent of assimilation by the mid-twentieth century, after the second great wave of Irish arrivals in the 1940s and 1950s: To say that this immigration has been assimilated would be misleading. However, it has increasingly become accepted, because invisible—at any rate compared to the much more obviously recognizable new migrants of the 1950s. The political separation of Ireland from Britain in 1921 had also eliminated one major reason why Englishmen and Scotsmen should be aware of Ireland and the Irish. Little by little the tensions between the communities have become less.³ ¹ E. J. Hobsbawn, Industry and Empire (Penguin edn., London, 1969), 312. ² Ibid. 311. ³ Ibid. 294–312.

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Introduction

Hobsbawn’s assessment lodged in the deeper recesses of my memory, as such an acknowledgement of the Irish role was—and still is—a relatively rare occurrence in general accounts of modern British history, and prompted me some ten years later to begin research on this topic. Since the 1960s British historians have increasingly turned their attention to the neglected histories of this ‘other Britain’, in all its various guises. What emerges from a huge range of historical writing is that modern Britain was a complex mosaic of competing national and ethnic identities, a diverse society that included migrants and other minorities and outsiders of various forms, and incorporated overlapping class, gender, and regional cultures within fluid and ever-shifting structures of power and authority.⁴ Occupying a central position in this ‘other Britain’ were the Irish. Throughout the twentieth century the Irish were the single largest foreign-born population in Britain.⁵ During the second half of the century more than one million Irish people travelled ‘across the water’ in search of a better life. By the mid-1960s, when public concern about the levels of Caribbean and South Asian immigration reached its height, Britain’s Irish population at just under one million was by a long stretch still the largest migrant group. Yet the Irish attracted relatively little attention, in part because they were far less visible than other newcomers, and they were perceived to be ‘largely accepted’.⁶ However, this degree of ‘acceptance’ was fragile and subject to rapid renegotiation, as became painfully obvious in the early 1970s when IRA bombings in Birmingham and elsewhere reinvigorated long-standing enmities and prejudices, which had only surfaced sporadically in the post-war years.⁷ The significance of the Irish in post-war Britain, however, is not solely a consequence of sheer numbers. They had some unique characteristics ⁴ See, for example, Richard Weight, Patriots: National Identity in Britain, 1940–2000 (London, 2002), which surveys much of the literature for the post-war period. See also the seminal account of England in the first half of the twentieth century: Ross McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England, 1918–1951 (Oxford, 1998). ⁵ Officially the census did not regard the Irish as a ‘foreign’ population, for reasons that will become apparent. ⁶ E. J. B. Rose et al., Colour and Citizenship: A Report on British Race Relations (London, 1969), 19. This figure includes those born in Northern Ireland, approximately one quarter of the total in both 1961 and 1971. ⁷ An assessment of the effects of the IRA bombings on the Irish in England prior to the Birmingham pub bombings in November 1974 can be found in Paul Harrison, ‘Culture and Migration: The Irish English’, New Society, 25, no. 272 (1973), 699–702. For the situation afterwards, see Mary Hickman and Bronwen Walter, Discrimination and the Irish Community in Britain (London, 1997), 210–19.

Introduction

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compared with other migrants from the Caribbean, continental Europe, Africa, and South Asia. They were white and spoke English; most were Roman Catholics; the majority only viewed living in Britain as a temporary sojourn until the Irish economy improved; unlike other immigrants in the 1960s, Irish citizens were not subjected to any form of restriction on entry; they arrived in roughly equal numbers of men and women; they were the latest wave of a historical tradition of Irish movement to Britain which existed since the late eighteenth century; and they came from a recently established new state that had been part of the United Kingdom until 1921–2. Often perceived to be similar to other inhabitants, many retained strongly cherished notions of a distinctive Irish identity, sustained in part by constant interaction with the society that they had left. A sense of home was never far from the minds of the Irish in post-war Britain. This book concentrates on this generation who left independent Ireland from the late 1940s until the late 1960s. Much of the coverage is centred on the late 1940s and 1950s when huge numbers of Irish came to Britain, and greater emphasis is placed on these initial years of settlement. This account is confined to those born in independent Ireland (or the twenty-six counties before 1921), rather than the children or grandchildren of those people who had already settled in Britain before the Second World War. The second generation feature when appropriate, such as in accounts of growing up with Irish parents or perceptions of life in Britain. A multigenerational study of those of Irish ethnic descent—the Irish-British, the Irish-English, or the Irish in Scotland—is regrettably beyond the scope of this book.⁸ Other historical writings have explored the reasons for the mass migrations from twentieth-century Ireland and identified the consequences for Irish society from the perspective of the sending country.⁹ This book ⁸ For a preliminary indication of the profile of the second-generation Irish, see Mary J. Hickman, Sarah Morgan, and Bronwen Walter, Second-Generation Irish People in Britain: A Demographic, Socio-Economic and Health Profile (London, 2001). An anthropological multigenerational study of the Irish in the United States is Reginald Byron, Irish America (Oxford, 1999). ⁹ Mary E. Daly, The Slow Failure: Population Decline and Independent Ireland, 1920–1973 (Madison, 2006); Enda Delaney, Demography, State and Society: Irish Migration to Britain, 1921–1971 (Kingston/Montreal and Liverpool, 2000); id., Irish Emigration Since 1921 (Dublin, 2002); P. J. Drudy, ‘Migration between Britain and Ireland Since Independence’, in P. J. Drudy (ed.), Ireland and Britain Since 1922 (Cambridge, 1986) (Irish Studies 5), 107–23; Donal Garvey, ‘The History of Migration

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Introduction

covers the second part of the story of this migrant generation, a neglected element of both British history and the history of the Irish overseas. It is the first major historical study of the post-war Irish in Britain to be published in over forty years, since John Archer Jackson’s seminal but now dated account which covered nearly two hundred years.¹⁰ In many respects, Jackson’s work was a product of its time. For instance, Irish women, who slightly outnumbered males, are almost completely absent from his narrative, and he was particularly concerned with the public reaction to large-scale Irish settlement. The intellectual framework in which he presented his findings was based around the now largely discredited process of one-sided immigrant assimilation, a key concern for historians and sociologists writing in the 1950s and 1960s.¹¹ Yet, with extraordinary regularity when writing this book and making a point that appeared to be original, I found, on consulting Jackson’s work, he had already covered similar territory. Frustrating as this was, it is a testament to his perceptive analysis, which was based almost exclusively on printed materials. Even with the increasing availability of unpublished records since the 1970s, many of the major findings of his study still stand the test of time. Since then, apart from one journalist, few historians have ventured into the more recent history of the Irish in Britain.¹² For the second half of the twentieth century, the best available historical account still remains Colin Holmes’s excellent overview of immigration and British society since the end of the nineteenth century.¹³ Inevitably his coverage of the Irish was circumscribed by the ambitious scope of the Flows in the Republic of Ireland’, Population Trends, 39 (1985), 22–30; J. J. Sexton, ‘Emigration and Immigration in the Twentieth Century: An Overview’, in J. R. Hill (ed.), A New History of Ireland, Vol. 7: Ireland, 1921–1984 (Oxford, 2003), 796–825; Pauric Travers, ‘ ‘‘The Dream Gone Bust’’: Irish Responses to Emigration, 1922–60’, in Oliver MacDonagh and W. F. Mandle (eds.), Irish-Australian Studies (Canberra, 1989), 318–42. ¹⁰ John Archer Jackson, The Irish in Britain (London, 1963). ¹¹ See Russell A. Kazal, ‘Revisiting Assimilation: The Rise, Fall, and Reappraisal of a Concept in American Ethnic History’, American Historical Review, 100, no. 2 (1995), 437–71. ¹² Kevin O’Connor, The Irish in Britain (London, 1972). See, for example, the listings in Maureen Hartigan and Mary Hickman, The History of the Irish in Britain: A Bibliography (London, 1986). One sociologist, Liam Ryan, has written a wide-ranging article based on his unpublished Ph.D. thesis: see ‘Irish Emigration to Britain Since World War II’, in Richard Kearney (ed.), Migrations: The Irish at Home and Abroad (Dublin, 1990), 45–67. ¹³ Colin Holmes, John Bull’s Island: Immigration and British Society, 1871–1971 (Basingstoke, 1988).

Introduction

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book. Given the range and high quality of published accounts of the Irish in Britain for the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this seems a curious anomaly. It may well be that historians view the more recent past as essentially the territory of the social scientist. Indeed, the more challenging findings on the Irish in post-war Britain have come from other disciplines such as sociology and geography.¹⁴ Much of this work is, however, infused with a strong theoretical component, which alienates those less versed in the abstruse vocabulary of postcolonial studies. What this book offers which is distinctive is a historical interpretation that seeks to locate those who arrived in the post-war years within the wider context of Irish settlement since the early nineteenth century. This long-range historical perspective is often lacking in social scientific accounts, leading to an inability or unwillingness to identify continuities and variations over the past two hundred years. By drawing on this rich historiography, it is possible to see how much had changed and equally what had stayed constant over time.¹⁵ This book does not aim to be comprehensive, covering every aspect of a bewildering array of individual experiences, but rather to identify and explore a number of key analytical questions. One of the overarching arguments is that there was no universal historical experience of being Irish in post-war Britain. Even if in the eyes of sometimes unsympathetic observers, the Irish were all the ¹⁴ e.g. Mary Hickman, Religion, Class, and Identity: The State, the Catholic Church, and the Education of the Irish in Britain (Aldershot, 1995); id., The Irish Community in Britain: Myth or Reality? (London, 1986); Hickman and Walter, Discrimination and the Irish Community in Britain. Bronwen Walter has also published extensively on this topic since the 1980s: for her recent contribution, see Outsiders Inside: Whiteness, Place and Irish Women (London, 2000). ¹⁵ Especially important works include Steven Fielding, Class and Ethnicity: Irish Catholics in England, 1880–1939 (Buckingham, 1993); David Fitzpatrick, ‘ ‘‘A Peculiar Tramping People’’: The Irish in Britain, 1801–70’, in W. E. Vaughan (ed.), A New History of Ireland, Vol. 5: Ireland Under the Union, I (1801–70) (Oxford, 1989), 623–60; David Fitzpatrick, ‘The Irish in Britain, 1871–1921’, in W. E. Vaughan (ed.), A New History of Ireland. Vol. 6: Ireland Under the Union, II (1870–1921) (Oxford, 1996), 653–702; Lynn Hollen Lees, Exiles of Erin: Irish Migrants in Victorian London (Manchester, 1979); M. A. G. Ó Tuathaigh, ‘The Irish in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Problems of Integration’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 31 (1981), 149–73; Roger Swift and Sheridan Gilley (eds.), The Irish in the Victorian City (London, 1985); Roger Swift and Sheridan Gilley (eds.), The Irish in Britain, 1815–1939 (London, 1989); Roger Swift and Sheridan Gilley (eds.), The Irish in Victorian Britain: The Local Dimension (Dublin, 1999). The best recent summary of this vast literature, which also incorporates a significant interpretative element and a valuable bibliographical essay, is Donald M. MacRaild, Irish Migrants in Modern Britain, 1750–1922 (Basingstoke, 1999).

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same, diversity rather than uniformity was the hallmark of the Irish migrant experience in Britain after 1945. Too often it was instinctively assumed by contemporaries that Irish nationality ensured a common mindset, pattern of behaviour, or ideological commitment. Geographical location, occupations, levels of education, length of time in Britain, gender, and most importantly social class shaped the divergent and often radically different experiences of the generation who left post-war Ireland. This heterogeneous character of the history of Britain’s Irish population after the Second World War is rarely acknowledged. The American historian John Bodnar’s comments on the historiography of immigrants in the nineteenth-century United States apply with equal force to the Irish in post-war Britain: Most previous descriptions of immigrants assume that the immigrant experience was a common experience shared equally by all; the transition to capitalism is either entirely difficult, conducted entirely within the confines of a traditional but apparently adaptive culture, or entirely rewarding over a given period of time. But even the most cursory glance at an immigrant community or stream will suggest that not all newcomers behaved in a similar fashion, that varying degrees of commitment to an assortment of cultures and ideologies were evident, and that not everyone faced identical experiences.¹⁶

In addition to presenting a more textured account, a second distinctive feature is the focus on the transnational history of the Irish in post-war Britain.¹⁷ Older histories often began the story of a migrant group on landing in the receiving country, with only a hazy knowledge or grasp of the social organization of the society which they had left. As migrants crossed the boundaries of nation-states the world over, few shed their cultural baggage and wholeheartedly embraced the values and norms of the host society where they settled. The complex process of negotiation and renegotiation that was involved in adapting and adjusting to life in an unfamiliar society lies at the heart of this book. A convincing interpretation of how migrants made sense of the new social worlds that they encountered in post-war Britain must take account of both elements of the society that they left and the landscape that they ¹⁶ John Bodnar, The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America (Bloomington, 1985), p. xvi. ¹⁷ For an assessment of the value and weaknesses of such a transnational approach with particular relevance to this study, see Kevin Kenny, ‘Diaspora and Comparison: The Global Irish as a Case Study’, Journal of American History, 90, no. 1 (2003), 134–62, and more generally, Wendy Webster, ‘Transnational Journeys and Domestic Histories’, Journal of Social History, 39, no. 3 (2006), 651–66.

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now inhabited. This book demonstrates that any understanding of how the Irish interacted with each other and the wider society was as much shaped by experiences prior to leaving Ireland as by subsequent events in Britain. Even the migrants themselves recognized this. As the sociologist Liam Ryan, who had just embarked on a large-scale ethnographic study in the early 1970s, was pointedly told by one migrant, ‘if you want to understand the Irish in England, you are wasting your time and your money coming to London; go back to Ireland and take a good look at the Irish at home’.¹⁸ This study is based on a wide range of unpublished materials, from official government records to the available archives held by Catholic dioceses in both Ireland and Britain. Throughout the 1940s the Irish state kept a close eye on its displaced citizenry and so did the British authorities at particular points in time. The extensive papers of John Charles McQuaid, Catholic archbishop of Dublin from 1940 until 1972, proved particularly useful as McQuaid retained a keen—perhaps even obsessive—interest in the ‘moral and spiritual welfare’ of the exiled Irish in Britain. Inevitably the documentation is heavily weighted towards what contemporaries identified as ‘problems’. These included the young single pregnant females who left for England to have a child, or the perceived widespread falling off in religious practice. Other historians have used this body of material, although few have consulted corresponding documentation held in Catholic archives in Britain.¹⁹ In a sense this was the documentary trace of the Irish in post-war Britain.²⁰ But this study seeks to move beyond the archive into the more fragmented sphere of the migrant mentalité, the ways in which people conceptualized their world and their understanding of their place within it. Very rarely do the voices of the migrants themselves feature in the masses of official or church documentation, and this book could simply have descended into a catalogue of one ‘problem’ after another, with the migrants emerging as passive subjects with little agency or indeed power to influence their own lives. The challenge for historians is to ¹⁸ Quoted by Liam Ryan, ‘Religious Practice Among Irish Emigrants’, Social Studies, 3, no. 2 (1974), 222. ¹⁹ Daly, The Slow Failure; Lindsey Earner-Byrne, ‘The Boat to England: An Analysis of the Official Reactions to the Emigration of Single Expectant Irishwomen to Britain, 1922–1972’, Irish Economic and Social History, 30 (2003), 52–70; Kieran O’Shea, The Irish Emigrant Chaplaincy Scheme in Britain, 1957–82 (Naas, 1985). ²⁰ For the concept of the documentary trace and the archive, see Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol. 3 (Chicago, 1988), 116–17; id., Memory, History and Forgetting (Chicago, 2004), 166–81.

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Introduction

explore the interactions between social realities and individual needs and to recover ‘the complexities of the lived experience’.²¹ Forms of personal testimony such as oral histories, memoirs, and autobiographies are extensively used to reconstruct the lived experience of migration and settlement, and to re-create what Bodnar terms the ‘culture of everyday life’.²² This inner history of immigration can only be probed by looking beyond the traditional documentary sources of historical enquiry.²³ Unlike official or ecclesiastical documentation, personal testimonies show that few people thought of their own lives in dichotomous terms, whether it be segregation in Irish ‘ghettos’ or wholesale assimilation, ‘good’ or ‘bad’ Catholics, or even success or failure. Such inner histories were often characterized by ambivalences, as Robert Orsi observed for Italian immigrants in Harlem in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.²⁴ The same can be said for the Irish in post-war Britain. Most retained a deep loyalty to home in the abstract sense of place rather than the Irish nation-state, yet recognized the material benefits of living in this ‘strange’ land. Others readily acknowledged the damaging consequences of Catholic hegemony of social and cultural life in independent Ireland, but still viewed Catholicism as an important component of individual identities. Some went as far as expressing anger at Britain’s historical role in Irish history yet just as instinctively identified ‘tolerance’ and ‘fair play’ as core English values. Migration by its very nature involved emotions. Leaving family and friends in Ireland was for many a deeply traumatic moment. Apprehension and a sense of venturing into the unknown naturally heightened anxieties, although these were often lessened by the knowledge that friendly faces were awaiting their arrival. Loneliness, alienation, dislocation, displacement with a disconnected sense of place and a perception of not belonging, are widely viewed as emotional responses to life in a new society.²⁵ Such emotions often went hand in hand with perceived needs. As Orsi argues, ‘the inner history of immigration is also a story of ²¹ Megan Vaughan, ‘Liminal’, London Review of Books, 28, no. 6 (2006), 15. ²² Bodnar, The Transplanted, 206–16. ²³ This term is taken from the impressive study of Robert Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880–1950, 2nd edn. (New Haven, 2002), 150. ²⁴ Ibid. 162. ²⁵ An imaginative account of this sense of dislocation can be found in Timothy O’Grady and Steve Pyke, I Could Read the Sky (London, 1997); see also the fascinating autobiographical account of Eva Hoffman, Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language (New York, 1989).

Introduction

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complex needs: for success, stability, participation, autonomy, faithfulness to tradition and an openness to the new ways, the need to recreate the familiar while in the midst of change’.²⁶ Lastly, this book eschews the traditional chronological structure much favoured by historians and instead is organized on a thematic basis, with each theme forming the analytical core of a chapter. The first chapter establishes the context of departure from Ireland and illustrates how migration to Britain became the established route for those who had lost any hope in the ability of the independent Irish state to provide jobs, economic security, or the range of opportunities so often associated with living in a ‘modern’ society. This disenchantment was one of the driving forces behind the massive exodus of the post-war years. Chapter 2 charts initial responses to the new environment as well as the ambiguous position of the Irish within the broader social landscape of post-war Britain. Where the Irish settled and how they coped with everyday life in Britain forms the core of the third chapter. By drawing on familiar elements such as the Catholic church, patterns of social interaction as well as leisure pursuits, it was possible to re-create a sense of home away from home, and these complex processes of adjustment and adaptation are examined in Chapter 4. The final chapter brings together much of the earlier arguments and maps out how individual and collective identities interacted, the ways in which the Irish imagined themselves and equally how they were perceived by others. ²⁶ Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street, 162.

1 Leaving Home Young people left independent Ireland in droves throughout the 1940s and 1950s. Loved ones lamented their departure yet at the same time recognized the basic necessity of earning a livelihood and resigned themselves to looking forward to some day in the future when conditions would improve so that their family and friends could at last return home permanently. Post-war Britain offered hope to this disenchanted generation who had little to gain from staying in their country of birth, and was still close enough that relationships could be maintained across the Irish Sea. These reluctant exiles then set about making sense of the new social worlds that they were now a part of, a complex process of adaptation that was often guided by kin and friends already settled there, while at the same time rarely forgetting about the world that they had left. Unlike earlier generations who left Ireland for North America and Australasia, however, this decision did not involve a complete rupture with the homeland. Family gatherings, weddings, funerals, and holidays all made for continuing interactions with the homeland. Before turning to the dynamics that underpinned mass migration from post-famine Ireland, first a brief word about sources. Our knowledge of the reasons why such large numbers of people left independent Ireland is largely mediated through the prism of the views of ‘experts’, ranging from the members of the Commission on Emigration and Other Population Problems who conducted extensive inquiries across the country in the late 1940s, to anthropologists and sociologists who embarked on ethnographic studies of rural communities or completed large-scale surveys on intending or returning migrants in the 1950s and 1960s.¹ The Commission on Emigration was appointed by the new government in 1948, ostensibly to examine population trends in general,

¹ The best of which is Damian F. Hannan, Rural Exodus (London, 1970).

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but its work was in practice devoted to emigration.² Interestingly, when the commissioners travelled the length and breadth of the country they sought the opinions of priests, teachers, and local government officials. They also tried where possible to conduct interviews with intending migrants, with varying degrees of success, and if none could be found, these reports were simply based on information derived from ‘notables’, with all the inherent epistemological problems involved.³ The list of organizations and individuals who presented oral and written evidence to the commission was dominated by government departments, public bodies, and interest groups.⁴ Implicitly there was a hierarchy of knowledge, with the subjects themselves coming low down on the list of those who possessed any ‘expert’ knowledge. This was far from unusual in the study of ‘social problems’ in this era, but politicians and civil servants also claimed to know why young people emigrated, drawing to a greater or lesser extent on direct first-hand experience. These explanations centred on the familiar trinity of the economy, poverty, and lack of employment. In effect, the voices of the migrants themselves were marginalized in the extensive discourse on emigration that emanated from Irish society at this time. As has been argued in the context of British race relations in the 1950s and 1960s, ‘the subaltern could not speak, except within the epistemological framework imposed by academic experts’.⁵

1. GOING EAST At least eight million people left the island of Ireland between the Act of Union (1800) and the foundation of the independent Irish state in 1921–2, an enormous outflow by any international standard.⁶ No other European country experienced emigration on such a scale, relative to the size of the total population. This sustained exodus had profound implications on the evolution of Irish society, and the ² Pauric Travers, ‘ ‘‘The Dream Gone Bust’’: Irish Responses to Emigration, 1922–60’, in Oliver MacDonagh and W. F. Mandle (eds.), Irish-Australian Studies (Canberra, 1989), 329–31; Delaney, Demography, State and Society, 189–91. ³ See Arnold Marsh Papers, TCD MS 8306. ⁴ Commission on Emigration, Reports, Apps. 1–3, 258–62; and for the transcripts of evidence, Marsh Papers, TCD MSS 8307–8. ⁵ Chris Waters, ‘ ‘‘Dark Strangers’’ in Our Midst: Discourses of Race and Nation in Britain, 1947–1963’, Journal of British Studies, 36, no. 2 (1997), 217. Emphasis as in the original. ⁶ David Fitzpatrick, Irish Emigration 1801–1921 (Dublin, 1984), 1.

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principal receiving countries of the United States, Canada, Britain, and Australasia.⁷ Traditionally in the Western world, coming of age involves leaving the family home. In modern Ireland those born since the mid-nineteenth century were faced with the more drastic prospect of leaving the country. As David Fitzpatrick has memorably observed, ‘growing up in Ireland meant preparing oneself to leave it’.⁸ Between the Great Famine of the 1840s and the First World War, emigration was an established stage in the life-cycle as generations of ‘young Irish people knew they were likely, like many before them, to experience adult life not in Ireland but in Britain, North America, or Australia’.⁹ In post-famine Ireland, few had the luxury of remaining within their local communities ‘as only a small minority were both able and willing to spend their lives in the house or farm of their upbringing’, and most knew that the ‘likelihood was their working lives would be conducted in another country’.¹⁰ By 1921 approximately one in four people who were born in Ireland lived abroad.¹¹ Little had changed after forty years of self-government. For the generation who came of age in the mid-twentieth century the decision to migrate was equally a rite of passage and an act that signified the difference between being dependent on one’s family and seeking to make one’s own way in the world. A quarter of the Irish population still resided overseas by the early 1960s. Roughly one in three of those aged under thirty years at the end of the Second World War no longer formed part of the social landscape by the early 1970s.¹² One sociologist, Damian Hannan, estimated that even though net emigration between 1946 and 1971 was recorded in official statistics as 670,000 people, more than twice that number had left the country at some stage during that twenty-five-year period.¹³ In other words, roughly three out of every five children growing up in the 1950s ⁷ See D. H. Akenson, The Irish Diaspora ( Toronto and Belfast, 1993), for a perceptive overview. ⁸ Fitzpatrick, Irish Emigration, 30. ⁹ Timothy W. Guinnane, The Vanishing Irish: Households, Migration, and the Rural Economy in Ireland, 1850–1914 (Princeton, 1997), 166. ¹⁰ David Fitzpatrick, ‘Emigration, 1801–70’, in W. E. Vaughan (ed.), A New History of Ireland, Vol. 5: Ireland Under the Union, I (1801–70) (Oxford, 1989), 562. ¹¹ Commission on Emigration and Other Population Problems, Reports (Dublin [1955]), Pr. 2541, table 95, 126. ¹² Donal Garvey, ‘The History of Migration Flows in the Republic of Ireland’, Population Trends, 39 (1985), 25. ¹³ Damian F. Hannan, ‘Irish Emigration Since the War’, unpublished typescript of RTE Thomas Davis Lecture [1973], 2. Annual net emigration is the difference between the number of people leaving and the number of people arriving in a country.

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were destined to leave at some stage.¹⁴ This was the generation of the ‘vanishing Irish’, as hundreds of thousands of young people who entered adulthood were to spend time living abroad, ranging from a couple of months to the rest of their lives.¹⁵ The destination for the vast majority of twentieth-century emigrants was Britain, Ireland’s nearest neighbour and the ‘old enemy’, which by 1971 had the largest number of people born in Ireland who lived overseas, at just under one million people.¹⁶ In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the Irish had departed for North America and Australasia as well as Britain, yet after the 1920s short-distance migrations became the norm. How can we account for such a complete break with the past? There is no simple explanation for this dramatic change in direction.¹⁷ Accounting for the preferences of literally hundreds of thousands of individuals is almost impossible. One obvious factor is the existence or otherwise of restrictions on entry to a particular nation-state. The traditional interpretation is that crossing the Atlantic became a much less attractive option with the introduction of American legislation to curb immigration in 1921, subsequently superseded by the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 and a range of ancillary measures, all of which made it more difficult for immigrants to enter the United States.¹⁸ According to John Jackson, ‘the gradual closing of the ever-open-door to the United States led to a greater number of emigrants turning eastwards toward Britain throughout the decade of the 1920s’.¹⁹ This gamut of restrictions was enshrined in legislation in the 1920s in ¹⁴ John A. Jackson, ‘The Irish’, in Ruth Glass (ed.), London: Aspects of Change (London, 1964), 305. Jackson based his comment on a newspaper report of a statement by the then Director of the Central Statistics Office, R. C. Geary. ¹⁵ Mary E. Daly, The Slow Failure: Population Decline and Independent Ireland, 1920–1973 (Madison, 2006), chs. 4 and 5; Enda Delaney, Demography, State and Society: Irish Migration to Britain, 1921–1971 (Kingston/Montreal and Liverpool, 2000), chs. 3–5. A brief account can be found in Enda Delaney, Irish Emigration Since 1921 (Dublin, 2002), 3–10. This was the title of a collection of essays edited by the Revd John A. O’Brien: The Vanishing Irish: The Enigma of the Modern World (New York, 1953). ¹⁶ Delaney, Irish Emigration Since 1921, table 4, 39. ¹⁷ P. J. Drudy, ‘Migration between Britain and Ireland Since Independence’, in P. J. Drudy (ed.), Ireland and Britain Since 1922 (Cambridge, 1986) (Irish Studies 5), 114–15. ¹⁸ David Caradog Jones (ed.), The Social Survey of Merseyside (Liverpool, 1934), i. 69; Delaney, Demography, State and Society, 42–6; John Archer Jackson, The Irish in Britain (London, 1963) 13, 97; R. S. Walshaw, Migration to and from the British Isles: Problems and Policies (London, 1941), 69–74. On the Act itself and its implications, see Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, 2004), 21–55. ¹⁹ Jackson, The Irish in Britain, 13.

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response to widely shared fears about the rising levels of immigration from eastern Europe and concerns about the capacity of the American economy to absorb additional immigrants. Even though a relatively generous quota was introduced for people from the newly established Irish Free State in 1924 and again in 1929, this was never filled before the eventual abandonment of the quota system in 1965 when the Immigration and Nationality Act fundamentally reformed American immigration policy.²⁰ But, as has recently been argued by Matthew J. O’Brien, it was not so much the introduction of the politically driven quota system as the implementation of administrative changes in the issuing of visas by consular officials in Dublin that discouraged Irish migration to the United Stares in the interwar years. In the late 1920s officials were instructed to apply a ‘likely to become a public charge’ test to all prospective immigrants.²¹ By 1929 an additional stipulation was added that they must be able to demonstrate either substantial financial capital or skills that would enable them to support themselves.²² After the Wall Street Crash in 1929, these criteria were imposed by local consular staff in Dublin with increasing rigidity.²³ Travelling across the Atlantic required a sustained engagement with officialdom, as well as the prospect of ‘proving’ that a potential migrant could support themselves either through capital or skills. The downturn in the American economy, news of which filtered back through networks of family and friends, presented a less than favourable impression of the once ‘promised land’. The Great Depression resulted in widespread unemployment and social deprivation, unlikely to prove attractive to any prospective newcomer. Its effects were particularly felt in the public sector, manufacturing, and industrial workforce, areas in which the Irish were heavily represented in urban America.²⁴ In the early 1930s thousands of Irish travelled back from the United States, stark evidence of the illusory nature of the American dream. ²⁰ P. J. Drudy, ‘Irish Population Change and Emigration Since Independence’, in P. J. Drudy (ed.), The Irish in America: Emigration, Assimilation, Impact (Cambridge, 1985), 72–6. ²¹ Matthew O’Brien, ‘Transatlantic Connections and the Sharp Edge of the Great Depression’, in Kevin Kenny (ed.), New Directions in Irish-American History (Madison, 2003), 80. ²² Ibid. 81; Commission on Emigration, Reports, app. V, 266. ²³ Sean Glynn, ‘Irish Immigration to Britain, 1911–1951: Patterns and Policy’, Irish Economic and Social History, 8 (1981), 51; O’Brien, ‘Transatlantic Connections’, 81. ²⁴ O’Brien, ‘Transatlantic Connections’, 85–7.

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To see this change in direction as solely an outcome of the legislative situation in the United States, however, captures only part of the story. One historian, Seán Glynn, argued in the early 1980s that since the American quotas on Irish entrants were never filled, the restrictions on immigration were not a ‘major direct influence’.²⁵ For Glynn, the altered political relationship between Britain and Ireland as well as the limited costs involved is more relevant, and, perhaps even more so, the widespread perception that the move to Britain ‘was easier to contemplate and less drastic and final than transatlantic movement’.²⁶ The domestic political environment also subtly shaped individual choices. The foundation of the Irish state in 1921–2 created what seem like—with the always helpful benefit of hindsight—unrealistic expectations about the capacity of an independent state to generate sufficient employment, reflecting earlier nationalist propaganda which posited that the solution to Ireland’s longstanding economic woes was the end of British rule and self-government. By the end of the Second World War the Irish economy was still unable to generate enough jobs to absorb the large numbers looking for work. After an initial boom in public expenditure in the late 1940s, including an aborted campaign to persuade skilled construction workers to come home in 1949–50, the economy declined even further in the 1950s, raising concerns about the capacity of the Irish state to function as a viable unit.²⁷ This was the ‘lost decade’, when unemployment and mass emigration dominated the political agenda.²⁸ Notwithstanding the actual course of events, contemporaries were unable to predict the future, and much of the rhetoric emanating from the main political parties centred on improving the economy. By choosing Britain over the United States or Australia allowed greater flexibility for a potential return home if conditions ever improved. As the sociologist Liam Ryan observed in the early 1970s, leaving for Britain was seen as a temporary expedient and was rarely the outcome of a decision to make a new life elsewhere: ‘A week’s wages will pay the fare over, and if things do not work out another week’s wages will pay the fare home again.’²⁹ And, as we shall see in a ²⁵ Glynn, ‘Irish Immigration to Britain, 1911–1951’, 51. Emphasis as in original. ²⁶ Ibid. ²⁷ For this campaign, see Delaney, Demography, State and Society, 192–3. ²⁸ See Dermot Keogh (ed.), A Lost Decade? Emigration, Culture and Society in Ireland in the 1950s (Cork, 2004). ²⁹ William Ryan, ‘Assimilation of Irish Immigrants in Britain’ (unpub. Ph.D. thesis, St Louis University, 1973), 116.

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later chapter, this possibility of return to Ireland loomed large in the migrant mentalité, even after decades living in Britain. Unlike the North American experience that was characterized by finality, emigration to Britain was driven by expediency and an easily reversible action. Although the American dream was increasingly looking like a figment of the immigrant imagination, enhanced opportunities were available in Britain from the mid–1930s, as, unlike its American counterpart, the British economy recovered quickly from the global depression, as new industries concentrated in the Midlands and south-east expanded to meet the demands of the consumer revolution. Car manufacturing and light engineering together with the construction industry expanded throughout the 1930s.³⁰ More traditional sources of employment for arrivals from Ireland such as domestic service and unskilled labouring continued to offer an abundance of opportunities. With the outbreak of war, the unprecedented demands of wartime production offered numerous new openings for the Irish, who could fill the gaps left by workers who were serving in the armed forces. The Second World War confirmed what was already the established pattern, as Britain became the main destination for Irish migrants. An official inquiry into emigration undertaken in the early 1950s reckoned that since the mid–1930s virtually all Irish migrants had departed for Britain.³¹ Later investigations have confirmed the continuance of this pattern until the early 1970s, with estimates that four out of five migrants from independent Ireland went ‘across the water’.³² Unlike the later nineteenth century, this was not a residual movement of those unable or unwilling to travel longer distances across the oceans.³³ While prior to the 1930s crossing the Atlantic had been the preferred pathway out of Ireland, John Bull’s island was now the destination of choice. Of equal significance was the issue of access. Britain could be entered freely and was just a short boat journey away. Until the outbreak of ³⁰ This account is based on Delaney, Demography, State and Society, 43–7. ³¹ Commission on Emigration, Reports, 117. ³² B. M. Walsh, ‘Expectations, Information, and Human Migration: Specifying an Econometric Model of Irish Migration to Britain’, Journal of Regional Science, 14, no. 1 (1974), 108; Hannan, ‘Irish Emigration Since the War’, 1; Ryan, ‘Assimilation of Irish Immigrants’, 7; National Economic and Social Council, The Economic and Social Implications of Emigration (Dublin, 1991) (Report No. 90), Pl. 7840, 60–1. ³³ David Fitzpatrick, ‘The Irish in Britain, 1871–1921’, in W. E. Vaughan (ed.), A New History of Ireland, Vol. 6: Ireland Under the Union, II (1870–1921) (Oxford, 1996), 653.

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the Second World War in September 1939, citizens of independent Ireland could enter the United Kingdom without having to satisfy any requirements for a visa or even produce any documents to confirm identity.³⁴ However, during the war a range of requirements were introduced by the British and Irish authorities to control and monitor movement between the two countries, many of which remained in place until the early 1950s.³⁵ After the eventual abandonment of controls in April 1952, Irish and British citizens could once again cross freely land and sea borders in what was formally constituted as the ‘common travel area’.³⁶ Official estimates indicate that as many as 150,000 had arrived during the Second World War, adding to the already substantial numbers of Irish living in Britain prior to 1939. The 1951 census recorded 466, 981 persons in England from independent Ireland, with an additional 131,955 who were residents of Northern Ireland.³⁷ This was a staggering increase of 65 per cent in just twenty years. In Scotland there were just under 90,000 Irish-born in the mid-twentieth century, divided roughly equally between those born in independent Ireland and Northern Ireland, reflecting the traditional links between Ulster and Scotland.³⁸ The number of Irish in Scotland had nearly halved since the early 1920s as Scotland declined dramatically as a destination for immigrants, from north and south, in the first quarter of the twentieth century. By 1951 the Irish in Britain numbered nearly 700,000 people, reversing the steady decline that had occurred from the late nineteenth century.³⁹ The actual proportions of Irish in the total population of England and Wales had risen dramatically throughout the 1930s and 1940s; by way of contrast, in Scotland the decline evident since the 1870s continued, as the flow was directed southwards to the expanding regions of the south-east. ³⁴ Elizabeth Meehan, Free Movement between Ireland and the UK: From the ‘Common Travel Area’ to The Common Travel Area (Dublin, 2000), 1, 22–6; for more details on the complicated issue of Irish citizenship, see Mary E. Daly, ‘Irish Nationality and Citizenship Since 1922’, Irish Historical Studies, 32, no. 129 (2001), 377–407. ³⁵ Commission on Emigration, Reports, app. VI, 267. ³⁶ Meehan, Free Movement Between Ireland and the UK, 26–30; Commission on Emigration, Reports, app. V, 266. ³⁷ Census 1951, England and Wales: General Report (London, 1958), table 49, 104. ³⁸ Census, 1951: Scotland: Vol. 3, General Volume (Edinburgh, 1954), table 32, 49. ³⁹ Fitzpatrick, ‘The Irish in Britain, 1871–1921’, 654.

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2 . ‘A N U PH E AVA L O F H O PE A N D H E A RT B R E A K ’ Why did so many people leave independent Ireland between the end of the Second World War and the 1960s? The dominant historical narrative centres on the dismal state of the Irish economy in the 1940s and 1950s, often described in terms such as ‘stagnation’ or ‘crisis’, and the consequent failure to create sufficient employment opportunities to absorb the large numbers of young people coming of age.⁴⁰ This is a convincing explanation for mass migration from Ireland, and not just in the post-war years but also throughout the modern period since 1750: a poor, underdeveloped, agricultural country, with an expanding population and an inadequate supply of jobs, generates mass movement, either internally to the centres of urban employment or externally to the rapidly expanding industrial economies. The European experience from the mid-eighteenth century would certainly show that such migrations are an inevitable outcome of the development of industrial capitalism. Independent Ireland was, however, different in one respect from its western European neighbours, and more akin to other peripheral regions of southern and northern Europe. Agriculture still accounted for approximately two-fifths of the working population in the late 1950s. Moreover, the small farm rural economy, especially in the west of Ireland, was in an irreversible decline.⁴¹ The interpretation that is offered here, while broadly accepting this backdrop, argues that additional factors unique to the 1940s and 1950s come into operation that explain the emergence of this second great wave of migration from modern Ireland. Since at least the mid-nineteenth century, mass migration was a response to the economic situation. The American historian Arnold Schrier identified what he termed as the American fever: ‘an alluring impression of America which came to predominate throughout the ⁴⁰ See Terence Brown, Ireland: A Social and Cultural History, 1922–1985, 2nd edn. (London, 1985), 211–38; Diarmaid Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland, 1900–2000 (London, 2004), 470–7; J. J. Lee, Ireland, 1912–85: Politics and Society (Cambridge, 1989), 359–60, 373–8; Kieran A. Kennedy, Thomas Giblin, and Deirdre McHugh, The Economic Development of Ireland in the Twentieth Century (London, 1988), 141; Cormac Ó Gráda, A Rocky Road: The Irish Economy since the 1920s (Manchester, 1997), 216–17. ⁴¹ Finola Kennedy, Family, Economy and Government in Ireland (Dublin, 1989), 10; Damian F. Hannan, ‘Peasant Models and the Understanding of Social and Cultural Change in Rural Ireland’, in P. J. Drudy (ed.), Ireland: Land, Politics and People (Cambridge, 1985), 153–61; Daly, The Slow Failure, 50–74.

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Irish countryside’.⁴² Drawing on a range of contemporary sources, he illustrates how this ‘lure’ propelled and sustained the exodus to the United States during the post-famine period. While ‘British fever’ raises all sorts of negative connotations in the context of the fraught nature of British–Irish political relationships in the mid-twentieth century, Schrier’s emphasis on the cultural context of emigration offers a muchneeded counterbalance to models inspired by neoclassical economics centred on rational actors weighing up the relative costs and benefits of leaving or staying. Individual decisions were taken within a broader economic, social, and cultural environment, as migrants were not insulated from the wider society: in simple terms, they were influenced by what other people were doing, saying, planning, and discussing. Leaving home was a shared response to the situation in which young people found themselves, and was far from being deviant or abnormal behaviour, as so often was assumed by politicians and civil servants. In the mid-twentieth century thinking about emigrating was deeply embedded in the psychology of young Irish people. Many left, others stayed behind, but most at least thought about leaving at some point in the future. As with the first mass movement from Ireland during the second half of the nineteenth century, emigration emerged as the favoured option for those who often ironically retained a deep attachment to a nostalgic vision of ‘home’, even though it had very little to offer them. With the growing disenchantment with the bleak situation, going to Britain at least offered some hope and the opportunity to prosper when both were in short supply in independent Ireland. Leaving always involved mixed feelings, appropriately characterized by Jackson as ‘an upheaval of hope and heartbreak’.⁴³ This was, of course, not by any means unique to postwar Ireland, and its existence has been noted by social scientists in other migration-prone societies such as the Caribbean and Mexico.⁴⁴ Within poorer communities, emigration becomes ‘deeply ingrained into the repertoire of people’s behaviours, and values associated with migration become part of the community’s values’.⁴⁵ In the Caribbean, for instance, ⁴² Arnold Schrier, Ireland and the American Emigration, 1850–1900 (Minneapolis, 1958), 18–19. ⁴³ Jackson, The Irish in Britain, 160. ⁴⁴ Jeffrey H. Cohen, The Culture of Migration in Southern Mexico (Austin, 2004). ⁴⁵ Douglas S. Massey, Joaquín Arango, Graeme Hugo, Ali Kouaouci, Adela Pellegrino, and J. Edward Taylor, ‘Theories of International Migration: A Review and Appraisal’, Population and Development Review, 19, no. 1 (1993), 452–3.

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leaving for work abroad was embedded in the cultural framework of individuals, households, and the wider social structure.⁴⁶ As the historian Mary Chamberlain remarks about the historical tradition of movement from Barbados, ‘family ties cross continents, oceans and borders and have done so for generations’.⁴⁷ In effect, the organization of such societies was based around the displacement of large numbers, who in turn supported those who stayed at home through remittances.⁴⁸ ‘Going to England’ or ‘across the water’, as contemporaries described emigration to Britain, were the catchphrases of the post-war years, an implicit acknowledgement that the established route to secure and steady employment—and the lifestyle that went along with a regular weekly income—inevitably involved crossing the Irish Sea. As the commission noted in 1955, emigration was ‘a part of the generally accepted pattern of life’.⁴⁹ What was viewed as exceptional in some other societies was an altogether more routine matter for young people growing up in post-war Ireland. After quizzing prospective male migrants in New Ross, County Wexford, one member of the commission believed it was ‘a sign of inferiority to remain at home . . . In others words, it is ‘‘the thing’’ to go to work in England.’⁵⁰ For the young women living in these County Wexford coastal towns, he noted that departing for England after the completion of elementary education was ‘in the blood’.⁵¹ Ireland’s geographical location next to one of the world’s most advanced economies underscored the contrasting lifestyles available in the two countries. As the sociologist Damian Hannan argued in the early 1970s, ‘this widespread existence of British points of reference for judging the adequacy of conditions at home is probably one of the most influential local consequences of our recent emigration history’.⁵² Newspapers and radio offered glimpses of a different way of life based on material wellbeing, a consumer-based social scene organized around ⁴⁶ Elizabeth M. Thomas-Hope, Explanation in Caribbean Migration, 1st edn. (London, 1992), 159–60. ⁴⁷ Mary Chamberlain, ‘Gender and the Narratives of Migration’, History Workshop Journal, no. 43 (1997), 88; for more details, see id., Narratives of Exile and Return (London, 1987). ⁴⁸ Cohen, The Culture of Migration. 29; see also Douglas S. Massey, Rafael Alarcón, Jorge Durand, and Humberto González, Return to Aztlan: The Social Process of International Migration from Western Mexico (Berkeley, 1987). ⁴⁹ Commission on Emigration, Reports, 137. ⁵⁰ S.8, Rural Survey of Waterford, Dungarvan, New Ross, Carrick-on-Suir, Enniscorthy, Carlow and Bagenalstown, prepared by Stanley Lyon [1948], Marsh Papers, TCD MS 8306. ⁵¹ Ibid. ⁵² Hannan, ‘Irish Emigration Since the War’, 8.

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popular activities such as dancing and going to the cinema, and, most importantly, a vision of a future that centred on the fulfilment of individual aspirations. In other words, what have come to be seen as central features of the ‘modern’ world were obtainable just across the water. British newspapers were read widely in Ireland, especially the more popular variants. A conservative Catholic cleric, the Revd Robert Devane SJ, estimated that nearly four hundred thousand British Sunday newspapers were imported every week, and even proposed in 1950 that the government should impose a special tariff on cheap imported newspapers and magazines to protect ‘innocent’ Irish minds.⁵³ Together with the alleged pernicious influence of newspapers, those living on the eastern coast of Ireland and close to the border with Northern Ireland could listen to the even more insidious British wireless service. Detailed research on listening habits undertaken by Radio Éireann in the early 1950s indicated that BBC Radio Light and Radio Luxembourg, both designed to appeal to a younger audience, were very popular across all social groups.⁵⁴ One of the most ubiquitous expressions of modernity was the cinema. Irish audiences invariably watched American or, to a lesser extent, British films as an indigenous industry had not developed to any degree.⁵⁵ By the mid–1930s it was reckoned that four-fifths of the films shown in Irish cinemas came from Hollywood.⁵⁶ For some conservative critics, the cinema was the ‘celluloid menace’, a powerful source that ‘confirmed the unthinking in their lack of thinking, and has filled their lives with a colourful and varied vacuity’.⁵⁷ A night out at the ‘pictures’ was by a long stretch the most popular form of leisure activity in Ireland by the mid-twentieth century. An estimate produced in 1954 suggested that roughly one in three people frequented the ‘palace of dreams’ at least once a week.⁵⁸ The wider world was viewed ⁵³ R. S. Devane, SJ, The Import Pressed: A National Menace—Some Remedies (Dublin, 1950), 8, 23; for more information about Devane and his idiosyncratic views, see Michael Adams, Censorship: The Irish Experience (Dublin, 1968), 162–4; Louise Fuller, Irish Catholicism since 1950: The Undoing of a Culture, 38. ⁵⁴ K. G. Forecast, ‘Radio Éireann Listener Research Inquiries, 1953–1955’, Journal of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland, 19 (1955–6), 10–12. ⁵⁵ Kevin Rockett, ‘Protecting the Family and the Nation: The Official Censorship of American Cinema in Ireland, 1923–1954’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 20, no. 3 (2000), 283. ⁵⁶ Gabriel Fallon, ‘Celluloid Menace’, in The Capuchin Annual, 1938 (Dublin, 1937), 249. ⁵⁷ Ibid. ⁵⁸ Ibid.; B. G. MacCarthy, ‘The Cinema as a Social Factor’, Studies, 33 (1944), 49; Fuller, Irish Catholicism since 1950, 40.

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through this technicolour lens, leading to unfavourable comparisons between the simple unencumbered life in rural Ireland and the cinematic representations of modernity contained in Hollywood’s portrayal of material success, fast city life, and private conceptions of morality. As Kevin Rockett has argued, Irish cinemagoers were confronted with ‘a radically contrasting world and lifestyle which necessarily challenged traditional Irish notions of morality and order and highlighted their own material lack, both personally and as a nation’.⁵⁹ Even if the notoriously strict censorship policy operated by the state removed licentious or sexually suggestive scenes from Hollywood films, the more compelling message that people elsewhere had better lives undermined traditional Irish nationalist values.⁶⁰ This sense of a disjuncture between life in Ireland and Hollywood representations was captured vividly by an educationalist writing in 1944: It is interesting to consider the average farm labourer, walking five or six miles . . . to go to the pictures, and then that way home again in our Irish rain. What has he seen that has the slightest relation to life as he knows it? He has seen night-club queens covered by a few spangles, Chicago gangsters talking a peculiar argot, society playboys babbling airily of Reno divorce. He has seen crooning cowboys, coal-black mammies, typists clad in Schiaparelli models living in luxurious flats, and millionaires living in Babylonian palaces. He is going home to fall into his bed in the loft, to rise the next morning and feed the pigs. What does he make of it all?⁶¹

Young Irish people were avid cinemagoers. While one can easily overstate the effect of the powerful images of late modernity contained in American and British films on the mentalities of a complete generation, films offered an alluring taste of the lifestyles available in the prosperous industrial economies. A member of the Commission on Emigration reflected on the far-reaching effects of these perceptions in 1948: It may be that, in years gone by, such persons have been content to live virtually on a subsistence basis, but the cinema, radio, newspapers and friends are now luring them into the attitude that they should not be satisfied with [this] but ⁵⁹ Kevin Rockett, Irish Film Censorship: A Cultural Journey from Silent Cinema to Internet Pornography (Dublin, 2004), 26. ⁶⁰ On censorship of film, see Rockett, Irish Film Censorship, chs. 3–7, and Donal Ó Drisceoil, Censorship in Ireland, 1939–1945 (Cork, 1996), 30–58. The best available treatment of the censorship of publications still remains Michael Adams, Censorship: The Irish Experience (Dublin, 1968). ⁶¹ MacCarthy, ‘The Cinema as a Social Factor’, 46; also partly quoted in Rockett, Irish Film Censorship, 26, and Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland, 429.

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should leave home and get wages to enable them to raise their standards, get married and have homes of their own. Who can blame them?⁶²

Contemporaries often alleged that females were especially influenced by such glamorous portrayals of American life, although this tells us more about the gendered nature of discourse and the lack of understanding of the rising aspirations of young women than about any innate differences.⁶³ This is neatly illustrated in a public controversy about the plight of Irish emigrants that occurred in August 1951 when the merits of the wholesome life at home were compared with the perils of urban Britain by a leading Irish politician. The Irish government was passed a copy of an unpublished report written by a social worker on the deplorable conditions of Irish workers in Birmingham and other Midland cities, and the then Taoiseach, Eamon de Valera, made a public speech in which he implicitly suggested that base materialism was one of the driving forces behind Irish emigration to Britain: ‘The saddest part of all this is that work is available at home, and in conditions infinitely better from the point of view of health and morals.’⁶⁴ We shall return to the furore caused by this speech in a later chapter, but de Valera was not alone in this view, and politicians and other public figures failed to grasp that even if similar jobs could be secured at home—and this was a debatable suggestion in itself—such work was often insecure in nature, of low status, and poorly paid. The suggestion that in seeking to obtain secure and well-paid employment migrants were somehow embracing crass materialism was derisory. Migrants were responding to a changing set of values. Moreover, it was not simply the lifestyle available in Britain that tended to make it an attractive destination but the effects of the developing consumerism that starkly contrasted with the simple and ‘pure’ life available in rural and small-town Ireland.⁶⁵ Material success, as measured by regular and secure income and the lifestyle that accompanied it, was incongruous with the traditional values ⁶² S.5, Rural Survey of Clonmel, Arklow and Wexford, prepared by W. A. Honohan, Sept. 1948, Marsh Papers, TCD MS 8306. ⁶³ See Ross McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England, 1918–1951 (Oxford, 1998), 431–2, 434, on this point. ⁶⁴ Quoted in Delaney, Demography, State and Society, 194. See below, 98–100. ⁶⁵ This view was not confined to Irish Catholic thinking: see Joan Keating, ‘Faith and Community Threatened? Roman Catholic Responses to the Welfare State, Materialism and Social Mobility, 1945–62’, Twentieth Century British History, 9, no. 1 (1998), 86–108.

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of rural Ireland. Those values of pure living and simplicity were often expected of the lower social groupings, yet the political classes, civil servants, and to an extent the comfortable larger farmers failed to grasp this fundamental point. Migrants were only seeking for themselves the same choices that their social superiors exercised. The sanctity of poverty appealed to only the purest of the pure in post-war Ireland.

3 . OT H E R T I M E S A N D OT H E R P L AC E S Only the reckless or the foolhardy embarked on the inherently risky venture of moving to a new country without basic information about job opportunities, the cost and availability of accommodation, and at least some knowledge about the social scene.⁶⁶ Potential migrants could often quote chapter and verse about conditions in Britain, something that astonished contemporaries, especially since much of the information was derived from the much more reliable source of personal contact rather than newspapers, cinema, or the radio.⁶⁷ Migrants home on holidays, friends and relatives living in Britain, and returnees acted as conduits of trustworthy information percolating back and forth across the Irish Sea. Far from being displaced from a rural idyll and transferred to the faceless environment of urban Britain, migrants from post-war Ireland actually possessed a remarkable degree of knowledge about what the move entailed and the consequences for individuals. When the writer Heinrich Böll toured around Ireland in the mid–1950s he overheard conversations on trains and in post offices where the talk was of London, Birmingham, and other distant places.⁶⁸ The social landscape of this generation was truly transnational in that it crossed the borders of the nation-state and included family members and friends living in Britain and further afield. This preoccupation with faraway places could lead to what one anthropologist referred to as ‘imaginative displacement’. In his classic study of poorer regions of the west of Ireland in the late 1960s, Hugh Brody charted the effects of this dispersal on the family of one of his subjects, Kath Nee, in a postscript written nearly twenty years later: ⁶⁶ This section draws heavily on Enda Delaney, ‘Transnationalism, Networks and Emigration from Post-War Ireland’, Immigrants and Minorities, 23, nos. 2–3 (2005), 425–46. ⁶⁷ For examples, see Delaney, Demography, State and Society, 168–83. ⁶⁸ Heinrich Böll, Irish Journal: A Traveller’s Portrait of Ireland (London, 1983), 3, 65–6, 72–3.

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‘meanwhile, the imagination of her sons, like all the emigrants both at home and abroad, and like Kath Nee herself, continue to be haunted by images of other times and other places’.⁶⁹ Understandably, the collective memory of post-war Irish emigration centres on poignant stories of young rural migrants displaced from their local worlds in search of work in the anonymous industrial centres of Britain. The historical narrative mirrors collective memory in this instance, though historians stop short of the powerful image of exile, so pervasive for the American-Irish in the second half of the nineteenth century.⁷⁰ Migration to be sure resulted in displacement and loneliness and evoked self-perceptions of being exiled.⁷¹ But networks lessened the obvious dislocation of emigration. These informal networks were built on obligations towards kinsfolk and friends, in essence the product of personal relationships, and enabled those with relatively little resources or indeed initiative to depart for Britain. Individual agency or the power to determine one’s own destiny was far more important in the process of leaving home for life in Britain than was acknowledged by either the migrants themselves or subsequent commentators. For many who left, a sense of home, in the concrete form of kin and friends, was a defining feature of their adaptation to life in Britain. This massive human movement was sustained and perpetuated by networks that connected emigrants, returned migrants, and non-migrants in both Ireland and Britain. These networks were founded on personal exchanges of knowledge, letters, visits home by migrants, casual conversations, and scraps of information, sometimes derived from second- and third-hand sources. Networks were essentially the outcome of other relationships, be they through the visceral bonds of kin, or the more elastic ties of friendship and shared local origin. Norms of reciprocity and obligations towards family and friends as well as the basic needs of companionship were the foundations of these migrant networks. Social relationships were ‘maintained rather than lost by moving geographically’ and for young people emigration was in some instances ⁶⁹ Hugh Brody, Inishkillane: Change and Decline in the West of Ireland, 2nd edn. (London, 1986), 17. ⁷⁰ For notions of exile among Irish emigrants in the United States in the late nineteenth century, see Kerby A. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (New York, 1985), 102–30; Matthew Frye Jacobson, Special Sorrows: The Diasporic Imagination of the Irish, Polish, and Jewish Immigrants in the United States, 2nd edn. (Berkeley, 2002), 11–32. ⁷¹ An evocative representation of this sense of dislocation can be found in Timothy O’Grady and Steve Pyke, I Could Read the Sky (London, 1997).

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the only way to remain in close contact with their friends and peers.⁷² As Liam Ryan noted, ‘the lack of work and lack of vitality (‘‘crack’’) in the rural community are two elements in emigration’.⁷³ He saw the rekindling of friendships and relationships as one of the driving forces of post-war emigration as large numbers of young people from each generation deserted rural Ireland: A letter from a friend, contact with relatives, travellers’ tales of returned emigrants might trigger the individual act of migration but the stage has been set long before. Renewal of friendships during the annual summer influx of holidaying emigrants was important because it enabled both emigrants and locals to recapture briefly the companionship and gaiety of a youthful Ireland in which people worked and laughed and worshipped God and got along together. More important, it emphasized for the local resident that the comradeship and the laughter which he no longer finds in his own community may indeed have migrated to Britain along with his friends and companions, and so the crowd which came back on holiday went back augmented.⁷⁴

The writer Richard Power, who spent a year on the Aran Islands in the mid–1950s, records how when all his friends on the island went to England he felt he had ‘an irrational compulsion to discover the rapture of youth once more. I wanted to leave at once.’⁷⁵ He gathered his belongings together and simply left Inis Mór, made his way via Dublin to London, and then eventually located his friends living in Birmingham. Power’s haunting description of the barren social landscape after the departure of his friends encapsulates this sense that the energy of the community had silently moved elsewhere: I had to leave. Everytime I went past Cóilín’s house, the old door locked up, the stain of dust on the windows, my optimism faltered. Dara Pheig was gone. The girls who once danced by my side, they were gone. The young strangers who used to amble along the roads at night, swimming in the sun and enjoying themselves on the beach, they were gone. In the place where they played handball, pools of water gathered and green moss grew . . . It occurred to me that the heart of the human race was beating strongly on some distant place and that there was only a faint tremulous pulse to be sensed in this extremity. I didn’t rightly know yet where such a distant place was, but I was certain it was there.⁷⁶ ⁷² Ryan, ‘Assimilation of Irish Immigrants’, 116. ⁷³ Ibid. 118. ⁷⁴ Ibid. 116. ⁷⁵ Richard Power, Apple on the Treetop, trans. from the Irish by Victor Power (Dublin, 1980), 151. This book was originally published in Irish as Risteard de Paor, Úll i mBárr an Ghéagáin (Dublin, 1958). ⁷⁶ Ibid.

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Undoubtedly such sentiments were experienced across rural and smalltown Ireland as this generation witnessed the departure of so many friends and contemporaries. John Healy’s famous lyrical account of the decline of his hometown, Charlestown, County Mayo, is another later example of the widespread perception that rural Ireland was gradually ‘dying’ as young people left in large numbers.⁷⁷ Members of the Commission on Emigration travelled throughout the country in 1948–9 to establish for themselves the principal causes of emigration. They also interviewed prospective male emigrants at employment exchanges who opted to travel under schemes funded by British companies, desperately in need of scarce unskilled male labour for heavy work. It is not clear if each commissioner was specifically requested to ask the prospective emigrants if they had family members living abroad, and the precision of the responses therefore varies. At least a third of these men explicitly stated that members of their immediate family were already settled in Britain.⁷⁸ The report of the commission underscored the importance of emigrants already living abroad who acted as ‘magnets’ for family members and friends seeking better lives elsewhere.⁷⁹ Tradition and example have also been very powerful influences. Emigration of some members of the family has almost become part of the established custom of the people in certain areas—a part of the generally accepted pattern of life. For very many emigrants there was a traditional path ‘from the known to the known’, that is to say, from areas where they lived to places where their friends and relations awaited them . . . Such a custom is kept alive by the connection which former emigrants retain with the home country and there is little doubt that these family connections will continue to exercise an influence, even if substantial improvements are effected in economic conditions and social amenities at home.⁸⁰

Similarly, migrants at home on holidays were identified as a valuable source of information.⁸¹ One report specifically highlighted what the author referred to as the ‘lure of England’, and observed that people who came back for holidays ‘did not fail to exaggerate the multitude ⁷⁷ John Healy, The Death of an Irish Town (Cork, 1968). ⁷⁸ Calculated from Rural Surveys S.1–S.23, Marsh Papers, TCD MS 8306. ⁷⁹ Commission on Emigration, Reports, 137. ⁸⁰ Ibid. ⁸¹ S.4, Rural Survey of Leitrim and Donegal, 23–25 Sept. 1948; S.10, Rural Survey of County Cork Employment Exchanges, n.d. [Oct. 1948]; S.11, Rural Survey of Galway City and Tuam, n.d. [Oct. 1948]; S.18, Rural Survey of Newbridge, n.d. [Oct. 1948], Marsh Papers, TCD MS 8306.

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of attractions of ‘‘life’’ in England with its high wages and little work’.⁸² In Middleton, in County Cork, a recent upsurge in emigration was explained by the conspicuous presence in the town of a number of emigrants home on holidays who were ‘flashing rolls of notes’.⁸³ The ‘returned Yank’ was a familiar figure in rural Ireland during the later nineteenth century.⁸⁴ In the mid-twentieth century the successful migrant at home on holidays from ‘England’ was still the source of mild curiosity, as evidenced by the caricature in John B. Keane’s play, Many Young Men of Twenty: Then they come back with new suits an’ fancy shirts, with tall tales about loose women in Piccadilly, boastin’ an’ braggin’ about all the money they’re earnin’. Fine mannerly accents like a country curate at his first sermon. Men o’ the world, with stories about the wonderful sights o’ Camden Town. They’ll buy porter for me when they come back on holidays. They’ll buy porter for any one. They’ll buy porter for every smart man that’ll believe their stories.⁸⁵

Networks expanded as emigration gained greater pace in the late 1940s, and an even greater number of people left independent Ireland throughout the following decade. Given the scale of the exodus, most young people would have known or at the very least have been aware of one relative or friend settled in Britain. These networks were not systematic or formalized in any sense, but centred on reciprocity and a sense of duty to assist friends and family. Obligations towards kin were a distinctive element of the small farm economy in Ireland during the first half of the twentieth century.⁸⁶ As two American anthropologists observed in County Clare in the 1930s, this sense of duty was not abandoned with emigration: The bonds of affection and family obligations still hold. If they have emigrated, the family members send back remittances and passage money for nephews and nieces and brothers and sisters left at home. A great many farms, especially in West and North Clare, are partially supported by Christmas gifts sent from children living abroad.⁸⁷ ⁸² S.8, Rural Survey of Waterford, Dungarvan, New Ross, Carrick-on-Suir, Enniscorthy, Carlow and Bagenalstown, n.d. [Nov. 1948], Marsh Papers, TCD MS 8306. ⁸³ S.10, Rural Survey of County Cork Employment Exchanges, n.d. [Oct. 1948], Marsh Papers, TCD MS 8306. ⁸⁴ Schrier, Ireland and the American Emigration, 129–42. ⁸⁵ John B. Keane, Many Young Men of Twenty: A Play with Music (Cork, 1961), 42. ⁸⁶ Conrad M. Arensberg and Solon T. Kimball, Family and Community in Ireland, 2nd edn. (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), 59–75. ⁸⁷ Ibid. 143.

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The functions of these networks were constantly changing over time. In the first instance, they served to shape the behaviour of individuals by placing the option of emigration on the mental map of individuals assessing prospective life courses. Second, during periods of change such as the journey or arrival, practical assistance and social and emotional support were vital in the traumatic process of adjusting to life in Britain. This was especially important as most migrants were from insulated environments, unfamiliar with the practical challenges of urban industrial life. In its most mundane form, this could mean learning about transportation, work practices, outlets to socialize, and the peculiarities of living with and working alongside the ‘English’. Not all those who left post-war Ireland did so with the direct assistance of friends and family. For instance, reports of young Irish migrants arriving in London’s train stations with little information or even a place to stay were common in the late 1950s.⁸⁸ As David Fitzpatrick has noted, a network is ‘open and optional rather than exclusive and fully reciprocal’.⁸⁹ In some instances, such as young females who were embarking on nursing training in Britain, institutional support structures were already in place to provide accommodation and support. Young pregnant women often took ‘the boat to England’ to avoid the stigma associated with being unmarried mothers. Numerous organizations catered for these women, with varying degrees of compassion and humanity.⁹⁰ Others simply wanted to make their own way in the world, stubbornly resisting any help or advice.

4 . R I S I N G A S PI R AT I O N S Unlike advanced industrial societies such as Britain where class distinctions were articulated openly and widely understood, in a predominantly agricultural and rural society the social hierarchy was less obvious to an ⁸⁸ Reports from Catholic welfare workers in London frequently cited such cases: see, for example, dictabelt from Fr Casey, London, November 1958, AB8/B/XXIX, McQuaid Papers, DDA. ⁸⁹ David Fitzpatrick, ‘The Irish in Britain: Settlers or Transients’, in Patrick Buckland and John Belchem (eds.), The Irish in British Labour History (Liverpool, 1993), 7. ⁹⁰ See Lindsey Earner-Byrne, ‘The Boat to England: An Analysis of the Official Reactions to the Emigration of Single Expectant Irishwomen to Britain, 1922–1972’, Irish Economic and Social History, 30 (2003), 52–70; Paul Michael Garrett, ‘The Abnormal Flight: The Migration and Repatriation of Irish Unmarried Mothers’, Social History, 25, no. 3 (2000), 330–43.

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outside observer.⁹¹ Even within broad groupings such as farmers, huge regional variations existed in terms of the size of holdings, the productive capacity of the land, the levels of income generated by agricultural production, and the numbers employed to assist in the day-to-day running of the farm. For instance, in parts of the west and north-west of Ireland, where small-scale subsistence farming was the norm, outside labour was rarely employed, and most holdings could barely support a family.⁹² Much of the literature on rural Ireland in the twentieth century comes from the west of Ireland, where class differentiation was less developed, and the focus on this region helps explain the historiographical silences surrounding social class in mid-twentieth-century Ireland.⁹³ Class was intrinsically tied up with occupational status in these rural communities. The most basic distinction was between those who owned the land, and the workers who were employed at particular times in the year by farmers, especially relevant in the commercialized regions of Leinster and east Munster.⁹⁴ At the bottom end of this social ladder were agricultural labourers and farm servants. An ethnographic study of farming communities in east Limerick completed in the late 1950s pinpointed the class tensions that were bubbling away under the surface. A number of farmers expressed attitudes that were more akin to the vilified former landlord class than the new nationalist élite of independent Ireland, and seemed unwilling to accept the legitimate aspirations of their social inferiors. A common thread in the responses derived from interviews with the farmers was that the education system was creating unrealistic ambitions on the part of the rural working classes. As one farmer put it eloquently: ‘education is ruining them; it gives them airs above their station’.⁹⁵ Education was perceived by farm labourers and their families as the pathway to securing employment outside agriculture and this, by necessity, involved emigration since industrial or manufacturing employment was not available locally.⁹⁶ Prior to the ⁹¹ See McKibbin, Classes and Cultures, on England. ⁹² Damian F. Hannan, Displacement and Development: Class, Kinship and Social Change in Irish Rural Communities (Dublin, 1979), 27–40. For a detailed account, see John J. Scully, Agriculture in the West of Ireland: A Study of the Low Farm Income Problem (Dublin, 1971). ⁹³ On the relative absence of class differentiation, see Hannan, Displacement and Development, 197. ⁹⁴ Ibid. 36. ⁹⁵ Patrick McNabb, ‘Social Structure’, in Jeremiah Newman (ed.), The Limerick Rural Survey, 1958–1964 ( Tipperary, 1964), 197. ⁹⁶ Ibid. 205.

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introduction of universal free secondary education in September 1967, few of these poorer families in Limerick were financially able to realize the objective of securing secondary education for their children. Many left school before completing the requisite examinations, most of them eventually migrating to England without any qualifications.⁹⁷ The rural working classes were caught in an unenviable dilemma. Unable to obtain educational qualifications that would allow them to compete for much-sought-after central and local government posts, the immediate prospects were grim. With a few notable exceptions, unskilled factory employment was scarce and concentrated in particular regions such as along the east coast. For young women, domestic service was a traditional form of unskilled work in Ireland, but, as most contemporaries acknowledged, it was an arduous and poorly paid job, which involved a considerable degree of drudgery, particularly as the ‘servant girl’ on a farm.⁹⁸ Nursing training was restricted to the daughters of the wealthy farming class since a payment of fees was required. One female migrant who trained in Britain recalled that ‘all the nurses in Dublin at the time were all farmers’ daughters’.⁹⁹ Males faced a similar range of unattractive options: intermittent employment by farmers or casual labouring with the local authority, where such opportunities existed, punctuated by long spells of underemployment. Monotonous and extremely heavy work in Britain in building, coal-mining, and factories offered young Irish males a chance to escape from the endless insecurity of scratching out a living in rural and small-town Ireland. The relationship between social class and migration was intimately associated with the educational system. Young women from more prosperous backgrounds tended to stay in education longer as farming families were keen to provide their daughters with skills and qualifications. But, as one sociological study of Cavan in the mid–1960s noted, this led to a higher rate of female migration since it increased ‘the level of occupational and other status aspirations of the girls vis-à-vis the boys’, few of which could be satisfied by staying within the local area.¹⁰⁰ Even if work were available in local factories, this was deemed to be ⁹⁷ Ibid. 203. ⁹⁸ Transcripts of evidence, Irish Housewives’ Association, n.d., Marsh Papers, TCD MS 8307/3; McNabb, ‘Social Structure’, 173. ⁹⁹ Quoted in Kaja Irene Ziesler, ‘The Irish in Birmingham, 1830–1970’ (unpub. Ph.D. thesis, University of Birmingham, 1989), 172. ¹⁰⁰ D. F. Hannan, ‘Migration Motives and Migration Differentials among Irish Rural Youth’, Sociologia Ruralis, 9, no. 3 (1969), 210; Hannan, Rural Exodus, 225.

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unacceptable for educated young women since the term ‘factory girls’ carried with it all sorts of negative connotations in rural Ireland.¹⁰¹ Only a minority of the Irish in Britain had continued education beyond the completion of primary schooling. By the mid–1950s roughly two-thirds of young adults leaving school in independent Ireland did so at the age of 14, having completed primary education.¹⁰² It was estimated in the 1960s that just one in five of the Irish in Britain had attended any form of secondary schooling prior to departure.¹⁰³ Another survey of the migrant Irish completed in the early 1970s indicated that three-quarters had left school after primary education.¹⁰⁴ Without educational qualifications, these migrants were restricted in the jobs that they could obtain on arrival in Britain, confining them to the bottom rungs of the occupational hierarchy. The inflexible nature of the class structure was itself a cause of emigration as seemingly restricted opportunities for upward mobility strengthened the imperative to leave. Numerous studies of social mobility in post-war Ireland arrive at much the same conclusion: prior to industrial development and the educational reforms of the 1960s which led to rapid expansion in the availability of free secondary education, opportunities for upward mobility were exceedingly restricted. The general consensus is that mass emigration was a key factor in maintaining stability across the rigid class structure since it impacted disproportionately on the working and lower middle classes.¹⁰⁵ And while it is difficult to chart, there is fragmentary evidence that emigration was a reflection of changes in attitudes towards the rigid system of social stratification. According to one well-informed observer, emigration was an indication ¹⁰¹ Hannan, Rural Exodus, 253. ¹⁰² Commission on Emigration, Reports, 177. ¹⁰³ Quoted in Hannan, ‘Irish Emigration Since the War’, 6; see also B. J. Whelan and J. G. Hughes, ‘A Survey of Returned and Intending Emigrants in Ireland’ (Unpublished Report Prepared for the EEC Study of Housing Conditions of Migrant Workers, 1976), 52. Copy available at the Economic and Social Research Institute Library, Dublin. ¹⁰⁴ Ryan, ‘Assimilation of Irish Immigrants’, 137. ¹⁰⁵ Richard Breen, Damian F. Hannan, David B. Rottman, and Christopher T. Whelan, Understanding Contemporary Ireland: State, Class and Development in the Republic of Ireland (London, 1990), 54; Christopher T. Whelan, Richard Breen, and Brendan J. Whelan, ‘Industrialisation, Class Formation and Social Mobility in Ireland’, in J. H. Goldthorpe and C. T. Whelan (eds.), The Development of Industrial Society in Ireland (Oxford, 1992), 107; Richard Breen and Christopher Whelan, ‘Social Mobility in Ireland: A Comparative Analysis’, in Anthony F. Heath, Richard Breen, and Christopher T. Whelan (eds.), Ireland North and South: Perspectives from the Social Sciences (Oxford, 1999), 337; Michael Hout, Following in Father’s Footsteps: Social Mobility in Ireland (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), 109–10.

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that the rural working classes were no longer prepared to accept their unhappy lot.¹⁰⁶ This silent revolution was a significant cause of the mass exodus from post-war Ireland. At the upper echelons of the educational scale, for the minuscule élite who entered Irish universities in the 1940s and 1950s—less than one in every hundred of the population in 1950—leaving the country was widely regarded as the eventual outcome of the completion of a professional degree course.¹⁰⁷ While uncertainty exists about the precise level of graduate emigration at this time, Irish universities were producing large numbers of graduates for export.¹⁰⁸ The rapidly expanding National Health Service in Britain generated an abundance of openings for newly qualified young Irish doctors in particular. Somewhere between one-half and one-quarter of Irish medical graduates in the 1940s and 1950s were employed abroad, the majority going ‘across the water’. By the mid–1960s over 3,500 Irish-born doctors were working in Britain, of whom three-quarters were born in independent Ireland.¹⁰⁹ After reviewing the evidence, an official commission of inquiry into the Irish higher education system recommended in 1967 that an ‘allowance’ should be made in future calculations for emigration in the provision of medical education.¹¹⁰ Other higher professionals were also compelled to leave on graduating from Irish universities, a phenomenon that was identified internationally in the late 1960s as the ‘brain drain’.¹¹¹ Based on surveys with current students at Trinity College Dublin and University College Dublin, one report suggested that three-quarters intended to leave Ireland, and about a quarter planned to return at an unspecified later date.¹¹² For those who aspired to enter the professions as doctors, engineers, architects, and managers, moving to Britain and elsewhere was an inevitable stage in the ¹⁰⁶ McNabb, ‘Social Structure’, 193–209. ¹⁰⁷ In 1950 0.23 per cent of the population attended university (Commission on Emigration, Reports, 178, n. 1). ¹⁰⁸ Commission on Emigration, Reports, 178; Delaney, Demography, State and Society, 259–61. ¹⁰⁹ Oscar Gish, ‘Emigration and the Supply and Demand for Medical Manpower: The Irish Case’, Minerva, 7 (1969), 669. ¹¹⁰ Commission on Higher Education, 1960–67, Report (Dublin, 1967), Pr 9389, i. 246. A consideration here was that the universities were no doubt keen to ensure that the numbers who were allowed to train as doctors were not reduced as a consequence of any recommendations made by the Commission. ¹¹¹ See D. W. Forrest, Managerial Emigration (Dublin, 1967); Richard Lynn, The Irish Brain Drain (Dublin, 1968). ¹¹² Lynn, The Irish Brain Drain, 2.

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process of acquiring relevant experience. Graduate emigration attracted relatively little public interest until the late 1960s. For a small country with an underdeveloped economy it was widely acknowledged that there was a finite number of openings for skilled professionals, and the implicit assumption was that experience garnered abroad might at some future date benefit the country. Those who embarked on such degree courses were well aware of the marginal chances in the short to medium term of ever securing permanent employment in independent Ireland. Given the long tradition of movement and the impact of emigration across all social classes, it might be taken as a given that leaving Ireland carried with it no negative connotations. Migration was the ostensible means to secure a livelihood for the working and lower middle classes as well as professionals. However, among the strong farming classes in the south and east with large holdings, emigration was also perceived to be a marker of social class. An unpublished study undertaken in the early 1970s captures in vivid detail this subtle distinction: To the unskilled and unemployed England seemed a land of opportunity, but to the fifty-acre farmers and the petty bourgeoisie of the towns and villages it seemed a kind of ghetto for Irish people, a kind of huge Irish slum, a place where none of the better class of people ever went, not even on holidays. And the threat of a son or daughter to take the boat train was a threat that the family name might be tainted with the mark of the emigrant and coupled with the labourers and others who somehow weren’t talented enough to get employment at home.¹¹³

Even for those who acquired substantial savings through working abroad and subsequently purchased a farm or pub back in Ireland, this money ‘was somehow tainted by the sins of England’ and they often found themselves isolated by the local farmers.¹¹⁴ Apparently such views were confined to the bourgeoisie of rural Ireland, as farmers with medium-sized holdings in rural Limerick adopted a more pragmatic approach. Emigration was perceived as the means by which their offspring could maintain and improve their social status.¹¹⁵ Both the parents and children shared the belief that status and security were the key considerations for getting an ‘acceptable’ job after emigration; if a son had accepted manual work while living abroad ‘the family would try to hide this fact from the neighbours’.¹¹⁶ Even in the poorer regions of the west of Ireland, the ¹¹³ Ryan, ‘Assimilation of Irish Immigrants’, 114. ¹¹⁵ McNabb, ‘Social Structure’, 215. ¹¹⁶ Ibid.

¹¹⁴ Ibid.

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strong farmers or ‘respectable’ classes viewed England as the destination of only the ‘very poor’, since those with access to any resources went to North America.¹¹⁷ Such finely grained distinctions show that social class was a significant influence on attitudes towards emigration. For the working and lower middle classes, leaving Ireland was a necessity to secure steady employment; for their social superiors, given the narrow range of suitable opportunities for white collar and professional workers, in order to maintain social status and achieve career and income aspirations, emigration was just as inevitable. Where the distinctions are most evident are in the perceptions of the ultimate purpose of emigration, and the extent to which it was perceived to be volitional or not. Often the movement from post-war Ireland was implicitly characterized as the displacement of the lumpenproletariat from the poverty-ridden regions of rural Ireland to the large industrial slums of post-war Britain. Irish politicians, on the one hand, decried the depopulation of rural communities—the simple life in the rural idyll was a central component of earlier nationalist ideology—yet privately understood the potential implications of large numbers staying at home.¹¹⁸ The language of class was most trenchantly expressed by Alexis Fitzgerald in his now infamous reservation to the report of the Commission on Emigration in 1955. Fitzgerald, a lawyer and lecturer in economics at University College Dublin, epitomized the élite mindset when it came to understanding the impact of emigration on individuals and families: I cannot accept either the view that a high rate of emigration is necessarily a sign of national decline or that policy should be over-anxiously framed to reduce it . . . Where there is a danger of complacency I believe that there should be a more realistic appreciation of the advantages of emigration. High emigration, granted a population excess, releases the social tensions which would otherwise explode and makes possible a stability of manners and customs which would otherwise be the subject of radical change. It is a national advantage that it is easy for emigrants to establish their lives in other parts of the world not merely from the point of view of the Irish society they leave behind but from the point of view of the individuals whose horizon of opportunity is widened.¹¹⁹

Two lines of thought may be identified relating to attitudes towards emigration.¹²⁰ First, there were those such as Eamon de Valera who ¹¹⁷ ¹¹⁸ ¹¹⁹ ¹²⁰

Hannan, Displacement and Development, 162. Delaney, Demography, State and Society, 206. Commission on Emigration, Reports, 222. This section draws heavily on Lee, Ireland, 1912–85, 371 ff.

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believed that emigration was fuelled by unrealistic (and irrational) expectations on the part of the poorer sectors of Irish society. For a politician whose ideal society was rural-based, simple, and devoid of materialism, leaving Ireland simply to carve out a decent livelihood was unthinkable. The other view, exemplified by his successor as leader of Fianna Fáil from 1959, Seán Lemass, centred on conventional logic: in order to reduce emigration Irish living standards needed to be increased over time, rather than hoping that the populace would in time lower their expectations. In his famous Clery’s speech in January 1957 Lemass had declared that ‘our standards must approximate to British standards, or our people will go’.¹²¹ And he was quite right: those who were not prepared to subsist in poverty or near-poverty chose the exit option and left. Another element of the discourse relating to emigration highlighted by J. J. Lee is the issue of class differences. Discussions about emigration, both those in the public sphere and those which took place behind closed doors, often presented the emigrant as somewhat feckless, easily led (especially in the case of women), and driven by a base and contemptible desire for higher income. But these were the desires, needs, and aspirations of those who had relatively little in Ireland being viewed through the eyes and mindset of those who had a great deal more. A revealing example of the disparity between élite views and the harsh reality experienced by many people can be found in the discussions of whether emigration was the result of economic expectations or ‘want’ and whether the movement of people was a ‘voluntary’ or ‘involuntary’ process.¹²² These distinctions were artificial constructions and, as Lee observes, it suited contemporary purposes: if emigrants left in order to improve their standard of living ‘the blame accordingly lay with the emigrants themselves, not with the society they left’.¹²³ Of course, one obvious implication of the exodus during the 1950s was that people emigrated because they had lost confidence in the ability of their politicians, civil servants, and other members of the ruling classes to create a society that might in the future allow them to enjoy a decent standard of living. It was often suggested that emigration acted as a safety-valve in the 1940s and 1950s.¹²⁴ For instance, if the British government had decided ¹²¹ Quoted ibid. 386. ¹²² Ibid. 374. ¹²³ Ibid. For an innovative analysis of this issue, see J. J. Lee, ‘Continuity and Change in Ireland, 1945–70’, in id. (ed.), Ireland, 1945–70 (Dublin, 1979), 166–77. ¹²⁴ Delaney, Irish Emigration Since 1921, 43.

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to restrict Irish immigration, as was mooted in the early 1960s, and Irish citizens were no longer allowed to take up employment in Britain, the impact on Irish society would have been far-reaching. With no possible outlet for the unemployed and underemployed, a reduction in the income of many households as a result of a lower level of migrant remittances, and thousands of people back in Ireland without work seeking welfare payments from an already depleted exchequer, the potential for social unrest would have greatly increased. This social unrest could have resulted in the development of the politics of class, an otherwise absent theme in post-war Irish politics. A recurring undercurrent in much of the public discussions was the seemingly inability of the working classes to maintain and uphold the morals of a ‘respectable’ Catholic country whilst living aboard. Much ink was spilt on the problem of ‘leakage’, that is, Catholics who failed to maintain strict ‘Irish’ norms of religious observance in England. The perceived failure to observe traditional Irish Catholic standards of sexual morality emerged as a key issue for the Catholic church and the body politic. Given the inextricable relationship between these powerful institutions in independent Ireland, this issue was increasingly placed under the spotlight, as we shall see in a later chapter.

5 . FA M I L I E S A N D H O U S E H O L D S The family was encoded in the Irish constitution of 1937 as ‘the natural primary and fundamental unit group of society’, which was afforded protection under the constitution ‘as the necessary basis of social order and as indispensable to the welfare of the nation and the state’, reflecting interwar Catholic social teaching.¹²⁵ In theory, the departure of such large numbers of young people should have led to a fracturing of close-knit relationships and severely disrupted the effective functioning of the family. Many families in post-war Ireland were dispersed with siblings living overseas for years on end, carving out livelihoods and raising children without direct access to the support structures that most people took for granted, as they set up home after marriage. How, then, did families view mass migration and what were the consequences for migrant households? ¹²⁵ Bunreacht na hÉireann (Dublin, 2003), art 41.1, 1◦ –2◦ .

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Traditionally, as we have seen, emigration was conceived as a collective response to the economic situation in Ireland after the Great Famine. Prior to independence, ’ew emigrants were accused of placing their own wellbeing over the collective ‘national’ interest or of being selfish, with the exception of the Anglo-Irish war when the provisional Dáil Éireann prohibited emigration in 1920 to stop potential IRA activists leaving the country.¹²⁶ In the mid-twentieth century, as levels of emigration continued to rise, an emerging theme in public discourse was the conflation of leaving Ireland with a vague and unspecified form of individualistic behaviour that resulted in material values being perceived to be more important than maintaining the family unit, and in effect undermined the viability of the wider community in rural Ireland. The behaviour of individuals, however, was conditioned by the broader environment, and decisions about emigration were often taken within the context of household needs. For the family unit to survive, it could not support children who had come of age, yet were unable to contribute to the overall income. The famous ethnographic study of north Clare in the 1930s by two American social anthropologists, Arensberg and Kimball, demonstrated that emigration was a vital element in the survival of the small farm economy in the poorer regions of the west of Ireland. While their portrayal of a timeless rural society was influenced by the functionalist tradition in which the work was originally conceived, inheritance patterns and ultimately the economic survival of the family were predicated on the ‘dispersal’ of children. Viewed in the light of this family structure, the decline of population becomes interpretable not as a flight from intolerable conditions, though economic distress had a powerful effect, not as a political gesture, though political disturbance took its toll, but rather as a movement arising from the effect of all these causes upon a family system whose very nature predisposed it to disperse population and which could, therefore, accommodate itself to that dispersal when it occurred.¹²⁷

Far from being a disruptive influence, emigration was essential for the maintenance of a harmonious social system. The household adapted with apparently effortless ease to this dispersal of ‘surplus’ children. This was a natural part, in their view, of the social reproduction of ¹²⁶ David Fitzpatrick, ‘Emigration, 1871–1921’, in W. E. Vaughan (ed.), A New History of Ireland, Vol. 6: Ireland Under the Union, II (1870–1921) (Oxford, 1996), 632–3. ¹²⁷ Arensberg and Kimball, Family and Community in Ireland, 150.

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small farm communities in the subsistence farming regions of the west of Ireland. While a number of central components of Arensberg and Kimball’s analysis were challenged by later scholars, this observation that emigration served to maintain rather than undermine the traditional structures of the family has stood the test of time.¹²⁸ What changed, however, from the Second World War onwards was the rural economy of the west and north-western counties. Subsistence farming which had characterized these regions became an increasingly impecunious livelihood in the context of commercialized large-scale agricultural production.¹²⁹ By the early 1970s such areas were identified in a plethora of surveys and reports as a ‘problem’, echoing earlier reports from the Congested Districts Board in the 1890s. One of the major ingredients of the ‘problem’ now was rural depopulation and the reluctance of children to remain and take over the family holding.¹³⁰ The simple life of subsistence farming had little to offer this generation. As one sociologist noted, ‘whereas in the 1920s brothers had competed for the inheritance, in the 1960s they vied to escape it’.¹³¹ The emigration of family members was a necessity for poorer households, but did it lead to the fracturing of social relations between the migrants and those left behind in Ireland? One commentator has argued that both emigration and the urbanization of the 1950s ‘greatly weakened the traditional family’.¹³² The evidence is not, however, as unequivocal as this statement indicates. As was discussed earlier, one of the characteristic features of the mass migrations of the post-war era was the interaction between migrants in Britain and friends and relatives at home. Autobiographies and oral histories show that migrants living in Britain retained close links with family and friends back in Ireland. Proximity and constant movement back and forth across the Irish Sea for holidays and other visits ensured that siblings maintained contact with each other. While such bonds may have lessened over time, it ¹²⁸ Peter Gibbon, ‘Arensberg and Kimball Revisited’, Economy and Society, 2, no. 4 (1973), 479–98; Peter Gibbon and Christopher Curtin, ‘The Stem Family in Ireland’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 20 (1978), 429–53, and a critique by David Fitzpatrick, ‘Irish Farming Families before the First World War’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 25 (1983), 339–74. ¹²⁹ For more details, see Hannan, Displacement and Development; Damian F. Hannan, ‘Kinship, Neighbourhood and Social Change in Irish Rural Communities’, Economic and Social Review, 3, no. 2 (1972), 163–88. ¹³⁰ Delaney, Demography, State and Society, 234–5. ¹³¹ Hannan, Displacement and Development, 159. ¹³² Kennedy, Family, Economy and Government, 12.

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appears that family relations were still maintained, notwithstanding the obvious problems posed by distance and location.¹³³ Does this imply that a gust of rampant individualism suddenly swept through post-war Ireland which undermined traditional social mores? According to one interpretative account of the changes in the family since the 1960s, ‘as Ireland developed from an agricultural and rural economy towards a more industrialized and urban economy, individualistic values tended to replace that set of values which granted pre-eminence to the family’.¹³⁴ Brody’s study described what he termed as a ‘personalized sense of self’ among young males, which shaped the decisions and judgements and confounded traditional expectations about the duty to the family and the land.¹³⁵ The cult of the ‘individual’ is a universally acknowledged feature of advanced capitalist societies.¹³⁶ But emigration could simultaneously reconcile the wants, needs, and aspirations of the individual with the collective interest in maintaining traditional ways of life.¹³⁷ In the 1940s and 1950s these attitudes towards family responsibilities were also gradually moving towards the western European norm. The values of the urban middle class, with an emphasis on individual fulfilment and personal achievement, and reflected in the patterns of consumption, clashed with rural norms of kin obligations and the ‘pre-eminence’ of the family as a group ‘over the individual’.¹³⁸ In a study conducted between 1949 and 1951 by an American Jesuit sociologist, based on fieldwork on the ‘new’ Dubliners, migrants who settled in the capital from rural Ireland, the author concluded that urbanization did result in the decline in traditional values centred on the family and kin.¹³⁹ Urban living did not, though, produce a more secular outlook: ‘In short, in spite of his [sic] many points of contact with modern secularism and his [sic] involvement with a modern ¹³³ See Sharon Lambert, Irish Women in Lancashire, 1922–1960: Their Story (Lancaster, 2001), 35–44; Louise Ryan, ‘Family Matters: (E)migration, Familial Networks and Irish Women in Britain’, Sociological Review, 52, no. 3 (2004), 351–70. ¹³⁴ Kennedy, Family, Economy and Government, 18. ¹³⁵ Brody, Inishkillane, 164–6. ¹³⁶ See Jose Harris, ‘Tradition and Transformation: Society and Civil Society in Britain, 1945–2001’, in Kathleen Burk (ed.), The British Isles Since 1945 (Oxford, 2003), 110. ¹³⁷ On this point, see Kennedy, Family, Economy and Government, 18. ¹³⁸ Alexander J. Humphreys, New Dubliners: Urbanization and the Irish Family (London, 1966), 22; also quoted by Kennedy, Family, Economy and Government, 18. ¹³⁹ Humphreys, New Dubliners, 32–9.

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industrial economy, the New Dubliner has not become secularized.’¹⁴⁰ This observation contrasts sharply with the frequently voiced concerns that life in urban—and, even more insidious, secular—Britain was a serious threat to the morals of Irish Catholics. One potential barometer of the degree to which the concerns of the family coexisted with the needs and aspirations of the individual was the amount of money sent home by migrants as remittances. According to a recent popular history of the Irish navvy in Britain, the ‘expectation of remittance money characterized almost every relationship between the Irish emigrant and his or her family back in Ireland’.¹⁴¹ Traditionally, sending money back home was an integral element of the process of migration. The flow of remittances back across the Atlantic in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was enormous by international standards. One historian estimated that roughly $260 million (£52 million) was sent back to the United Kingdom between 1848 and 1900, the vast majority from the Irish in the United States.¹⁴² Such statistics, it must be said, should be treated with caution as they are of ‘doubtful quality’, although there is little doubt that the ‘golden stream of dollars’ was a significant source of income for migrant households across Ireland. The ‘American money’ was used to pay rents and other bills, and in the case of more comfortable families to purchase additional land or livestock.¹⁴³ By the mid-twentieth century ‘American money’ was still a crucial element in some of the poorer communities in the west of Ireland. One member of the Commission on Emigration was astonished to learn that the apparent prosperity of the parish of Lahardane in County Mayo was based solely on migrant remittances from the United States: Because of emigrants’ remittances and of gifts of clothing from relatives abroad, particularly those in U.S.A. [sic], the people of the parish are well dressed and are not short of money . . . This dependence on outside resources colours the outlook of many to such an extent that they are not prepared to do anything for themselves or even to avail of facilities designed to help them improve their lot. The senior curate, who takes a keen interest in the public affairs of the country ¹⁴⁰ Ibid. 38. ¹⁴¹ Ultan Cowley, The Men Who Built Britain: A History of the Irish Navvy (Dublin, 2001), 86. ¹⁴² Schrier, Ireland and the American Emigration, 105. This figure has been accepted by later historians, but Schrier’s original estimate refers to the United Kingdom as a whole and not just Ireland; see Kevin A. Kenny, The American Irish (Harlow, 2000), 139; Miller, Emigrants and Exiles, 397. ¹⁴³ Fitzpatrick, ‘Emigration, 1801–70’, 601; Schrier, Ireland and the American Emigration, 104–22.

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and is most enterprising, has found it impossible to arouse local interest in proposals for the improvement of conditions.¹⁴⁴

Clearly the Catholic curate was venting his frustration at the culture of ‘dependency’ in this particular parish, a dependency fed by the sense of duty and obligation of friends and relatives living overseas. Data on migrant remittances from the United States and Britain were collected by the Irish state by monitoring the amount of money and telegraphic or ‘wire’ orders. One estimate suggests that almost £3 billion was sent from Britain to Ireland between 1939 and 1969 through official means such as telegrams and money orders.¹⁴⁵ Any official statistics would underestimate the total figure since a couple of pounds could simply be slipped into an envelope or handed over faceto-face when home on holidays.¹⁴⁶ British currency was exchangeable in many shops in Ireland and there was therefore no need for this type of transaction to attract the attention of the prying eyes of the world of officialdom. As the historian Mary E. Daly has noted, by the mid to late 1950s the annual inflow of emigrants’ remittances amounted to roughly the sum spent by the Irish state on old age pensions.¹⁴⁷ In 1952 migrant remittances constituted roughly 2.5 per cent of national income, rose slightly in the early 1960s to 3.2 per cent, and thereafter remained at its previous level throughout the 1960s, until a steep decline in the following decade.¹⁴⁸ In the late 1960s roughly £20 million per annum was remitted back to Ireland.¹⁴⁹ While the total amounts involved are undoubtedly significant, there is fragmentary evidence that sending money home declined over the course of the post-war years. The widely shared assumption that migrant children living abroad would contribute to the household income was undermined by the ¹⁴⁴ S.1, Rural Survey of Mayo and Sligo, prepared by J. P. Beddy, n.d. (1948), Marsh Papers, TCD MS 8306. ¹⁴⁵ Cowley, The Men Who Built Britain, 29. A slightly higher figure of £3.5 billion was cited by the leader of the Irish Labour Party, Pat Rabbitte, in a parliamentary debate in 2004: Dáil Éireaan Debates, 578 (27 Jan. 2004), col. 279. ¹⁴⁶ I am very grateful to Professor Mary E. Daly for advice on this point. ¹⁴⁷ Mary E. Daly, ‘The Irish Family Since the Famine: Continuity and Change’, Irish Journal of Feminist Studies, 3, no. 2 (1999), 6. ¹⁴⁸ Commission on Emigration, Reports, table 39, 55; Miceal Ross, Further Data on County Income in the Sixties (Dublin, 1972), tables 1–3; J. J. Sexton, B. M. Walsh, D. F. Hannan, and Dorren McMahon, The Economic and Social Implications of Emigration (Dublin, 1991), 242; Cormac Ó Gráda and Brendan M. Walsh, ‘The Economic Effects of Emigration: Ireland’, in Beth J. Asch (ed.), Emigration and Its Effects on the Sending Country (Santa Monica, Calif., 1994), 137. ¹⁴⁹ Hannan, ‘Irish Emigration Since the War’, 8.

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actual experience. Prospective migrants often cited the pressing need to support the family as one of the principal reasons for emigration.¹⁵⁰ Nevertheless, complaints about children (and indeed spouses) who failed to live up to this expectation were routinely received by welfare organizations and, as Daly notes, married men were the group most likely to send money home. She argues further that ‘the growing demand for economic independence on the part of daughters and sons also encouraged emigration, while making it less likely that emigrants would send money home’.¹⁵¹ In the initial stages this obligation was at the forefront of mindsets, but it is reasonable to assume that, as time moved on, financial commitments towards those remaining at home receded in consciousness, especially as disposable income was used for other purposes, including housing, personal consumption, and leisure activities. Admittedly the evidence is ambiguous on the extent to which maintaining a direct financial connection with family in Ireland was in itself a reflection of the durability of ties across the Irish Sea. The association between leaving home and sending money back is a component of the traditional migrant story, and not just in Ireland. The hard-pressed emigrant working abroad, living in American or British cities, scraped and saved every penny to support his or her poor relatives back in Ireland. By the 1950s this nostalgic vision was looking increasingly out of touch with the realities of the relationships between those who left and those who stayed behind. Whether individuals felt obliged to support family members who were still living in Ireland was influenced by the context of the original departure, the length of time in Britain, and, not least, the level of disposable income that could be allocated for this particular purpose. As with so much else in human actions, there is no one pattern of behaviour that can neatly be applied to the hundreds of thousands who left independent Ireland after the end of the Second World War. Mass migration from post-war Ireland was a continuation of a tradition of large-scale movement since at least the mid-eighteenth century. But significant differences existed in the post-war years. Gone were the days when the reluctant exile left the homeland on the assumption that they would never set foot in the old country again. Moving to Britain allowed for repeated visits home, and thousands ¹⁵⁰ Daly, ‘The Irish Family Since the Famine’, 6; for more details, see Marsh Papers, TCD MS 8306. ¹⁵¹ Daly, ‘The Irish Family Since the Famine’, 8.

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regularly travelled back and forth across the Irish Sea, in a pattern more akin to seasonal migration than the finality of a permanent departure. This massive exodus had its roots in the dismal economic environment that existed up to the early 1960s, and leaving was rationalized as a temporary expedient until things improved at home. Individuals were also responding to changing values and attitudes that emphasized individual wellbeing and personal aspirations. As one contemporary observed, young people growing up in post-war Ireland were ‘gradually becoming less willing to accept the frugal standards of previous generations’.¹⁵² One the final decision was made, all that now remained was the initial journey across the Irish Sea. ¹⁵² McNabb, ‘Social Structure’, 260; also quoted in Brody, Inishkillane, 99.

2 In a Strange Land

1

What I couldn’t do. Eat a meal lacking potatoes. Trust banks. Wear a watch. Ask a woman to go for a walk. Work with drains or objects smaller than a nail. Drive a motor car. Eat tomatoes. Remember the routes of buses. Wear a collar in comfort. Win at cards. Acknowledge the Queen. Abide loud voices. Perform the manners of greeting and leaving. Save money. Take pleasure in work carried out in a factory. Drink coffee. Look into a wound. Follow cricket. Understand the speech of a man from west Kerry. Wear shoes or boots made from rubber. Best P.J. in an argument. Speak with men wearing collars. Stay afloat in water. Understand their jokes. Face the dentist. Kill a Sunday. Stop remembering.²

What was different about this ‘strange land’ that the Irish travelled to in such large numbers? According to one imaginative novel, it was the mundane things that were part and parcel of the minutiae of everyday existence that made the dislocation even more painful. In his twilight years, the elderly male narrator reflected on a lifetime spent working in England and recited this list of things that he felt he could never do. Remembering was a tortuous experience, as his life was marked by displacement, loss, and the ultimate loneliness of existing in a onebedroom flat in Kentish Town in London. But at the same time his memories were also interspersed with fleeting moments of happiness from his childhood and life back at home. This is a work of fiction, but, as the historian Patrick Joyce remarks, such an exploration illustrates the challenge to the historical imagination to re-create a social world ‘out ¹ The title of this chapter is taken from the autobiographical account of John O’Donoghue, In a Strange Land (London, 1958). ² Timothy O’Grady and Steve Pyke, I Could Read the Sky (London, 1997), 71; first cited by Patrick Joyce, ‘More Secondary Modern than Postmodern’, Rethinking History, 5, no. 3 (2001), 380.

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of a sense of the intimate details of the everyday, the competencies and inner knowledge available only to those who experience them directly’.³ Traditional documentary sources shed little light on the inner feelings, fears, or emotions of migrants, as the complexities of the lived experience involved in such a move were intensely personal. Even contemporary surveys are more likely to tell us what the respondent felt should be the ‘right’ answer, as the dynamics of power shaped these encounters. By far the most valuable fragments are to be found in the actual words of the migrants themselves: in autobiographies, collections of interviews, memoirs, oral histories, and more ephemeral collections of memories and reminiscences. These disjointed, unsystematic, and diverse contrasting voices form the basis for much of what follows in this chapter, as we seek to explore what Robert Orsi describes as ‘the inner history of immigration’.⁴ As well as charting the actual experiences of the thousands who left post-war Ireland for Britain, the challenge for historians is to ‘reconstruct the world-view through which they experienced it’.⁵

1 . AC RO S S T H E WAT E R Taking leave of Ireland for the first time was a poignant event. The typical scene of the departing migrant at the quayside saying tearful goodbyes to huddled crowds of anxious relatives was, in fact, quite an untypical experience for the majority of those who left post-war Ireland. Few families could afford to accompany a loved one to the ports of Dublin, Dun Laoghaire, Cork, or Rosslare. The first stage of the emotional departure therefore occurred at the nearest railway station. Painful scenes of separation and loss were enacted on desolate railway platforms across post-war Ireland. Unlike their British counterpart, the railways in Ireland were constructed on a model that centred on the two main cities, Dublin and Cork, with the port of Dun Laoghaire only a short hop away by train from Westland Row in the capital city. The decaying railway network, which had suffered from decades of lack of investment, together with the even more unreliable rural motor-bus ³ Joyce, ‘More Secondary Modern than Postmodern’, 380. ⁴ Robert Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880–1950, 2nd edn. (New Haven, 2002), 150. ⁵ Matthew Frye Jacobson, Special Sorrows: The Diasporic Imagination of Irish, Polish, and Jewish Immigrants in the United States, 2nd edn. (Berkeley, 2002), 6.

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services, transported hundreds of thousands of young Irish people to the sites of departure in what was truly a remarkable feat given its state of decrepitude. In an evocative documentary film, The Irishmen, produced for the BBC in the mid–1960s by Philip Donnellan, but for various reasons never broadcast, the central character is followed on the long journey from the Connemara Irish-speaking Gaeltacht to metropolitan London.⁶ Several of the scenes are concerned with the train journey to Dublin, and while this aspect is ‘perhaps the least well-handed feature’ of the film, they do capture with insight the initial stages of the experience of leaving home.⁷ For the journalist Donal Foley, who left his native Waterford in September 1944 for wartime London, it was a heartbreaking scene as ‘the platform was crowded with young people, the mothers clinging on to them loath to let go and anxious to get the last seconds of their companionship’.⁸ Paddy Fahey, the photographer who did so much to document the lives of the London Irish, remembered that the departure of the train from Waterford city was an event in itself. At a quarter to nine each evening the train for Rosslare in the early 1940s was watched by crowds to see who was leaving and ‘there was a procession of people catching the boat’.⁹ When the writer John B. Keane left County Kerry in 1952, he recounted that when he ‘boarded the train at Listowel that morning it seemed as if everyone was leaving. It was the same at every train station along the way.’¹⁰ In his musical play, Many Young Men of Twenty, first performed in 1961, Keane drew on these experiences, as one of the characters described what he witnessed on the train to Dublin: It was the same at every station along the way, Danger. ’Twould make anybody cry. Young boys and girls leaving home for the first time. Fathers and mothers heartbroken, turnin’ their heads away to hide the tears. ’Twould turn you against railway stations.¹¹ ⁶ The Irishmen: An Impression of Exile (BBC, not transmitted, 1965). For the background to this documentary and the reasons why ultimately it was not broadcast, see Lance Pettitt, ‘Philip Donnellan, Ireland and Dissident Documentary’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 20, no. 3 (2000), 356–8. Donnellan’s BBC Controller described it, rather harshly, as ‘shapeless, pretentious and, to be frank, boring’ (ibid. 358). ⁷ Ibid. 356. ⁸ Donal Foley, Three Villages: An Autobiography (Dublin, 1977), 52. ⁹ Paddy Fahey, The Irish in London: Photographs and Memories (London, 1991), 24. ¹⁰ John B. Keane, Self-Portrait (Cork, 1964), 32. ¹¹ John B. Keane, Many Young Men of Twenty (Cork, 1961), 155.

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It is a historical irony that the coming of the railway, which was such a portentous precursor of modernization in nineteenth-century Ireland, also signalled the arrival of a brutally efficient system of transporting large numbers of would-be migrants on the initial stages of the journey from geographically isolated locations to American and British cities. On arrival in Dublin or Cork many migrants stayed overnight with friends or relatives or in hostels or lodging-houses before setting sail the following day. From the Second World War until the early 1950s it was possible under certain conditions to have the complete passage paid for by the British authorities, who were anxious to secure workers for ‘essential industries and services’ that were experiencing labour shortages.¹² For instance, in 1946 thousands of Irish men were recruited for coal-mining. The following year nearly 3,000 women travelled to Britain to embark on nursing training.¹³ This scheme was a legacy of the elaborate machinery that was established by the British and Irish governments in 1940 to make arrangements for the placement of Irish workers in particular forms of employment. Even after the end of the war in 1945, these mechanisms continued to operate until the mid–1950s, offering the prospect of a guaranteed job and a pre-paid fare, albeit in the least desirable types of employment. But those who availed themselves of this scheme had to undergo a thorough medical examination in Dublin to ensure that they were fit, healthy, and suitable for the particular job, prior to leaving Ireland. By all accounts, this was a demeaning procedure conducted with ruthless efficiency by the Irish doctors who were assigned to the task. For one young woman who left Ireland in 1946 to be a domestic servant in Manchester the event was irrevocably etched in her memory: When we got to Dublin, we were met there and taken to this hotel. I’ll never forget that experience, it was terrible. The way they looked at you, we had to strip, take all our clothes off and they looked at every bit of us, at our hair and everything, before they gave us a cup of tea even. Then we had to go and get a bed; it was hard to get a bed because there was such a crowd of us. It was something terrible, I’ll never forget that night.¹⁴

A British official who was based in Dublin during the war praised the efforts of Irish public health doctors who were ‘100 per cent efficient’, but

¹² Julius Isaac, British Post-War Migration (Cambridge, 1954), 194. ¹³ Ibid. ¹⁴ Anne Lynch (ed.), The Irish in Exile: Stories of Emigration (London, 1988), 15.

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this efficacy came at a deeply humiliating price.¹⁵ The Irish chief medical advisor, James Deeny, was shocked at the treatment that he witnessed on a visit to inspect the Health Embarkation Scheme at the Globe Hotel on Talbot Street in Dublin, during the war.¹⁶ For younger people who travelled with official assistance, for many of whom it was their first time away from home, to be subjected to an invasive medical examination in this clinical environment must have been a terrifying ordeal. The historical resonance with the experiences of famine refugees who arrived in North America and Britain in the late 1840s was obvious: thousands of reluctant and powerless migrants had to endure similar medical checks to ensure that they were in a fit state to enter the host country. And the irony was that it was now Irish medical officers in Dublin who had the power to say who was fit to travel and who had to remain behind. An additional aspect that necessitated an engagement with official bureaucracy was the requirement up to 1952 to obtain a travel permit from the Irish authorities. This document was issued by the Irish Department of External Affairs and obtained from the local police station, to be presented on arrival in Britain as proof of identity. Until December 1947 visas or permits to enter Britain were also required and applications were made to the United Kingdom Permit Office in Dublin. Visas were issued for visits or for those going to work on a temporary basis, although this flexible distinction was open to manipulation.¹⁷ Armed with various documents, including a travel permit and official guidance leaflets, and a case of personal belongings, the reluctant migrant was now ready to set sail. The port of Dun Laoghaire was the main hub of activity for the post-war exodus from Ireland. This locus of departure was, according to Keane’s retrospective account, a pathetic sight. Dun Laoghaire, for the first time, was a heartbreaking experience—the goodbyes to husbands going back after Christmas, chubby-faced boys and girls leaving home for the first time, bewilderment written all over them, hard-faced oldstagers who never let on but who felt it worst of all because they knew only too well what lay before them.¹⁸ ¹⁵ A. V. Judges, ‘Irish Labour in Great Britain, 1939–1945’, 44, Jan. 1949, LAB 8/1528, PRO. ¹⁶ Enda Delaney, Demography, State and Society: Irish Migration to Britain, 1921–1971 (Kingston/Montreal and Liverpool, 2000), 143. ¹⁷ More details can be found in Commission on Emigration, Reports, app. VI–VII, and Isaac, British Post-War Migration, 192–6. ¹⁸ Keane, Self-Portrait, 32.

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Many departed from Carlisle Pier in Dun Laoghaire for Holyhead on one of the ships that daily criss-crossed the short distance across the Irish Sea. The irony of leaving on a ship named Hibernia to do work of British ‘national importance’ during the war was not lost on Donal Foley.¹⁹ While a number of newer, larger, and better-equipped ships operated this route, a smaller vessel which did not have stabilizers, the Princess Maud, was brought into service during busy periods, and its notorious roll and the ensuing sickness has ensured its place in the folklore of those who left.²⁰ Used as a troop-carrier during the Normandy D-Day invasion in 1944, comfort was not its selling point. One passenger described his crossing as a ‘nightmare journey’, with people vomiting as the wind buffeted the small ship.²¹ Others left from the North Wall to set sail for Liverpool, and for those who lived in the south of the country, Cork and Rosslare were the points of departure. The Innisfallen, which operated between Cork and Fishguard, was a similar icon for generations of Munster migrants.²² Conditions on board were grim. Despite glossy promotional materials designed to attract the lucrative first-class tourist passengers, the voyage was less appealing for those in the crowded second-class compartments. People slept where they could find any space, on benches, along the corridors, and even on the floors. The Cork–Fishguard trip was the longest one, with the boat setting sail around six o’clock in the evening and arriving in south Wales in the early hours of the morning. From the North Wall in Dublin to Liverpool the journey was roughly seven hours. The Dun Laoghaire route was much shorter, approximately four to five hours, depending on weather conditions. One migrant, who left as a child from Cork in the late 1950s, remembered that the boats ‘were appalling, just like converted cattle ships’.²³ Only in the mid–1960s with the introduction of the modern car ferry services did conditions improve for those who made that seemingly endless pilgrimage across the Irish Sea.²⁴ For Foley, who left from Dun Laoghaire, the ship was ‘like a travelling Irish town, moving slowly and darkly across the ¹⁹ Foley, Three Villages, 53. ²⁰ Interview with Michael Frank Horan, 9 April 2002, MH 2002/261, LM; Dónall Mac Amhlaigh, An Irish Navvy: The Diary of an Exile, trans. from the Irish by Valentin Iremonger (London, 1964), 5; John Healy, No One Shouted Stop! (Achill, 1988), 89. This is a revised and expanded edition of Healy’s famous study first published as The Death of an Irish Town (Cork, 1968). ²¹ Pam Schweitzer (ed.), Across the Irish Sea, 2nd edn. (London, 1991), 135. ²² Lynch (ed.), The Irish in Exile, 2. ²³ Ibid. ²⁴ Ibid. 18.

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water’.²⁵ Heavy drinking was one familiar leisure activity to pass the time, as the new exiles sought consolation from that most traditional source of Hibernian inner resolve.²⁶ Often the ships were overcrowded, with inadequate sleeping provision for the travellers in second class. Traditional prejudices could also surface, as, according to Keane, the British crew could not on occasions conceal their contempt for their Irish cargo: ‘The tourist is fawned over and spoiled, but they can’t wait to deposit the departing Paddy on the other side.’²⁷ Bleary-eyed and disorientated, the first-time Irish traveller arrived in Britain, often in the small hours of the morning and after a long and tiring journey. Holyhead was, according to one account, ‘surely the unfriendliest spot during those years in whole world’.²⁸ Foley described the scene in 1944 with ambivalence as the passengers disembarked from the ship: We shuffled off the boat, a long dark crocodile of people. Walking as it were into the unknown except for those among us who had known the horrors of Camden Town, Kilburn, Birmingham, Glasgow, Coventry, Leeds, Reading and Slough before now. Horrors, yes, but warm with consolations too. The welcoming pubs, the weekly wage packet and the comradeship of adversity.²⁹

The first hurdle was passing through customs and immigration controls, and the stringent set of checks that were imposed during the war (although relaxed thereafter). This process could often take hours, and meanwhile the travellers were left exposed to the elements.³⁰ This initial encounter with British officialdom was often remembered vividly by some of the new arrivals.³¹ For John O’Donoghue, who came to Britain during the later years of the war, the passengers were scrutinized by the ‘keen-eyed’ officials who met those coming off the boat on the quayside in Holyhead: When we landed we were filtered through one barrier after another where we had to show our tickets and travel permits, be examined from head to toe until the officials were satisfied that we were the real people whose pictures appeared on the permits, and that all particulars connected with us were in order, so that no undesirable person might enter the country at such a dangerous time in its history.³² ²⁵ Foley, Three Villages, 53. ²⁶ Foley, Three Villages, 53–4; O’Donoghue, In a Strange Land, 12–13. ²⁷ Keane, Self-Portrait, 35. ²⁸ Foley, Three Villages, 54. ²⁹ Ibid. ³⁰ Keane, Self-Portrait, 38; Judges, ‘Irish Labour in Great Britain’, 39. ³¹ See, for example, Schweitzer (ed.), Across the Irish Sea, 149; Nottingham Irish Studies Group, Making it Home: Experiences of Being Irish (Nottingham, 2001), 27.

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Dónall Mac Amhlaigh, who first arrived in 1951, recounted a touching scene he witnessed in the customs hall in Holyhead. One Irish man who carried an old battered suitcase tied together with rope was asked to open it for inspection by the customs officer. At first he protested, then eventually he acceded to the request. He cut the twine and out came an old pair of Wellington boots, but ‘devil the thing else was in the case—not even a change of socks’.³³ The absence of any material possessions was exposed for all to see in the clinical conditions of this customs hall. Given the sheer scale of this movement of people, it was inevitable that at least a minority of those who landed would quickly run into difficulties. The Ministry of Labour made extensive efforts to position welfare officers at the main ports for workers who travelled under official schemes, and after a number of initial teething troubles this seemed to work reasonably well in the late 1940s and early 1950s. For others, who made their own way on the basis of a job offer or simply speculatively, serious problems could develop. For instance, volunteers from the Liverpool Vigilance Association (LVA) kept a daily logbook of individuals who needed assistance, and the arriving Irish were one of the main groups offered advice and guidance. In one instance cited by the volunteers an unnamed young Irish woman who was travelling to Cheshire in 1945 for a job was waiting at the port to be met. A misunderstanding had developed with her potential employers and she was left stranded, even though it was her first time in England and she had no idea how to get to her new place of employment. Spotting her obvious distress, the LVA worker approached her and managed to identify the relevant firm and make contact to ensure someone was able to meet her at the train station.³⁴ By the early 1950s reports were passed to the Irish government of young females disembarking in Liverpool without a job offer, resources, contacts, or even luggage, and this fed into the moral panic created by the large-scale female emigration among politicians and religious leaders.³⁵ For others, the landing was followed by the much more mundane event of catching the Irish Mail service to all points eastwards. Changes at busy stations such as Crewe for those going to the West Midlands, ³² O’Donoghue, In a Strange Land, 14. ³³ Mac Amhlaigh, An Irish Navvy, 6. ³⁴ Cited in Liverpool Vigilance Association, Unpublished Annual Report, 1 Apr. 1945–31 March 1946, 326 VIG/3, LRO. ³⁵ Memorandum on the Problem of Irish Girls Emigrating to England, prepared by Elizabeth Fitzgerald, 25 Aug. 1953, DT S 11582E, NAI.

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or Rugby, for places north of London such as Northampton, were an inevitable part of the arduous trek. Unfortunate incidents occurred, in part due to the complexity of the British railway network and the lack of familiarity of many of the Irish migrants with the changes required at appropriate points along the way. During the war one group of workers destined for Northampton had apparently boarded a train marked for Southampton and arrived there in the small hours of the morning ‘cursing the British government’.³⁶ Euston along with Paddington were the stations for arrivals travelling to London. By all accounts, Euston was a veritable outpost of Erin with thousands of Irish passing through the station each day, often in the very early morning when the train arrived from Holyhead. This was a grim vista of modernity for the new arrivals, according to Richard Power, who made the journey in the mid-1950s: Euston Station, a foggy winter morning. Derelicts still sleeping under the pillars in the main hall, like the cold clay statues of the poor who built this Victorian temple. In a barber’s shop, beneath the platform, a gang of Teddy boys waited for the barber, looking as if they hadn’t had a wink of sleep the night before. Graffiti on the walls of the toilet; swearwords, illicit appointments, obscene verses, cris de coeur ranting against some injustice or other or against life, boasts of demeaning sins, every sort of public expression that an overwrought person would make who desperately needed to broadcast a confession.³⁷

A frequent sight on the platform in Euston, with their distinctive armbands, were the volunteers from the Legion of Mary and the Catholic Women’s League who offered assistance to travellers. This was perhaps an unwelcome vision for the minority who had emigrated to escape the social control of the authoritarian streak of Irish Catholicism that the Legion of Mary represented in its starkest form. Nevertheless, for those who required information or guidance in the early hours of the morning, the volunteers were a useful source of immediate assistance. One Columban priest, who assisted the lay volunteers at Euston and Paddington in the late 1950s, reflected on its value: The meeting of the trains I think is useful work. Every day you meet somebody or other whom you can help; sometimes by simply giving them directions; sometimes telling them where to get digs; and in general making things easy for them. Some of them are very shy, but we find no resentment anywhere and ³⁶ Quoted in Judges, ‘Irish Labour in Great Britain’, 40. ³⁷ Richard Power, Apple on the Treetop, trans. from the Irish by Victor Power (Dublin, 1980), 160.

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once they get to know who we are, they are glad to have us because a lot of them when they arrive on the journey for the first time, are inclined to be a bit frightened.³⁸

The Westminster Branch of the Catholic Women’s League was also involved in ‘escorting’ young Irish student nurses whose details had been passed on by Catholic organizations in Dublin from Euston and Paddington to London hospitals. But many more came independently and simply made their own way. According to railway workers at Euston in 1953, ‘they arrive in hordes’ to start out on this new life in Britain.³⁹

2 . T H E P RO M I S E D L A N D Expectations of the place of destination were part of the mental map that migrants brought with them on the journey to a destination society. For Italian immigrants making the long sea journey to New York at the turn of the twentieth century, ‘excitement and fear, apprehension and expectation characterized the crossing’.⁴⁰ For arrivals from the Caribbean in the 1950s, who had been socialized with positive images of the ‘Mother Country’ as an imagined space, a ‘mythological territory’, England as the centre of imperial power was the ‘land of milk and honey’.⁴¹ As a result of years of English-centred education and political rhetoric that emphasized equal citizenship within the Commonwealth, Britain was seen as a land of opportunity, a place for self-improvement.⁴² As Mary Chamberlain comments, any illusions about the welcome extended by the worthy inhabitants of the ‘Mother Country’ were ‘punctured at the point of arrival’, and it was not just the physical environment that did not match up, but also the prejudice and racism that Caribbean migrants encountered on an everyday basis.⁴³ For migrants from Pakistan in the early 1960s, Britain was also the ‘land of promise, a place to improve one’s standard of living and gain greater ³⁸ Dictabelt from Fr [John] Casey, London, Nov. 1958, AB8/B/XXIX, McQuaid Papers, DDA. ³⁹ Memorandum on the Problem of Irish Girls Emigrating to England, prepared by Elizabeth Fitzgerald, 25 Aug. 1953, DT S 11582E, NAI. ⁴⁰ Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street, 162. ⁴¹ Mary Chamberlain, Narratives of Exile and Return, new edn. (New Brunswick, 2005) 75, 72. ⁴² Sheila Patterson, Dark Strangers (London, 1963), 225. ⁴³ Chamberlain, Narratives of Exile and Return, 70–9.

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independence’, even if the morality of that society, as reflected in the standards of sexual behaviour, was something to be shunned at all costs.⁴⁴ Few Irish migrants possessed any such illusions of Britain as an El Dorado. Preconceptions were formed well in advance of leaving home. It was most certainly not the promised land of biblical imagery, and expectations of life in this ‘strange land’ were invariably formed by the wider cultural milieu of independent Ireland. British newspapers and the cinema played a significant role in shaping these images, as we have seen in the previous chapter. A further source of information were the stories—some accurate, some half-true, and others simply fiction, so called ‘tall tales’—that were recounted by earlier waves of migrants who had direct first-hand knowledge of John Bull’s island.⁴⁵ But the formation of consciousness about the amorphous ‘English’—few contemporaries distinguished between English and British—had begun much earlier and was subliminally transmitted in the development of young children at school. Moreover, what marks this generation out as relatively unique in the long history of emigration from Ireland is that those who left in the 1940s and 1950s were the first generation of expatriates who had attended primary school, with a national curriculum that was designed by the educational authorities of the independent state. Determined efforts were made in the 1920s and 1930s to revise the teaching of subjects most likely to instil a patriotic spirit: the Irish language and Irish history were the most obvious mechanisms for achieving such an objective. The guidelines for history teaching produced for the fledgling state in April 1922 stated that ‘one of the chief aims of the teaching of history should be to develop the best traits of the national character and to inculcate national pride and self-respect’, a sentiment that was echoed in the preface to one of the more popular textbooks.⁴⁶ Subsequent revisions to the history curriculum in 1926 recommended that the periods of Irish history that ‘were more inspiring and better calculated to lead to pride of country should be dwelt ⁴⁴ Verity Saifullah Khan, ‘The Pakistanis: Mirpuri Villagers at Home and in Bradford’, in James L. Watson (ed.), Between Two Cultures: Migrants and Minorities in Britain (Oxford, 1977), 69. ⁴⁵ For such ‘tall tales’, see Keane, Many Young Men of Twenty, 138. ⁴⁶ Quoted in David Fitzpatrick, ‘The Futility of History: A Failed Experiment in Irish Education’, in Ciaran Brady (ed.), Ideology and the Historians (Dublin, 1991), 176; James Carty, A Class-Book of Irish History: Book III (From the Flight of the Earls to the Act of Union) (Dublin, 1930), 2.

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upon’.⁴⁷ At primary schools, only Irish history was taught, and the classbooks used were ‘impregnated with a spirit of exaggerated nationalism’ which reified rather than dissipated traditional prejudices.⁴⁸ What the historian David Fitzpatrick describes as the ‘subordination of history to patriotism’ continued without question until the early 1960s.⁴⁹ Invariably patriotism centred on the tortured course of British–Irish relations from the arrival of the Normans in the twelfth century, but more especially the ‘struggle’ for national independence since the late eighteenth century. A committee which included professional historians and educationalists put it more pithily in 1967: the long-standing ‘Ireland versus England’ theme had dominated much of the teaching of history since the 1920s.⁵⁰ It had done so for a long time before in particular schools, especially those run by the Christian Brothers, who, according to one scholar, since the second half of the nineteenth century had engaged in the ‘most systematic exploitation of history in the service of Catholic nationalism’.⁵¹ Even if textbooks that copiously documented the historic wrongs inflicted on the Irish ‘nation’ failed to capture the patriotic imagination of young children at school, popular nationalist ballads were even more effective mnemonic devices. One woman who left in the early 1950s could vividly remember the patriotic ballads from her schooldays some forty years later, and another had kept for posterity a collection of racy nationalist songs that was widely used by schoolchildren when she was growing up in Ireland.⁵² The irony that such a large proportion of this generation ended up in Britain after years of socialization that demonized the country’s historical role in Irish history was not lost on another interviewee: ‘In a sense we were taught to hate. We were taught this history, you were sorta [sic] taught to hate England and then sent there.’⁵³ Throughout the 1930s and 1940s patriotism was intimately associated with the narrative of self-sufficiency in the political, economic, and ⁴⁷ Francis T. Holohan, ‘History Teaching in the Irish Free State, 1922–35’, History Ireland, 2, no. 4 (1994), 54. ⁴⁸ Jack Magee, ‘The Teaching of Irish History in Irish Schools’, Northern Teacher, 10, no. 1 (1970), unpaginated. ⁴⁹ Fitzpatrick, ‘The Futility of History’, 177. ⁵⁰ ‘The Teaching of History in Irish Schools’, Administration, 15, no. 4 (1967), 285. ⁵¹ Fitzpatrick, ‘The Futility of History’, 169; Barry N. Coldrey, Faith and Fatherland (Dublin, 1988), ch. 6. ⁵² Sharon Lambert, Irish Women in Lancashire, 1922–1960: Their Story (Lancaster, 2001), 84. ⁵³ Quoted ibid. 88.

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cultural spheres, as de Valera’s successive governments sought to reduce the reliance on Britain by asserting the obdurate sovereignty of the independent state—most obviously during the Second World War—and by nurturing a Gaelic and Catholic cultural ethos and encouraging the development of indigenous manufacturing industries.⁵⁴ But from the late 1930s onwards this drive for self-sufficiency and the cherishing of all things Irish sat awkwardly with the realities of large-scale poverty and the increasing numbers who were leaving the country. This simple rural life was an integral element of the nationalist ideology articulated by de Valera and other leading politicians. The long-standing anti-English overtones of Irish separatism were reinforced by more immediate events such as the fragile state of British–Irish relations in the 1930s and early 1940s. Constitutional issues about political sovereignty dominated public discourse as Eamon de Valera from March 1932 set about energetically removing the last vestiges of Ireland’s links with the Commonwealth, a process that ironically was finally completed by his political opponent, John A. Costello, in 1948 with the secession from the Commonwealth and the declaration of a republic. British and, to a lesser degree, American opposition to Irish neutrality during the Second World War consolidated domestic support around the leadership of de Valera, most obviously in the case of his dignified response to Winston Churchill’s intemperate remarks in a victory broadcast at the end of the war in Europe in May 1945, which were widely reported at the time and for many Irish illustrated the David and Goliath nature of the struggle.⁵⁵ Virtually all of the Irish political leaders up to the late 1950s had been actively involved in some shape or form with the revolutionary politics of the early twentieth century, and anti-English rhetoric came almost instinctively, and equally was always a guaranteed vote-winner in parliamentary elections. The wider political climate was suffused with negative images of Britain as the former governing power that combined with proximate concerns about political relationships as the goal of complete sovereignty inevitably nudged the independent state further away from the Commonwealth in the 1940s. Traditional enmities were never far beneath the surface when it came to relations between Britain and Ireland. ⁵⁴ See Terence Brown, Ireland: A Social and Cultural History, 1922–1985, 2nd edn. (London, 1985), chs. 5–6. ⁵⁵ Robert Fisk, In Time of War: Ireland, Ulster and the Price of Neutrality, 1939–45 (London, 1983), 537–41.

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In addition to the political climate, in a society where Catholicism infused virtually all aspects of social and cultural life, the perception was that England was a ‘pagan’ place, where paganism was predictably equated with Protestantism.⁵⁶ Few troubled themselves with the finer distinctions of these varieties of deism. Britain was a ‘godless’ country in which Catholicism—in particular its Irish variant—was perceived with suspicion and mistrust. A ubiquitous theme in the clerical discourse on the evils of Irish emigration in the 1940s and 1950s was the potential danger to the faith and morals of the Irish in Britain posed by life in a secular society. This was one of the principal arguments advanced by leading Irish ecclesiastical figures for the regulation of emigration from the country, especially the movement of young females, who, it was believed, were more vulnerable to the pitfalls of secularism.⁵⁷ Secularism went hand in hand with that other great evil, materialism; for early twentieth-century Irish nationalists ‘the British characteristic most forcefully projected was an obsession with the material aspect of life, a convenient mirror-image to Ireland’s other worldliness’.⁵⁸ Nevertheless, these alarmist statements tended to instil apprehension about ‘pagan’ England and the degenerative effects of living in such a society infused with materialistic values and inhabited by what were semi-seriously described as ‘heathens’.⁵⁹ To say, as the Caribbean writer George Lamming memorably described the colonial encounter between Caribbean migrants and British society in the 1950s, that ‘we have met before’ is an understatement in the Irish case.⁶⁰ The complex and often fraught nature of British–Irish relations over centuries ensured that ‘England’ had many symbolic associations, most of which were negative, as it was cast as the ‘intimate enemy’.⁶¹ What then did the new arrivals make of the society which ⁵⁶ See, for instance, the comments of William McKeown on the Christian Brothers and ‘pagan’ England: Nottingham Irish Studies Group, Making it Home, 37. ⁵⁷ Delaney, Demography, State and Society, 187–92. ⁵⁸ Gabriel Doherty, ‘National Identity and the Study of Irish History’, English Historical Review, 111, no. 441 (1996), 347. ⁵⁹ Lambert, Irish Women in Lancashire, 88; Anne O’Grady, Irish Migration to London in the 1940s and 1950s (London, 1988) 10; the ‘heathen’ quotation is taken from Joyce, ‘More Secondary Modern than Postmodern’, 369; see also Fahey, The Irish in London, 33, for a comparable reference to the perception that England was a ‘heathen land’. ⁶⁰ George Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile (London, 1960), quoted in Bill Schwarz, ‘Crossing the Seas’, in id. (ed), West Indian Intellectuals in Britain (Manchester, 2003), 2. ⁶¹ This term is borrowed from Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of the Self Under Colonialism (Oxford, 1983).

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had for so long played a malevolent role in the history of Ireland and was widely blamed for much of the nation’s woes over the past eight hundred years, and which contained a population of ‘heathens’, or, even worse, Protestants? Apart from gloomy sights of Holyhead, Fishguard, or Liverpool, the train journey provided the first glimpses of the place that was ultimately to become the home of so many of these migrants, although the fact that the service was speeding through the night hindered any systematic inspection of the Welsh and English countryside. Wartime travellers could see even less, as the blackout created a vista of seemingly unending darkness. Simple differences were perhaps the most startling. For instance, the pace of life and the conception of time were different to the sleepy villages and towns of rural Ireland. Mac Amhlaigh, who was destined for Northampton, had a two-hour stopover in Rugby at four o’clock in the morning. As it drew nearer to the morning rush hour, the station became a hub of activity with commuters catching the train to work. My heart sank altogether as I stood and looked around at the dirty ugly station. Everything looked so foreign to me there. Round about six o’clock hundreds started pouring into the station, pallid pasty faces with identical lunch boxes slung from their shoulders. They were all getting the train to work and their likes were getting off the train at the same time coming to work in Rugby, I suppose. God save us, I murmured to myself as I thought that nobody in Ireland would be even thinking of getting out of their beds for another couple of hours yet.⁶²

Even the colour of the post-boxes, red instead of green, struck one new arrival as different and foreign.⁶³ This was ironic as one of the first things that the new Irish government did after 1922 was to paint all the pillar-boxes green to indicate a break with the old British regime. London was the epicentre of all things that were modern about living in post-war Britain.⁶⁴ A huge sprawling city, with an elaborate transportation system, it accommodated nearly seven million people by the end of the Second World War in 1945, and was over ten times the size of Ireland’s capital, Dublin, the closest experience that most migrants had to urban life. A common response was amazement at the sheer scale and ‘vastness’ of the city, and more pragmatic consideration of ⁶² Mac Amhlaigh, An Irish Navvy, 6. ⁶³ Lynch (ed.), The Irish in Exile, 22. ⁶⁴ For an assessment of London’s modernity in the period 1840–1950, see Richard Dennis, ‘Modern London’, in Martin Daunton (ed.), The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, III (1840–1950) (Cambridge, 2000), 99–117.

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the time involved in simply getting around on the complex underground and bus network.⁶⁵ The chaos of large numbers of people rushing about was bewildering for the new arrival: I didn’t know what to think of London. There were crowds everywhere and I didn’t know where all the people were coming from or going to. I’d come now from a rural area where you saw lads once a week, unless they were going to the well or something. And now I’d come over here and everybody was knocking you down. I was bewildered. I remember well the underground, going on the tube and then the moving stairs. I was awful afraid until I got used to it.⁶⁶

The devastation of the central parts of London presented those who arrived in the immediate post-war years with a less than glamorous introduction to urban life in the metropolis. For one young woman, who travelled alone in 1946 on her way to a hospital job in Surrey, the grim reality that she was confronted with while making the trek from Euston to Waterloo contrasted with her image. As she walked through the bomb-damaged streets, she wondered, ‘where was the wonderful London of the picture palace? It was dust and bombs and broken down houses and crowds everywhere. There was nothing nice at all.’⁶⁷ The promised land did not live up to the heightened expectations of this recent arrival. A child vividly remembered the size of the clock at Paddington station and thinking that she had never seen one of that size.⁶⁸ Everything somehow seemed bigger and on a much larger scale than at ‘home’. Modernity could take other forms. In an industrial society time was a valuable commodity to be used as efficiently as possible, with sharp distinctions between work and leisure time; in a predominantly agricultural society these boundaries were always more fluid and flexible. Whether the Irish arrivals ‘clung to their traditional notions of time’, as famously asserted by the American historian Herbert G. Gutman in the context of immigrant responses to industrial America at the turn of the twentieth century, is less apparent.⁶⁹ Initial impressions did, however, ⁶⁵ O’Grady, Irish Migration to London, 10. ⁶⁶ Mary Lennon, Marie McAdam, and Joanne O’Brien, Across the Water: Irish Women’s Lives in Britain (London, 1988), 43. ⁶⁷ Schweitzer (ed.), Across the Irish Sea, 150. ⁶⁸ Catherine Dunne, An Unconsidered People: The Irish in London (Dublin, 2003), 25. ⁶⁹ Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York, 1991), 8; Herbert G. Gutman, Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America (New York, 1976); see for different perspectives, Daniel T. Rodgers, ‘Tradition, Modernity, and the American Industrial Worker: Reflections and

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underline the quick pace of life and the predominance of clock time. On arrival at Euston, Foley remarked that there was ‘a special confusing urgency about early morning London. The people seem to be filled with a dogged determination to get somewhere fast.’⁷⁰ The organization of working time in round-the-clock manufacturing factories did differ significantly from Ireland, where few such operations existed; shift work was well paid but could adversely affect the social life of the young migrant, especially if it involved working for long periods of time or on a Sunday.⁷¹ The technology of modernity could also make a lasting impression. One child recalled her excitement when she spotted an airplane passing through the sky above London, a rare vista for an 8-year-old from Cork. Another migrant recounted his fascination when he watched television for the first time to see the Coronation in June 1953: this was an iconic moment when television ‘came of age’, with almost half of the population tuning in for the event.⁷² Technology could also mean liberation from the drudgery of rural life for women; a family who came from County Tipperary in the early 1960s witnessed the liberation of their mother, who ‘loved the technological advantages of living in a city with shops, transport and modern amenities’.⁷³ The heavily urbanized society often compared unfavourably with nostalgic memories of rolling green fields and beautiful unspoilt countryside back at home. A central theme in the subsequent recollections of first impressions is the ‘grim’, ‘drab’, or ‘dreary’ physical environment, and this has been incorporated into the collective narrative of the Irish in post-war Britain. For example, the introduction to an edited collection of ‘memories’ underscores this sharp distinction between ‘home’ and life in Britain: ‘Their stories begin more than fifty years ago, when London was a grey and hostile place, a bleak, alien landscape for those accustomed to the friendliness and pastoral beauty of their home land.’⁷⁴ The Irish were not alone in this reaction; migrants from the Caribbean Critique’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 7 (1977), 655–81; Tamara K. Hareven, Family Time and Industrial Time (Cambridge, 1982). ⁷⁰ Foley, Three Villages, 55. ⁷¹ Keane, Self-Portrait, 54; Ethnic Communities Oral History Project, Caoin na Gael: The Hammersmith Irish Reminiscence Group (London, 2000), 11. ⁷² Interview with Larry McGrattan (b. 1932), MH 2002/263, LM; on the televising of the Coronation, see Becky Conekin, Frank Mort, and Chris Waters, ‘Introduction’, in id. (ed.), Moments of Modernity: Reconstructing Britain, 1945–1964 (London, 1999), 2. ⁷³ Nottingham Irish Studies Group, Making it Home, 25. ⁷⁴ Lynda O’Hare (ed.), Thousands are Sailing: A Collection of Memories ([London], 2000), 1.

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in the 1950s were confounded by the ‘dull’, ‘dead’, and ‘gloomy’ appearance and dissonance between the realities and long-cherished images of the ‘Mother Country’.⁷⁵ An unnamed interviewee in Donnellan’s documentary who came to London from the west coast of Ireland wondered: ‘Where were all the cows? Where were all the tracks leading to?’⁷⁶ For another, England was the ‘saddest and loneliest country’.⁷⁷ These nostalgic visions even extended to the conflation of the weather conditions with the mental state of the newly arrived migrant. For one female office worker, ‘the day we arrived was miserable, it was dreary and raining and foggy, and I suppose we did feel kind of awesome, because we’d left living in the country’. Even the notoriously poor Irish weather somehow now seemed better when feeling homesick and confronted with the monotonous physical environment of industrial Britain. Excitement and the sense of embarking on an adventure also featured prominently in these subsequent reminiscences. Most were young, few had any knowledge of urban life, and some had relatively sheltered upbringings. One young woman from rural Galway who left Ireland at the tender age of 15 to work in London, staying with a relative, recalled her excitement when first taken shopping on the Edgware Road. Having been brought up in an isolated farming community, the metropole was a ‘complete change’.⁷⁸ Keane surveyed the faces on board the ship and distinguished between those who knew what awaited them and the newcomers: ‘There was eagerness written on the younger faces. This would be their first time. Always the first time, despite the loneliness, there is an air of adventure. Not so the second and third times and the times after that.’⁷⁹ In many respects, these initial impressions of Britain were to be expected. It was then the most heavily urbanized country in the Western world and the majority of Irish migrants had negligible experience of city living, with all the opportunities and pitfalls that this new way of life presented.⁸⁰ Social interaction was different: for someone accustomed to the buzz of an inner-city neighbourhood in Dublin or the familiarity of knowing everybody within a small rural community, the unfriendliness of London, for instance, gave the impression of a ‘cold place’.⁸¹ But ⁷⁵ Chamberlain, Narratives of Exile and Return, 76. ⁷⁶ O’Grady, The Irish in Exile, 9. ⁷⁷ Ibid. ⁷⁸ Dunne, An Unconsidered People, 81. ⁷⁹ Keane, Self-Portrait, 36 ⁸⁰ Daunton, ‘Introduction’, in id. (ed.), The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, p. xx. ⁸¹ Lennon, McAdam, and O’Brien, Across the Water, 142.

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the anonymity of the large city had obvious benefits compared with the suffocating environment of insular Ireland; as one migrant aptly put it: ‘if you sneeze in Cork everyone knows about it and that’s Ireland’s second largest city. In Britain you can get on with your life without everyone knowing everything.’⁸² This was by no means a cultural encounter that was unique to the generation who left Ireland in the 1940s and 1950s: a similar readjustment to urban living had been an inevitable part of the process of migration since the 1840s and 1850s. The culture shock that one priest described captures the initial experiences of Irish arrivals who found that ‘everything was so completely different from what they were used to at home’.⁸³ Urbanization, Irish style, took place across national boundaries. Historical longevity, however, did not make this process any easier for successive waves of new arrivals. Initial impressions were diverse, depending on the context of the migration, the outlook of the individual, place of arrival, subsequent journey, and even the weather. Few doubted the differences between Ireland and Britain, and often commented on the ‘strange’ or ‘foreign’ physical environment and the intimidating urban spaces of the large cities. Even relatively simple differences such as the complexity of the transport network, or the hectic pace of life as first witnessed in the rush hour as the migrants made their way after arriving in London in the early morning, were sometimes unsettling introductions to the norms and values of British society. But for the constant stream of arrivals this understandable apprehension about the alien land that they now inhabited could be fused with excitement about the potential opportunities that life in Britain offered, free from the relentless social control that had such a suffocating influence on communities across rural and small-town Ireland.⁸⁴ Urban England offered so much more than the pure life devoid of materialism barely existing in rural Ireland. 3. VISIONS OF RETURN The sense of foreboding that was a completely rational emotion for a new arrival was balanced by a strong conviction that settling in this ⁸² Henrietta O’Connor, ‘Women Abroad: The Life Experiences of Irish Women in Leicester’ (unpub. M. Litt. thesis, Trinity College Dublin, 1993), 105. ⁸³ Dunne, An Unconsidered People, 137. ⁸⁴ See, for example, interview with Tommy Healy, Reg Hall Archive, C903/377/C1, NSABL.

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strange land was a temporary expedient, something to be endured—or perhaps even enjoyed—until conditions improved at home, as it was universally expected they must do in due course. Undoubtedly this lessened the inherent anxiety involved in the unsettling move in the first instance. Prior to departure, when asked if the decision to leave was a permanent one, the response was unequivocal across generations and over time.⁸⁵ For many the actual return proved to be little more than an illusion. Nevertheless, this possibility also shaped the mental images of home that were created over time. For one migrant, when she left she had ‘no intention of staying in England really’, and even after more than forty years ‘a terrible longing to go back to Ireland’ still existed.⁸⁶ A well-known study of the British worker in the mid-twentieth century by the sociologist Ferdynand Zweig recounted the comments of one personnel manager: ‘whenever you talk to an Irishman, the first thing he tells you is that he is going home when he makes enough money’.⁸⁷ This medium- to long-term aspiration had crucial implications for the sense of Irish identity that evolved over time, with few ostensibly expressing a desire to ‘become British’ and most retaining strong if diverse Irish identities, as we shall see in a later chapter. This vision of return also conditioned outlooks towards living in Britain. The sociologist Liam Ryan, who conducted an ethnographic study of over 1,400 Irish migrants in London in the late 1960s, noted that ‘the unwillingness to define emigration as permanent leads to a lack of commitment to British society which is a major factor preventing successful integration and assimilation of Irish immigrants at all social levels’.⁸⁸ This possibility of return was not new, and was a central component of Irish diasporic identity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. And this should not be tritely dismissed as misty-eyed nostalgia, itself succinctly described by the writer Eva Hoffman as an ‘excess of memory’.⁸⁹ The redemptive homecoming loomed large in the social imaginaries of the expatriate Irish, when this term is used to describe, following the philosopher Charles Taylor, ‘the ways in which people ⁸⁵ John A. Jackson, Report on the Skibbereen Social Survey (Dublin, 1967), 39; Lynch (ed.), The Irish in Exile, 18, 24; Schweitzer (ed.), Across the Irish Sea, 152; Lennon, McAdam, and O’Brien, Across the Water, 97. ⁸⁶ Schweitzer (ed.), Across the Irish Sea, 149. ⁸⁷ Ferdynand Zweig, The British Worker (Pelican edn., Harmondsworth, 1952), 50. ⁸⁸ William Ryan, ‘The Assimilation of Irish Immigrants in Britain’ (unpub. Ph.D. thesis, St Louis University, 1973), 89. ⁸⁹ Eva Hoffman, ‘The New Nomads’, in André Aciman (ed.), Letters of Transit: Reflections on Exile, Identity, Language and Loss (New York, 1999), 52.

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imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underline these expectations’.⁹⁰ Individual world-views, social interactions with other Irish migrants and the wider society, and what Matthew Frye Jacobson refers to as the diasporic imagination were shaped by this vision of return. For Jacobson, this imagination is a fusion of ‘both the shared currency of cultural imagery, and the mindset of the individual as he or she navigates the inner geography of international migration’.⁹¹ While his particular focus is on the significance of homeland politics for Irish, Polish, and Jewish immigrants in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, he has perceptively identified how home, be it an imaginary or real form, influenced the outlooks and mindsets of those who had moved to the New World. The most obvious historical parallel is with the Jewish diaspora in Europe and North America, where the return to Israel was preserved as the defining feature of Jewish identity over centuries of exile.⁹² Other migrant groups nurtured similar aspirations to return to the homeland, such as the Poles who had arrived in Britain after the end of the Second World War, many of whom had been forcibly removed from their homes by the Soviet Army and deported to Siberia.⁹³ The widely held perception was that a couple of years in England was a short-term strategy to get a job that offered stability, earn money, undergo training—particularly relevant for student nurses—and then return to Ireland.⁹⁴ Only a minority ever anticipated a much longer sojourn, and usually this was for a specific reason such as the breakdown of a marriage or a pregnancy outside marriage—both sources of shame in post-war Ireland—or strained relationships with family members. One historian, Patrick Joyce, himself the child of Irish parents living ⁹⁰ Charles Taylor, ‘Modern Social Imaginaries’, Public Culture, 14, no. 1 (2002), 106. ⁹¹ Jacobson, Special Sorrows, 7. ⁹² Arnold M. Eisen, Galut: Modern Jewish Reflection on Homelessness and Homecoming (Indiana, 1986). ⁹³ Kathy Burrell, ‘Homeland Memories and the Polish Community in Leicester’, in Peter D. Stachura (ed.), The Poles in Britain, 1940–2000: From Betrayal to Assimilation (London, 2004), 69–84; Sheila Patterson, ‘The Polish Exile Community in Britain’, Polish Review, 6, no. 3 (1961), 69–88. ⁹⁴ Such views were shared by Caribbean and Pakistani migrants who also arrived in the 1950s; see Chamberlain, Narratives of Exile and Return, 74; Muhammed Anwar, The Myth of Return (London, 1979).

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in London in the 1940s and 1950s, perceptively delineates this longing for ‘the possibility of return, and often the possibility of restitution’.⁹⁵ Displaced from the social and mental worlds of rural Ireland, this redemptive vision loomed large in the minds of the Irish in post-war Britain. This was by no means unique to the generation who left post-war Ireland; indeed, the ‘myth’ of return is a common feature of all migrations, Irish or otherwise.⁹⁶ For instance, the Portuguese phrase emigrar para voltar (to emigrate to return) captures the extent to which the eventual return was seen as the ultimate outcome of departing in the first instance.⁹⁷ However, a distinction must be made between the intention of eventually returning and the actual physical act of coming back.⁹⁸ Migration and return were two contrapuntal forces, yet intimately related in the Weltanschauung of those who left. Personal testimonies are replete with references to Ireland as ‘home’, even in some cases after nearly half a century living in Britain; many expressed a desire to ultimately settle back in Ireland at some unspecified date in the future.⁹⁹ For elderly Irish migrants interviewed in the 1980s and 1990s after decades in Britain, this ‘dream’ usually involved moving back to Ireland after retirement.¹⁰⁰ Children of Irish migrants subsequently described this outlook with a degree of incredulity. For instance, Brian Keaney, who was raised in Walthamstow in East London, remarked that even though his parents had lived in England for thirty years, ‘as far as they were concerned they weren’t living in England at all, just visiting’.¹⁰¹ He then goes on to describe a scene that was a familiar one in thousands of Irish households across Britain, where Irish provincial newspapers were avidly read and his parents struggled to listen to the crackly reception of Radio Éireann on a Sunday morning on a special high-powered device which was on ‘really loud . . . because the ⁹⁵ Joyce, ‘More Secondary Modern than Postmodern’, 380. ⁹⁶ See, for an earlier historical period, Mark Wyman, Round-Trip to America: The Immigrants Return to Europe, 1880–1930 (Ithaca, 1993). ⁹⁷ Caroline B. Brettell, ‘Emigrar Para Voltar: A Portuguese Ideology of Return Migration’, Papers in Anthropology, 20, no. 1 (1979), 1–20. ⁹⁸ Ibid. 1. ⁹⁹ Schweitzer (ed.), Across the Irish Sea, 141; Dunne, An Unconsidered People, 43–4, 68–9; 86–7, 147–8; Nottingham Irish Studies Group, Making it Home, 25, 33. ¹⁰⁰ See, for example, Schweitzer (ed.), Across the Irish Sea, 133; Dunne, An Unconsidered People, 147–8. ¹⁰¹ Brian Keaney, Don’t Hang About (Oxford, 1985), 95.

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interference was terrible’.¹⁰² Another woman, who had spent nearly four decades in London before eventually moving back to Ireland, remarked, somewhat unkindly, about the ‘fantasies’ of her compatriots: There are so many Irish people in England who didn’t want to be there. They had to go, for the work. Even though they’d physically gone over on the boat, they still lived in Ireland, in this dream-world of how wonderful it was. And it wasn’t wonderful . . . A lot of them have fantasies about going back home. But when are they going back? They don’t want to give up the money they’re earning, the life they have in London and all the good things that go with it.¹⁰³

The reality of home was never far away for those who sought to maintain personal relationships that transcended the borders of the two nation-states. Unlike famine migrants or the millions of others who left post-Famine Ireland for North America, regular visits back were possible, and indeed the ease of travel between the two countries was one of the principal reasons why Britain was in the first instance chosen over the United States as a destination from the 1930s onwards, as we saw in the previous chapter. Even by the mid–1950s the adventurous minority who opted for the United States, Canada, Australia or New Zealand were unconsciously making a statement about the degree of contact that they wished to maintain with Ireland. Migrants rarely thought of any move as irreversible, and given the short distances involved and relative ease of travel between the two countries, individuals could spend time in Britain, return home for a couple of weeks or months, and then go back across the water for another sojourn, and so on. Individual life stories underscore the extent of continuous movement back and forth across the Irish Sea.¹⁰⁴ While census enumerations invariably yield snapshots at decennial points in time, the migratory behaviour of human beings does not lend itself towards such rigid classification. We have to rely on other sources of information to capture the level of movement back and forth across the Irish Sea until the mid–1960s when the question was first posed in the British census about the ‘former usual residence’ in the previous five years.¹⁰⁵ Both governments collected statistics on net passenger movement and health insurance transfers that also provide a useful guide to the extent of movement. After ¹⁰² Ibid. ¹⁰³ Dunne, An Unconsidered People, 109–10. ¹⁰⁴ See, for instance, Mac Amhlaigh, An Irish Navvy, which details his constant trips home during the initial years of settlement. ¹⁰⁵ B. M. Walsh, Migration to the United Kingdom from Ireland, 1961–66 (Dublin, 1970), 1.

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reviewing the various sources of data, the Commission on Emigration concluded in the mid–1950s that ‘in many cases, the outgoing traveller was not, in any sense, a permanent emigrant and frequently came and went like a seasonal migrant’.¹⁰⁶ From south-east England the reverse journey took less than a day, and was a habitual feature of the annual calendar at least during the early years of settlement in Britain. During the Second World War a visit home every six months was allowed under the official recruitment schemes.¹⁰⁷ Family relationships could often be maintained across the Irish Sea, through letters and visits. Holidays were also taken in Ireland, and one of the complaints of some British employers concerned workers overstaying their periods of leave, especially at Christmas.¹⁰⁸ One migrant recounted how her employer in Manchester coined the term the ‘Irish month’, ‘because we’d go for a month and stop six weeks!’¹⁰⁹ Children born and raised in Britain were often sent to Ireland for the summer holidays from school or even to stay for longer periods, leading to some piquant cultural encounters between those of Irish descent and the worthy inhabitants of the motherland.¹¹⁰ The equivalence of future intentions and actual realities varied considerably. Significant numbers did return in the 1960s and 1970s as the economy expanded and, in a remarkable discontinuity with the past century and a half, for a couple of years in the early 1970s more people came to live in Ireland than followed the traditional migrant pathways.¹¹¹ The sociologist John Jackson estimated in the mid–1960s that roughly one in four of the Irish population had at some stage lived abroad.¹¹² But sometimes the biblical return did not simply live up to ¹⁰⁶ Commission on Emigration, Reports, 128. For the technical issues, see [R. C.] Geary, ‘Statistics of Emigration and Passenger Movement’, Irish Trade Journal and Statistical Bulletin, n. v., June 1951, 83–4; J. G. Hughes, Estimates of Annual Net Migration and their Relationship with Series on Annual Net Passenger Movement: Ireland, 1926–76 (Dublin, 1977), 4–7. ¹⁰⁷ Judges, ‘Irish Labour in Great Britain’, 50. ¹⁰⁸ S.24, Employment and Living Conditions of Irish Workers in Great Britain, prepared by Stanley Lyon, n.d. [Nov. 1948], Marsh Papers, TCD MS 8306; John. A. Jackson, ‘The Irish’, in Ruth Glass (ed.), London: Aspects of Change (London, 1964), 301. ¹⁰⁹ Quoted in Lambert, Irish Women in Lancashire, 42. ¹¹⁰ Ibid. 42–3; see also John Healy, The Grass Arena: An Autobiography (1988), 6–10; Lennon, McAdam, and O’Brien, Across the Water, 221–2. I owe the reference to John Healy’s work to Liam Harte. ¹¹¹ Enda Delaney, Irish Emigration Since 1921 (Dublin, 2002), 6; J. J. Sexton, ‘Emigration and Immigration in the Twentieth Century: An Overview’, in J. R. Hill (ed.), A New History of Ireland, Vol. 7: Ireland, 1921–1984 (Oxford, 2003), 796–7. ¹¹² John A. Jackson, ‘Ireland’, in OECD, Emigrant Workers Returning to the Home Country: Supplement to the Final Report (Paris, 1967), 4.

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expectations nourished over years spent in Britain; for example, one migrant who left in 1949 decided to move back to County Mayo in the 1960s, but was frustrated with the ‘quietness of country life’ and came back to England again after a couple of years.¹¹³ Ethnographic accounts point to the painful realities of initial readjustment to rural and small-town Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s. The slow pace of life, the ‘narrow-minded’ and provincial outlooks of local people, and difficulties in re-establishing former relationships with relatives and friends were cited by returnees as significant problems.¹¹⁴ Others eschewed the prospect of settling back into small communities and opted for Dublin and Cork, where more jobs were available, and urban living was closer to that of the large British cities from which they had returned. Nevertheless, a much larger group, for a variety of reasons, were unable—or unwilling—to return. As the number of years spent abroad increased, marriage, the availability of housing, the purchase of a property, as well as lifestyle and income aspirations, all worked against the realization of the eventual homecoming. The arrival of children signified a watershed in the life course of individuals living in Britain. Once children started school, it was even more difficult to contemplate the prospect of the upheaval involved in returning to Ireland. Raising a family was widely perceived to be a significant determinant in expediting the inevitable process of ‘settling down’, and, as one migrant aptly described, ‘imperceptibly, you put down roots’.¹¹⁵ Putting down roots invariably led to the postponement of the return. The passage of time and the death of relatives as well as the benefits of an extended family living in England militated against taking the plunge and resettling in Ireland. The sense that there was ‘nothing to go back to’ also featured occasionally in reminiscences.¹¹⁶ By the late 1990s, with the profound changes in Irish society brought about by sustained economic growth, some of the elderly migrants interviewed explicitly stated that as the country no longer resembled the imaginary homeland which was cherished over many decades living abroad, they no longer had any wish to live there.¹¹⁷ ¹¹³ Schweitzer (ed.), Across the Irish Sea, 138. ¹¹⁴ These studies are examined in more detail in Delaney, Demography, State and Society, 271–7. ¹¹⁵ Lynch (ed.), The Irish in Exile, 24. ¹¹⁶ Schweitzer (ed.), Across the Irish Sea, 133; see also Dunne, An Unconsidered People, 61, 147–8. ¹¹⁷ This theme emerges clearly in the most recent study based on interviews: see Dunne, An Unconsidered People.

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Whereas significant numbers of nineteenth and early twentiethcentury migrants from Ireland harboured deep resentment towards successive British administrations for their enforced exile in the New World, those who left post-war Ireland thought differently about the circumstances in which they found themselves heading across the Irish Sea. In the first instance, by the mid–1940s the independent Irish state had been in existence for nearly a quarter of a century, so any grievances about the political or economic conditions were more appropriately directed at the revolutionary generation who had secured self-government and dominated the political landscape for the next three decades. Some migrants, both at the time and subsequently in reminiscences, did vent anger at the ruling élite in independent Ireland who were ultimately responsible for the dismal state of the economy, but these feelings were vague and often directed more generally at the society as a whole than at any particular political party or interest group.¹¹⁸ That said, de Valera was predictably sometimes singled out for particular reproach, as the high priest of national self-sufficiency and the most vocal advocate of the virtues of the simple rural life.¹¹⁹ 4. CITIZENS AND ALIENS Restrictions on immigration were introduced across western Europe and North America during the twentieth century as nation states defined who belonged and equally who was to be excluded from the rights conferred by citizenship. In Britain the Aliens Act (1905) was passed, and other pieces of supplementary legislation introduced in the first quarter of the twentieth century sought to control the entry of Eastern European Jews. As we have seen, from the 1920s restrictions were introduced in the United States, primarily directed at arrivals from southern and eastern Europe, perceived to be less ‘desirable’ than their northern European counterparts. Under the Anglo-Irish treaty of 1921 Britain retained the historical tradition of free entry for those travelling from what was its nearest dominion after the foundation of the new Irish state in 1922.¹²⁰ The Irish ¹¹⁸ Foley, Three Villages, 53. ¹¹⁹ See, for example, Dunne, An Unconsidered People, 225–7. ¹²⁰ Eunan O’Halpin, ‘Politics and the State, 1922–1932’, in Hill (ed.), A New History of Ireland, Vol. 7, 105; Elizabeth Meehan, Free Movement between Ireland and the UK: From the ‘Common Travel Area’ to The Common Travel Area (Dublin, 2000), 22–4.

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could enter Britain without the need for a visa or employment permit for most of the period after independence in 1922. The exception was the Second World War and shortly thereafter, when, on the basis of national security, the British authorities imposed strict border controls to restrict movement in and out of the country. Only those deemed to be on ‘business of national importance’ were allowed to enter the country. From June 1940 all arrivals from independent Ireland had to have in their possession a travel identity card, issued by the Irish government, and an employment visa, issued by the British Ministry of Labour through a permit office established in Dublin. The Irish government only issued identity cards to workers who were not regarded as essential to key industries such as turf-cutting or harvesting. Over time an elaborate set of mechanisms evolved, usually on the basis of detailed negotiations between the British and Irish officials, to regulate the movement of workers across the Irish Sea, and these migrants were allocated to particular forms of employment. The operation of this scheme has been extensively documented elsewhere, but its broader significance is that it was in effect an element of official control on the migrant flow from independent Ireland, which hitherto had been unregulated since time immemorial.¹²¹ Irish citizens living in Britain were also required to register with the local police and could be ‘repatriated’ back to Ireland under the Prevention of Violence Act (1939), an ‘emergency’ measure which was passed in response to the IRA bombing campaign in England.¹²² Even with the end of the war in 1945, these controls remained in place for a short period afterwards. From January 1947 employment visas were phased out and Irish citizens were no longer required to work in specific employments. The final stage in the dismantling of border controls was the removal of the need to have a travel identity document from April 1952 onwards. Free movement of individuals was then restored.¹²³ ¹²¹ See Delaney, Demography, State and Society, 116–28; Commission on Emigration, Reports, 268–70; Jackson, The Irish in Britain, 98–105. ¹²² Sean Glynn, ‘Irish Immigration to Britain, 1911–1951: Patterns and Policy’, Irish Economic and Social History, 8 (1981), 68; Paddy Hillyard (Suspect Community: People’s Experience of the Prevention of Terrorism Acts in Britain (London, 1993), 198) notes that during the fifteen years that this Act was in force ‘a total of 268 expulsion and prohibition orders were authorised by the then home secretaries’. For the operation of this Act in relation to one admittedly unique case, see Colin Holmes, ‘The British Government and Brendan Behan, 1941–54: The Persistence of the Prevention of Violence Act’, Saothar, 14 (1989), 125–8. ¹²³ Commission on Emigration, Reports, 268–9; Meehan, Free Movement between Ireland and the UK, 26–7.

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The status, in legal terms, of the Irish in Britain was but one element of the vexed questions of citizenship and nationality that preoccupied Irish politicians in the interwar years and was intrinsically tied up with British–Irish relations until the late 1940s.¹²⁴ Under the terms of the Irish constitution introduced in 1922, a form of common citizenship existed and, in British eyes at least, Irish citizens were still viewed as subjects, much to the chagrin of nationalist politicians.¹²⁵ De Valera’s definition of nationality introduced in the Irish Nationality and Citizenship Act (1935) did not change the legal status of Irish citizens living in Britain since under British law such people were still regarded as ‘subjects’.¹²⁶ Even after independent Ireland formally withdrew from the Commonwealth in April 1949, Irish nationals retained a ‘special’ position in British nationality law and were not viewed as aliens.¹²⁷ Both the British Nationality Act (1948) and the Ireland Act (1949) enshrined a ‘unique set of nationality provisions’ for the Irish that, in short, conferred on them the same rights as British citizens.¹²⁸ One historian, Kathleen Paul, has underlined the racial undertones of these efforts by the Labour government to ‘construct a separate sphere of nationality for Irish people living in Britain because it believed that not to do so endangered the Commonwealth by undermining larger imperial ¹²⁴ Only a brief summary can be offered here; for more details, see Mary E. Daly, ‘Irish Nationality and Citizenship since 1922’, Irish Historical Studies, 32, no. 127 (2001), 377–407. This is an admirably clear account of what is a complicated set of legal issues. For the wider context, see Ronan Fanning, Independent Ireland (Dublin, 1983), 172–180; id. ‘The Response of the London and Belfast Governments to the Declaration of the Republic of Ireland, 1948–49’, International Affairs, 58, no. 1 (1981–2), 95–114; Ian McCabe, A Diplomatic History of Ireland, 1948–49: The Republic, Commonwealth and NATO (Dublin, 1991); J. H. Whyte, ‘Declaration of the Republic and the Ireland Act, 1945–9’, in Hill (ed.), A New History of Ireland, Vol. 7, 261–77. ¹²⁵ Daly, ‘Irish Nationality and Citizenship’, 379. ¹²⁶ Ibid. 387; Kathleen Paul, Whitewashing Britain: Race and Citizenship in the Postwar Era (Ithaca, 1997), 222, n. 9. As Daly points out (‘Irish Nationality and Citizenship’, 385) much of the groundwork for this legislation had been completed by the Cumann na nGaedheal administration before Fianna Fáil came to power in March 1932. ¹²⁷ Daly, ‘Irish Nationality and Citizenship’, 390; R. F. V. Heuston, ‘British Nationality and Irish Citizenship’, International Affairs, 26, no. 1 (1950), 77–90; John Megaw, ‘British Subjects and Eire Citizens’, Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly, 8, no. 3 (1949), 129–39. ¹²⁸ Paul, Whitewashing Britain, 105. See also Randall Hansen, Citizenship and Immigration in Post-War Britain (Oxford, 2000), 45–9; for the broader context of the introduction of this Act, see Randall Hansen, ‘The Politics of Citizenship in 1940s Britain: The British Nationality Act’, Twentieth Century British History, 10, no. 1 (1999), 67–95.

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objectives’.¹²⁹ As she acknowledges, other considerations were equally as important as the imperial dimension, such as the perception that Ireland was a valuable source of much-needed labour, and the realization that it would be extremely difficult to impose border controls, which would among other things alienate the Irish government. A factor which Paul neglects, however, is the issue of Northern Ireland, where questions of nationality and citizenship were intimately related to the constitutional status of the province within the United Kingdom, which was reaffirmed in the Ireland Act of 1949.¹³⁰ It appears that in November 1948 Labour politicians did seriously contemplate amending the British Nationality Act after Costello announced his intention to repeal the External Relations Act (1936), and withdraw from the Commonwealth. These retaliatory measures included the imposition of border controls and treating Irish nationals already residing in Britain as aliens.¹³¹ Such a move would have had serious implications for the nearly threequarters of a million Irish citizens living in Britain at this time. Equally serious, from the point of view of British officials, were the potential outcomes of following through on these threats: the prospect of losing a valuable source of labour, strained relations with other Commonwealth countries with sizeable Irish populations; the practical difficulties in re-establishing border controls; and, most significantly, the potential repercussions for British–Irish relations.¹³² For these controls to work effectively would have required either a tightly monitored frontier at the land border between Northern Ireland and the southern state—which, given the length of the boundary, was almost impracticable—or a similar arrangement to what was in place during the war with Britain treated as an integral unit. Residents of Northern Ireland would be ¹²⁹ Paul, Whitewashing Britain, 90. ¹³⁰ Mary Hickman, ‘Reconstructing Deconstructing ‘‘Race’’: British Political Discourses about the Irish in Britain’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 21, no. 2 (1998), 294–6; for more details on Northern Ireland, see Fanning, ‘The Response of the London and Belfast Governments’. ¹³¹ Daly, ‘Irish Nationality and Citizenship’, 390; D. W. Dean, ‘Final Exit? Britain, Eire, the Commonwealth and the Repeal of the External Relations Act, 1945–1949’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 20, no. 3 (1992), 404–7; Fanning, ‘The Response of the London and Belfast Governments’, 99–102; McCabe, A Diplomatic History of Ireland, 52–6; Paul, Whitewashing Britain, 101–2; Richard Weight, Patriots: National Identity in Britain, 1940–2000 (London, 2002), 142–5. McCabe notes that in the view of Lord Chancellor Jowett the repeal of the External Relations Act would not change the legal status of Irish citizens in Britain because of the provisions of the British Nationality Act, 1948 (p. 53). ¹³² Dean, ‘Final Exit?’, 405–10; Paul, Whitewashing Britain, 105–6.

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subjected to the same controls if the latter option were introduced. Neither was a very attractive prospect, and certainly the establishment of Britain rather than the United Kingdom as the area for control would have incensed the Unionist government in Northern Ireland. Even during the war they deeply resented the restrictions on travel to Britain since it ‘was a little humiliating to have to submit to permit regulations which seemed to isolate the province from the rest of the United Kingdom’.¹³³ After frenzied negotiations a compromise was eventually reached in November 1948, whereby the status quo was maintained and independent Ireland was not viewed in practical terms as a ‘foreign’ state, and its nationals living in Britain were granted the same citizenship rights as their British counterparts.¹³⁴ Under this arrangement the Irish retained what one historian has recently concluded were ‘extraordinary rights of citizenship given to no other foreign country’.¹³⁵ Outside of the rarefied confines of high-level political intrigue, the decision to leave the Commonwealth created uncertainty among the Irish living in Britain. One letter sent to the Taoiseach, John A. Costello, written by a labourer working in England after the bill to declare the Republic of Ireland was introduced in the Dáil in December 1948, in Ronan Fanning’s telling words ‘exposes the gulf separating the world of Irish emigrants in Britain from the world of their erstwhile political leaders’.¹³⁶ I am an Irishman working in England. My foreman is an Englishman, my fellow workers are English. I live with an English family. Since your government announced its proposal to sever the last link with the crown and commonwealth, I have been asked questions by aforementioned persons viz. What are the advantages of such action by your gov’t. All the disadvantages are outlined for me and a very gloomy list it is for us, reporting to the Ploice [sic] station, having to return to Ireland, unemployment, a lower standard of living. Is the last doorway in Mr de Valera’s wall being bricked up. As Sean Ó Faoláin so ably put it in his talk over the radio tonight ‘The only world open to the Irish soon will be the next one.’ Don’t think that we are sending out angels and saints in our Irish boy and girl emigrants. Most of them are backward and unable to fit into the more civilized mode of living here after the more cramped and less free standards prevailing in Ireland.¹³⁷ ¹³³ J. W. Blake, Northern Ireland in the Second World War (Belfast, 1956), 84. ¹³⁴ Daly, ‘Irish Nationality and Citizenship’, 390; McCabe, A Diplomatic History of Ireland, 76–90. ¹³⁵ Weight, Patriots, 147. ¹³⁶ Fanning, Independent Ireland, 191. ¹³⁷ Ibid. Sean Ó Faoláin was a well-known Irish writer and broadcaster who along with other writers such as Liam O’Flaherty and Frank O’Connor ‘expressed a deep

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Skin colour, prejudice, perceptions of racial inferiority, together with post-imperial considerations, shaped responses to the migrants from the ‘New’ Commonwealth in the mid-to-late 1950s, and reduced the political visibility at least of the Irish in post-war Britain.¹³⁸ In the mid–1950s, when the Conservative government led by Anthony Eden was preparing draft legislation to limit colonial immigration, which had become ‘an ominous problem’, it was concluded in November 1956 that the large number of Irish ‘does not give rise to the same kind of problems or forebodings as the presence here of similar numbers of coloured people might be thought to justify’.¹³⁹ An earlier interdepartmental committee had noted, in the previous year, the poor housing conditions of the Irish, but in a much-quoted passage emphasized the degree of homogeneity with the British population: When all this has been said, however, it cannot be held that the same difficulties arise in the case of the Irish as in the case of coloured people. For instance, an Irishman looking for lodgings is, generally speaking, not likely to have any more difficulty than an Englishman, whereas the coloured man is often turned away. In fact, the outstanding difference is that the Irish are not—whether they like it or not—a different race from the ordinary inhabitants of Great Britain, and indeed one of the difficulties in any attempt to estimate the economic and social consequences of the influx from the Republic would be to define who are Irish.¹⁴⁰ disillusionment about the kind of Ireland that independence had inaugurated’ (Brown, Ireland: A Social and Cultural History, 154). ¹³⁸ On the attitudes towards immigration in the 1950s, see D. W. Dean, ‘Conservative Governments and the Restriction of Commonwealth Immigration in the 1950s: The Problems of Constraint’, Historical Journal, 35, no. 1 (1992), 171–94; Hansen, Citizenship and Immigration, chs. 3–4; Paul, Whitewashing Britain, ch. 6; Zig LaytonHenry, The Politics of Immigration: Immigration, ‘Race’ and ‘Race’ Relations in Post-War Britain (Oxford, 1992), ch. 2; Bob Carter, Clive Harris, and Shirley Joshi, ‘The 1951–55 Conservative Government and the Racialization of Black Immigration’, Immigrants and Minorities, 6, no. 3 (1987), 345. ¹³⁹ Colonial Immigrants: Supplementary Report of the Committee of Ministers, 14 Nov. 1956, CAB 129/84 CP (56) 263, PRO. For the wider context of this committee, see Dean, ‘Conservative Governments and the Restriction of Commonwealth Immigration’; Hansen, Citizenship and Immigration, 77; Paul, Whitewashing Britain, 146–7; Ian R. G. Spencer, British Immigration Policy Since 1939: The Making of Multiracial Britain (London, 1997), 85–6. ¹⁴⁰ Report of the Committee on the Social and Economic Problems arising from the Growing Influx into the United Kingdom of Coloured Workers from other Commonwealth Countries, 3 Aug. 1955, CAB 129/77 CP (55) 102, PRO. Also cited by Layton-Henry, The Politics of Immigration, 33; Hickman, ‘Reconstructing Deconstructing ‘‘Race’’ ’, 296–7; Carter, Harris, and Joshi, ‘The 1951–55 Conservative Government’, 345.

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Once excluded from the imagined nation, by the 1950s the Irish were gradually being incorporated ‘whether they like it or not’ into the homogeneous British ‘race’.¹⁴¹ This process of deracialization had much to do with the changing climate relating to colonial immigration. Opinions differed, moreover, and this was not a universally shared view: for instance, the ‘social problems’ associated with the Irish were advanced by the Birmingham Young Conservatives in 1956 as good grounds for imposing controls to the flow from Ireland as well as ‘coloured men’, and this theme also featured in some later comments.¹⁴² The riots in Notting Hill and Nottingham in August 1958 focused the spotlight on the position of Commonwealth migrants, and ‘propelled the issue of black immigration onto the front pages of the newspapers and television, and made it a national rather a series of independent local issues’.¹⁴³ It is often assumed that since the Irish no longer openly featured in these debates about immigration restrictions they were ‘largely accepted’ after the Second World War.¹⁴⁴ However, this interpretation overstates the degree to which politicians and officials viewed the unregulated entry of Irish citizens into Britain as a fait accompli. The matter was more complex than is widely assumed, and even by the early 1960s the issue of whether controls should be applied to Irish citizens coming to Britain was still a matter of debate. In the late 1950s the traditional position that British subjects had the right to free entry to the ‘mother country’ was replaced by a widespread acceptance among the political élite that some form of control should be introduced.¹⁴⁵ Perceptions were all-important, and the Conservative government ‘spent much of its time searching for ways to limit possible damage to its reputation as it discarded unrestricted entry’.¹⁴⁶ In early 1961 officials were developing detailed proposals for the restriction of immigration, and inevitably the issue of the ¹⁴¹ Hickman, ‘Reconstructing Deconstructing ‘‘Race’’ ’, 296–9, describes this process as the ‘construction of a myth of homogeneity’. ¹⁴² Birmingham Young Conservatives, The Problem of Coloured Peoples in Britain, Oct. 1956, copy in DFA 402/218/3, NAI; see also Hickman, ‘Reconstructing Deconstructing ‘‘Race’’ ’, 302, for comments along similar lines during the debates on the Commonwealth Immigrants Bill in February–March 1962. ¹⁴³ Layton-Henry, The Politics of Immigration, 38. ¹⁴⁴ E. J. B. Rose et al., Colour and Citizenship: A Report on British Race Relations (London, 1969), 19. ¹⁴⁵ Hansen, Citizenship and Immigration, 99. ¹⁴⁶ Dennis Dean, ‘The Conservative Government and the 1961 Commonwealth Immigration Act: The Inside Story’, Race and Class, 35, no. 2 (1993), 67.

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position of Irish citizens came up for discussion: the recommendation was that the restrictions should not apply to the Irish.¹⁴⁷ Rab Butler, the Conservative Home Secretary, recognized the potential difficulties in ‘privileging Irish aliens over British subjects’, and it was agreed by the cabinet that the Commonwealth Immigrants Bill would formally include the Irish, although in reality they would not be subject to any control.¹⁴⁸ On the day the bill was published, Harold Macmillan was asked by Hugh Gaitskell if the Irish were to be included and the reply was ‘Yes, certainly’.¹⁴⁹ This was a Jesuitical response, as it soon became apparent that this was merely window dressing and that, in practice, the Irish were to be exempt from any control.¹⁵⁰ Opinion across the political spectrum was vehemently opposed to this aspect of the bill. National newspapers, including The Times, strongly objected to the exemption of Irish citizens.¹⁵¹ A pressing concern for ministers was the possibility that a backbench revolt combined with Labour opposition would defeat the bill.¹⁵² For Labour this was conclusive proof that the aim was to impose a ‘colour bar’ on entry to Britain, a position that is echoed subsequently in the judgements of a number of historians.¹⁵³ One Labour MP noted that this underlined the racist intent of the bill. Mr Butler is saying that control is not to be applied to the Irish unless there is an absolute necessity, and that necessity will not arise as long as Irish immigrants continue to be white. But if enough people come in through Irish ports and Irish immigrants begin to be black, then the absolute necessity arises.¹⁵⁴

Conservative backbenchers, on the other hand, resented the privilege given to the ‘disloyal Irish’, who had remained neutral in the Second World War, whereas British subjects from ‘old’ Dominions were to ¹⁴⁷ Hansen, Citizenship and Immigration, 104; Paul, Whitewashing Britain, 108. ¹⁴⁸ Paul, Whitewashing Britain, 108–9. ¹⁴⁹ Quoted by Paul Foot, Immigration and Race in British Politics (Harmondsworth, 1965), 139. ¹⁵⁰ For a detailed discussion of the frenzied diplomatic discussions between Irish and British officials, see Meehan, Free Movement between Ireland and the UK, 84–93. ¹⁵¹ Sheila Patterson, Immigration and Race Relations in Britain, 1960–1967 (London, 1969), 19. ¹⁵² Dean, ‘The Conservative Government and the 1961 Immigration Act’, 69. ¹⁵³ Paul, Whitewashing Britain, 108–10; Bob Carter, Marci Green, and Rick Halpern, ‘Immigration Policy and the Racialization of Migrant Labour: The Construction of National Identities in the USA and Britain’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 19, no. 1 (1996), 149–51; Spencer, British Immigration Policy, 153–4. ¹⁵⁴ The Times, 6 Dec. 1961, quoted in Carter, Green, and Halpern, ‘Immigration Policy and the Racialization of Migrant Labour’, 151.

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be formally subject to restriction. As Randall Hansen has perceptively observed, ‘to the extent that the Conservatives longed for a racist exclusion, it was Canadians, Australians, and New Zealanders whom they wished to see exempted’.¹⁵⁵ John Biggs-Davison, a backbencher, organized opposition to the exclusion of the Irish from the legislation, and another prominent party official, Sir Douglas Glover, chairman of the Central Union of Conservative and Unionist Associations, declared in a speech in Bradford that ‘we have got to incorporate the Irish into this bill’.¹⁵⁶ Even Duncan Sandys, the Commonwealth Relations Secretary, acknowledged that he was ‘unhappy’ about the Irish being seen to have privileges that were denied to Commonwealth citizens.¹⁵⁷ It became readily apparent to ministers and officials that a significant number of backbenchers would vote against the bill on its third reading.¹⁵⁸ Eventually a compromise was agreed whereby Irish citizens who were convicted of an offence would be deported back to Ireland under the legislation, and the government undertook to examine the numbers of Irish people arriving in Britain.¹⁵⁹ By mollifying the backbench opposition led by Biggs-Davison, through minor amendments to the original bill, the government secured enough support for the legislation to be eventually passed in March 1962. According to Randall Hansen, ‘had it not been for this compromise, the government almost certainly would have been defeated’.¹⁶⁰ The ostensible justification for not applying controls in practice to Irish citizens was the impossibility of controlling the land border between independent Ireland and Northern Ireland, and the potential difficulties in regulating the numerous sea crossings to Britain, reflecting earlier views that were expressed in the late 1940s in the debates surrounding Ireland’s exit from the Commonwealth. An earlier agreement by the cabinet that it ‘might be justified by reference to the ‘‘special historical ¹⁵⁵ Hansen, Citizenship and Immigration, 118. This effectively occurred under the Immigration Act (1971), whose partiality provisions privileged Australians, Canadians, and New Zealanders (ibid. 195). ¹⁵⁶ Hansen, Citizenship and Immigration, 114; Foot, Immigration and Race, 140. Biggs-Davison was a rare bird: a devout Catholic who was a strong Ulster Unionist (Patrick Cosgrave, ‘Davison, Sir John Alec Biggs- (1918–1988)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004) [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/70374, accessed 4 April 2006]). ¹⁵⁷ Dean, ‘The Conservative Government and the 1961 Immigration Act’, 69; Paul, Whitewashing Britain, 108. ¹⁵⁸ Dean, ‘The Conservative Government and the 1961 Immigration Act’, 69. ¹⁵⁹ Foot, Immigration and Race, 140; Hansen, Citizenship and Immigration, 117. ¹⁶⁰ Hansen, Citizenship and Immigration, 117.

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and geographical relationship’’ between Ireland and Britain’ was not mentioned in parliament.¹⁶¹ What emerged in the debate was the view that if controls were to be effective, Northern Ireland and independent Ireland would have to be treated as a unit—as was the case during the war—and this would be vehemently opposed by the Unionist government in Northern Ireland, since it undermined the integration of the United Kingdom. In the House of Commons in November 1961, Butler referred to discussions with Lord Brookeborough, the prime minister of Northern Ireland, during which it became clear that ‘any proposal to restrict freedom of travel between Northern Ireland which is an integral part of the United Kingdom, and the rest of the country would be unacceptable to the Northern Ireland government’.¹⁶² As Mary Hickman points out, this complicating factor is rarely mentioned in analyses of the Commonwealth Immigrants Act that see the exclusion of the Irish as hard evidence of the racist intent of the legislation.¹⁶³ Undoubtedly an unstated preference for white migrants influenced the content of the controls introduced in 1962; nevertheless, the wider political context also determined which groups were to be restricted in practice. An additional element that is also neglected, although it featured in the discussions at the time, is that both countries were at this time applying for entry to the European Economic Community, which provided for the free movement of labour between member states.¹⁶⁴ From the early days the Irish government was assured that Britain would continue to be freely accessible to Irish citizens who wanted to leave the country. Both the government in Dublin and more particularly officials at the Irish Embassy in London were closely monitoring the developing situation. When it became clear from early 1961 that the intention was to introduce legislation, the question of whether this would apply to the Irish was raised in both the British and Irish press.¹⁶⁵ There was the admittedly unlikely prospect of nearly three-quarters of a million people having to seek retrospectively employment vouchers ¹⁶¹ Paul, Whitewashing Britain, 109–10; Hickman, ‘Reconstructing Deconstructing ‘‘Race’’ ’, 300. ¹⁶² Quoted in Hickman, ‘Reconstructing Deconstructing ‘‘Race’’ ’, 300–1; see also Hansen, Citizenship and Immigration, 117, on this point. ¹⁶³ Hickman, ‘Reconstructing Deconstructing ‘‘Race’’ ’, 301–2. ¹⁶⁴ Patterson, Immigration and Race Relations, 19; Dean, ‘The Conservative Government and the 1961 Immigration Act’, 73; Meehan, Free Movement between Ireland and the UK, 37. ¹⁶⁵ e.g. Sunday Times, 5 Feb. 1961.

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to continue living in Britain. Few anticipated such a nightmarish scenario. More pressing, however, were the large numbers entering Britain every year at the time of the passing of the Act who might in the future be subject to control: British sources indicated that over 70,000 Irish people arrived in 1960 alone.¹⁶⁶ Informally Irish officials sought clarification from their British counterparts as to the eventual form that the legislation would take, and the government was naturally relieved to learn as early as February 1961 that a ‘certain amount of administrative ‘‘winking’’ would have to go on and that emigration from Ireland to Great Britain was unlikely to be radically altered’.¹⁶⁷ As we noted, such ‘winking’ fooled few people when the bill was first introduced in parliament. Prior to the publication of the original bill, an embassy official, Valentin Iremonger, enquired informally of his counterpart in the Commonwealth Relations Office what form the restriction might take, and was told that the proposals should cause the Irish authorities ‘neither alarm or despondency’ and that Ireland’s interests ‘would be very well catered for’.¹⁶⁸ By the second reading of the bill in November 1961, the Minister for External Affairs, Frank Aiken, could confidently state in response to questions in the Dáil that the ‘present freedom of movement between the two countries is to their mutual advantage and I hope that the consultations taking place will lead to its being maintained’.¹⁶⁹ By the end of November, Séan Lemass, the Taoiseach, issued a statement in response to newspaper requests for a comment on the proposed legislation. Apart from the usual banal claims about the aim of the government being the reduction of emigration, he also stressed the ‘mutual benefits’ of the existing arrangements, and noted that any moves to introduce controls would be a ‘retrograde step’.¹⁷⁰ He also pointed to the co-operation between the two countries on the control of aliens, an element that was an important consideration for British officials since, for the ‘common travel area’ to work effectively, the Irish authorities needed to be as rigorous as ¹⁶⁶ Seventh Report of the Overseas Migration Board, 1961–62, Cmd. 1586, XVIII, 767, 12. ¹⁶⁷ Cremin to Secretary, Department of the Taoiseach, 13 Feb. 1961, DT S 13476 D/61, NAI. ¹⁶⁸ Valentin Iremonger (London) to Secretary, Department of External Affairs, 30 Sept. 1961, DT S 97/6/310, NAI. ¹⁶⁹ Dáil Éireann deb, 192 (15 Nov. 1961), 173. ¹⁷⁰ Statement by the Taoiseach, Séan Lemass, on the proposed British legislation on Immigration, 21 Nov. 1961, DT S 97/6/310, NAI.

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their British counterparts, an understanding that was privately agreed in discussions between officials.¹⁷¹ The Commonwealth Immigrants Act, 1962, was a landmark in the history of British immigration policy since for the first time it introduced ‘a formal difference between those subjects born in, or otherwise belonging to, the United Kingdom and those of the Commonwealth and colonies’.¹⁷² The employment voucher that was required for entry from July 1962 onwards was the first element of control; subsequent legislation introduced in 1968 and brought together under the Immigration Act (1971) sought to restrict even further who was free to enter the country.¹⁷³ Within a decade Britain had moved from the traditional position of free entry for Commonwealth subjects to an increasingly restrictive policy. From the late 1950s public opinion was strongly in favour of control and Macmillan’s Conservative government moved somewhat reluctantly to implement proposals in the context of increasing disquiet about the consequences of large-scale immigration, most of which had been discussed with a greater or lesser degree of urgency since the mid–1950s. The practical exclusion of Irish citizens was not universally accepted, and indeed it was one of the most contentious aspects of the legislation. Few policymakers doubted the need for some control of immigration, but the decisions about which groups were to be restricted provoked accusations that it was a racist piece of legislation.¹⁷⁴ Without doubt, the perceived cultural homogeneity influenced the decision not to apply controls to the significant numbers arriving from Ireland each year. Equally, there were the obvious difficulties with enforcing such restrictions, given the porous border with Northern Ireland. The government of Northern Ireland would have vigorously resisted any controls that were applied on entry to mainland Britain, since this raised fundamental questions about the integration of the province within the United Kingdom. The Irish were less visible than Commonwealth migrants, and this influenced public opinion that was at best ambiguous about the position of all white arrivals, from Ireland ¹⁷¹ Hansen, Citizenship and Immigration, 114, n. 56. Hansen bases this observation on an interview with an unnamed Home Office official. This was a long-standing concern for British officials, as it was perceived that Ireland could be a ‘back door’ for migrants to the United Kingdom. Elizabeth Meehan’s research on Irish official records confirms this: see Meehan, Free Movement between Ireland and the UK, 30–6. ¹⁷² Hansen, Citizenship and Immigration, 123. ¹⁷³ Ann Dummett and Andrew Nichol, Subjects, Citizens, Aliens and Others: Nationality and Immigration Law (London, 1990), 183–7, 202–3, 216–23. ¹⁷⁴ Patterson, Immigration and Race Relations, 19.

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or from the ‘old’ dominions of Australia, New Zealand, and Canada.¹⁷⁵ Last but not least, such a restriction would have abolished the ‘common travel area’, and indubitably incurred the wrath of the Lemass government, which was less concerned with issues of national sovereignty and showing signs of a willingness to have a better working relationship with the old enemy. It would also have undermined the application of both countries to join the European Economic Community since the free movement of labour was a sine qua non of membership. The end result, in terms of how the legislation actually operated, certainly discriminated unduly against Caribbean and South Asian Commonwealth citizens. This admittedly long list of related considerations faced the Macmillan government in the early 1960s: to present the exclusion of the Irish as simply a matter of skin colour lacks subtlety. Needless to say, the inner workings of the politics of citizenship were of little interest to the majority of the Irish in post-war Britain. Citizenship, however, was more than just an abstruse legal concept, as, according to T. H. Marshall in his famous study published in 1950, it conferred rights in three key areas: civil rights, political rights, and social rights, including access to welfare and education.¹⁷⁶ Coming from a society where the concept of citizenship was weakly developed, being a citizen rather than classified as an ‘alien’ allowed the Irish to enter the country freely, come and go as they wished, vote in parliamentary elections, and have the same welfare and social security benefits as other citizens. As was noted in the late 1960s, few people objected to the extension of these rights to the Irish in post-war Britain.¹⁷⁷ The Irish were ‘neither subjects nor aliens’, but in that uncertain middle ground, where they most certainly were not ‘foreigners’, yet still could not be classified as British subjects.¹⁷⁸ This ambiguity in legal terms was also reflected in the migrant world-view. One newspaper in the early 1960s described Irish migrants in Britain as the ‘the Irish middle nation’, citizens of independent Ireland but living a life that traversed mentally and physically the Irish Sea.¹⁷⁹ In the aftermath of Enoch Powell’s notorious ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in April 1968, the writer John Walsh recalls his father’s indignation at Powell’s apparent suggestion that the ¹⁷⁵ Spencer, British Immigration Policy, 153. ¹⁷⁶ T. H. Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class (Cambridge, 1950), quoted in Rose et al., Colour and Citizenship, 27. ¹⁷⁷ Rose et al., Colour and Citizenship, 19. ¹⁷⁸ This phrase is taken from Paul, Whitewashing Britain, 91. ¹⁷⁹ Irish Press, 18 June 1960, quoted in Jackson, The Irish in Britain, 159.

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Irish be ‘repatriated’ along with other arrivals.¹⁸⁰ His father finds the description of the Irish as ‘immigrants’ insulting, yet his life in London was only ‘a temporary, contingent thing’.¹⁸¹ For one well-informed observer, Dónall Mac Amhlaigh, a curious feature of this outlook was that the Irish did not view themselves as ‘foreigners’ and deeply resented that label, which was often applied indiscriminately to all eastern Europeans, generically lumped together in the popular imagination as ‘Poles’.¹⁸² But, as Mac Amhlaigh perceptively observes, this sat rather uneasily with the more truculent expressions of Irish nationalism. All but the more politically aware of the Irish I knew resented being called foreigners and they did not thank you when you pointed out to them since they came from an independent republic . . . they must surely be foreign—they could hardly hope to have it both ways . . . We seemed to me to be wanting to have our cake and eat it, to be better accepted by the British than any other immigrant group while at the same time making it clear that we were different, and being very slow to forget the wrongs done to us in the past.¹⁸³

5 . ‘ I ’ M WA L K I N G B AC K WA R D S F O R C H R I S T M A S ( AC RO S S T H E I R I S H S E A ) ’ In a well-known speech, an energetic young Irish minister, Donogh O’Malley, speaking in London on a St Patrick’s Day visit in 1966, urged the Irish in Britain to be less concerned about matters in Ireland, and adumbrated the case for greater integration within British society: Any element of maudlin sentimentality about the ‘old country’ should be rejected; rather, the Irish in Britain should seek to play their full part in the political and social life of this island. I do not think that, at present, they exert an influence commensurate with their numbers. I suspect that this is partly due to a fear of betraying their Irish heritage. But today, we in these islands, are moving with the tide of history towards European citizenship . . . I look forward to the day when the Irish and their descendants will have forged a ¹⁸⁰ I have been unable to find evidence of Powell having made such a comment in his various speeches and this may well have been an urban myth. ¹⁸¹ This example is cited by Liam Harte, ‘ ‘‘Somewhere Beyond England and Ireland’: Narratives of ‘‘Home’’ in Second-Generation Irish Autobiography’, Irish Studies Review, 11, no. 3 (2003), 301. ¹⁸² Dónall Mac Amhlaigh, ‘Documenting the Fifties’, Irish Studies in Britain, 15 (1989), 12. ¹⁸³ Ibid.

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satisfactory role for themselves in British society; when they are eager to go forth and serve the country of their adoption.¹⁸⁴

After decades of Irish politicians encouraging people not to emigrate in the first instance, and then reminding them at every opportunity that their true spiritual home was Ireland, this was a remarkable exhortation for the Irish in post-war Britain to ‘go forth and serve the country of their adoption’.¹⁸⁵ O’Malley was a different breed of Irish politician, representative of a new generation who were not veterans of the Irish revolution, less concerned with the past, and more preoccupied with shaping a prosperous ‘modern’ Ireland. He was mapping out a different future where sentimental attachments to the imaginary homeland could be maintained, but the primary focus should be on making inroads into the political and social fabric of British society. O’Malley also commented on the extent to which the Irish were part of two societies, yet never firmly located in either one as it was impossible to be ‘true citizens of Britain and Ireland simultaneously’.¹⁸⁶ For one journalist, Kevin O’Connor, his speech was finely timed since by the mid–1960s the Irish in Britain had ‘become assured and settled’.¹⁸⁷ Many had been living there for nearly two decades and ‘reluctantly they were beginning to realize that for most of them there would be ‘‘no going home next year’’; that they were here to stay’.¹⁸⁸ The view that the Irish were an element of British society, yet still somehow on the margins, was an all-pervasive one. This ‘strange land’ with its unfamiliar physical landscape would never be ‘home’, and even after decades living in Britain the vision of return and ultimate redemption was still a defining feature of the social imaginary. In 1956 Spike Milligan, with his usual wit, captured this ambiguity in his famous song from the Goon Show: ‘I’m walking backwards for Christmas (across the Irish Sea)’.¹⁸⁹ While proximity had the obvious advantage of being able to travel between the two countries at regular intervals and maintain family and personal relationships with those still in Ireland, it also served ¹⁸⁴ Copy of address by Donogh O’Malley, Minister for Health, to the National University of Ireland Club, Grosvenor House, London, on St Patrick’s Day, 1966, DT S 96/6/437, NAI. ¹⁸⁵ Ibid. ¹⁸⁶ Ibid. ¹⁸⁷ O’Connor, The Irish in Britain, 99. ¹⁸⁸ Ibid. 99–100. ¹⁸⁹ Ibid. 161. This song reached the top of the British charts in the summer of 1956. Milligan was well placed to observe the Irish migrant mindset as his father was Irish, he was raised in India, moved to London, and eventually took out Irish citizenship in the early 1960s.

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to sustain the illusion of occupying a ‘half-way house’, between two cultures, with a ‘foot in both camps—with obligations to each’.¹⁹⁰ This proximity, however, strengthened rather than weakened Irish identities in Britain and added an element of continuous replenishment to cultural identities. As John Jackson noted in the early 1960s, ambivalence was a key feature of Irish migrant identity: For citizens of the British Isles and others whose migrations are local in character it is less easy to face the consequences of the personal upheaval. Proximity provides a convenient excuse and escape which allows the ambiguity to be sustained and fostered. The duality is expressed in the yearning to return home when away and the restlessness and readiness to be off again which may characterize the time that is spent at home.¹⁹¹

As the years passed the return home was a remote prospect for many migrants as they settled down to life in Britain, yet it still featured prominently in the diasporic imagination. ¹⁹⁰ Ryan, ‘Assimilation of Irish Immigrants’, 58; Jackson, ‘The Irish’, 306. ¹⁹¹ Jackson, The Irish in Britain, 161.

3 People and Places Where the Irish settled and who they shared these spaces with had been concerns of social investigators and other commentators since the early nineteenth century. Contemporaries outlined the potentially dire consequences for Victorian towns and cities of the growth of Irish ‘ghettos’, anticipating similar sentiments about virtually every other migrant group who arrived in significant numbers subsequently. Up to the last quarter of the nineteenth century the Irish were the largest and most visible presence. By the late 1950s, however, they were but one of many newcomers and less readily identifiable than other arrivals from the Commonwealth. Echoes of the past coexisted with new irrational fears as the ‘coloured’ quarter was now the source of foreboding and suspicion. From the mid-1830s contemporary accounts of the poor Irish who settled in the rapidly expanding industrial centres of Liverpool, Manchester, and Glasgow drew public attention to the horrendous conditions in which the Hibernian newcomers lived in urban slums. The talk was of ‘little Irelands’, synonymous with poverty, filth, and squalor, and this fuelled pre-existing stereotypes and prejudices about the innate racial inferiority of the ‘miserable’ Irish.¹ Middle-class nineteenth-century observers who documented the social problems of Victorian working-class life expressed similar sentiments as the ‘Condition of England’ was debated.² The Irish who arrived in the 1830s and 1840s were identified as one of the ‘main causes of the urban crisis in early Victorian Britain’.³ For ¹ Graham Davis, The Irish in Britain, 1815–1914 (Dublin, 1991), 51–82; David Fitzpatrick, ‘ ‘‘A Peculiar Tramping People’’: The Irish in Britain, 1801–70’, in W. E. Vaughan (ed.), A New History of Ireland, Vol. 5: Ireland Under the Union, I (1801–70) (Oxford, 1989), 633–6; Donald M. MacRaild, Irish Migrants in Modern Britain, 1750–1922 (Basingstoke, 1999), 51–7. ² Donald M. MacRaild, ‘Irish Immigration and the ‘‘Condition of England’’ Question: The Roots of an Historiographical Tradition’, Immigrants and Minorities, 14, no. 1 (1995), 67–85. ³ David Feldman, ‘Migrants, Immigrants and Welfare from the Old Poor Law to the Welfare State’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 13 (2003), 95.

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Friedrich Engels, who graphically described Manchester’s ‘Little Ireland’ in 1845, the wandering Celt was a degrading influence on native workers: The worst quarters of all the large towns are inhabited by Irishmen. Whenever a district is distinguished for especial filth and especial ruinousness, the explorer may safely count on meeting chiefly those Celtic faces which one recognizes at the first glance as different from the Saxon physiognomy of the native, and the singing, aspirate brogue which the true Irishman never loses . . . In short, the Irish have, as Dr Kay says, discovered the minimum of the necessities of life, and are now making the English workers acquainted with it.⁴

The principal fear was the possibility of moral contagion as the ‘wild Milesian Irish’, to quote Thomas Carlyle’s famous description from 1839, would be a pernicious influence and encourage indolence within the indigenous poor, a pressing concern after the introduction of the new English poor law system in 1834.⁵ The fact that these arrivals tended to settle, in the first instance at least, in close proximity to their fellow-compatriots conjured up threatening images of Irish ‘ghettos’ in the minds of hostile observers in the 1830s and 1840s. The Morning Chronicle remarked in 1849, when the famine refugees were arriving in huge numbers, that ‘the Irish invariably herd together’.⁶ The assertion that the Irish were hermetically sealed from the other residents of working-class districts of British cities and towns is now widely acknowledged by historians to be erroneous, a product of fertile Victorian imaginations and deeply engrained stereotypes. Undoubtedly within particular areas of cities and large towns clusters of Irish migrants developed, but this reflected the economic opportunities available to these unskilled and impoverished manual workers. As David Fitzpatrick has cogently argued, ‘though Irish ghettos developed virtually nowhere in Britain, the settlers were clustered in the most congested and decaying districts of most British towns, among which they moved ⁴ Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, ed. David McLellan (Oxford, 1993), 102. Sir J. P. Kay-Shuttleworth was a social reformer who was secretary to the Manchester Board of Health, and had published an earlier pamphlet on The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes Employed in Cotton Manufacture in Manchester (London, 1832); for further details, see Mary Hickman, ‘Alternative Historiographies of the Irish in Britain: A Critique of the Segregation/Assimilation Model’, in Roger Swift and Sheridan Gilley (eds.), The Irish in Victorian Britain: The Local Dimension (Dublin, 1999), 245–6. ⁵ MacRaild, ‘Irish Immigration and the ‘‘Condition of England’’ Question’, 72. ⁶ Quoted in Fitzpatrick, ‘ ‘‘A Peculiar Tramping People’’ ’, 634. For a selection of contemporary responses, see Roger Swift (ed.), Irish Migrants in Britain, 1815–1914 (Cork, 2002), 35–46.

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with startlingly rapidity from one insalubrious lodging to another’.⁷ By the turn of the twentieth century these so-called ‘Irish’ quarters were in terminal decline as the numbers arriving from Ireland decreased from the 1870s onwards. The more established settlers were dispersed within urban centres. When Engels republished his book in 1892, he concluded in the preface that the ‘Little Ireland’ in Manchester, which he had so graphically described in 1845, no longer existed.⁸ A century or more later such views were uncommon, since the gaze of policymakers and the wider public was now directed at the more visible alien presence, but this was a long-drawn-out process as ‘old prejudices die hard’.⁹ But even by the mid-1930s, liberal-minded writers such as J. B. Priestley could still describe the poor Irish in Liverpool in racial terms: The Irishman in Ireland may, as we are so often assured he is, be the best fellow in the world, only waiting to say good-bye to the hateful Empire so that, free and independent at last, he can astonish the world. But the Irishman in England too often cuts a very miserable figure . . . But the English of this class generally make some attempt to live as decently as they can under these conditions; their existence has been turned into an obstacle race, with the most monstrous and gigantic obstacles, but you may see them straining and panting, still in the race. From such glimpses that I have had, however, the Irish appear in general never even to have tried; they have settled in the nearest poor quarter and turned it into a slum or, finding a slum, have promptly settled to out-slum it.¹⁰

By the mid-twentieth century the numbers arriving reinvigorated existing centres of Irish settlement in many large British cities, the most obvious example being London. 1 . M E T RO P O L I S The Irish who arrived in London after the Second World War were by no means pioneers as the ‘London Irish’ had been a feature of ⁷ David Fitzpatrick, ‘The Irish in Britain, 1871–1921’, in W. E. Vaughan (ed.), A New History of Ireland, Vol. 6: Ireland Under the Union, II (1870–1921) (Oxford, 1996), 653. ⁸ Ibid. 656–7; Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, 315. ⁹ M. A. G. Ó Tuathaigh, ‘The Irish in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Problems of Integration’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 31 (1981), 173. ¹⁰ J. B. Priestley, An English Journey (Harmondsworth, 1977), 235–6, quoted in Steven Fielding, Class and Ethnicity: Irish Catholics in England, 1880–1939 (Buckingham, 1993), 131–2. On Priestley, see Chris Waters, ‘J. B. Priestley, 1894–1984: Englishness and the Politics of Nostalgia’, in Susan Pedersen and Peter Mandler (eds.), After the Victorians: Private Conscience and Public Duty in Modern Britain (London, 1996), 208–26.

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the metropolitan landscape for as long as records exist.¹¹ As the city expanded and changed throughout the nineteenth century so too did the social geography of the London Irish as older communities were displaced in the 1860s and 1870s by commercial development in the inner zones, and the Irish moved to Hammersmith, Islington, and other outlying districts.¹² Whereas much of the older historical writing tended to dwell on the enduring image of the nineteenth-century poor Irish in London, more recent work has underscored the multi-layered social profile of waves of migrants who arrived in the city. For middle-class professionals seeking to improve career prospects, London was the place to go. Opportunities for advancement and preferment far exceeded those available in Dublin or provincial Ireland. Journalists, politicians, lawyers, doctors, writers, and artists flocked to London in large numbers from at least the eighteenth century and entered into metropolitan life with some gusto. Roy Foster has described these late nineteenth-century ‘aspiring careerists’ as ‘Micks on the make’.¹³ The constant stream of arrivals from ‘across the water’ since the mid-1930s meant that London’s Irish population nearly doubled in twenty years. In 1951, with a total of 111,671 people in the administrative county of London, the Irish were the largest single group of people born in any foreign or Commonwealth country, in Scotland or Wales, or in any other county in England and Wales, with the obvious exception of London itself.¹⁴ If the outlying suburbs are included, this figure doubles. Roughly a third of the Irish-born population in England and Wales in the mid-twentieth century lived in Greater London, with areas such as Willesden in Middlesex and expanding industrial centres such as Luton, Dagenham, and Slough all containing significant numbers of Irish.¹⁵ Within the city boundaries the 1931 ¹¹ John A. Jackson, ‘The Irish’, in Ruth Glass (ed.), London: Aspects of Change (London, 1964), 293; Patrick Fitzgerald, ‘ ‘‘Like Crickets to the Crevice of a BrewHouse’’: Poor Irish Migrants in England, 1560–1640’, in Patrick O’Sullivan (ed.), Patterns of Migration (London, 1992), 13–35; Lynn Hollen Lees, Exiles of Erin: Irish Migrants in Victorian London (Manchester, 1979), 55–6. ¹² For a detailed discussion, see Lees, Exiles of Erin, 55–87. ¹³ Craig A. Bailey, ‘Metropole and Colony: Irish Networks and Patronage in the Eighteenth-Century Empire’, Immigrants and Minorities, 23 (2005), 161–81; Roy Foster, ‘Marginal Men and Micks on the Make: The Uses of Irish Exile, c.1840–1922’, in Paddy and Mr Punch (London, 1995), 281–305, quotation from 282. ¹⁴ Jackson, ‘The Irish’, 296. ¹⁵ Ibid. 302. On the development of suburban London in the first half of the twentieth century, see Jerry White, London in the Twentieth Century: A City and its People (London, 2001), 24–45.

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census recorded heavy concentrations of Irish in boroughs such as Westminster, Kensington, Chelsea, and Marylebone.¹⁶ By the 1950s the Irish accounted for just under 10 per cent of the population of the borough of Paddington, with smaller numbers in St Pancras, Westminster, Chelsea, Hammersmith, Hampstead, Holborn, Marylebone, and Kensington.¹⁷ Two decades later, by the early 1970s nearly half of the London Irish lived in seven boroughs: Camden, Kensington and Chelsea, Westminster, Islington, Hammersmith, Ealing, and Brent, which was a well-known stronghold.¹⁸ In ‘inner’ London, John Jackson observed the final stages of a shift in terms of historic settlement patterns from the nineteenth century centred on the East End to the West End. Hammersmith, Kensington, and Paddington became increasingly popular areas for Irish arrivals by the early 1950s. In large part, this reflected immediate needs and opportunities as ‘the new transitional areas of decayed Victorian terraced houses, unpainted, sub-divided and uncared for, provide cheap rooms and lodging for immigrant communities composed predominantly of single men and women’.¹⁹ One psychologist undertaking a study of personality types in a poor district close to Paddington railway station in the late 1940s—dubbed ‘one of the worst slums in London’—could not conceal her middle-class sensibilities when she described the living conditions of this area which was dominated by the displaced sons and daughters of Erin: The slum group selected is living in an area known to social workers and the police as one of the worst slums in London . . . All about the streets are children—whether it is a school day or a holiday there always seems to be children playing in the road or going to and fro with shopping baskets and ration books. Women and a few men stand in doorways or sit on the house steps; and everywhere there are dogs . . . The district is notorious in London for vice and delinquency; it is a major prostitution area and is considered by the Probation Service the blackest spot in the city for juvenile delinquency. A large proportion of the inhabitants are Irish; social workers say: ‘The Irish land here, and while the respectable soon move away, the ignorant and shiftless stay’ . . . The most noticeable characteristic of the house is the strong and unpleasant smell, indeed ¹⁶ Census of England and Wales, 1931: General Report (London, 1950), 171. ¹⁷ John Archer Jackson, The Irish in Britain (London, 1963), 18. ¹⁸ Colin Holmes, John Bull’s Island: Immigration and British Society, 1871–1971 (Basingstoke, 1988), 216. ¹⁹ Jackson, The Irish in Britain, 8. The data can be found in Census of England and Wales, 1951: General Report (London, 1958), 105.

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on a first visit the middle-class stomach may find it impossible to stay longer than five minutes.²⁰

From the 1950s the more established migrants tended to move away from central districts, and some of the new arrivals went to the expanding industrial areas of Dagenham, Staines, and West Drayton.²¹ This was in large part determined by the location of employment: for instance, in the 1940s the Ford motor plant in Dagenham recruited employees for heavy foundry work directly from Ireland.²² Many lived either in or near the West End, especially in hotels of various sizes and kinds. In the late 1950s one estimate produced by Catholic clergy suggested that over 15,000 Irish migrants, the majority female, worked in the hotels, clubs, and cafés of the West End. In one large hotel, the Cumberland, with 2,700 staff, over 90 per cent of the workers were Irish.²³ Over a quarter of all economically active Irish females by the mid-twentieth century were ‘persons engaged in personal service’, mostly domestic servants, cleaners, and waitresses.²⁴ One contemporary reported staying at a London hotel in 1950 where the staff included nearly two hundred young Irish women.²⁵ Hotel and catering work was a relatively easy entry to the labour market in London, since few skills were required and jobs could often be found simply by word of mouth through family and friends. Another source of employment were hospitals, and, as Jackson remarks, by the early 1960s the omnipresent Irish nurse had ‘become so much a characteristic feature of the London hospital service that they are taken for granted and not thought of as immigrant labour’.²⁶ By the early 1960s Irish women were viewed as so deeply embedded in the staffing needs of London hospitals that when a survey was completed on hospitals in Croydon, ²⁰ B. M. Spinley, The Deprived and the Privileged: Personality Development in English Society (London, 1953), 39–40. ²¹ J. V. Hickey, The Irish Rural Immigrant and British Urban Society ( Taunton, 2005) 29; this is a published version of a report that was completed by the Newman Demographic Survey in 1960 and circulated privately. ²² S.24, Employment and Living Conditions of Irish Workers in Great Britain, prepared by Stanley Lyon, [Nov.] 1948, Marsh Papers, TCD MS 8306. ²³ Report on the Progress of the Camp and Hotel Workers’ Chaplain Scheme, Dec. 1957, cited in Kieran O’Shea, The Irish Emigrant Chaplaincy Scheme in Britain, 1957–82 (Naas, 1985), 28–9; Report prepared by Fr Charles Travers on the parish of St Aloysius, Somers Town, [June] 1959, AB8/B/XXIX, McQuaid Papers, DDA. ²⁴ Census of England and Wales, 1951: Occupation Tables (London, 1956), table 26, 606. ²⁵ M. J. Molloy, ‘Correspondence’, The Furrow, 1, no. 10 (Nov. 1950), 530. ²⁶ Jackson, ‘The Irish’, 300.

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three matrons even failed to include the Irish among the numbers of immigrant staff.²⁷ But equally the Irish could be found across a range of occupations in a London hospital: from doctors to matrons to maids and orderlies.²⁸ Nursing training offered a relatively ‘safe’ environment for young Irish girls to obtain professional qualifications in the highly regulated confines of a hospital with supervised living quarters. Roughly a sixth of Irish-born women in England and Wales in 1951 were classified as ‘professionals’, most of them nurses and midwives.²⁹ Throughout the post-war years the London Irish continued to grow, reflecting the quickened pace of arrivals off the boats and trains. In the 1960s the Irish formed just under 5 per cent of the capital’s total population, concentrated in west and north-west London. Detailed analysis of the spatial distribution of the Irish in London in the mid-1960s shows that when broken down to ward rather than borough level, some clear patterns of settlement emerge. Boroughs such as Brent, Hammersmith, Camden, and Westminster had large Irish populations, but within these large areas districts such as Kilburn and Cricklewood had even denser concentrations of Irish residents. Both areas loom large in the collective memory as peculiarly Irish districts, especially Cricklewood, the home to the Galtymore Club, the best-known ballroom for the London Irish. Kilburn, perhaps the most Irish place outside of Ireland, where one in four of the residents was Irish, is still today regarded as an ‘Irish’ area. In 1954 a new hostel for Irish arrivals was established by the Catholic church with voluntary support in Camden Town, which, as the flamboyant jazz musician George Melly memorably put it, was ‘as far from Euston Station as an Irishman with two suitcases can walk on a rainy night’.³⁰ The middle-class Irish who came to London in the 1940s and 1950s knew little of the dancehall worlds of Cricklewood and Kilburn. About one in five of the London Irish in the mid-1960s were middle class, and came to Britain for jobs and career advancement.³¹ The Irish Club in Eaton Square, founded in 1947, and the National University ²⁷ Cited in Jackson, The Irish in Britain, 108. ²⁸ A well-known example of an Irish doctor working in Britain who over time became less inclined to identify with her Irish background was Blake Morrison’s mother: see Things My Mother Never Told Me (London, 2003). ²⁹ Census of England and Wales 1951: Occupation Tables, table 26, 606. ³⁰ Quoted in Gerry Harrison, The Scattering: A History of the London Irish Centre, 1954–2004 (London, 2004), 9. ³¹ E. J. B. Rose et al., Colour and Citizenship: A Report on British Race Relations (London, 1969), 176.

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of Ireland Club in Grosvenor Place, established as a dining society in 1929, catered for the large number of professional and middleclass migrants who made London their home. The aim of the latter was to provide ‘a home from home for young graduates, where they could meet people of their own kind with an Irish outlook’.³² As Jackson remarked, these venues were ‘almost exclusively limited to white-collar members of the Irish community in Britain’, and provided a ‘common meeting ground for clerks, doctors, engineers, lawyers, teachers and civil servants, active and retired army officers, people whose social interests are in any case not limited by their Irish interests’.³³ When asked to join the fledgling Irish Club, George Bernard Shaw, then in his early nineties and unlikely to join any club, Irish or otherwise, nevertheless responded with a pithy postcard that wittily rejected the whole notion of a club for the professional Irish in Britain. I can imagine nothing less desirable than an Irish club. Irish people in England should join English clubs, and avoid each other like the plague. If they flock together like geese they might as well have never left Ireland. They don’t admire, nor even like one another. In English clubs they are always welcome. More fools the English perhaps; but the two are so foreign that they have much to learn from their association and co-operation.³⁴

The list of founding members contains elements of both the new and old Ireland, with former army officers—reflecting its origins as a wartime club for Irish servicemen in the British forces—and landowners but also the new wealth of building contractors, doctors, businessmen, and hotel owners. The Irish Club combined the functions of bolstering the social pretensions of the upwardly mobile Irish in London with acting as a conduit for interchange between politicians and other opinion formers at the annual St Patrick’s Day dinner attended by both Irish and British politicians. For some members, however, its purpose was to challenge stereotypes of the Irish in post-war Britain by demonstrating to ‘the English that we weren’t all navvies and chambermaids’.³⁵ ³² National University of Ireland, NUI Awards 2005 (Dublin, 2005), 17. The NUI Club was dissolved in 2003 and its assets used to fund a scholarship. My thanks go to Noirín Moynihan at the NUI for providing me with this information. ³³ Jackson, The Irish in Britain, 131. ³⁴ Cited in Kevin O’Connor, The Irish in Britain (London, 1972), 84. ³⁵ Ibid. 84. The list of founding members of the Irish Club can be found on pp. 183–4.

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The last bastion of the middle-class Irish mentalité was the Irish Embassy, which from 1950 was located nearby in Belgravia.³⁶ This outpost of official Ireland had the unenviable task of mediating between ministers in Ireland and their counterparts in Britain, and generally smoothing the course of the occasionally labyrinthine relationship between the two countries.³⁷ An additional function that was increasingly significant from the mid-1930s was its role in monitoring the position of its citizens living in Britain, and, if needs be, to respond to blatantly anti-Irish statements in the national press or elsewhere. For instance, when a number of controversies arose in the early 1950s about the living conditions of Irish workers in Britain, F. H. Boland, the ambassador, investigated the situation. As he acknowledged in July 1951, one of the functions ‘is to watch over the interests of Irish citizens within its area of accreditation and to safeguard them so far as possible’.³⁸ The Irish state relied on its officials in London for information on the large Irish population in Britain. The Irish ambassador was occasionally asked to prepare reports for ministers back in Dublin in the 1940s and 1950s. Boland and his successor, Hugh McCann, were especially proactive in this respect. But a social chasm existed between the bureaucrats of official Ireland and their political masters and the majority of the working-class Irish in Britain, always quaintly labelled in official reports as ‘our people’. Irish London coexisted with ‘Polski London’ as well as a whole host of other newcomers who had settled in the metropole since the Second World War. London was a truly cosmopolitan city in the mid-twentieth century.³⁹ In addition to the Irish, by the early 1950s, the main migrant groups were Germans, Poles, and Russians, with smaller numbers of Chinese, Maltese, and Cypriots.⁴⁰ While the arrival of the SS Empire Windrush at Tilbury in June 1948 with 492 ³⁶ My thanks go to Michael Kennedy of the Royal Irish Academy Documents on Irish Foreign Policy project for confirming the date that the Irish Embassy moved from Regent Street to Grosvenor Place. ³⁷ For instance, Embassy officials played a central role in the negotiations surrounding the introduction of the Commonwealth Immigrants Act (1962). ³⁸ Report on the Irish in Birmingham prepared by F. H. Boland (Ambassador in London) to Secretary, Department of External Affairs, 23 July 1951, DFA 402/222, NAI. ³⁹ White, London in the Twentieth Century, 103–16; for more details on Polish London, see Sheila Patterson, ‘Polish London’, in Ruth Glass (ed.), London: Aspects of Change (London, 1964), 309–42. ⁴⁰ Holmes, John Bull’s Island, 211–19; id., A Tolerant Country? Immigrants, Refugees and Minorities in Britain (London, 1991), 45–9.

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passengers from Jamaica is etched in the popular imagination as the ‘beginning’ of mass immigration, Caribbean immigrants had come to Britain in significant numbers during the Second World War.⁴¹ By the start of the 1960s over 70,000 West Indians lived in London.⁴² The other major flows to the city came from India and Pakistan in the early 1960s, and later from a number of African countries, all of which attracted much public attention, as we shall see later. Unlike many of the other sites of settlement in the Midlands, the Irish had come to London for centuries, and those who arrived in the post-war years were following a well-trodden path to the bright lights of the metropole.

2. SITES OF SETTLEMENT The generation who left Ireland in the 1940s and 1950s also settled in cities that had no previous established tradition of large-scale Irish settlement such as Birmingham, Coventry, and Leicester, all expanding centres of population in post-war Britain. Only London of the four nineteenth-century major cities of Irish settlement (Glasgow, Manchester, Liverpool, and London) retained its importance as a destination by the second half of the twentieth century. The patterns of migrant choice invariably reflected the availability of jobs: the heavy industries of Lancashire and Clydeside were badly hit by the depression of the interwar years whereas the ‘new’ industries, for the most part located in southern England, were expanding. The direction of the flow of Irish immigrants was intimately related to the ‘growing regional division between North and South’ in Britain.⁴³ This is not to imply that for some people leaving independent Ireland familiar places did not have something to offer. For instance, a study of Irish women in Lancashire shows that even by the early 1960s, north-west England was second only to London in numerical terms.⁴⁴ But the Irish in Liverpool were a residual trace of earlier migration streams, and many of the new arrivals ⁴¹ White, London in the Twentieth Century, 131–2; Sheila Patterson, Dark Strangers (London, 1963), 38–9. ⁴² Ceri Peach, West Indian Migration to Britain: A Social Geography (London, 1968), table 48, 86. ⁴³ Ross McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England, 1918–1951 (Oxford, 1998), 74. ⁴⁴ Sharon Lambert, Irish Women in Lancashire, 1922–1960: Their Story (Lancaster, 2001), 14.

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in the 1940s and 1950s went south.⁴⁵ Scotland, as we noted before, also declined in importance so that by the early 1960s the Irish in Scotland had dropped to under 2 per cent of the population, and were concentrated in Glasgow and Edinburgh, and in smaller urban centres in the west of Scotland.⁴⁶ Birmingham, the second largest city in England, stands apart from the other ‘new’ cities of settlement in that it had a small but yet significant population from the 1820s onwards, even if ‘the Irish never formed as large a proportion of citizens as they did in Liverpool, Manchester and Glasgow’.⁴⁷ From the mid-1930s, as light manufacturing industries developed in the West Midlands, increasing numbers of migrants came to Birmingham from across Britain, and also from Ireland. The outbreak of war brought thousands of Irish newcomers to the city as many of the factories that were deemed essential to the war effort were located there. Workers were assigned to factories designated of crucial importance to the war effort under the government scheme of controlled recruitment. A Mass Observation survey in 1942 of one factory producing tubes for the Admiralty, which employed women workers recruited directly from Ireland, pointed to an atmosphere of mutual distrust. The Irish women complained about the working conditions and how they differed to their expectations, whereas the ‘locals’ stated that ‘they’ve [the Irish ‘‘girls’’] got all the best jobs in the factory—you never hear of an Irish girl being put off a job to make room for a Birmingham girl’.⁴⁸ It was not just irrational fears about preferential treatment that aroused hostility. An outbreak of scabies in the city in October 1942 was put down to the recent influx of Irish workers, reflecting earlier scares nearly a hundred years previously about Irish fever or typhus-infected Irish refugees who arrived during the Great Famine.⁴⁹ ⁴⁵ Alan Strachan, ‘Post-War Irish Migration and Settlement in England and Wales’, in Russell King (ed.), Contemporary Irish Migration (Dublin, 1991), 22; for more details, see Bronwen Walter, ‘The Geography of Irish Migration to Britain since 1939, with Special Reference to Luton and Bolton’ (unpub. D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford, 1978). ⁴⁶ Census of Scotland, 1961: Birthplace and Nationality (Edinburgh, 1966), table 1, 1. This figure includes those born in Northern Ireland. ⁴⁷ Carl Chinn, ‘ ‘‘Sturdy Catholic Emigrants’’: The Irish in Early Victorian Birmingham’, in Roger Swift and Sheridan Gilley (eds.), The Irish in Victorian Britain: The Local Dimension (Dublin, 1999), 53; for first-hand accounts of post-war settlement in Birmingham, see id., Birmingham Irish: Making our Mark (Birmingham, 2003), 116–38. ⁴⁸ Cited in Kenneth Lunn, ‘ ‘‘Good for a Few Hundred at Least’’: Irish labour Recruitment into Britain during the Second World War’, in Patrick Buckland and John Belchem (eds.), The Irish in British Labour History (Liverpool, 1993), 107. ⁴⁹ Ibid. 110.

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The post-war boom in construction, light engineering—especially motor-car manufacturing—and textiles in Birmingham meant that by the early 1960s nearly 60,000 people, or just over 5 per cent of the city’s population, were born in Ireland, three times the national average.⁵⁰ Occupations such as working on buses and trams were rejected by English workers for the higher wages and appealing shorter working hours enjoyed by their counterparts in factories. One contemporary estimated that in just fourteen months in 1946–7 two-thirds of the 6,000 drivers and conductors in Birmingham had resigned and taken other employment.⁵¹ As was the case in London, the local transport authority recruited directly from independent Ireland, continuing in effect a practice initiated during the war that eventually ceased in 1953. By the early 1950s roughly one-third of the transport authority’s staff were Irish, many of them women.⁵² Nursing training also proved popular with young Irish women, and the expanding NHS generated plenty of opportunities in hospitals such as the Birmingham Infirmary. And the wages were much better: one woman, who was interviewed in the late 1980s, recounted that her monthly pay for nursing training in a Birmingham hospital was over £3 per week; in her previous incarnation as a nanny in Dublin she earned just twelve shillings a week.⁵³ Other major employers of Irish workers included the Austin Motor Company, located at Longbridge on the outskirts of the city, which had over 20,000 workers prior to the outbreak of the Second World War, and firms which made motor components, such as Lucas.⁵⁴ These were exactly the type of jobs that were few and far between at home: regular, reasonably well paid, and with clearly defined working hours. The conditions in the workplaces, however, varied considerably. A report on the Irish in Birmingham was prepared by Maurice Foley, an organizer for the Young Christian Workers’ Association.⁵⁵ Foley, whose ⁵⁰ Philip N. Jones, The Segregation of Immigrant Communities in the City of Birmingham, 1961 (Hull, 1967), 29–30. ⁵¹ Kaja Irene Ziesler, ‘The Irish in Birmingham, 1830–1970’ (unpub. Ph.D. thesis, University of Birmingham, 1989), 177. ⁵² Ibid. 178. ⁵³ Ibid. 179. ⁵⁴ David Reeder and Richard Rodger, ‘Industrialisation and the City Economy’, in Martin Daunton (ed.), The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, III (1840–1950) (Cambridge, 2000), 581. See also Anthony Sutcliffe and Roger Smith, History of Birmingham, III: Birmingham, 1939–1970 (Birmingham, 1974). ⁵⁵ Foley later became the Labour MP for West Bromwich, and a junior minister with special responsibility for race relations in the mid-1960s, and subsequently took up a post at the European Commission in 1973 (Dennis Dean, ‘The Race Relations Policy

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parents were Irish, found that large firms tended to treat the workers well and provided good working conditions. For smaller concerns, with less than twenty employees, the findings were less favourable, although this applied to the conditions for all workers and not just the Irish. Foley’s investigation was regarded by the Irish ambassador in London as ‘objective, trustworthy, and not exaggerated in any way’, even if his main concern, as might be expected, given his role, was with the moral and spiritual role of the Catholic Irish immigrants as ‘potential apostles’.⁵⁶ In the 1940s and 1950s most of the Irish migrants living in Birmingham settled in the first instance where accommodation was available, which invariably meant the cheaper inner districts of the city populated by boarding houses and rundown flats. These houses of the ‘respectable’ Victorian middle classes, who fled to the suburbs in the 1920s and 1930s, were transformed by landlords into flats for letting to newcomers, who were often charged exorbitant rents. Finding any accommodation, regardless of its quality, was a difficult task, since Birmingham experienced an acute housing shortage, as the demand created by migrants came on top of the damage to the housing stock during the war. Multiple occupancy was common, and Foley found that the newly arrived Irish in the city were concentrated in the worst-quality housing, often shared with large groups of other migrants. He estimated that at least half were living in groups of between fifteen to twenty people. An extreme example cited was of one house where fifty Irishmen lived, with fifteen people sharing one room.⁵⁷ The Irish ambassador reported ‘that the degrading conditions under which Irish workers in Birmingham live and work has a grievously lowering effect on their prestige and morale and has grave consequences from the health, moral and religious points of view’.⁵⁸ Double-letting of beds occurred in some instances.⁵⁹ This of the First Wilson Government’, Twentieth Century British History, 11, no. 3 (2000), 277–9). Dean describes Foley as having ‘a strong autodidactic streak, which led him to develop an interest in race relations’ (p. 277). For an assessment of his career as a whole, see his obituary in The Guardian, 22 Feb. 2002. ⁵⁶ F. H. Boland (Ambassador in London) to Secretary, Department of External Affairs, 23 July 1951, DFA 402/222, NAI; ‘Some Notes on the Situation of Irish Workers in Birmingham’, Report prepared by Maurice Foley, Young Christian Workers’ Association, [July] 1951, DFA 402/222, NAI. ⁵⁷ ‘Some Notes on the Situation of Irish Workers in Birmingham.’ ⁵⁸ Boland to Secretary, Department of External Affairs, 23 July 1951, DFA 402/222, NAI. ⁵⁹ ‘Some Notes on the Situation of Irish Workers in Birmingham.’

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account of cramped and unhealthy living conditions is reminiscent of mid-nineteenth-century descriptions of Irish hovels in Liverpool and Manchester. Large numbers of friends and family members sharing occupation conjured up images of hordes of ‘miserable’ Irish sharing tenements and implicitly offended urban middle-class English sensibilities, where the family home was seen as encapsulating ‘a strong desire for domesticity, comfort and privacy’.⁶⁰ The domesticity of the family home was a defining feature of the new affluent lifestyle that became dominant after the end of the Second World War.⁶¹ As the American historian Donna Gabaccia has argued in the context of immigrants coming to the United States in the later nineteenth century, ‘chains of migrating kin in turn encouraged immigrants to live in households violating American norms of privacy and propriety’.⁶² On learning of the details contained in Foley’s report, the then Taoiseach, Eamon de Valera, decided to publicize the conditions of ‘absolute degradation’ that large numbers of Irish migrants in British cities were enduring, drawing on his investigations in Birmingham, and to make private representations to the British authorities.⁶³ These comments, in a speech delivered at Galway on 29 August 1951, attracted a huge amount of publicity in both the British and Irish press—as was de Valera’s original intention, since he hoped this knowledge would dissuade people from leaving Ireland.⁶⁴ This strategy, however, completely backfired. Irish newspapers raised the awkward issue of why people were forced to emigrate in the first instance, and local politicians in the Midlands were outraged at the negative coverage.⁶⁵ British officials who looked into the matter concluded that his allegations were ‘sensational’, and ruefully observed that since his speech recruitment of Irish workers through official schemes had ⁶⁰ Richard Trainor, ‘The Middle Class’, in Daunton (ed.), The Cambridge Urban History, III, 693. ⁶¹ See Claire Langhamer, ‘The Meanings of Home in Post-War Britain’, Journal of Contemporary History, 40, no. 2 (2005), 341–62. ⁶² Donna Gabaccia, From the Other Side: Gender, Women, and Immigrant Life in the United States, 1820–1990 (Bloomington, 1994), 62. ⁶³ On the domestic political ramifications of this controversy, see Enda Delaney, Demography, State and Society: Irish Migration to Britain, 1921–1971 (Kingston/Montreal and Liverpool, 2000), 193–6. ⁶⁴ Irish Independent, 30 Aug. 1951; Irish Press, 30 Aug. 1951; Irish Times, 30 Aug. 1951; Daily Telegraph, 30 Aug. 1951, The Times, 30 Aug. 1951, Daily Express, 30 Aug. 1951. ⁶⁵ See the subsequent coverage in Irish Independent, Irish Times, and Irish Press, 31 Aug.–4 Sept. 1951.

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actually increased, undoubtedly an unintended consequence of the publicity given to opportunities in Birmingham.⁶⁶ British civil servants also rightly raised questions about the date of completion of the survey, since a more or less identical version was published in the Catholic journal, The Furrow, a year earlier, under the name of Fr Eugene Hopkins, also of the Young Christian Workers’ Association.⁶⁷ Less charitably, it was observed by officials that the desire to make money quickly and with little outlay determined the choice and quality of accommodation: Overcrowding results not only from the general housing shortage in Birmingham which applies without discrimination to English and Irish but also from the desire of Irishmen [sic] to live cheaply in order to save money (as a high proportion have to be disinfested before coming to this country, one can assume that they are not used to good living conditions).⁶⁸

Whatever the conditions in Birmingham or elsewhere, few people believed de Valera’s assertion that ‘the saddest part of all this is that work is available at home, and in conditions infinitely better from the point of view of both health and morals’.⁶⁹ The underlying assumption in his comments was that urbanized Britain was a dangerous and unhealthy place for migrants from rural Ireland, or, as one British diplomat in Dublin observed, ‘he [de Valera] also takes the line that conditions in the United Kingdom for the Irish workers constitute a danger inter alia to morals and religion’.⁷⁰ The inherent dangers of engagement with British urbanity was a comment theme in much of the discourse that emanated from religious figures in particular, as we shall see in the next chapter. Two years later, Birmingham was still the focus of attention for Irish civil servants. By early 1953 the Irish ambassador was reporting that things had changed with the downturn in the economy. The situation was particularly acute for young married couples with children, who ⁶⁶ G. W. Tory (British Embassy, Dublin) to N. E. Costar (Commonwealth Relations Office), 31 Aug. 1951; Tory to Costar, 16 Oct. 1951, DO35/3917, PRO. ⁶⁷ Text of Telegram no. 85 from UK Ambassador in Dublin to Commonwealth Relations Office, 5 Sept. 1951, DO 35/3917, PRO; Eugene Hopkins, ‘Irish Catholics in Britain’, The Furrow, 1, no. 8 (1950), 396–406. ⁶⁸ File minute by N. E. Costar, 5 Nov. 1951, DO35/3917, PRO. ⁶⁹ Text issued to the press on Mr de Valera’s speech at Galway, 30 Aug. 1951, DFA 402/222, NAI. ⁷⁰ G. W. Tory (British Embassy, Dublin) to N. E. Costar (Commonwealth Relations Office), 31 Aug. 1951, DO35/3917, PRO.

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often had to leave private accommodation on the birth of a child, and who had to be resident in the city for five years to qualify for entry to the council house list.⁷¹ One couple who were effectively cohabiting were asked when they would marry by a worker for the Catholic rural development organization, Muintir na Tíre, who travelled to Birmingham in June 1957, ‘to find out for myself the truth about the lot of our people over there’, and he was dismayed by the reply: ‘We do not want to get married for a while as we can not have children in houses; landlords will not allow you to stay.’⁷² Even when council houses did become available, these were often poor-quality back-to-back houses close to the city centre in areas such as Hockley and Aston, many of which were subsequently demolished in the slum clearance programmes of the late 1950s and 1960s.⁷³ Nevertheless, one migrant recalled the obvious advantages of having a house over a rented room: ‘They put us there because they wanted to get them houses down . . . But it was my first house and I thought it was great. Oh, it was terrific to have your own door, and you could just go in and shut it.’⁷⁴ Over time the middle-class values of domesticity were embraced by some of the Irish as enthusiastically as their British counterparts. A new concern for Irish officials were reports that emerged in the British broadsheet press of Irish people sharing with recent arrivals from the Caribbean and South Asia in Birmingham in September 1955.⁷⁵ This was deemed to be a ‘disturbing matter’ that should be investigated lest any controversy arise in Ireland.⁷⁶ Valentin Iremonger, then a junior official in the London Embassy and a noted poet, was dispatched off to the Midlands to prepare yet another report on the Irish in Birmingham, which he duly completed in June 1956. Iremonger choose to base his observations on ‘conversations’ that he had with local Catholic clergy and the welfare officers of two large employers, and interestingly he did not find the time to speak with any Irish migrants, which is quite telling in itself. He concluded that recent lay-offs in the motor industry would not affect the numbers of Irish coming to the city as other work was plentiful, and found no evidence of the Irish sharing with ‘coloured’ immigrants. The housing situation was still ‘chronic’, yet ⁷¹ Ziesler, ‘The Irish in Birmingham’, 186. ⁷² Oliver Reilly, ‘A Worker in Birmingham’, The Furrow, 9, no. 4 (1958), 217, 219. ⁷³ Ziesler, ‘The Irish in Birmingham’, 188. ⁷⁴ Quoted ibid. ⁷⁵ The Times, 20 Sept. 1955. ⁷⁶ Seán Murphy (Secretary, Department of External Affairs) to F. H. Boland (Ambassador in London), 18 Oct. 1955, DFA 402/222, NAI.

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still ‘not so bad as it was five or six years ago’.⁷⁷ The house-building programme simply could not keep pace with the numbers coming to the city for jobs in industry in the 1950s, and this created much hardship not only for the Irish, ‘but the Birmingham workers, the coloured workers and those others who come into the city from British rural areas’.⁷⁸ By the early 1960s the Irish in Birmingham were living in most districts of the city, with clusters in areas close to the city centre such as Handsworth, Balsall Heath, Sparkhill, and Sparkbrook. A detailed analysis of migrant communities in Birmingham noted that ‘the Irish immigrant is far less concentrated than his coloured counterpart’, reflecting the chronology of arrivals.⁷⁹ Sparkbrook was a distinctively Irish area, memorably described by the sociologists Rex and Moore as a ‘twilight zone’, a reception area for all new immigrants with poor-quality housing. Many of the Irish who lived there had aspirations to move out to other, ‘better’ parts of the city.⁸⁰ Even if some areas had an Irish feel, many of the more established Irish had decamped to ‘mixed’ districts across the city. A process of dispersal from the arrival zones occurred as people bought homes or were allocated council houses on the outskirts of the city. By the late 1960s, with the overall drop in numbers leaving Ireland, Birmingham declined in importance as a site of settlement. The Irish Centre reported that there was only a trickle of people coming from Ireland in the late 1960s. Birmingham, which during the 1940s and 1950s was second only to London as a destination, received few new Irish arrivals by the early 1970s. What did remain in the city, however, was a substantial Irish population. The waves of post-war Irish migration to Birmingham followed a classic model of settlement. On arrival, migrants obtained shortterm accommodation in rented rooms and lodging houses in the least salubrious districts of the city, a situation that was accentuated by the acute shortage of housing in Birmingham. Subsequently, later migrants also travelled to these areas, since, for the most part, knowledge about somewhere to stay in the first instance was shared by family and friends. Over time, as the newcomers became established, some at least were in a position to purchase a home in the suburbs. For others, the availability ⁷⁷ Report prepared by Valentin Iremonger (Irish Embassy, London) on the Irish in Birmingham, [7] Aug. 1956, DFA 402/222, NAI. ⁷⁸ Ibid. ⁷⁹ Jones, The Segregation of Immigrant Communities, 30. ⁸⁰ John Rex and Robert Moore, Race, Community and Conflict: A Study of Sparkbrook (London, 1967), 92.

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of council housing shaped the settlement patterns. In the late 1940s the Irish were heavily concentrated in the poorer parts of Birmingham, but by the 1960s the Irish migrant population was dispersed across the sprawling precincts of the ever-growing city. Other cities that experienced rapid growth also proved attractive to the post-war generation who crossed the Irish Sea. Coventry is the best example of an industrial centre which until the interwar years had little or no experience of Irish settlement. In the early twentieth century the Irish numbered just under a thousand. The new industries such as motor-car manufacturing offered endless opportunities in the interwar years, and it had the fastest growing population in Britain as migrants from northern England, Wales, and Scotland flocked to the city for work.⁸¹ During the Second World War, it was a centre of production for the light engineering and electrical industries that were so vital to the war effort.⁸² Coventry after 1945 was a symbol of Labour’s post-war programme of reconstruction, emerging like a ‘phoenix city arising from the ashes of the blitz’.⁸³ As a consequence, by the midtwentieth century this rapidly expanding area was ‘predominantly a city of newcomers’, including thousands of recently arrived Irish who came to this ‘Klondyke city of the Midlands’.⁸⁴ Between the 1930s and the 1950s the Irish population quadrupled. Migrants from Ireland first started to arrive in Coventry in significant numbers in the mid-1930s to work in the building boom, and during the war many Irish workers who came to Britain were directed to employment in factories in the city and stayed on after the end of hostilities.⁸⁵ The number of Irish doubled in the 1950s as this ‘blitz town’ gradually became a ‘boom town’.⁸⁶ By the mid-1960s there were twice as many newcomers from ⁸¹ D. W. Thoms and T. Donnelly, ‘Coventry’s Industrial Economy’, in Bill Lancaster and Tony Mason (eds.), Life and Labour in a Twentieth-Century City: The Experience of Coventry (Coventry, 1996), 25; Peter Scott, ‘Women, Other ‘‘Fresh’’ Workers, and the New Manufacturing Workforce of Interwar Britain’, International Review of Social History, 45, no. 3 (2000), 456. ⁸² Kenneth Richardson, Twentieth-Century Coventry (London, 1972), 328. ⁸³ Peter Bailey, ‘Jazz at the Spirella: Coming of Age in Coventry in the 1950s’, in Becky Conekin, Frank Mort, and Chris Waters (eds.), Moments of Modernity: Reconstructing Britain, 1945–1964 (London, 1999), 22. ⁸⁴ Bill Lancaster, ‘Who’s a Real Coventry Kid? Migration into Twentieth-Century Coventry’, in Lancaster and Mason (eds.), Life and Labour in a Twentieth-Century City, 74; Bailey, ‘Jazz at the Spirella’, 23. ⁸⁵ Russell King, Ian Shuttleworth, and Alan Strachan, ‘The Irish in Coventry: The Social Geography of a Relict Community’, Irish Geography, 22, no. 2 (1989), 68. ⁸⁶ Richardson, Twentieth-Century Coventry, 98.

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Ireland, north and south, as from the ‘New’ Commonwealth, despite the contemporary perception that the city was ‘flooded’ with black migrants.⁸⁷ The decline in people leaving Ireland combined with the recessionary climate of the 1970s, and few Irish arrivals came to the city thereafter.⁸⁸ Most of the Coventry Irish were unskilled workers who found employment in the construction industry and large factories that constituted the manufacturing base of the local economy. Coventry was, as one contemporary remarked, ‘essentially a city of factory workers’.⁸⁹ Irish wartime workers were accommodated in large hostels, as housing was scarce and the authorities found it extremely difficult to find billets because of the ‘unwillingness of landladies to house Irish labour’.⁹⁰ By the end of the Second World War the Irish were to be found in inner-city areas where boarding houses and cheap rented accommodation dominated the landscape.⁹¹ Even though de Valera referred to Coventry in his diatribe about the living conditions in English cities in 1951, it was generally accepted that the situation was less acute than in Birmingham, as accommodation was available in the fifteen large hostels dotted around the city.⁹² From the late 1950s onwards the Irish in Coventry moved from the inner city districts to the suburban areas by either buying a private home or obtaining local authority housing.⁹³ The Irish also went to other Midland cities and towns such as Leicester, Northampton, Nottingham, and Corby, where plenty of jobs were available.⁹⁴ In Leicester, for example, the 1950s and early 1960s were the peak years of Irish movement to the city. An area close to the city centre, Highfields, was nicknamed ‘Paddy’s colony’, and it ⁸⁷ Lancaster, ‘Who’s a Real Coventry Kid?’, 73–6. ⁸⁸ King, Shuttleworth, and Strachan, ‘The Irish in Coventry’, 68. ⁸⁹ Leo Kuper, ‘Blueprint for Living Together’, in id. (ed.), Living in Towns (London, 1953), 31. This sociological study of Houghton, a suburb of Coventry, was completed between 1949 and 1951. ⁹⁰ P[hyllis] Inman, Labour in the Munitions Industries (London, 1957), 168; for more details, see A. V. Judges, ‘Irish Labour in Great Britain, 1939–1945’, Jan. 1949, LAB 8/1528, PRO. ⁹¹ Lancaster, ‘Who’s a Real Coventry Kid?’, 73. ⁹² King, Shuttleworth, and Strachan, ‘The Irish in Coventry’, 71; Richardson, Twentieth-Century Coventry, 93–4; for a description of housing conditions, see Kuper, ‘Blueprint for Living Together’, 28–30. ⁹³ King, Shuttleworth, and Strachan, ‘The Irish in Coventry’, 72–4. ⁹⁴ Strachan, ‘Post-War Irish Migration and Settlement in England and Wales’, 24.

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was dominated by Victorian terraced housing transformed into lodging houses and cheap rented accommodation.⁹⁵ In the late 1950s and early 1960s, for young couples who had spent a couple of years in England, got married, and started to have children, the densely populated urban environment no longer suited their needs. They moved to the new local authority and private suburban estates on the outskirts of the city.⁹⁶ Nottingham, where the numbers had remained relatively static in the first quarter of the twentieth century, also witnessed a significant influx of Irish arrivals in the 1940s and 1950s. Some cities that had long experience of Irish immigration were also destinations for the post-war generation. Leeds, for instance, which had been a site of large-scale settlement in the mid-nineteenth century, had a small yet significant growth in numbers throughout the 1950s and 1960s, although far below the levels reached in the Victorian period.⁹⁷ Even so, it was still observed by one contemporary in 1948 that the young Irish men who had arrived in Leeds were ‘unwilling to pay highly for good digs, and so they get into slum districts, in lodging houses which are without comfort, and among a rough class of people. Irish people—sometimes whole families—are to be found in the worst parts of the city.’⁹⁸ Outside of the major cities, the Irish could also be found in mediumsized English towns with expanding industries. The pioneering work of the geographer Bronwen Walter has shown how in Luton, which had little experience of Irish settlement until the 1950s, roughly half of the Irish who eventually settled came after they had lived in other parts of England.⁹⁹ The Vauxhall motor-car plant expanded in the ⁹⁵ Quoted in Russell King and Henrietta O’Connor, ‘Migration and Gender: Irish Women in Leicester’, Geography, 81, no. 4 (1996), 315; David Nash and David Redder (eds.), Leicester in the Twentieth Century (Stroud, 1993) 183. ⁹⁶ Henrietta O’Connor, ‘Women Abroad: The Life Experiences of Irish Women in Leicester’ (unpub. M. Litt. diss., Trinity College Dublin, 1993), 72–3; King and O’Connor, ‘Migration and Gender’, 314–5. ⁹⁷ The statistics are presented in Strachan, ‘Post-War Irish Migration and Settlement in England and Wales’, table 1, 22; see also Pauline Freeman, ‘Erin’s Exiles: The Irish in Leeds’, in Robert E. Finnigan and George T. Bradley (eds.), Catholicism in Leeds: A Community of Faith, 1794–1994 (Leeds, 1994), 83–6. ⁹⁸ Eugene Hopkins, ‘Irish Workers in England’, Christus Rex, 2, no. 2 (1948), 18. Hopkins was a priest working with the Young Christian Workers’ Association and his account drew on replies received ‘to a questionnaire sent to a few people in England on the Irish workers in this country’ (p. 17). ⁹⁹ Bronwen Walter, ‘Time-Space Patterns of Second-Wave Irish Immigration into British Towns’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, new ser., 5, no. 3 (1980), 297–317; id., ‘Ethnicity and Irish Residential Distribution’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, new ser., 11, no. 2 (1986), 131–46; id., ‘Tradition

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1950s and this created plenty of opportunities for employment. Once significant numbers had settled in Luton by the late 1950s, new arrivals came directly from Ireland, basing their decision to locate there on information from family and friends.¹⁰⁰ Central parts of the town were popular for initial settlement, as most of the rented accommodation was located in this area. Over time, with the arrival of children, many of the Irish moved out to suburban areas on the fringes of the town, a process that can be directly mapped by charting the location of the Catholic churches in Luton.¹⁰¹ This detailed study of the Irish in Luton provides rare evidence of how the patterns of settlement changed. It shows how a town, which traditionally had received few Irish migrants, came to be a popular destination for those who came directly from Ireland by the mid-1960s. Equally, the sheer level of movement within the locality was extraordinary, as migrants moved about from one district to another for better accommodation, to be nearer friends, or have access to Catholic schools. Less is known about the Irish in other mediumsized expanding towns such as nearby Bedford or Northampton, as detailed studies of this type are yet to be undertaken, although it is reasonable to assume that more or less the same processes were at work.¹⁰²

3 . S U BU R B A N A S PI R AT I O N S One of the most distinctive features of the evolution of British society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was the rise of suburbia.¹⁰³ Originally, the growth of the suburbs was a reflection of Victorian middle-class preferences to be insulated from the hazards that were seen as inherent features of city life. Notions of ‘the attractions and virtues of privacy’, combined with an emphasis on domesticity, were intimately related to the development of suburbia between 1815 and the outbreak and Ethnic Interaction: Second-Wave Irish Settlement in Luton and Bolton’, in Colin Clarke, David Ley, and Ceri Peach (eds.), Geography and Ethnic Pluralism (London, 1984), 258–83. ¹⁰⁰ Walter, ‘Time-Space Patterns of Second-Wave Irish Immigration’, 314. ¹⁰¹ Walter, ‘Ethnicity and Irish Residential Distribution’, 135–6. ¹⁰² For instance, the Irish only get a brief mention in a study of Bedford: see John Brown, The Un-Melting Pot: An English Town and its Immigrants (London, 1970), 180. ¹⁰³ See Mark Clapson, Invincible Green Suburbs, Brave New Towns: Social Change and Urban Dispersal in Post-War England (Manchester, 1998).

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of the Second World War. According to F. M. L. Thompson, ‘the creation of an environment [with] this division of middle-class male lives between a public world of work contacts and a private world of family life was what the rise of suburbia was all about’.¹⁰⁴ But suburban life was not just a middle-class experience from the 1920s onwards. The vigorous programme of building local authority houses after the First World War—‘Homes fit for heroes’—displaced hundreds of thousands of working-class inner-city dwellers to the new sprawling estates on the outskirts of British cities.¹⁰⁵ In the 1920s and 1930s over 1.1 million council houses were built, 90 per cent of which were on suburban estates, including the massive Becontree and Dagenham estate in Essex which had 120,000 dwellers by 1939.¹⁰⁶ Many of the new residents came from inner-city districts that were demolished in programmes of slum clearance that had been initiated in the 1890s, but which operated with greater zeal in the 1930s, as housing emerged as a central element of public policy.¹⁰⁷ As Ross McKibbin has noted, ‘from all the major English towns people were decanted into outlying or ‘‘out-country’’ estates which were unique in Europe’.¹⁰⁸ A boom in private house building also occurred in the interwar years as large numbers of the middle classes sought refuge in the suburbs; roughly half of the new houses built in the interwar years were for owner-occupation, although the physical spaces that the aspiring middle classes occupied were very different in both conception and form.¹⁰⁹ The outbreak of war in September effectively put an end to the programme of new house building. One of the dominant themes of wartime propaganda, however, was that the country was fighting for a ‘better tomorrow’, which included better housing. The most pressing concern, nevertheless, was the acute shortage of available housing, which, as we have seen, was particularly bad in the new industrial centres of the Midlands. The ¹⁰⁴ F. M. L. Thompson, ‘Introduction: The Rise of Suburbia’, in id. (ed.), The Rise of Suburbia (Leicester, 1982), 9. ¹⁰⁵ M. J. Daunton, ‘Housing’, in F. M. L. Thompson (ed.), The Cambridge Social History of Britain, II: People and their Environment (Cambridge, 1990), 234–42. ¹⁰⁶ McKibbin, Classes and Cultures, 189. ¹⁰⁷ Richard Rodger, ‘Slums and Suburbs: The Persistence of Residential Apartheid’, in Philip Waller (ed.), The English Urban Landscape (Oxford, 2000), 253; Colin G. Pooley, ‘Patterns on the Ground: Urban Form, Residential Structure and the Social Construction of Space’, in Daunton (ed.), The Cambridge Urban History, III, 438; John Stevenson, ‘The Jerusalem that Failed? The Rebuilding of Post-War Britain’, in Terry Gourvish and Alan O’Day (eds.), Britain Since 1945 (London, 1992), 90. ¹⁰⁸ McKibbin, Classes and Cultures, 188–9. ¹⁰⁹ Daunton, ‘Housing’, 243.

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war destroyed or damaged a significant proportion of existing housing stock and equally brought construction to a ‘virtual standstill’.¹¹⁰ The growing population, the increase in wartime marriages, the demand for households that better suited the needs of young workers, and the movement of workers across regions added to the sense of an imminent crisis. The new Labour government which came into power in 1945 embarked on a series of ambitious programmes to improve the quality and availability of public and private housing, a policy that was continued by the Conservatives from 1951 onwards. Notwithstanding quite an impressive record of house building throughout the 1940s and 1950s, supply could not keep pace with the growing demand. The consequence of this shortfall was, as Stevenson has observed, serious competition to obtain quality rented accommodation in major British cities until the late 1960s.¹¹¹ The situation was particularly bad in London, where ‘Rachmanism’ hit the headlines in 1963 and the official inquiry chaired by Sir Edward Milner Holland on housing in London concluded in 1965 that there was ‘squalor in the midst of progress’.¹¹² The intense competition for housing coincided with the arrival of large numbers of immigrants, which from the mid-1950s exacerbated existing racial tensions.¹¹³ This backdrop had important reverberations for the urban spaces that the Irish inhabited in post-war Britain. The ‘old’ Irish, that is those who arrived before the Second World War, and had settled in Liverpool, Manchester, London, and Glasgow as well as a host of other major cities and towns, were part of the slum clearance schemes of the 1930s. Some well-known examples include the case of the Liverpool Irish, as the city authorities embarked on a vigorous campaign of slum clearance and relocation in suburban estates which had a ‘profound effect on the working-class housing standards between the wars’.¹¹⁴ The clearances of the northern dockland area of Liverpool, where the Irish were heavily concentrated, were initiated in the late 1920s and continued after the Second World War. The Irish, like other inner city ¹¹⁰ Stevenson, ‘The Jerusalem that Failed?’, 97. ¹¹¹ Ibid. 99–100. ¹¹² Quoted in Sheila Patterson, Immigration and Race Relations in Britain, 1960–1967 (London, 1969), 215; Report of the Committee on Housing in Greater London, XVII, 1964–5, Cmd 2605. ¹¹³ John Davis, ‘Rents and Race in 1960s London: New Light on Rachmanism’, Twentieth Century British History, 12, no. 1 (2001), 69–92. ¹¹⁴ Madeline KcKenna, ‘The Suburbanization of the Working-Class Population of Liverpool Between the Wars’, Social History, 16, no. 2 (1991), 181.

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dwellers, were dispersed to housing estates in the suburbs of the city.¹¹⁵ In Glasgow, the redevelopment of the notorious Gorbals in the 1950s and the ‘forced trek to housing schemes situated miles from traditional centres of activity weakened the Irish component of the Catholic west of Scotland identity in a way that perhaps no single event has done’.¹¹⁶ Likewise in Manchester plans for clearance of inner-city slums, first mooted in the 1930s, were put into action in the 1950s and 1960s, leading to the widespread dispersal of the Irish working classes.¹¹⁷ For the ‘New’ Irish who arrived in the 1940s and 1950s, securing any form of accommodation was the overriding objective in the first instance. A number of immediate options were available: stay with family and friends already living in Britain, obtain private rented accommodation, or get a room in a lodging or boarding house. All the evidence suggests that social networks based on kinship and friendship were crucial in shaping this initial decision. Boarding houses were clearly a viable option in the short term, but as the length of stay in Britain increased, more permanent solutions were required. From the end of the Second World War, rented accommodation was very difficult to secure, and, as we have seen, the changes in housing in the post-war period resulted in a contraction in the number of properties available in many cities as the provision of owner-occupied and council housing emerged as the twin aims of government policy. In this context, when faced with difficulties in obtaining accommodation, multiple occupancy of rented properties made sound economic sense for single immigrants who did not envisage long-term settlement, and, moreover, for those who sought to reduce the costs. As new suburban horizons were opened to the prosperous working classes and slum clearance demolished many privately rented homes in the central districts of cities, the market was even tighter, with some very poor quality accommodation in the ¹¹⁵ Frank Boyce, ‘Irish Catholicism in Liverpool: The 1920s and 1930s’, in Patrick Buckland and John Belchem (eds.), The Irish in British Labour History (Liverpool, 1992), 99; id., ‘Catholicism in Liverpool’s Docklands, 1950s–1990s’, in Michael P. HornsbySmith (ed.), Catholics in England, 1950–2000 (London, 1999), 46–7; for an unflattering portrait of the economic and social status of the Liverpool Irish in the late 1920s, see David Caradog Jones (ed.), The Social Survey of Merseyside (Liverpool, 1934), i. 81–2, 198–206. ¹¹⁶ Tom Gallagher, ‘The Catholic Irish in Scotland: In Search of an Identity’, in T. M. Devine (ed.), Irish Immigrants and Scottish Society in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Edinburgh, 1991), 36–7; id., Glasgow: The Uneasy Peace (Manchester, 1987), 231–4. ¹¹⁷ Fielding, Class and Ethnicity, 129.

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‘twilight zones’ such as Brixton and North Kensington in London and Sparkbrook in Birmingham.¹¹⁸ By the early 1960s these rundown districts were largely inhabited by poor families, transitory populations, and immigrants.¹¹⁹ Life changes shaped subsequent housing decisions. Marriage and the arrival of children created difficulties with private landlords who refused to rent to families. Another range of choices presented themselves. Obtaining council housing required a certain degree of stability and, most importantly, the passage of time. Local authorities required a fiveor three-year residence qualification before entry to the housing list, a rule that affected all migrants equally, in theory at least.¹²⁰ Peripatetic movement for new jobs in new places worked against such stability, as did the perception that the sojourn abroad was only a temporary expedient. By the mid-1960s roughly a third of the Irish in London and Birmingham were living in local authority housing, more than double the number than was the case at the start of the decade.¹²¹ By the late 1960s a survey indicated the continuance of a broadly similar pattern.¹²² A survey of over five hundred returned migrants completed in the early 1970s showed that one in ten had lived in council housing prior to coming back to Ireland.¹²³ The other significant landmark was buying a house. Given the centrality of a vision of return in the Irish migrant imagination, obtaining a mortgage and purchasing a home was a recognition that the biblical return to Ireland was not going to occur in the immediate future. House purchase was an acknowledgement of the prospect of a much longer stay in Britain, and perceived to be a lasting stake in a society where settlement was always regarded as temporary.¹²⁴ When one migrant told her husband that she wanted to buy a house, the response was symptomatic of this view: ¹¹⁸ Patterson, Immigration and Race Relations, 194. ¹¹⁹ Pooley, ‘Patterns on the Ground’, 451. ¹²⁰ Patterson, Immigration and Race Relations, 210. ¹²¹ R. B. Davison, Black British: Immigrants to England (London, 1966), table 27, 53; Rose et al., Colour and Citizenship, 142–4. ¹²² Patterson, Immigration and Race Relations, app. vii, 422. ¹²³ B. J. Whelan and J. G. Hughes, ‘A Survey of Returned and Intending Emigrants in Ireland’ (unpublished report prepared for the EEC Study of Housing Conditions of Migrant Workers by the Economic and Social Research Institute, Dublin 1976), table 3.e.6, 109. Copy available at the ESRI Library, Dublin. ¹²⁴ William Ryan, ‘Assimilation of Irish Immigrants in Britain’ (unpub. Ph.D. thesis, St Louis University, 1973), 72.

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From when I was at work during the war, we had £600 saved, and I said, ‘We’ll buy a house’. My husband was all against that. He said, ‘if you do, it’s a milestone round your neck’ . . . not many people bought houses then.¹²⁵

An estate agent in Brixton interviewed in the late 1950s remarked that few of his clients were Irish as ‘they don’t usually buy houses’.¹²⁶ One way to help meet mortgage payments was to take in lodgers, a common strategy to boost household income for all immigrants who did invest in a home.¹²⁷ The ability to purchase a house also depended on the actual location. For instance, studies of inner-city districts of London in the 1960s found that less than one in ten of the Irish households were owner-occupied, but this partly reflects the localized demand for housing in the city as well as the transitory nature of these areas, where up to half of the Irish lived in shared dwellings.¹²⁸ In the St Paul’s district of Bristol, owner-occupation was also low compared with both English-born and other immigrants, a situation that was attributed to the number of Irish single males living in the district.¹²⁹ In Sparkbrook, on the other hand, it was possible for the more established Irish to purchase small terraced houses. After nearly ten years in England, one family, who were uncertain about whether they would stay in England or not, had taken the plunge as ‘they felt they ought not to put their names down for a council house as council houses were Englishmen’s by right’.¹³⁰ By the early 1970s interviews with returnees illustrate the small but significant growing trend towards home ownership: roughly 12 per cent of a large sample of people who came back to Ireland had owned a property in Britain prior to returning, and another 17 per cent had lived with relatives who were property owners.¹³¹ Liam Ryan noted that since the mid-1960s more of the Irish were buying homes, as this was seen as ‘a real monetary investment rather a commitment to a particular neighbourhood or city’.¹³² Owner-occupation was often perceived by contemporaries to be a marker of immigrant assimilation. ¹²⁵ Quoted in Ziesler, ‘The Irish in Birmingham’, 192. ¹²⁶ Patterson, Dark Strangers, 197. ¹²⁷ Rose et al., Colour and Citizenship, 134. ¹²⁸ Davison, Black British, table 27, 53, table 29, 58; Rose et al., Colour and Citizenship, 120–1. ¹²⁹ Anthony Richmond, Migration and Race Relations in an English City: A Study in Bristol (London, 1973), 116–17. ¹³⁰ Rex and Moore, Race, Community and Conflict, 87–8. ¹³¹ Whelan and Hughes, ‘A Survey of Returned and Intending Emigrants in Ireland’, table 3.e.6, 109. ¹³² Ryan, ‘Assimilation of Irish Immigrants’, 72.

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For the sociologist Sheila Patterson, writing in the early 1960s, home ownership ‘turns the immigrant or exile into a settler, a citizen, and a good neighbour, and so speeds the process of absorption’.¹³³ The classic immigrant narrative is replayed as ‘success’, measured by the extent to which the newcomer is absorbed into the fabric of the host society. But for the migrants themselves owning a home was also a symbolic marker: ‘There is something of Mr Biswas in many an immigrant, be he from east or west, who reaches these shores . . . The goal of owneroccupation is to many immigrants (as indeed to growing numbers of Englishmen) the ultimate symbol of self-sufficiency and success, for which it is worth making still further sacrifices and risks.’¹³⁴ There was a sharp contrast between those who had moved to a ‘good’ area for a private house, where often the physical appearance of these homes was influenced by the ‘house proud’ look, and the shabbiness of the lodginghouse districts of the inner city.¹³⁵ Respectability was the overriding concern. 4 . O N T H E M OV E McAlpine went by motor-car And Wimpey went by train. But Paddy tramped the Great North Road, And got there just the same!¹³⁶

While the move to suburbia invariably involved a degree of physical separation between the workplace and home, one group of Irish workers engaged in a nomadic existence ‘following’ the opportunities that were available in many parts of Britain. The sharp distinction between home and work that was such a defining characteristic of middle-class values of domesticity and privacy simply did not apply to working-class unskilled Irish building workers who were engaged in heavy construction work in the post-war era. Constant movement was a prerequisite for earning a livelihood. The navvy was a familiar part of the employment kaleidoscope of Britain from at least the early nineteenth century, and ¹³³ Patterson, Dark Strangers, 213. ¹³⁴ Elizabeth Burley, Housing on Trial: A Study of Immigrants and Local Government (London, 1967), 32. The reference is to V. S. Naipaul, A House for Mr Biswas (London, 1961). ¹³⁵ Ibid. 56. ¹³⁶ Quoted in John O’Donoghue, In a Strange Land (London, 1958), 202.

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Irish labour was heavily involved in the huge construction projects associated with the expansion of the railway and canal network in the Victorian era.¹³⁷ Thousands of Irish men worked on the construction sites of wartime Britain building airfields and factories.¹³⁸ By the midtwentieth century it was power stations, motorways, and airports as well as housing schemes, tunnels, and hydro-electric dams that were the main sources of employment. One well-informed contemporary estimated in 1957 that over 150,0000 Irishmen were employed in such work.¹³⁹ Often the workers were housed in camps adjacent to the building sites or in lodgings or hostels located nearby. The life of the Irish navvy was punctuated by spells in a particular location, followed by a move to the next large project and so on, often in isolated locations where power stations or hydro-electric dams were built in the 1940s and 1950s. Of all the realms of British industry, construction work had the highest levels of labour turnover; on one site in Bedfordshire, where 600 of the 700 men employed were Irish, it was estimated that the turnover of labour was roughly 10 per cent each month, as workers decided to ‘jack’ or quit the job on a regular basis.¹⁴⁰ ‘Jacking’ or leaving was ‘a demonstration of freedom and independence of the employer’ and, according to one ethnographic study carried out in 1953 on a hydro-electric construction site in northern Scotland, the desire to make choices without the constraints of the traditional employer–employee relationship: It is possible that some of the jacking observed in the camp was premeditated, but all departures were made with dramatic suddenness and at odd hours of the day as though completely spontaneous—for example, a man got up at the end of the morning tea break, said ‘I’m off boys’, and walked away.¹⁴¹

This was a peculiarly transient lifestyle, and set the navvy apart not only from the wider society but also from the Irish who lived in more stable environments. For those who were not located in geographically remote locations, it often made no sense to live in cheap accommodation in one ¹³⁷ MacRaild, Irish Migrants in Modern Britain, 46–7; see also David Brooke, The Railway Navvy: ‘That Despicable Race of Men’ (Newton Abbot, 1983) and Terry Coleman, The Railway Navvies: A History of the Men Who Made the Railways (London, 1965). ¹³⁸ Judges, ‘Irish Labour in Great Britain’, 77–8. ¹³⁹ John Charles McQuaid to Donald A. Campbell, archbishop of Glasgow, 1 May 1957, AB8/B/XXIX, McQuaid Papers, DDA. ¹⁴⁰ Jackson, The Irish in Britain, 107. ¹⁴¹ A. J. M. Sykes, ‘Navvies: Their Work Attitudes’, Sociology, 3, no. 1 (1969), 26.

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of the larger cities such as London or Birmingham and then make the daily trek to sites in rural locations in transport arranged by building contractors. The image of the Irish navvy as a hard-working and heavy-drinking ‘rough’ and unpredictable character, prone to violence, who refused to settle in any one place, is one of the most enduring in collective memory. A recent mildly celebratory account of the ‘men who built Britain’ reinforces such stereotypes.¹⁴² The navvy is also immortalized in popular ballads such as ‘McAlpine’s Fusiliers’, and autobiographical accounts illustrate that, in many respects, the life of the unskilled Irish construction or building worker in post-war Britain was a peculiarly transient one, moving about to earn a hard living in Irish-dominated employment niches.¹⁴³ Masculine values dominated social interaction among fellow-workers and physical weakness was frowned upon, as indeed was the shirking of particular tasks or a perception of an unwillingness to do the ‘dirty work’.¹⁴⁴ One migrant recalled his encounters with Irish ‘tunnel tigers’ in post-war Glasgow: On the hydro schemes was where the good money could be made, working in the tunnels. The ‘tunnel tigers’ as they were called, came down at the weekends, all rough and scruffy, and badly in need of a bath, but with plenty of money in their pockets. They would explain, to let us know the hardy breed of men they were, about the terrible conditions they endured . . . And it was mostly true. No wonder those men became prematurely old and died before their time.¹⁴⁵

In many respects this image dominated perceptions as the ubiquitous ‘Paddy’ or ‘Mick’. For Roy Hattersley, the prominent Labour politician and MP for the constituency of Birmingham Sparkbrook, which had a large Irish population, this served to perpetuate a one-size-fits-all description: To their detractors they appear uniformly violent and unskilled, with a pick-axe in one hand, a bottle of stout in the other and the name of a building contractor stencilled on their backs. Even their champions often mount no more persuasive ¹⁴² Ultan Cowley, The Men Who Built Britain: A History of the Irish Navvy (Dublin, 2001). ¹⁴³ Dónall Mac Amhlaigh, An Irish Navvy: The Diary of an Exile, trans. from the Irish by Valentin Iremonger (London, 1964); Sean Ó Ciaráin, Farewell to Mayo: An Emigrant’s Memoirs of Ireland and Scotland (Dublin, 1991); Jim Phelan, We Follow the Roads (London, 1949); O’Donoghue, In a Strange Land. ¹⁴⁴ Cowley, The Men Who Built Britain, 155. ¹⁴⁵ Ó Ciaráin, Farewell to Mayo, 130–1.

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a defence than our duty to be grateful for the railways, canals and roads that could not have been built without them.¹⁴⁶

Such stereotyping was, of course, not reserved for the Irish; the Pakistani shopkeeper or the Italian ice-cream parlour owner were equally erroneous conflations of nationality and occupation, yet this image of the ‘rough’ drunken Irish navvy was pervasive in post-war Britain. Only in the 1980s and 1990s, with the third-wave emigration of skilled Irish, many of whom were graduates, did this monolithic construction look increasingly out-of-date. A peripatetic existence was also the plight of agricultural workers who came annually from Ireland to work on English and Scottish farms and then returned home for the winter. These seasonal migrants were a crucial component of the British agricultural labour force up to the Second World War, as thousands of people travelled across the Irish Sea to work as harvesters, continuing a long-standing tradition since the early nineteenth century. Wartime workers were recruited independently of the official schemes by the British Sugar Corporation or by Irish ‘gangers’ who organized travel arrangements for gangs of ‘tattie hookers’ who were needed to lift the potato crop in Scotland and elsewhere.¹⁴⁷ In poorer regions in parts of the west and north-west of Ireland, where subsistence farming dominated, this seasonal migration was an established way of life. The small-farm economy was, as we noted earlier, in terminal decline, and by the early 1950s it was clear that harvesters were spending more time away, ‘leaving less time for work on the holding which in consequence deteriorates’.¹⁴⁸ By the early 1960s this practice of seasonal migration was apparently still in existence, especially in Lincolnshire and Scotland.¹⁴⁹ However, increasing mechanization and the better lifestyles offered by manufacturing and industrial jobs meant that farmers had to offer higher wages to retain the workers. As Jackson observed, this temporary form of migration paved the way for more permanent settlement in Britain. Whatever advantages and disadvantages seasonal migration may represent in British eyes, it clearly has real advantages in enabling something of the best of both worlds to be had by the Irish migrant. It is a half-way stage to permanent ¹⁴⁶ 1971. ¹⁴⁷ ¹⁴⁸ ¹⁴⁹

Roy Hattersley, ‘The Irish: Moving Up The Social Pyramid’, The Times, 16 Feb. Judges, ‘Irish Labour in Great Britain’, 20–1. Commission on Emigration, Reports, 167. Jackson, The Irish in Britain, 77.

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immigration, creating a powerful inducement for settlement in Britain. It has forged a bridge of familiarity between the two countries which removed much of the strangeness attached to more permanent settlement. The harvesters may never settle, be little assimilated, or even exposed, to English ways, but they have found work in England, and naturally set an example which others follow.¹⁵⁰

High levels of mobility among Irish unskilled workers were in part an outcome of the sheer abundance of opportunities in post-war Britain for those who did not wish to be tied to a particular location, and the reluctance of the native population to take on such heavy and arduous work. Liam Ryan identified what was termed the ‘geographical cure’ among the unskilled Irish, the tendency ‘to change jobs and lodgings at the slightest suggestion that something better is perhaps available elsewhere’.¹⁵¹ This transient lifestyle contrasted sharply with value systems that placed an emphasis on residential stability, centred on the domestic home. And it was not just Irish migrants who were perceived to be highly mobile, as other newcomers were associated with this ‘myth of high mobility’.¹⁵² Traditional employer–employee relationships were undermined by workers who rarely let sentimental concerns trouble them unduly. But even for those who choose not to ‘follow the roads’, moving about for a new job or better accommodation with remarkable rapidity was part and parcel of the migrant experience in the initial stages of settlement. Not unlike their mid-nineteenth-century counterparts, significant numbers of the Irish in post-war Britain were in ‘perpetual transience’, and, in the words of David Fitzpatrick, ‘the concept of ‘‘settlement’’ had little relevance to the experience of much of Britain’s Irish population, forever on the move in search of better jobs or cheaper lodgings’.¹⁵³

5 . ‘ B L AC K I R I S H ’ The term of abuse levelled at the West Indians who arrived in the mid-1950s and lived in Notting Hill was ‘Black Irish’, a pejorative label that managed to combine varieties of racism with long-standing fears of the ‘foreigner’ that had been directed at the Irish and other ¹⁵⁰ ¹⁵¹ ¹⁵² ¹⁵³

Jackson, The Irish in Britain, 78. Ryan, ‘Assimilation of Irish Immigrants’, 134. See W. W. Daniel, Racial Discrimination in England (London, 1968), 215. Fitzpatrick, ‘ ‘‘A Peculiar Tramping People’’ ’, 636, 637.

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newcomers since at least the early nineteenth century.¹⁵⁴ On the streets of London, Birmingham, and other British cities, these ‘dark strangers’ met with hostility, intolerance, and prejudice, including occasional violent attacks.¹⁵⁵ Just as the British working classes feared the Hibernian newcomers in the mid-nineteenth century, as it was widely assumed they would undercut wages at the lowest levels of the unskilled labour market, a similar volatile cocktail of ‘fear, hatred and contempt’ greeted the arrivals from the ‘New’ Commonwealth in the 1950s. With the onset of large-scale immigration from the Caribbean, India, and Pakistan, the Irish were no longer a ‘problem’. Moreover, the public focus shifted to these ‘dark strangers’, who became the subject of entensive enquiry by journalists, policy makers, and social investigators. But, as we shall see, while the Irish became a less visible presence in British society by the 1960s, older engrained attitudes continued to linger on. In the immediate post-war era, the Irish, who, along with Jewish and German immigrants, were the archetypical foreigners in early twentiethcentury Britain were joined by a whole plethora of other white European groups. Nearly a quarter of a million Poles had served under British command during the war and the prospect of returning to a now Communist country was far from appealing.¹⁵⁶ The government made special arrangements between 1945 and 1948 for the resettlement of approximately 145,000 exiled Poles in Britain, mostly former soldiers.¹⁵⁷ Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, and Ukrainians and other refugees and ‘displaced persons’, mainly from eastern Europe, were included in the category of European Volunteer Workers, who were recruited in the late 1940s for employment in industries with labour shortages such as coalmining, agriculture, and hospitals.¹⁵⁸ Italians also arrived in significant ¹⁵⁴ Editorial, ‘ ‘‘Black Irish’’ ’, The Political Quarterly, 39, no. 1 (1968), 1. E. J. B. Rose et al., in Colour and Citizenship refer to the use of the term ‘toasted Irish’ (p. 18). On the racialization of Irishness in interwar Britain, see R. M. Douglas, ‘Anglo-Saxons and Attacotti: The Racialization of Irishness in Britain between the World Wars’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 25, no. 1 (2002), 4–63. Douglas makes a similar point, drawing on Rose’s comments (p. 55). ¹⁵⁵ White, London in the Twentieth Century, 145. ¹⁵⁶ Holmes, John Bull’s Island, 211. ¹⁵⁷ Panikos Panayi, The Impact of Immigration: A Documentary History of the Effects and Experiences of Immigrants in Britain since 1945 (Manchester, 1999); 13; Holmes, John Bull’s Island, 211–12; Peter D. Stachura, ‘Towards and Beyond Yalta’, in id. (ed.), The Poles in Britain, 1940–2000 (London, 2004), 15. ¹⁵⁸ Panayi, The Impact of Immigration, 13; Kathleen Paul, Whitewashing Britain: Race and Citizenship in the Post-War Era (Ithaca, 1997), 67–89; Diana Kay and Robert

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numbers during the 1950s and 1960s, some under schemes organized by the government, but many others making the journey without any official assistance.¹⁵⁹ By the 1960s the Italians were the fifth largest migrant group in British society.¹⁶⁰ These immigrants were located in the same cities and towns as the Irish and often shared the same spaces; for instance, large numbers of Poles settled in London as well as in smaller expanding Midland cities such as Leicester.¹⁶¹ European Voluntary Workers were drafted into Coventry in 1946 to assist in the rebuilding of the city, a task in which the Irish were heavily involved.¹⁶² Irish workers recruited under British official schemes in the late 1940s were also directed to heavy industrial work, coal-mining, and agriculture as well as the National Health Service, all spheres of employment that were experiencing a severe shortage of labour. For instance, Italians who worked in the brickworks in Bedford mingled with the Irish who also came to the town, who were later joined by West Indians, Pakistanis, and Indians. By the late 1960s, one in five of the town’s inhabitants were immigrants.¹⁶³ Unlike the Poles or Italians, the Irish had attracted widespread attention before the Second World War, when their position came under intense scrutiny as a result of the IRA bombing campaign initiated in January 1939, which eventually fizzled out in March 1940.¹⁶⁴ In London alone fifty-four attacks occurred in the first half of 1939. A series of explosions in Birmingham between March and June led to arrests, convictions, and deportations of suspected IRA members back to Ireland.¹⁶⁵ In response to this campaign, which was for the most part directed at civilians going about their daily business in shopping districts and train stations, the government introduced the Prevention of Violence Act in July 1939, which required Irish citizens resident Miles, Refugees or Migrant Workers? European Volunteer Workers in Britain, 1946–1951 (London, 1992). ¹⁵⁹ Holmes, John Bull’s Island, 214–15; Anne-Marie Fortier, Migrant Belongings: Memory, Space and Identity (Oxford, 2000), 28–9. ¹⁶⁰ Colin Holmes, ‘Immigration’, in Gourvish and O’Day (eds.), Britain Since 1945, 210. ¹⁶¹ Kathy Burrell, ‘Homeland Memories and the Polish Community in Leicester’, in Peter D. Stachura (ed.), The Poles in Britain, 1940–2000 (London, 2004), 69–84; Nash and Reeder (eds.), Leicester in the Twentieth Century, 184–5. ¹⁶² Richardson, Twentieth-Century Coventry, 329. ¹⁶³ Brown, The Un-Melting Pot, 11–12; Burley, Housing on Trial 227–35. ¹⁶⁴ Tim Pat Coogan, The IRA (London, 1970), 127–35. ¹⁶⁵ See Ziesler, ‘The Irish in Birmingham’, 159–63.

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in Britain to register with the police.¹⁶⁶ The majority of the people involved had come over directly from Ireland and took advantage of the anonymity afforded by the expanding number of their compatriots in Britain, but few contemporaries distinguished between Irish terrorists and Irish migrants. In the local press in Birmingham, ‘the majority [were held] at least partially responsible for the acts of few’; legend has it that ‘no Irish need apply’ signs were apparently not uncommon sights in some Birmingham factories before the war, and the IRA bombing campaign simply served to reinforce existing anti-Irish prejudices on the part of local employers.¹⁶⁷ The most notorious incident took place in Coventry, when five people were killed and many others were injured after a bomb placed in the basket of a bicycle exploded on 25 August 1939 in the busy Broadgate area of the city. This incident provoked strong anti-Irish feelings, including a march by two thousand aircraft workers who demanded that Irish workers be refused employment in the city’s factories.¹⁶⁸ Two Irishmen were executed for their part in this explosion in February 1940, one of whom, Peter Barnes, was convicted in questionable circumstances, causing much outrage in Ireland.¹⁶⁹ The outbreak of war in September 1939 overshadowed the more immediate—and, it should be said, understandable—responses to these events as the imminent threat from Nazi Germany occupied the centre stage. Nevertheless, the pre-war IRA bombing campaign together with Irish neutrality during the Second World War, which was widely misunderstood in Britain, cast a long shadow over the Irish, as their ‘loyalty’ was always open to question in the 1940s and 1950s.¹⁷⁰ Colonial immigration eclipsed any sustained consideration of the Irish presence in Britain, notwithstanding the fact that in the late 1950s nearly 60,000 Irish were arriving annually whereas migrants from the ‘New’ Commonwealth constituted less than half that amount. For instance, in 1959 official statistics reported 64,494 entrants into the National Insurance scheme from independent Ireland compared with 30,842 from colonial territories and an additional 35,198 people from Commonwealth countries.¹⁷¹ Roughly one of three entering Britain in this year was from Ireland, although the pattern varied over time. The early 1960s witnessed, for instance, an unprecedented increase in the rate of arrivals ¹⁶⁶ ¹⁶⁷ ¹⁶⁸ ¹⁶⁹ ¹⁷¹

O’Connor, The Irish in Britain, 76. Ziesler, The Irish in Birmingham’, 162–3. Richardson, Twentieth-Century Coventry, 97. Coogan, The IRA, 134–5. ¹⁷⁰ O’Connor, The Irish in Britain, 79. Sixth Report of the Overseas Migration Board, XI, 1960–61, Cmnd 1243, 13.

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from South Asia as people sought to ‘beat-the-ban’ in 1961, when it became evident that some form of immigration control was inevitable in the lead-up to the introduction of the Commonwealth Immigrants Act in July 1962.¹⁷² As we have seen, for a variety of complex reasons that were discussed in the previous chapter, the Irish were excluded from control under this legislation, prompting a number of historians to argue that the Act was ‘designed to exclude immigrants of colour’.¹⁷³ Nevertheless, continuities existed in the response to large-scale colonial immigration in the 1950s, which bore the hallmarks of traditional reactions to the arrival of ‘foreigners’ in British society. Even though Britain could provide jobs for most, if not all, of these immigrants, the housing shortage exacerbated many of the problems that new arrivals faced, and one of the justifications advanced for the later introduction of immigration controls by the Conservative government in 1962 was the housing problem.¹⁷⁴ Like the Irish, many other immigrants initially settled in the ‘twilight zones’ of British cities and towns where conditions were poor, multiple occupancy was the norm, and the lodging house was the principal form of available accommodation. British landlords were often reluctant to offer accommodation to ‘coloured’ immigrants; in Brixton, for instance, one sociologist recounts the experiences of West Indians who arrived before 1955 and were refused rooms by white landlords or were put off even asking by advertisements in shops inscribed with ‘sorry, no coloured’ or ‘English only’. By the later 1950s new arrivals often made their way directly to friends and relatives in Brixton or to ‘friendly’ white landlords, rather than ‘risk a rebuff ’.¹⁷⁵ The initial patterns of settlement for colonial migrants were therefore similar to those of more established groups. Multiple occupancy of old Victorian houses was a short-term solution to the acute shortage of privately rented accommodation and the length of time required before it was possible to join the list for local authority housing, the criteria for which often included at least three years’ residency.¹⁷⁶ One way of ¹⁷² Rose et al., Colour and Citizenship, 68; Randall Hansen, Citizenship and Immigration in Post-War Britain (Oxford, 2000), 118; Paul, Whitewashing Britain, 161; Holmes, John Bull’s Island, 262. ¹⁷³ Hansen, Citizenship and Immigration, 117, summarizing the views of Paul, Whitewashing Britain, 109–10. See above, pp. 76–82. ¹⁷⁴ Patterson, Immigration and Race Relations, 206. ¹⁷⁵ Patterson, Dark Strangers, 209. ¹⁷⁶ The rules varied across local authorities: see Burley, Housing on Trial.

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getting around these problems was to purchase cheap and often decaying houses and sublet to other immigrants, and the evidence suggests that this was common practice by the late 1950s in London and elsewhere. Apparently Irish, Cypriot, and Polish landlords ‘had less colour consciousness’ and perhaps better business sense, and were willing to rent accommodation in London to Caribbean and South Asian immigrants, and vice versa in the case of Sparkbrook in Birmingham.¹⁷⁷ Much of the tension that occurred centred on this issue and on the concentration of migrant groups in particular districts, leading to deeply rooted fears about the establishment of ‘dark ghettos’. Well-meaning social investigators ventured into the ‘coloured quarters’ of British cities to identify the ‘social problems’ created by large-scale immigration.¹⁷⁸ As Waters has noted, ‘the theme of ‘‘strangers’’ and ‘‘strangeness’’ permeated the discourse on race relations in the 1950s’: for instance, one social anthropologist vividly recounted her ‘sense of strangeness’ on walking down a street in Brixton in May 1955: As I turned off the main shopping street, I was immediately overcome with a sense of strangeness, almost of shock. The street was a fairly typical South London side-street, grubby and narrow, lined with cheap cafés, shabby pubs, and flashy clothing-shops. All this was normal enough. But what struck one so forcefully was that, apart from some shopping housewives and a posse of Teddy boys in tight jeans outside the billiards hall, almost everybody in sight had a coloured skin.¹⁷⁹

A newspaper account of Birmingham’s immigration districts from the early 1960s also captures this sense of a profound culture shock when an urban wasteland inhabited by immigrants was encountered: . . . streets littered with paper and broken bottles, gardens back and front used as rubbish tips, broken gates, shabby doors, bare, rotting woodwork, tell the story visually. For the people who live there, often as many as thirty to a house . . . there has been no incentive to do anything except move on as soon as possible.¹⁸⁰

Sociologists and other commentators often used the Irish as a ‘control group’ in detailed ethnographic accounts of migrant adjustment in areas ¹⁷⁷ Patterson, Dark Strangers, 210; see also the examples cited in Rex and Moore, Race, Community and Conflict, 86, 89, 121, 135, 139. ¹⁷⁸ The early classic study is of Stepney, East London, by Michael Banton, The Coloured Quarter: Negro Immigrants in an English City (London, 1955); see also Rex and Moore, Race, Community and Conflict, 44. ¹⁷⁹ Waters, ‘‘Dark Strangers’’ in Our Midst, 121. Patterson, Dark Strangers, 3. ¹⁸⁰ The Guardian, 20 Jan. 1961, quoted in Ziesler, ‘The Irish in Birmingham’, 189.

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of settlement in London, Birmingham, and elsewhere, to assess the extent to which racial prejudice was shaping local responses.¹⁸¹ In her study of Brixton, Patterson recorded comments from its inhabitants that suggest an established hierarchy of immigrants when it came to preferences as to potential neighbours. While West Indians came out as the group least likely to conform to the values and mores of the ‘respectable’ upper working class, Irish migrants were often said to be ‘as ‘‘bad as the darkies’’; but they are not so easily identifiable, and the criticisms are therefore not so sharply focused’.¹⁸² When it came to the allocation of housing, the Irish had a number of distinct advantages. In the first instance, large-scale Irish immigration in the 1940s and early 1950s preceded the arrival of other newcomers, ensuring that the Irish had gained valuable years on the waiting list. Up to the mid-1960s and the introduction of legislation in 1965 and 1968, many local authorities discriminated against all immigrants, both in the rules governing residence requirements and in the actual allocation of housing, by offering poorer-quality accommodation on ‘rough’ estates or properties that were listed for demolition, policies that were ‘exercised capriciously’.¹⁸³ As Feldman has remarked, ‘a view of whether a family really ‘‘belonged’’ to the authority superseded a strict assessment of housing need’.¹⁸⁴ Only with the intervention of central government from the mid-1960s onwards were serious efforts made to counter this overt form of discrimination. Lastly, even though the Irish faced a similar reluctance on the part of local officials to give houses to others than ‘our own people’, it was not perceived that the allocation of a council house would cause hostility on the part of local inhabitants, which may well have influenced marginal decisions.¹⁸⁵ 6 . ‘ N O B L AC K S , N O I R I S H ’ By the early 1960s the context of Irish settlement had fundamentally changed with the arrival of large numbers of migrants from the ‘New’ ¹⁸¹ See, for example, Rex and Moore, Race, Community and Conflict. ¹⁸² Patterson, Dark Strangers, 199. ¹⁸³ Rose et al., Colour and Citizenship, 236; Patterson, Immigration and Race Relations, 209–14. This is extensively documented in Burley, Housing on Trial. ¹⁸⁴ Feldman, ‘Migrants, Immigrants and Welfare’, 98. ¹⁸⁵ Quoted in Patterson, Immigration and Race Relations, 209. For perception that the local authority discriminated against Irish applicants in Birmingham, see Rex and Moore, Race, Community and Conflict, 87–8.

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Commonwealth. The social and cultural consequences that arose from this large-scale immigration occupied centre stage in the early 1960s, prompting legislation in 1962 to curtail the free entry of these British subjects, who had a much stronger claim to free entry after independent Ireland left the Commonwealth in 1949. ‘No blacks, no Irish’ or ‘No Irish need apply’ signs were apparently not uncommon sights in the 1950s. In fact, they occupy a central place in the collective memory of the Irish in Britain, often featuring in the personal testimony of migrants as emblematic of the reaction to large-scale Irish settlement in post-war Britain and even appearing in the title of the autobiography of John Lydon, the lead singer with the punk band, the Sex Pistols, who was raised by Irish parents.¹⁸⁶ Such signs are, by their very nature, ephemeral, but unlike the American case, where the existence of ‘No Irish need apply’ signs was challenged by one historian, who claimed that Irish Americans had incorporated this myth into a wider account of discrimination and anti-Irish prejudice, no one has, as yet, set themselves the almost impossible task of disproving their existence.¹⁸⁷ But caution is needed here as such foundational narratives can effortlessly enter oral testimonies as individuals interweave a wellknown communal memory into a personal life story. There is little doubt that the terminology was subsequently altered to take account of more recent nomenclature—‘coloured’ was the term in widespread use before this description came to be seen as offensive in the 1970s.¹⁸⁸ Such discriminatory advertisements brutally expressed the universality ¹⁸⁶ See, for example, Anne Lynch (ed.), The Irish in Exile: Stories of Emigration (London, 1988), 22; Pam Schweitzer (ed.), Across the Irish Sea, 2nd edn. (London, 1991); Mary Lennon, Marie McAdam, and Joanne O’Brien, Across the Water: Irish Women’s Lives in Britain (London, 1988), 136, 141; Anne O’Grady, Irish Migration to London in the 1940s and 1950s (London, 1988), 13. Another study based on oral history reported similar statements by respondents: see Louise Ryan, ‘Family Matters: (E)migration, Familial Networks and Irish Women in Britain’, Sociological Review, 52, no. 3 (2004), 365; John Lydon, Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs (London, 1994). According to one contemporary assessment, which truncates the offensive statement to simply ‘No Irish’, these signs are ‘now often forgotten outside the Irish community’ (Mary Hickman and Bronwen Walter, Discrimination and the Irish Community in Britain (London, 1997), 235). ¹⁸⁷ Richard Jensen, ‘ ‘‘No Irish Need Apply’’: A Myth of Victimization’, Journal of Social History, 36, no. 2 (2002), 405–29. ¹⁸⁸ Zig Layton-Henry, The Politics of Immigration: Immigration, ‘Race’ and ‘Race’ Relations in Post-War Britain (Oxford, 1992), 21, n. 20. Patterson, however, as early as 1963 noted that the term is ‘open to criticism’ (Patterson, Dark Strangers, 3, n. 1).

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of British prejudices towards the ‘foreigner’ and the ‘stranger’. The sociologist John Jackson, who conducted his fieldwork in the late 1950s, reported that this succinct combination of old and new animosities arose particularly over issues such as housing: In some districts a fairly active discrimination over housing is enforced against the Irish. In Birmingham, Manchester and parts of London it is not uncommon to find notices offering accommodation that specify ‘no coloured; no Irish’. There is a strongly held impression that these groups, once they move into a street or district, will ‘lower the tone of the neighbourhood’ and, what is much more important, will ‘bring down property values’.¹⁸⁹

One of the pioneers in the field of race relations, Michael Banton, encountered similar inscriptions in Sparkbrook in Birmingham when conducting a survey in 1952; interestingly, he noticed more ‘No Irish’ than ‘No coloured’ notices, although this may be a reflection of the relatively low level of Commonwealth immigration to the city at this time.¹⁹⁰ Another sociologist has even suggested that such signs were still common in the mid-1960s.¹⁹¹ Isolated incidents where employers were unwilling to employ Irish workers in service industries were still reported in the early 1960s, justified on the dubious grounds that they would not be acceptable to householders.¹⁹² But this was not comparable to the widespread and systematic discrimination that black and Asian immigrants faced in employment, housing, and the provision of financial services.¹⁹³ The Second World War had opened up a whole range of new occupations for the Irish in Britain. Evidence from the censuses conducted in the postwar period shows that while the Irish were still heavily concentrated in particular spheres such as building and nursing, their distribution across the whole range of forms of employment led Jackson to conclude that by the mid-1960s, ‘in the main . . . the Irish immigrant enjoys equal opportunities in the labour market with the native worker’.¹⁹⁴ This ¹⁸⁹ Jackson, The Irish in Britain, 63. ¹⁹⁰ Holmes, John Bull’s Island, 393, n. 377. ¹⁹¹ Richmond, Migration and Race Relations in an English City, 24. ¹⁹² Jackson, The Irish in Britain, 177, n. 13. ¹⁹³ This is extensively documented in Political and Economic Planning, Racial Discrimination in Britain (London, 1967). For a summary of the report prepared for a popular readership, published as a Penguin paperback, see Daniel, Racial Discrimination in England. See also Rose et al., Colour and Citizenship, 296–329. ¹⁹⁴ Jackson, The Irish in Britain, 108.

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assessment is supported by the plethora of social studies which indicated that the Irish occupied an intermediate position, between that of white British workers and Caribbean and South Asian immigrants.¹⁹⁵ There is little evidence to support the recent contention by Richard Weight that the Irish ‘were guilty of some of the worst racism themselves’, and furthermore that they were actively involved in ‘stigmatizing others more vulnerable than themselves’.¹⁹⁶ Before such a sweeping judgement can be made, the relations between the Irish and other immigrants who settled in post-war Britain need to be systematically investigated by scholars. Weight’s other observation that the ‘hostility towards black Britons also benefited the Irish because much of the public animus directed at them was diverted towards the new arrivals’ is much more persuasive. The new other was now the ‘dark stranger’, as the Irish were gradually deracialized and seen as an acceptable element of British society. Acceptance is indubitably an elusive concept. The volatile nature of responses was illustrated by the resurgence of visceral anti-Irish prejudices from the early 1970s with the onset of violent conflict in Northern Ireland and the IRA bombing campaign in Britain. To suggest, as one contemporary did in 1968, that the Irish were ‘honorary AngloSaxons’, echoing the fictional Irish-American wit Mr Dooley, overstates the degree of acceptance, since older latent prejudices continued to linger and encounters with the Irish still provoked hostile responses.¹⁹⁷ One hundred years earlier, the Irish influx was characterized as an unwelcome presence that would have a degrading effect on the British working classes, a theme that re-emerged occasionally until the Second World War, usually based on pre-ordained racial hierarchies of AngloSaxons and Celts.¹⁹⁸ The arrival of other, more visible migrants served to distract attention away from Britain’s Irish population and allowed ¹⁹⁵ Rose et al., Colour and Citizenship, 176; Sheila Patterson, ‘Immigrants and Employment’, Political Quarterly, 39, no. 1 (1968), 67. Rose adds that this varied across space, with the Irish in the West Midlands ‘much nearer the position of other immigrant groups than that of the English’, whereas the situation in London differed, which can be explained by a higher proportion of middle-class Irish professionals. ¹⁹⁶ Weight, Patriots, 145. ¹⁹⁷ ‘ ‘‘Black Irish’’ ’, 1; on the character of Mr Dooley, see Charles Fanning (ed.), Mr Dooley and the Chicago Irish: The Autobiography of an American Ethnic Group (Washington, DC, 1997); for a generally upbeat assessment of the Irish in the 1960s, see O’Connor, The Irish in Britain, chs. 6–9. ¹⁹⁸ Fitzpatrick, ‘ ‘‘A Peculiar Tramping People’’ ’, 624.

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the Irish to move up the hierarchy of newcomers in British society. Once feared in the late 1920s as ‘almost a class of helots living in an alien land’, the Irish quietly slipped out of public consciousness by the 1960s.¹⁹⁹ ¹⁹⁹ Enda Delaney, ‘ ‘‘Almost a Class of Helots in an Alien Land’’: The British State and Irish Immigration, 1921–45’, Immigrants and Minorities, 18, nos. 2–3 (1999), 240–65.

4 Cultures of Adjustment For the Irish, unlike other migrants who arrived in Britain after the Second World War, adjusting did not involve overcoming the obstacles of mastering a new language or getting to grips with a completely alien culture. However, the widespread assumption that since the Irish no longer seemed so different to British eyes rapid assimilation occurred fails to take account of the complexities of adapting to a new life in a new country. Many sought understandably to ‘recreate the familiar whilst in the midst of change’ to counter the dislocation of emigration.¹ This was not simply misty eyed nostalgia for the old country, but paradoxically a crucial transitional stage in the intricate process of reconciling oneself to an indeterminate period of time living in a society that could never be home. Traditional historical accounts invariably perceive migrants as passive actors who were powerless in the face of the insurmountable obstacles that they confronted in the industrial societies of western Europe and North America. The classic account of The Uprooted by the distinguished American historian Oscar Handlin, first published in 1951, depicts this encounter as ‘one of uprootedness and alienation’.² More recent work, however, restores agency and power to individuals who made rational decisions about how to adjust to life in the new environment. For John Bodnar, ‘immigrant adjustment to capitalism in America was ultimately a product of a dynamic between the expanding economic and social imperatives of capitalism and the life strategies of ordinary people’.³ It is this inherent tension between individual needs, responses, and world-views and ¹ Robert Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880–1950, 2nd edn. (New Haven, 2002), 162. ² Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted, 1st edn. (Boston, 1951); Jon Gjerde, Major Problems in American Immigration and Ethnic History (Boston, 1998), 2. ³ John Bodnar, The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America (Bloomington, 1985), 207.

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wider structures that encouraged adaptation that forms the core of this chapter. Migrants in a new society cling to what is known and familiar from the ‘old’ world, as part of the complicated process of adjusting to the ‘new’ one. The argument that is advanced here is that Irish migrants adopted a wide range of strategies that aided adjustment to life in post-war Britain. On the face of it, the new social worlds that migrants encountered were indeed perplexing and confusing. The urban environments that the Irish now inhabited in post-war Britain were unfamiliar and strange to this predominantly rural population, feeding a sense of deep alienation. But the e´migr´e mindset on arrival was not suddenly shorn of all previous experiences, understandings, memories, and cultural frameworks. It was quite natural for migrants to be drawn to what was ostensibly familiar and known, as they sought to make sense of their new lives. The most recognizable feature was the Catholic church, which dominated Irish society up to the late 1960s. Few would disagree with John Jackson’s contention that the church was a ‘central institution’ for the Irish in Britain, but the detailed implications of this centrality remain to be systematically explored for the period after the Second World War.⁴ Undoubtedly, organized religion served to ease the transition from a rural and predominantly agricultural society to this new life in urban and industrial Britain. By acting as the focal point for interaction with other Irish Catholics, and as the principal provider of education and welfare, the church was the mediator between the migrant and the wider society. Religious faith, however, was more than just a shared sense of identity or the physical incarnations of churches, priests, schools, and welfare organizations: Catholicism offered a route to the understanding of one’s place in the world, and for the diasporic Irish dispersed across the globe, it was, in Sheridan Gilley’s words, ‘a source of dignity and strength, offering them hope in this world and for another’.⁵ Other familiar features of the social and cultural landscape included Gaelic sports, especially football and hurling, and dancehalls, run by and largely for the Irish migrant population in cities such as London and Birmingham. But adjustment was not simply a one-way linear process of the effortless re-creation of islands of Irishness in an alien land, so ⁴ John Archer Jackson, The Irish in Britain (London, 1963), 135. ⁵ Sheridan Gilley, ‘Irish Catholicism in Britain’, in Donal A. Kerr (ed.), Religion, State and Ethnic Groups (Aldershot, 1992), 254.

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that the migrants could remain hermetically sealed from the rest of the population. In the post-war period, British society was transformed as traditional sources of moral authority declined and well-established norms concerning sexuality, gender roles, the role of youth, individual rights, and freedoms were effectively undermined, most obviously in the 1960s as the ‘permissive’ society slowly came into being. These changes had important implications for society at large and equally for its largest group of immigrants.

1 . T H E S TAT U E O F S T PAT R I C K A young Irish priest who had spent three years in Britain in the late 1950s recounted a story that sums up the dilemma faced by the Catholic church in the century after the restoration of the hierarchy in England and Wales in 1850.⁶ On being appointed parish priest in an unspecified area of London, an anonymous cleric immediately decreed that the statue of St Patrick be removed from its prominent position in his church.⁷ The statue was placed there some thirty years previously ‘in deference to the sentiments of those Irish labourers and domestics whose pennies and half-pennies built the church’.⁸ His justification for this action was grounded not in aesthetics, or indeed practical considerations, but rather in the symbolic message that this was now ‘an English church’.⁹ Up to the 1840s, English Catholic churches had traditionally ‘combined the class exclusiveness of an Anglican proprietary chapel with the devotional ethos of a Dissenting meeting-house’, and the statues were conspicuous by their absence.¹⁰ Perhaps this account of the removal of the statue of St Patrick was an urban myth, or a half-true tale surreptitiously shared among Irish priests—the provenance cannot be verified—but, as the storyteller readily acknowledged, it was an extreme instance of the efforts of the native clergy to retain the distinctively English character ⁶ According to the lists compiled by Kieran O’Shea, Gaynor was in Britain between 1957 and 1959 (Kieran O’Shea, The Irish Emigrant Chaplaincy Scheme in Britain, 1957–82 (Naas, 1985), 69) and the author of a guidebook for intending migrants, The Shamrock Express (Dublin, 1962). ⁷ Eamonn Gaynor, ‘The Irish in Britain’, The Furrow, 5, no. 4 (1954), 239. ⁸ Ibid. ⁹ Ibid. ¹⁰ Sheridan Gilley, ‘Catholic Faith of the Irish Slums: London, 1840–70’, in H. J. Dyos and M. Wolff (eds.), The Victorian City: Image and Reality, 2 vols. (London, 1973), ii. 841.

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of the church. Notwithstanding its exceptional nature, it does illustrate the desire of some native Catholics, both clerical and lay, to play down the substantial Irish influence on the growth and development of the English church in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and equally its recounting reminds us of the long-standing feeling of Irish Catholics in Britain that their presence was by no means universally welcomed by their co-religionists.¹¹ For the Irish, St Patrick was a symbolic figure with no equal as the link between God and Ireland, ‘binding them in one’, and his feast day was celebrated across the globe in an intricate fusion of nationality and religion.¹² Clergy in London and Manchester in the late nineteenth century recognized this and employed symbols such as St Patrick to unite ‘the appeal of religion with that of nationalism’, with the former always taking precedence over the latter.¹³ The parish priest’s actions in removing the statue sent out the message that as far as he was concerned, this ‘Irish religion’ was no longer welcome in his church.¹⁴ Sensitivities about the placing of statues apart, in terms of sheer numbers the Irish presence could not be so easily disregarded, as the church was transformed by the huge Irish influx from the midnineteenth century onwards. By the late nineteenth century it was, as ´ Tuathaigh puts it, ‘very much the church of the immigrant Gearoid O Irish’.¹⁵ A small group of well-born recusants concentrated in pockets in the landowning and gentry classes was supplemented by a largely proletarian population, from the neighbouring island. This was an encounter of sharp contrasts, as Gilley observes: The English Catholic church confronted in the Irish a manner of men utterly remote from its own experience. Its priests ministered to a devout gentry; they ¹¹ For the tendency to overplay the Irish role in the revival of English Catholicism in the first half of the nineteenth century, see G. P. Connolly, ‘The Transubstantiation of Myth: Towards a New Popular History of Nineteenth-Century Catholicism in England’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 35, no. 1 (1984), 87–93. ¹² Sheridan Gilley, ‘The Roman Catholic Church and the Nineteenth-Century Irish Diaspora’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 35, no. 2 (1984), 207. ¹³ Lynn Hollen Lees, Exiles of Erin: Irish Migrants in Victorian London (Manchester, 1979), 195; Steven Fielding, Class and Ethnicity: Irish Catholics in England, 1880–1939 (Buckingham, 1993), 42–3. ¹⁴ This description of Irish Catholicism is taken from Raphael Samuel, ‘An Irish Religion’, in Raphael Samuel (ed.), Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, Vol. 2: Minorities and Outsiders (London, 1987). ´ Tuathaigh, ‘The Irish in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Problems of ¹⁵ M. A. G. O Integration’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 31 (1981), 165.

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had now to serve a pious proletariat. The faith in England had survived in the country; the Irish flocked to the towns. English congregations were small, and mostly worshipped in manor chapels; the Irish multitudes would require cathedrals.¹⁶

Large-scale Catholic Irish immigration had profound implications for the overall shape and complexion of the British Catholic church. As David Fitzpatrick says with characteristic acuity, ‘between 1800 and 1870 it was transfigured from being a small, proud, rich, and unpopular body to become a large, prudent, poorer, and unpopular body, with a vast majority of Irish adherents’.¹⁷ The process of ‘hibernicization’ was not universally welcomed by native-born Catholics, as these predominantly poor newcomers had different needs and world-views, and were accustomed to popular religious practices that had few parallels in the more esoteric version of English Catholicism, which one historian, Sheridan Gilley, has described as having ‘developed a very English restraint and reserve with an austere liturgy and devotional life’.¹⁸ This distinctive brand of Catholicism had more in common with Anglicanism than it did with its Irish variant.¹⁹ By the end of the eighteenth century, it was estimated that Catholics in Britain numbered about 120,000, though all such estimates of the numbers of Catholics are inherently unreliable.²⁰ Between 1770 and the restoration of the English hierarchy in 1850 the numbers of Catholics ‘multiplied about ten times’ as the total reached roughly half a million.²¹ This numerical growth presented both opportunities for ‘revival’, in numerical terms at least, and a whole plethora of practical problems. Throughout the late nineteenth century an elaborate ¹⁶ Sheridan Gilley, ‘The Roman Catholic Mission to the Irish in London, 1840–1860’, Recusant History, 10 (1969–70), 123. ¹⁷ David Fitzpatrick, ‘ ‘‘A Peculiar Tramping People’’: The Irish in Britain, 1801–70’, in W. E. Vaughan (ed.), A New History of Ireland, Vol. 5: Ireland Under the Union, I (1801–70) (Oxford, 1989), 651. ¹⁸ Gilley, ‘Irish Catholicism in Britain’, 237. ¹⁹ See Gaynor, ‘The Irish in Britain’, 239, for comments along these lines. ²⁰ For a discussion of the problems with these numbers, see Robert Currie, Alan Gilbert, and Lee Horsley, Churches and Churchgoers: Patterns of Church Growth in the British Isles since 1700 (Oxford, 1977), n. 6, 27, and A. E. C. W. Spencer, ‘The Demography and Sociography of the Roman Catholic Community of England and Wales’, in Laurence Bright and Simon Clements (eds.), The Commited Church (London, 1966), 60–85. ²¹ John Bossy, The English Catholic Community, 1570–1850 (London, 1975), 298; Sheridan Gilley, ‘The Roman Catholic Church in England, 1780–1940’, in Sheridan Gilley and W. J. Shiels (eds.), A History of Religion in Britain: Practice and Belief from the Pre-Roman Times to the Present (Oxford, 1994), 351.

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set of mechanisms were devised to assist poor Catholic Irish migrants in urban centres, after an initially ambivalent response by English clergy to their rapidly expanding Irish flock from the 1840s. As well as vigorous church and school building programmes, the mission to Irish Catholics included provision of social and recreational activities. Irish-born clergy were recruited in large numbers to minister to the displaced faithful, a crucial consideration for the minority of Irish-speaking migrants.²² What Raphael Samuel memorably characterized as the ‘double mission’ of the church combined proselytizing work among the rich with serving as the ‘national church of the Irish poor’.²³ One ecclesiastical figure who was heavily involved with the latter, Cardinal Henry Manning, declared with some degree of understandable exasperation in 1887 that ‘I have spent my life in working for the Irish occupation of England’.²⁴ A wide range of detailed local studies demonstrate just how successful a role the church played in catering for the social and spiritual needs of the Catholic Irish in Victorian and Edwardian Britain.²⁵ Fulfilment of this role, however, fed a sense that Irish Catholics were different, not only from others in the urban working-class districts which they inhabited, but also from English Catholics, who had remarkably little in common ´ Tuathaigh, the implications with their Hibernian co-religionists. For O were clear: ‘In short, the Catholic church was a crucial force inhibiting, indeed actively discouraging, the assimilation of the Irish immigrants in the working-class culture of the native majority.’²⁶ The development of communal identities in the cities and towns of Victorian Britain, where anti-Catholicism was a pervasive feature of public discourse, helped to cultivate a subculture, based on religion, nationality, and political outlook, the latter being especially repugnant to English Catholics, who after centuries of mistrust were keen to demonstrate their patriotism and loyalty to King and country.²⁷ By the first quarter of the ²² David Fitzpatrick, ‘The Irish in Britain, 1871–1921’, in W. E. Vaughan (ed.), A New History of Ireland, Vol. 6: Ireland Under the Union, II (1870–1921) (Oxford, 1996), 672; Samuel, ‘An Irish Religion’, 103–4. ²³ Raphael Samuel, ‘The Roman Catholic Church and the Irish Poor’, in Roger Swift and Sheridan Gilley (eds.), The Irish in the Victorian City (London, 1985), 271. ²⁴ Quoted in Denis Gwynn, ‘The Irish Immigration’, in G. A. Beck (ed.), The English Catholics (London, 1950), 265; also quoted by Fitzpatrick, ‘The Irish in Britain’, 672. ²⁵ See Donald M. MacRaild, Irish Migrants in Modern Britain, 1750–1922 (Basingstoke 1999), ch. 3 for an excellent synthesis of this large literature. ´ Tuathaigh, ‘The Irish in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, 168. ²⁶ O ²⁷ Ibid. 169–71; Fielding, Class and Ethnicity, (1993), 40–1.

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twentieth century the Catholic church had successfully accommodated, but not wholly incorporated, its large Irish component. For instance, few Irish-born clerics had risen within the ranks of the hierarchy, and there remained an unresolved tension between the more reserved Anglo-Saxon religious imagination and ‘a Catholic population with a rather different understanding of Catholicism’.²⁸ And, as a number of historians have argued, the church also performed its most obvious function by acting as a source of solace and inspiration for the faithful that served ‘to point the Irish exile to heaven through a particular vision of the holy’.²⁹ There existed significant concentrations of Irish Catholics across Britain, with strongholds in the west of Scotland, Lancashire, and parts of London. According to Gilley, within these areas Catholicism ‘provided the social cement for a flourishing communal life’, but the formal attachment to the rituals of the church naturally varied considerably: What helped the church in the long term was the emergence of partly Irish Catholic neighbourhoods, settled peacefully in the midst of the British working class, but with their own pubs, schools and churches, and with a large core of committed churchgoers and a large fringe of ‘bad Catholics’ who might be reclaimed for the time by a mission, who would despatch their children to the Catholic school and send for the priest when dying.³⁰

Anti-Catholicism had declined by the First World War, although outbursts could still occur, as was the case in the 1920s and 1930s when both leaders of the Church of Scotland and the Anglican church in Liverpool campaigned for restrictions on Irish immigration.³¹ This rhetoric of restriction and repatriation was a residual trace of an earlier age, when the all-embracing fear of the Irish papist was a ubiquitous feature of mid-Victorian life, even if the complaints about the Irish were always dressed up in the language of social ‘problems’ and racial difference. In Wales, on the other hand, it was still a potent force up until the second half of the twentieth century.³² The new wave of ²⁸ Gilley, ‘The Roman Catholic Church in England, 1780–1940’, 351. ²⁹ Gilley, ‘The Roman Catholic Church and the Nineteenth-Century Irish Diaspora’, 206. ³⁰ Gilley, ‘The Roman Catholic Church in England, 1780–1940’, 361. ³¹ Stewart J. Brown, ‘ ‘‘Outside the Covenant’’: The Scottish Presbyterian Churches and Irish Immigration, 1922–1938’, The Innes Review, 42, no. 1 (1991), 19–45; Enda Delaney, ‘ ‘‘Almost a Class of Helots in an Alien Land’’: The British State and Irish Immigration, 1921–45’, Immigrants and Minorities, 18, nos. 2–3 (1999), 240–65. ³² Trystan Owain Hughes, ‘Anti-Catholicism in Wales, 1900–1960’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 53, no. 2 (2002), 312–25; see also the rejoinder by Paul O’Leary,

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Irish migration to Britain which began in earnest during the mid-1930s was again to present the Catholic church with both the prospect of a numerical revival and a whole host of pastoral challenges, some of which proved virtually intractable. In 1920 the Catholic population of Britain had increased to two million people, primarily as a result of large-scale Irish settlement since the 1840s.³³ Over the next half-century until the early 1970s, the number more than doubled to just under five million, with some suggestions that this may even be a significant underestimate.³⁴ Post-war migrants from Poland and other parts of continental Europe accounted for some of this growth, as did conversions from other denominations, but the majority of the increase was a direct outcome of Irish settlement.³⁵ Numerically at least, Catholicism in twentieth-century Britain was transformed, and of the total Catholic population it was estimated that ‘half and perhaps three-quarters of the total must be Irish migrants and their descendants’.³⁶ And with this sharp rise in the number of adherents came an accompanying steady increase in personnel. In 1900 clergy, secular and religious, amounted to just over three thousand; by 1970 this had multiplied threefold.³⁷ During the Second World War government officials and clerics in Britain and Ireland co-operated to ensure that the spiritual needs of Irish Catholics were catered for, and British civil servants were acutely conscious of the necessity to be seen by the Irish bishops to make special provisions for attendance by migrant workers at religious services and other duties, fearing that sustained opposition by the Irish Catholic church would effectively put an end to large-scale labour recruitment from Ireland. John Charles McQuaid, the Catholic archbishop of ‘When Was Anti-Catholicism? The Case of Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Wales’, in Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 56, no. 2 (2005), 308–25, and Hughes’s response, ‘When Was Anti-Catholicism? A Response’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 56, no. 2 (2005), 326–33. ³³ Currie, Gilbert, and Horsley, Churches and Churchgoers, table 2.3, 25; for England, see Adrian Hastings, A History of English Christianity, 1920–2000, 4th edn. (London, 2001), 134. ³⁴ Joan Keating, ‘Faith and Community Threatened? Roman Catholic Responses to the Welfare State, Materialism and Social Mobility, 1945–62’, Twentieth Century British History, 9, no. 1 (1998), 87; Currie, Gilbert, and Horsley, Churches and Churchgoers, table 2.3, 25. ³⁵ There were about 740,000 adult conversions to Catholicism in Britain between 1900 and 1960 (Currie, Gilbert, and Horsley, Churches and Churchgoers, 50). ³⁶ Ibid. ³⁷ Ibid., table D3, 209–11; Hastings, A History of English Christianity, 473–5.

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Dublin from 1940 until the early 1970s, was the principal high-ranking ecclesiastical figure involved in the issue of emigrant welfare. In 1942 he established the Catholic Social Welfare Bureau, to offer practical advice to intending emigrants and assistance during the overnight stay in Dublin, and guidance and support along the journey, with the help of various Catholic organizations such as the Legion of Mary.³⁸ Even though this body was concerned with all aspects of migrant welfare, it placed a strong emphasis on ‘questions of religious and moral welfare’ and was particularly interested in young Irish females, who were, reflecting gendered stereotypes, perceived to be especially vulnerable to ‘moral danger’.³⁹ It was less successful at providing information to the parish authorities in Britain of migrants who were travelling to particular locations, since this for the most part was dependent on the willingness of individuals to offer such information.⁴⁰ The understandable anxiety about travelling to a country in the midst of war encouraged migrants to make contact with the bureau in Dublin, which was located in Westland Row, just opposite one of the main railway stations for those travelling to Britain. The abolition of restrictions on movement from 1947 onwards greatly circumscribed the activities of the bureau, as an overnight stay was no longer required in Dublin, intending migrants did not require a job offer, parish clergy who had during the war counter-signed applications for travel permits did not know who was leaving and hence were unable to pass on this information, and migrants as well as parents were less concerned about the dangers of travelling to Britain. Few regular travellers lamented the removal of the restrictions. In the eyes of the director of the emigrants’ section of the Catholic Social Welfare Bureau, writing in the mid-1950s, this had unfortunate consequences, since, with the absence of controls, the administrative machinery established by the Catholic authorities in Ireland was now rendered more or less defunct. ³⁸ Mary E. Daly, The Slow Failure: Population Decline and Independent Ireland, 1920–1973 (Madison, 2006), 277–9; Enda Delaney, Demography, State and Society: Irish Migration to Britain, 1921–1971 (Kingston/Montreal and Liverpool, 2000), 134. ³⁹ Henry J. Gray, ‘The Extent, Nature and Circumstances of the Emigration from Ireland and the Work of the Catholic Social Welfare Bureau for Irish Catholic Emigrants’, Social Compass, 3 (1955), 182; Daly, The Slow Failure, 278; Pauric Travers, ‘ ‘‘There Was Nothing For Me There’’: Irish Female Emigration, 1922–71’, in Patrick O’Sullivan (ed.), Irish Women and Irish Migration (London, 1995), 163. ⁴⁰ For somewhat uncritical accounts of the work of the bureau in its early years, by the director of its emigrants’ section, see Henry J. Gray, ‘A Service for Emigrants’, The Furrow, 5, no. 7 (1954), 411–16; and id., ‘The Extent, Nature and Circumstances’.

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The return of peacetime conditions removed these incentives to the emigrant to seek the bureau’s aid and, unfortunately, the spiritual dangers inherent in emigration became much less formidable in the public mind once the insecurity and anxiety of war conditions disappeared. It is now the exception rather than the rule for an emigrant, or an emigrant’s parents, to perceive the need for aid such as the bureau can give. The mere fact that so many men and women, and especially young people, had gone to Great Britain during the war years increased the false sense of security with which parents could view the departure of their own children.⁴¹

Even though the Catholic Social Welfare Bureau continued its work until the late 1960s, it relied principally on contacts made with people before they left or on the journey; in some instances details of particular cases were forwarded by family members or local priests after departure.⁴² The church, which, as we have seen, had long experience of accommodating Irish Catholics, at first sought to incorporate the latest newcomers within its established parochial structures. Few initiatives emerged until the late 1940s to cater for the Irish in particular, perhaps because it was widely anticipated—and perhaps even hoped—that many would return at the end of the war, a view that was shared by politicians and civil servants in Ireland. The welfare apparatus established by various departments was widely believed to be effective, and after a visit to Dublin by one British Ministry of Labour official in 1942, McQuaid was reported to be very grateful ‘for what is being done for his people’, an appreciation that he reported to a general meeting of the Irish hierarchy in April of that year.⁴³ From the official point of view, by making special provision for the ‘spiritual welfare’ of the Irish workers in Britain through arranging for time off to attend mass and alerting local clergy to the existence of numbers of Irish Catholics in the vicinity, it was possible to convince powerful ecclesiastical figures in Ireland that the potential dangers of being in Britain, in strictly religious terms, were limited. While individual priests were keen to co-operate, it seems, however, that some of the English bishops were less than enthusiastic. When a civil servant visited an unnamed bishop to press ⁴¹ Gray, ‘The Extent, Nature and Circumstances’, 184. ⁴² See Catholic Social Welfare Bureau (Emigrants’ section): Survey of Irish Emigrant Cases, 1959, D’Alton Papers, ADA. ⁴³ Unsigned Report of Visit to Ireland from 8–19 June 1942, n.d., LAB 26/9 PRO; Bishop’s Meeting, 14 April 1942, handwritten note by McQuaid, AB8/XV/B/01, McQuaid Papers, DDA.

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for greater involvement of the church in organizing social activities for the Irish, he was met with a lack of interest about that issue, but subjected to ‘a diatribe against my employer, the government, for the 1944 Education Act’.⁴⁴ By the mid-1940s it was becoming clear that the Irish would not be going ‘home’, and if anything even larger numbers were expected to arrive in Britain after the removal of restrictions—an issue which was apparently even troubling the Labour government of the day, as ministers were reported in May 1946 to be ‘feeling anxious about a large increase in our Irish resident population’.⁴⁵ The ability of the British church to cope with such a huge increase in its faithful was open to question. While a rather sanguine assessment by a well-informed English observer emphasizes the degree of co-operation between the Irish and English hierarchies about serving the needs of Catholic Irish, much of the impetus came not from English bishops but from Ireland, especially Archbishop McQuaid.⁴⁶ McQuaid’s modus operandi in all aspects of his authoritarian episcopacy was to draw on an extensive network of loyal and trusted individuals, both clerical and lay, to gather detailed information before embarking on a new initiative, or making a significant decision.⁴⁷ The plight of hundreds of thousands of displaced Irish living in Britain was no different. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s a number of trusted Irish priests who had first-hand experience of the conditions of migrants reported directly to McQuaid.⁴⁸ Within the Irish hierarchy, he was the central figure who had access to a wide range of informants and often acted as the principal source of contact with members of the Catholic hierarchy in Britain. This relationship was potentially a tense one, and not only because of the politics of ecclesiastical jurisdiction. McQuaid always wished to be seen to be extremely sensitive to any form of criticism, implied or otherwise, of his counterparts in Britain, who ultimately were responsible for all Catholics and whose co-operation was an essential prerequisite. How the Irish ‘flock’ were treated could ⁴⁴ Quoted in A. V. Judges, ‘Irish Labour in Great Britain, 1939–1945’, Jan. 1949, 47, LAB 8/1528 PRO. ⁴⁵ Hull (Home Office) to Rossetti (Ministry of Labour), 20 May 1946, LAB 8/1480 PRO. ⁴⁶ J. Derek Holmes, ‘English Catholicism from Hinsley to Heenan’, Clergy Review, 62 (1977), 49. ⁴⁷ His voluminous papers held at the Dublin Diocesan Archives are a testament to the wide range of informants and correspondents. ⁴⁸ These letters can be found in AB8/B/XXIX, McQuaid Papers, DDA.

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therefore be a matter of delicate ecclesiastical politics. Individual relationships between bishops proved significant in this respect. McQuaid often used visits to England to press the case for the full incorporation of Irish Catholics into the activities of the British church; for example, Archbishop (later Cardinal) Bernard Griffin of Westminster and, from 1956 onwards, William Godfrey were the first points of contact for McQuaid. Although the English Catholic church lacked the centralized ethos of its Irish equivalent, the archbishop of Westminster often applied subtle pressure to his fellow bishops throughout England and Wales.⁴⁹ For instance, Griffin wrote to Archbishop Grimshaw of Birmingham in 1946, recounting a long conversation with McQuaid about the ‘spiritual care of men and women workers coming from ´ to this country’.⁵⁰ Scotland was a wholly different matter, and in Eire the late 1950s, when McQuaid wrote to the Catholic archbishop of Glasgow, Donald Campbell, about potential missions to Irish construction workers located in hydro-electric schemes, he received a friendly but firm rebuke which stressed how ‘zealous’ the local clergy were in making contact with Irish Catholics employed on these building sites.⁵¹ For sound historic reasons, the Scottish bishops were reluctant to countenance any interference by the so-called ruler of Catholic Ireland.⁵² Gradually, as it became clear that the large numbers of Irish who had arrived in the 1940s were not going to be returning in the near future, and, furthermore, that more were coming after the removal of restrictions in December 1947, it was recognized that a co-ordinated response was required. As early as 1949, McQuaid had received a detailed report completed by a respected Jesuit priest, Leonard Sheil, in which he indicated that many of the Irish workers located in isolated locations were unable to attend mass and subsequently gave up their religion. In the early 1950s missions were organized on an ad hoc basis by the Jesuits in particular to cater for these migrants who, by virtue ⁴⁹ On the dynamics of the English Catholic hierarchy in the 1940s and 1950s, see the well-informed accounts in Hastings, A History of English Christianity, 275, 478–80, and Edward Norman, Roman Catholicism in England (Oxford, 1985), 107–29; a less analytical but still useful survey which focuses on ecclesiastical personalities can be found in Holmes, ‘English Catholicism from Hinsley to Heenan’. ⁵⁰ Griffin to Grimshaw, 30 Aug. 1946, AP/J7, Grimshaw Papers, BDA. ⁵¹ McQuaid to Campbell, 1 May 1957; Campbell to McQuaid, 20 May 1957; McQuaid to Campbell, 22 May 1957, AB8/B/XXIX, McQuaid Papers, DDA. ⁵² This description of McQuaid is from John Cooney, John Charles McQuaid: The Ruler of Catholic Ireland (Dublin, 1999).

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of geographical location, encountered practical difficulties attending a religious service.⁵³ For instance, at the Isle of Grain, where a huge oil refinery was under construction in an isolated area of Kent in the early 1950s, over 5,000 workers were employed by McAlpines and other smaller contractors. This site had a very high turnover of labour and throughout this decade it acquired a semi-legendary status among Irish building workers based in south-east England, many of whom had spent at least some time there.⁵⁴ Another Jesuit priest, Robert Stevenson, who spent a week with a fellow missionary at the camp in September 1952, was apparently enthralled by the impressive transformation of the demeanour of the unruly Irish workers which was obvious by the end of this intensive activity. Gradually Grace, working through the Mass, the Sacraments and the praedictio Verbi Divini, had its effect. Window-smashing ceased altogether, drunkenness waned, the bar and the cinema were empty, and a sermon on Communism alerted the men to their danger . . . The gambling schools also suffered a setback, and the gentlemen behind the tables finally ‘folded their tents and silently slipped away’. Saturday night, September 6th, was more quiet and peaceful than probably any that the Grain camp had ever seen, and on the Sunday, two very packed congregations listened to the closing sermons, and vows were renewed with full solemnity and lighted candles. There were hundreds of rosaries, crucifixes and other pious objects to be blessed, and the missioners felt confident that the rumble of many hundred deep-chested voices, raised in solemn pledge to God and in singing ‘Faith of our Fathers’, was a genuine token of future goodwill and loyalty to Jesus Christ.⁵⁵

This description conjures up the touching image of rows of Irish navvies adopting angelic poses, cheerily singing what was widely understood to be the anthem that most symbolized the historical fusion of Irish nationalism and Catholicism. Needless to say, the behaviour and activities of the faithful after the departure of the two Jesuit missionaries may well have returned to business as usual, but at least the company officials ⁵³ This account draws on O’Shea, The Irish Emigrant Chaplaincy Scheme, 12. The most comprehensive account of the history of the Irish Jesuits does not mention this activity in Britain, but gives a sense of the missionary zeal of the times: see Louis McRedmond, To The Greater Glory: A History of the Irish Jesuits (Dublin, 1991), 293–7. ⁵⁴ Ultan Cowley, The Men Who Built Britain: A History of the Irish Navvy (Dublin, 2001), 167–8. ⁵⁵ Robert L. Stevenson, ‘The Irish in Britain’, Christus Rex, 9, no. 3 (1955), 203. Stevenson was also the author of a manual designed to warn intending migrants of the potential dangers posed by living in Britain, Shall I Emigrate? (Dublin, [1965]).

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were given a period of brief respite, since ‘even the most grudging were heard to admit that the Catholic church could handle the men in a way that was far beyond anything they could do’.⁵⁶ Here, as so often in the past, the Irish priest acted as the intermediary between the migrant and the representatives of British officialdom in all its various guises.⁵⁷ Priests were often granted respect simply on the basis of their position, and few Irish Catholics raised in an atmosphere of almost complete deference to this figure—in public at least—would have openly challenged clerical authority.⁵⁸ Hundreds of miles away from home, the mission re-created a heady atmosphere and, for a couple of days at least, offered the building workers a break from the monotonous routine of work on this desolate landscape, and an opportunity to renew both religious and nationalist sentiments, though these were rarely separate spheres in the Irish case. This was a transitory redemptive moment, when the body, soul, and patriotic spirit were revitalized in the company of hundreds of others likewise searching for atonement. Located at this apotheosis of modernity, a massive building site in the middle of nowhere, these men were caught in a vortex of self-renewal, albeit short-lived. By the mid-1950s this missionary activity had expanded enormously, and McQuaid, along with James Staunton, the bishop of Ferns, and James Walsh, the archbishop of Tuam, was charged from January 1955 with organizing an intensive series of missions among the Irish in Britain and securing the crucial support of the English hierarchy for this initiative.⁵⁹ The aim of these missions, usually held in a local church over a number of consecutive nights, was to revitalize interest in the actual fulfilment of religious duties, and encourage a deeper attachment to the Catholic faith. A distinguished Jesuit writer, Mathias Bodkin, who was involved in parish missions in England in the early 1950s, pointed out that combating indifference was the chief aim of this activity and ⁵⁶ Stevenson, ‘The Irish in Britain’, 203. ⁵⁷ For a fascinating discussion of this role in the 1830s and 1840s, see G. P. Connolly, ‘Little Brother Be At Peace: The Priest as Holy Man in the Nineteenth-Century Ghetto’, in W. J. Shiels (ed.), The Church and Healing (London, 1982), 198–9. Connolly is critical of E. P. Thompson’s famous assessment of the social role of the Catholic priest in the Irish ‘ghetto’ (ibid. 191). See E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1963), 479–80. ⁵⁸ See Jean Blanchard, The Church in Contemporary Ireland (Dublin, 1963), 82–4; John A. Murphy, ‘Priests and People in Modern Irish History’, Christus Rex, 23, no. 4 (1969), 235–59; J. H. Whyte, Church and State in Modern Ireland, 1923–1979, 2nd edn. (Dublin, 1980), 7–8. ⁵⁹ Minutes of the General Meeting of the Irish Hierarchy, 21 June 1955, AB8/XV/B/03, McQuaid Papers, DDA.

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that the potential audience was composed of the ‘good, very good, a few bad and a disproportionate number indifferent’.⁶⁰ The American historian Jay Dolan, writing about immigrant districts of New York in the 1850s, describes the purpose of such parish missions succinctly as ‘to reclaim the lukewarm, indifferent, and unfaithful Catholics’.⁶¹ Dolan rightly recognizes the exceptional nature of this activity, since ‘although the church always had to seek out such lost sheep, there were certain times when this apostolate was more urgently needed’.⁶² The 1940s and 1950s were such a time for the Catholic church as the faithful drifted across Britain in search of employment. But a broader purpose was to reach out beyond the traditional parochial structures to the thousands of Irish based in camps and other forms of temporary accommodation all across Britain.⁶³ The success or otherwise of these endeavours is naturally difficult to gauge. The number who simply attended was often cited as a barometer, as was the extent to which these people attended confession or joined religious confraternities after the mission. After one mission at St Chad’s in Birmingham the Confraternity of the Holy Family was established and had 1,200 members after a fortnight; within a year the number had apparently risen to 5,000.⁶⁴ The Jesuit priest Leonard Sheil estimated in 1958 that ‘well over half a million people’ had attended missions given by Irish priests in Britain since the late 1940s.⁶⁵ Many high-ranking clerical figures attached great importance to such vigorous activity throughout the 1950s and 1960s. In May 1955 Cardinal Griffin, in a pastoral letter devoted to the position of Irish Catholics in Britain, stressed the success of these missions, as he announced the intensification of this type of activity by religious orders from Ireland.⁶⁶ Throughout the decade Archbishop McQuaid continued to be heavily involved in the supervision of missions in Britain. The final element of the co-operation between the national churches was the temporary secondment of Irish-trained priests to parishes that had significant Irish concentrations. As Bodkin noted, missions ⁶⁰ Mathias Bodkin, ‘The Irish in Britain’, The Furrow, 5, no. 4 (1954), 210. ⁶¹ Jay P. Dolan, The Immigrant Church: New York’s Irish and German Catholics, 1815–1865 (Baltimore, 1975), 151. ⁶² Ibid. ⁶³ See O’Shea, The Irish Emigrant Chaplaincy Scheme, 12–35. ⁶⁴ Stevenson, ‘The Irish in Britain’, 207. ⁶⁵ Leonard Sheil, ‘Marriage and the Leakage’, The Furrow, 9, no. 8 (1958), 527. ⁶⁶ Pastoral Letter of Cardinal Griffin, Archbishop of Westminster, for Trinity Sunday, 1955 (London, 1955), 9.

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were only an interim solution towards serving the need of this ‘strange Anglo-Irish Catholic church’ and what was really needed was an injection of fresh personnel from Ireland: It is hard to combine the welcome familiarity with Ireland and an understanding of the character and problems of English Catholics. It is still harder to be ‘fresh from the old country’ and sufficiently rooted in England to understand its institutions. To be, so to speak, religiously bi-lingual is a difficult task—one, perhaps, beyond most men.⁶⁷

An English priest working in London declared in 1954 that ‘we need every Irish priest who can be spared for us and are glad to have him’.⁶⁸ It was widely recognized that these priests were more in tune with their compatriots, and throughout the period hundreds were based in parishes across Britain, many released from duties in Ireland, some of whom found the experience of ministering to their displaced flock somewhat ‘salutary and disconcerting’.⁶⁹ The social distance between the English Catholic priest and Irish migrant was often alluded to by observers, but rarely mentioned in public as this was a ‘delicate matter’.⁷⁰ However, one priest based in Ireland who contributed to a symposium on Irish Catholics in Britain published in the clerical journal The Furrow noted that there was a widespread perception that English Catholics, including priests, looked down on ‘the mere Irish’.⁷¹ A clerical sociologist and future bishop of Limerick, Jeremiah Newman, writing in the mid-1950s, lamented the apparent lack of interest of English Catholics and argued that Irish priests should only be a short-term expedient if the Irish were to be accommodated into the wider Catholic community.⁷² An Irish-born priest working in London commented that there seemed to be a lack of sympathy ‘between purely English priests and Irish Catholics’ and a reluctance to integrate the newcomers into parochial life.⁷³ But this worked both ways: according to one well-informed observer of post-war English Catholicism, indigenous ⁶⁷ Bodkin, ‘The Irish in Britain’, 219. ⁶⁸ Holloway, ‘The Irish in Britain’, 224. ⁶⁹ Kevin O’Connor, The Irish in Britain (London, 1972), 146. O’Connor’s comments were based on interviews with Irish priests working in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s. ⁷⁰ Fr Brian Connolly to Fr Christopher Mangan (secretary to Archbishop McQuaid), 25 Feb. 1954, AB8/B/XXIX, McQuaid Papers, DDA. ⁷¹ David O’Leary, ‘Irish Catholics in Britain’, The Furrow, 1, no. 8 (1950), 411. ⁷² Jeremiah Newman, ‘Social Documents: The Catholic Attitude to Migration’, Christus Rex, 9, no. 1 (1955), 62. ⁷³ O’Leary, ‘Irish Catholics in Britain’, 411.

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Catholics often had to endure ‘the ministrations of Irishmen who were manifestly out of sympathy with British culture and society’.⁷⁴ Aedan McGrath, a well-known Columban missionary who had headed the Legion of Mary in China before he was imprisoned and then subsequently expelled in 1954, was sent to England in 1955 to establish the Legion of Mary across England and Wales. Interestingly, as Mary E. Daly notes, he was to report to the director of the Legion of Mary in England rather than Ireland, on the insistence of Cardinal Griffin, who was no doubt fearful of creating separate structures.⁷⁵ McGrath travelled extensively across the country and occasionally he encountered a distinct lack of understanding among English priests about their recently arrived proletarian Irish flock. One priest in the genteel district of Tunbridge Wells in Kent said he was more concerned with the ‘old and staunch Catholics’ of the parish, and some Irish parishioners reported that they ‘were not catered for at all’.⁷⁶ This was a long-standing grievance of the Irish in Britain since at least the early part of the nineteenth century.⁷⁷ When giving a retreat in Bedford in January 1957, the parish priest told McGrath that he should visit the local prison as all the Catholic inmates were Irish-born and observed that the ‘Irish have no sense of social responsibility’.⁷⁸ Nearly one hundred years previously such a view was recounted by a well-born Northumbrian Catholic, Barbara Charlton, who at a house party in 1860 hosted by the Marquis of Westminster was identified as being a Catholic, after a number of maladroit remarks at dinner about her co-religionists. Her response was ‘Yes, but an English Catholic, not an Irish one, which is all the difference in the world’. She continued to explain the essential difference: ‘English Catholics are responsible beings who are taught right from wrong, whereas Irish Catholics, belonging to a yet savage nation, know no better and are perhaps excusable on that account.’⁷⁹ ⁷⁴ Anthony Spencer, ‘The Catholic Community as a British Melting Pot’, New Community, 2, no. 2 (1973), 128. ⁷⁵ Daly, The Slow Failure, 302. ⁷⁶ Dictabelt to Fr Timothy Connolly from Fr Aedan McGrath, 10 Jan. 1957, AB8/B/XXIX, McQuaid Papers, DDA. ⁷⁷ Connolly, ‘The Transubstantiation of Myth’, 89–92. ⁷⁸ Dictabelt to Fr Timothy Connolly from Fr Aedan McGrath, 10 Jan. 1957, AB8/B/XXIX, McQuaid Papers, DDA. ⁷⁹ Barbara Charlton, The Recollections of a Northumbrian Lady (London, 1949), quoted in Gwynn, ‘The Irish Immigration’, 270, and also quoted partly by Jackson, The Irish in Britain, 144.

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Such attitudes persisted into the twentieth century. In her autobiographical account of her Catholic childhood in south London in the 1950s and early 1960s, the historian Mary Chamberlain remembers the distinctions that were made: ‘Irish piety was recognised, but Irish social graces and occupations looked down upon. The Irish were perceived as a holy, but lumpen, proletariat with, inevitably, ‘‘exceptions’’ among the priests and nuns, and friends.’⁸⁰ In the event, when McGrath checked the details, the Irish accounted for roughly a third of the Catholic prisoners, but in later conversation with a nun at the convent where he was staying, it became clear that the priest was deeply anti-Irish, which, given that he was the child of an Irish parent, seemed somewhat surprising: so strong was his distaste for the Irish that he had apparently requested to be moved from Liverpool to the Northampton diocese. No doubt this atavistic abhorrence was untypical, but F. X. Martin, a historian of medieval Ireland who was studying at Cambridge in the mid-1950s, observed sardonically to his brother, the secretary to Archbishop McQuaid, that the English clergy were not ‘over-eager to take the Irish papists to their beefy bosoms’ and they have to ‘shoulder some of the blame for their attitude to the ‘‘wild Irish’’ ’.⁸¹ Martin pointed to the curious historical position of English Catholics, who were so anxious to demonstrate their patriotism and have been ‘only too ready to look askance at the Irish whose rebellious activities cause further doubt to be cast on the patriotism of the English RCs’.⁸² Evelyn Waugh, the writer and Catholic convert, was identified by Martin as someone who ‘goes out of his way to sneer at the Irish’, but whose innate snobbery was ‘also jarred by the lack of social graces among the Irish clerics who are sent to England’.⁸³ An unnamed parish priest who was responsible for the Russell Square area of London was also deemed to be anti-Irish by a Columban missionary who met with him to discuss the problems migrants faced on arrival in London.⁸⁴ ⁸⁰ Mary Chamberlain, ‘Growing up Catholic’, in Samuel (ed.), Patriotism, 23; also quoted by Mary J. Hickman, Religion, Class and Identity (Aldershot, 1995), 223. ⁸¹ Fr Frank [F. X.] Martin [Cambridge] to Fr Liam Martin, n.d. [1954], DDA, McQuaid Papers, AB8/B/XXIX. It is obvious from the informal tone that even though this long letter was passed to McQuaid, it was not prepared for this purpose. ⁸² Ibid. ⁸³ Ibid. On Waugh and Irish Catholics, see Richard Weight, Patriots: National Identity in Britain, 1940–2000 (London, 2002), 67. ⁸⁴ Dictabelt to Fr Connolly from Revd James Casey, n.d. [July 1957], AB8/B/XXIX, McQuaid Papers, DDA.

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Given this social distance in some areas of London and Birmingham, Irish priests were the essential element in efforts to maintain relationships with newly arrived migrants. But this dissonance between the faithful and the flock could also be mediated by class and not just nationality. One observer remarked that the hierarchy, which was at this time mostly drawn from a privileged e´lite, had very little in common with working-class Catholics, regardless of nationality.⁸⁵ Throughout the 1950s dioceses sent mainly young priests to England and Wales to the expanding centres of Irish settlement for a couple of years, continuing a long historical tradition. According to Cardinal Godfrey, writing in 1959, this was a ‘great success’.⁸⁶ In Salford, for example, nearly half of the Catholic clergy working in the diocese in the 1920s were born in Ireland.⁸⁷ In other areas of established Irish settlement such as Liverpool, priests born in Ireland continued to make up a sizeable component of the secular clergy even up to the late 1950s.⁸⁸ Nearly half of the clergy in Cardiff archdiocese in the mid-twentieth century were on loan from the ‘old country’, though the church in Wales was exceptional in terms of its rapid growth in the twentieth century.⁸⁹ By the mid-1950s every parish in Birmingham had at least one Irish priest, and the administrator of St Chad’s Cathedral remarked in passing that the Irish newcomers had often commented that they had more contact with clergy in the city than at home.⁹⁰ In Leeds the numbers of Irish priests increased substantially and by 1960 two-thirds of the clergy were originally from Ireland, with a high proportion from All Hallows College.⁹¹ The life of the Irish priest working in the twilight zones of an inner city with a transient population was a challenging one: tracking ⁸⁵ Chamberlain, ‘Growing up Catholic’, 21. ⁸⁶ Godfrey to O’Hara, 27 Nov. 1959, Godfrey Papers, AAW. ⁸⁷ Fielding, Class and Ethnicity, 43. ⁸⁸ Roughly one-third of the secular priests in Liverpool in 1957 were born in Ireland, which was a lower proportion than in the early twentieth century up to the 1930s (Conor K. Ward, Priests and People: A Study in the Sociology of Religion (Liverpool, 1965), 41, n. 1). ⁸⁹ Trystan Owain Hughes, ‘Crossing Cultural Boundaries? Irish Catholics and the Welsh Language in the Twentieth Century’, in Pamela O’Neill (ed.), Nation and Federation in the Celtic World (Sydney, 2002), 105; for more details, see id., Winds of Change: The Roman Catholic Church and Society in Wales, 1916–1962 (Cardiff, 1999), 6–43; see also Tim Pat Coogan, Wherever Green is Worn: The Story of the Irish Diaspora (London, 2000), 217–18. ⁹⁰ B. Gerald Hodgson, ‘The Irish in Britain’, The Furrow, 5, no. 4 (1954), 226. ⁹¹ Pauline E. Freeman, ‘Erin’s Exiles—The Irish in Leeds’, in Robert E. Finnigan and G. T. Bradley (eds.), Catholicism in Leeds: A Community of Faith, 1794–1994 (Leeds, 1994), 86–6, tables 2–3, 91.

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down the faithful was the first hurdle, since the living arrangements of the arrivals were often fluid, as they moved around lodging houses or rented accommodation. Remaining in contact with them proved an even more difficult task.⁹² Much of this essentially involved relying on tried and trusted methods: missions, the use of Irish clergy, and the development of institutions concerned with welfare specifically directed at the Irish arrivals, as we shall see below. Underpinning these initiatives was the assumption shared by bishops and clerics in both Britain and Ireland, that the Irish were somehow different, with distinctive needs, and that special mechanisms were required. Notwithstanding this recognition, many within the English Catholic church were reluctant to create what would be, in effect, a separate church for the Irish who had arrived from the 1940s onwards. Griffin, in his pastoral letter in 1955, was at pains to point out the unitary nature of Catholicism—‘we have no wish to treat the Irish as a separate community’.⁹³ For this reason, it was thought desirable to locate Irish clergy within parochial houses rather than provide separate accommodation, which would leave them isolated from local priests, and ‘to overcome the dangers of little ghettos forming’.⁹⁴ Equally, English bishops, while recognizing the particular needs of the Irish newcomers, were convinced that the most effective way of providing for them was through incorporation into the wider church. According to Liam Ryan, the unwritten and ‘unacknowledged’ law among English-born clergy was ‘Thou shalt not create an Irish ghetto’.⁹⁵ When McQuaid had the temerity to suggest to Archbishop Grimshaw in 1963 that certain priests undertake missions in particular parishes where large numbers of Irish migrants had settled in Birmingham, Grimshaw pointedly outlined to him the dangers of such exclusively Irish activities: . . . it seems to the clergy as well as to myself that we must avoid carefully the danger of creating two separate sections in a parish, the long resident and the newcomers. We do all in our power to integrate the latter into the life of the parish. Missions therefore have been announced as parochial missions ⁹² A. P. Boland, ‘A London Parish’, The Furrow, 9, no. 4 (1958), 239–42. Compare this with the colourful description of Anthony Kenny’s time as a curate in Liverpool between 1959 and 1963, A Path from Rome: An Autobiography (London, 1985), 151–68. ⁹³ Pastoral Letter of Cardinal Griffin for Trinity Sunday, 10. ⁹⁴ Minutes of Bishops’ and Provincials’ Meeting, Easter Emigrant Congress, 24 April 1962, AB8/B/XXIX, McQuaid Papers, DDA. ⁹⁵ Liam Ryan, ‘Religious Practice Among Irish Emigrants’, Social Studies, 3, no. 2 (1974), 219.

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although the preachers of these missions have been chosen for their sympathy with the newly arrived, and for the ability to seek them out and help them.⁹⁶

Unlike North America or Australia, in England there would be no ‘hibernarchy’, dominated by powerful Irish prelates. The appearance of Irish-sounding surnames among the list of English Catholic bishops is a relatively recent development, and these are the children and grandchildren of those who were actually born in Ireland.⁹⁷ Until the last quarter of the twentieth century, the strong Irish presence within the English church was less visible at leadership level.⁹⁸ Few Irish-born priests in post-war England achieved any great intellectual distinction, or succeeded in ecclesiastical politics, but this was partly an outcome of clerical training in Ireland. Maynooth College and All Hallows College as well as diocesan seminaries across the country were more concerned with producing energetic and pragmatic pastors than distinguished scholars or church diplomats.⁹⁹ In Wales, where large-scale Irish Catholic settlement in the nineteenth century was reinvigorated by roughly 60,000 post-war arrivals until the 1960s, the situation could not have been more different. Catholicism in Wales was ‘the Irish religion’, and the Irish dominated the ecclesiastical landscape. The Irish occupied a virtually hegemonic position during the episcopacy of the Irish-born Archbishop Michael McGrath of Cardiff, who held office from 1940.¹⁰⁰ The tensions that erupted with such great force in Scotland in the mid-nineteenth century between the Scottish clergy and Irish priests and their flocks had no parallel in the twentieth century.¹⁰¹ Rome was also keeping a watching brief on the position of Irish Catholics in Britain, but within a much broader context of the practical problems that arose from the migration of Catholics and equally the potential for ‘spreading the faith’.¹⁰² For the Catholic church in the post-war years this was a pressing issue across Europe, as many of ⁹⁶ Grimshaw to McQuaid, 9 July 1963, AP/J6, Grimshaw Papers, BDA. ⁹⁷ For the Irish ‘hibernarchy’, see Sheridan Gilley, ‘Catholicism, Ireland and the Irish Diaspora’, in Sheridan Gilley and Brian Stanley (eds.), World Christianities, c.1815–c.1914: The Cambridge History of Christianity, Vol. 8 (Cambridge, 2006), 254. ⁹⁸ Fielding, Class and Ethnicity, 40. ⁹⁹ Gwynn, ‘The Irish Immigration’, 290. ¹⁰⁰ Hughes, ‘Crossing Cultural Boundaries?’, 104–5; id., Winds of Change, 4. ¹⁰¹ Bernard Aspinwall, ‘Scots and Irish Clergy Ministering to Immigrants’, The Innes Review, 47, no. 1 (1996), 46–58; James E. Handley, The Irish in Modern Scotland (Cork, 1947), 47–92. ¹⁰² Jeremiah Newman, ‘Emigration and the Faith: The Principles’, Christus Rex, 10, no. 4 (1956), 317; Jackson, The Irish in Britain, 149.

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those who were displaced in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and countries in south-east Europe after 1945 by the Soviet occupation were Catholics, and Catholic countries such as Italy and Portugal were experiencing significant population losses to the advanced western European countries such as France and West Germany.¹⁰³ Overseas emigration to Australia, Canada, the United States, and parts of South America also involved large numbers of Catholics. An International Catholic Migration Commission was established in Geneva in 1951 at the request of the pope to formulate policy and co-ordinate information.¹⁰⁴ The apostolic constitution, Exsul Familia, published in 1952, underlined the duties of the church to the migrant.¹⁰⁵ Throughout the 1950s this was a constant preoccupation and one in which Pius XII took a particular interest.¹⁰⁶ The Irish hierarchy, with its ultramontane leanings, was particularly anxious to be seen as at least to be actively addressing this issue. During their ad limina visits to the Vatican in the autumn of 1947, a number of Irish bishops were told of the pope’s concern about the ‘dangers to their faith to which young emigrants from Ireland are exposed’, and, prompted by this, at their October meeting, that year the Irish hierarchy issued a statement which warned ‘their faithful people of the gravity of these dangers’.¹⁰⁷ Similar statements were made throughout the 1950s and 1960s, including two pastoral letters in 1955 and 1967, and a whole plethora of comments at public events.¹⁰⁸ Apart from this publicity, it was recognized by Archbishop McQuaid and others that what was also required was better organization of the diffuse and often overlapping activities of various bodies. From 1956 McQuaid hosted annual Easter meetings at Clonliffe College in Dublin for priests working with the Irish in Britain to share knowledge and experiences. But the message from the pope was also clear to the British church as he urged that native Catholics in the receiving societies had a ‘grave obligation . . . to ¹⁰³ Newman, ‘Social Documents: The Catholic Attitude to Migration’, 60. ¹⁰⁴ Newman, ‘Emigration and the Faith’, 318. ¹⁰⁵ Gray, ‘Catering for Our Emigrants’, 17. ¹⁰⁶ J. V. Hickey, The Irish Rural Immigrant and British Urban Society (Taunton, 2005), 51–3; Newman, ‘Emigration and the Faith’, 317–19; see also the text of the statement by Pius XII in July 1957, reproduced in ‘The Church and the Emigrant’, The Furrow, 9, no. 4 (1958), 209–17. ¹⁰⁷ Irish Catholic Directory, 1948 (7 Oct. 1947), 731; (1 Nov. 1947), 735; see also Eugene Hopkins, ‘Irish Workers in England’, Christus Rex, 2, no. 2 (1948), 24. ¹⁰⁸ For more details, see Enda Delaney, ‘The Churches and Irish Emigration to Britain, 1921–1960’, Archivium Hibernicum, 52 (1998), 98–114.

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welcome the strangers into their midst’.¹⁰⁹ As Mary E. Daly argues, Cardinal Griffin’s renewed interest in the position of Irish Catholics in the mid-1950s may well have reflected ‘pressure from Rome’.¹¹⁰ And so we return to St Patrick. For the Irish who were described by Cardinal Griffin as ‘true sons of St Patrick, missionaries, apostles, carrying the torch of faith into their new surroundings’, the response of the Catholic church was ambivalent at first, perhaps in the vain hope that this was only a temporary sojourn.¹¹¹ The church authorities gradually—and reluctantly—adopted measures that sought at least to bring the Irish within the wider Catholic fold, under pressure from Ireland, and to address the wider concerns within the global church on the plight of the migrant through a shared sense of social responsibility. But this was no immigrant church in which ethnic groups vied for political power: the ethos of the Catholic church was to remain firmly English or Scottish, and Wales with its strong Hibernian influence was the exception rather than the norm.

2 . FA I T H O F O U R FAT H E R S Many of those who arrived in post-war Britain would have been astonished to learn that the great anthem of the diasporic Irish worldwide, ‘Faith of our Fathers’, routinely sung at sporting occasions and other gatherings in Ireland even up to the 1960s, was the work of a former Anglican clergyman and Catholic convert, F. W. Faber (1812–63).¹¹² Faber, an Oratorian priest, had penned two versions in 1849: one ‘for England’, and another, longer one for use in Ireland. For English Catholics, this hymn commemorated their stoicism over centuries of persecution and the possession of the true religion.¹¹³ The Irish variant similarly stressed the immutability of the faith for those at home, and equally for the displaced who lived overseas, but additionally the role of saints such as Patrick and Columba in the spread of Christianity ¹⁰⁹ Quoted in Hickey, The Irish Rural Immigrant and British Urban Society, 53. ¹¹⁰ Daly, The Slow Failure, 300. ¹¹¹ Pastoral Letter of Cardinal Griffin for Trinity Sunday, 5. ¹¹² For Faber’s colourful career and life, see Sheridan Gilley, ‘Faber, Frederick William (1814–1863)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004) [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/9050, accessed 12 June 2006]. ¹¹³ Chamberlain, ‘Growing up Catholic’, 19. According to Chamberlain’s memoir, this hymn was still sung in English Catholic schools in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

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as well as the historic challenges from Protestantism in Ireland.¹¹⁴ Faber had another connection with Ireland: he was the first superior of the London Oratory in 1849—subsequently to become, in 1856, the Brompton Oratory—established as an offshoot to its better-known mother house in Birmingham, founded by Cardinal Newman.¹¹⁵ In this role, Faber was directly involved in the mission to the Irish poor in London in the early 1850s, when he helped to establish a ragged school and the appropriately named St Patrick’s Society to provide social amenities for those living in the slums.¹¹⁶ But what Faber is perhaps most remembered for is his role in the promotion of popular Catholic practices in mid-Victorian Britain, such as vernacular hymns and devotions to the Virgin Mary.¹¹⁷ These devotional practices were also a distinguishing feature of the ultramontane Irish Catholicism that evolved after the Great Famine, even if many English Catholics deemed them to be somewhat ‘vulgar’ and ‘uncultured’, and, worse still, even superstitious.¹¹⁸ What Faber and others were attempting to do in the 1850s was to encourage popular piety among the urban working classes, particularly the newly arrived immigrant Irish. A century later the same concerns exercised the Catholic clergy in Britain. All contemporaries seemed to agree on at least one thing: unlike Ireland, Britain was a society in which secular values dominated, and regular religious practice was a marginal activity for the majority of its inhabitants. In an impressionistic survey of post-war English society published in 1951, the Quaker social investigator Seebohm Rowntree identified the continuing decline in formal religious practice among the adherents of the main Protestant churches.¹¹⁹ The Catholic church, according to Rowntree, however, was attracting greater numbers, and he ¹¹⁴ Leon B. Litvack, ‘The Psychology of Song, the Theology of Hymn: Songs and Hymns of the Irish Migration’, in Patrick O’Sullivan (ed.), Religion and Identity (London, 1996), 84–5. ¹¹⁵ Sheridan Gilley, ‘Vulgar Piety and the Brompton Oratory, 1850–1860’, in Swift and Gilley (eds.), The Irish in the Victorian City, 257. ¹¹⁶ Ibid. 257–8. ¹¹⁷ Mary Heimann, ‘Catholic Revivalism in Worship and Devotion’, in Gilley and Stanley (eds.), World Christianities, c.1815-c.1914, 79; Mary Heimann, Catholic Devotion in Victorian England (Oxford, 1995), 26–30; Gilley, ‘Catholic Faith of the Irish Slums’, 839–40. ¹¹⁸ See Gilley, ‘Vulgar Piety and the Brompton Oratory, 1850–1860’. ¹¹⁹ B. Seebohm Rowntree and G. R. Lavers, English Life and Leisure: A Social Study (London, 1951), 339–74. According to Brian Harrison, this survey ‘suffered more than his earlier books from impressionism and lack of focus’ (Brian Harrison, ‘Rowntree, (Benjamin) Seebohm (1871–1954)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004), [http:///www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/35856, accessed 5 June 2006].

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predicted—accurately as it turned out—an increase in its total membership in coming years.¹²⁰ His explanation for this development was an unorthodox one, and owed much to the climate of the Cold War, with the explicit parallels between the Catholic church and totalitarianism: Its success today is gained by removing from individual minds all sense of fear, doubt and uncertainty, and by giving instead a feeling of security. Like totalitarian organizations in other fields of human activity, spiritual totalitarianism can produce satisfactory results over a considerable period of time. It might indeed provide a permanent solution, if the minds of those whom it sways were closed to all other influences. But in fact men’s minds and spirits, however, imperfect they may be, cannot for ever be forced or persuaded to eschew the critical functioning which asks of dogma, ‘Is it true?’ and of priests, ‘Are they necessary?’¹²¹

For Rowntree Catholicism apparently maintained its vitality through its ‘spiritual totalitarianism’. Few Catholics would have accepted this assessment, which perhaps owes more to a deep distain of all forms of dogma, rather than a serious-minded enquiry into the appeal of this form of religion. Catholicism in post-war Britain was about religious conviction rather than tradition or habit: and this explains the mysterious image of the church and the widely shared notion by Catholics and non-Catholics alike up until the 1960s that they were, in many respects, ‘different’, as one insider put it.¹²² And this world-view shaped responses to all aspects of life; what Chamberlain describes as a ‘sense of exclusivity, uniqueness and destiny’ made English Catholics different, and this was reinforced in schools, parishes, and family homes, fostering what has been termed a distinctive subculture.¹²³ Materialism, secular values, and the questioning of traditional sources of authority created an unsettling environment in which the apparent verities offered by Catholicism were constantly under scrutiny. In his pastoral letter, Cardinal Griffin described these essential differences in a thinly veiled warning to potential Irish migrants and, more particularly, their families: But this is not a Catholic country. The atmosphere of faith in which these young people have been reared will be absent. They will be surrounded by materialist ¹²⁰ Rowntree and Lavers, English Life and Leisure, 373. ¹²¹ Ibid. 374. ¹²² George Scott, The RCs: A Report on Roman Catholics in Britain Today (London, 1967), 2. This view also pervades a recent account of British Catholicism, Dennis Sewell, Catholics: Britain’s Largest Minority (London, 2001). ¹²³ Chamberlain, ‘Growing up Catholic’, 32; Peter Coman, Catholics and the Welfare State (London, 1977), 15–30; Michael P. Hornsby-Smith, Roman Catholics in England: Studies in Social Structure Since the Second World War (Cambridge, 1987), 208–14.

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conditions and they will be questioned about truths and values which in the past they have taken for granted. It is essential that they should both realise that these questions are not necessarily posed in an antagonistic fashion and be capable of defending the truths of their holy religion.¹²⁴

Few would have challenged Griffin’s assertion that Irish migrants were coming from a country where the Catholic ethos was all-pervasive in civic and political culture, as well as in the values and norms espoused by the vast majority of the population, and where the authority of the Catholic church was only rarely challenged: in fact it was, as J. H. Whyte noted, enshrined in the moral code of the independent Irish state in the interwar years.¹²⁵ What was taken for granted in Ireland—that everybody shared a Catholic viewpoint—was an atypical stance in Britain. Attachment to a particular variation of religion is often measured by the extent to which practice is a regular activity. Notwithstanding the dire warnings from some Irish clerics in sermons that ‘England is a country of out-and-out pagans’, on arrival migrants found this to be far from the case.¹²⁶ Contemporary accounts demonstrate that even though the rates of religious practice were low, the central Christian beliefs in a supernatural presence and an afterlife of some unspecified form were widespread, leading one sociologist to characterize the situation as ‘believing without belonging’.¹²⁷ Rates of churchgoing in Britain had traditionally been lower than in other Western societies, even at the high point of organized religion in the Victorian era.¹²⁸ Approximately one in six attended a place of worship at least once a week in the 1950s, according to contemporary estimates, although this varied considerably by social class, region, and gender.¹²⁹ The contrast with Ireland could not have been sharper: the 1950s were the high-water mark of popular ¹²⁴ Pastoral Letter of Cardinal Griffin for Trinity Sunday, 6–7. ¹²⁵ Whyte, Church and State in Modern Ireland, 24–61. ¹²⁶ M. D. Campbell, ‘Irish Men and Women Going to England’, Christus Rex, 9, no. 1 (1955), 41. According to Brian Fallon, the term ‘pagan’ was ‘a favourite word of this period’ (An Age of Innocence: Irish Culture, 1930–1960 (Dublin, 1998), 190). In the nineteenth century the description most commonly used was ‘haythen’ (Samuel, ‘An Irish Religion’, 97). ¹²⁷ Grace Davie, Religion in Britain Since 1945: Believing without Belonging (Oxford, 1994). ¹²⁸ Hugh McLeod, ‘The Crisis of Christianity in the West: Entering a Post-Christian Era’, in Hugh McLeod (ed.), World Christianities, c.1914–c.2000: The Cambridge History of Christianity, Vol. 9 (Cambridge, 2006), 323. ¹²⁹ See Geoffrey Gorer, Exploring English Character (London, 1955), 241–2; A. M. Carr-Saunders, D. Caradog Jones, and C. A. Moser, A Survey of Social Conditions in

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Catholicism and attendance at mass each week was nearly universal, and many also took part in a range of devotional practices.¹³⁰ In the rapidly expanding suburbs of Dublin a major church-building programme was initiated in the late 1940s to cope with the large numbers of migrants who moved to the city from rural Ireland.¹³¹ But it was more than just churches and masses that conditioned the prevailing ethos, as Catholic belief and practice ‘dominated daily life’.¹³² Outside observers were impressed with the manifestations of religious piety in what was described by a visiting prelate from New Zealand in the late 1940s as ‘a land of faith’.¹³³ Across western Europe the parish was universally recognized as the basic structure of Catholicism.¹³⁴ It was at the heart of Catholic life, being the lowest level of ecclesiastical organization, and the focal point for much of the devotional activities of the faithful in a district, as well as the physical location of the church, presbytery, often a primary school, and perhaps a meeting hall of some sort, depending on the number of parishioners and its financial resources. The ‘devotional revolution’ in Ireland, largely associated with Cardinal Paul Cullen in the 1850s and 1860s, was centred around the parish.¹³⁵ In rural Ireland a parish was readily identifiable, not only through its local church, but also because in many cases it had served as the basic unit for the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) since the late nineteenth century. With the restoration of the hierarchy in England and Wales in 1850, and in Scotland in 1878, an elaborate machinery of church governance and organization was put in place to serve the needs of the expanding number of British Catholics.¹³⁶ Even though there was on occasions a mismatch between the churches and the actual location of significant concentrations of Catholics, as was the case in industrial England and Wales (Oxford, 1958), 258–61; Callum G. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain (London, 2001), 145–69. ¹³⁰ For a flavour of this atmosphere and its ultimate ill-effects, see Diarmaid Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland, 1900–2000 (London, 2004), 517–23. ¹³¹ Terence Brown, Ireland: A Social and Cultural History, 1922–1985, 2nd edn. (London, 1985), 220–1. ¹³² Ibid. 220. ¹³³ Louise Fuller, Irish Catholicism Since 1950: The Undoing of a Culture (Dublin, 2002), 29. ¹³⁴ Dolan, The Immigrant Church, 4–5. ¹³⁵ Emmet Larkin, ‘The Devotional Revolution in Ireland, 1850–75’, American Historical Review, 77, no. 3 (1972), 625–52. ¹³⁶ For a detailed description, see Morgan V. Sweeney, ‘Diocesan Organisation and Administration’, in Beck (ed.), The English Catholics, 116–53.

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South Wales, the ambitious building programme ensured for the most part that the faithful were adequately catered for, particularly in the large urban centres where the Irish had settled from the 1840s.¹³⁷ As Fielding observes, the character of the parish was ‘inevitably variable, for it tended to reflect the social composition of the district it served’.¹³⁸ Middleclass parishes in Manchester were often dominated by English Catholics, whereas the poorer ones contained both Irish-born Catholics and people of Irish descent. The initial panic that had accompanied the large-scale movement of Irish poor in the Victorian era had dissipated, and by the early twentieth century established parishes with strong Hibernian components were the hubs of communal activity. In some larger urban parishes during the first half of the twentieth century, ostentatious displays of Catholic piety indicated a ‘triumphalist efflorescence of faith’, with outdoor processions and other devotional activities that served to demonstrate group solidarity as well as ‘proclaiming separation from the world outside’.¹³⁹ One description of such events in London during the episcopacy of Cardinal Hinsley of Westminster (1935–43) captures the flavour of these occasions: Week by week they continued throughout the liturgical year, the indoor and outdoor processions, rhythmically swaying their way by aisle and nave, through terraced street and suburban avenue, safely girt about by the episcopal cordon sanitaire of Catholic Action and the confident certainty of doctrinal belief. The serried ranks of the faithful in the sashes and regalia of their individual parish organizations thundered forth the four square of Victorian hymnody Faith of our Fathers, Holy Faith, In spite of dungeon, fire and sword . . . which soared above the tossing banners of the myriad parochial guilds, the sky blue veils of the Children of Mary and the weeping black mantillas of the Wayside Solidarity. Sometimes the only parishioners remaining at rest in their pews were those too young or too old to walk.¹⁴⁰

Coming from a society where such devotional activities were part and parcel of popular culture of the late 1940s and early 1950s, it might ¹³⁷ J. Derek Holmes, More Roman than Rome: English Catholicism in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1978), 213. ¹³⁸ Fielding, Class and Ethnicity, 40. ¹³⁹ Thomas Moloney, Westminster, Whitehall and the Vatican: The Role of Cardinal Hinsley, 1935–43 (London, 1985), 242; see also Fielding, Class and Ethnicity, 72–7; Gilley, ‘The Roman Catholic Church in England’, 361. ¹⁴⁰ Moloney, Westminster, Whitehall and the Vatican, 242.

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be anticipated that the new arrivals would seamlessly slip into English parish life. The reality proved completely different. The initial difficulty was that the Irish who arrived in the 1940s and 1950s settled in many areas where historically Catholics were thin on the ground and, moreover, where the parish infrastructure was weakly developed, since it was only designed to cater for tiny numbers. As we saw in the previous chapter, the combination of housing shortages and the availability of work ensured that this new generation of Irish migrants chose to move to places which in many instances had precious little experience of any form of immigration, Irish or otherwise. This was particularly evident in parts of south-east England and even within parts of London, but also occurred in the Midlands, and both these were the areas with the most rapidly growing Catholic population in the 1940s and 1950s.¹⁴¹ In some urban areas it was common for additional masses to be arranged, as the older smaller churches were overcrowded and in need of replacement, and the congregations would overflow on to the streets.¹⁴² Stories were told of the Irish faithful in the early 1950s unable to find a seat and kneeling outside churches in London.¹⁴³ To cope with such capacity difficulties, new churches were built and special temporary mass centres established across England and Wales in the 1940s and 1950s. The Irish literally renovated a newly acquired building with their own hands in the late 1950s in the north London parish of Tollington Park. The English parish priest was full of admiration, and the piquancy of taking over an impressively sited Protestant church in London was perhaps not lost on his Irish parishioners: A small church with a seating capacity of 140 served our needs up to August last. Not so long ago Catholics were not too numerous in these parts but in the last years, with the influx of the Irish emigrants, we now have a parish of over 4,000 souls, 90 per cent of which were Irish. As we went in and out of our small church, we often cast longing eyes across the street where there was a magnificent church belonging to the Congregationalists, capable of seating 1,300 people, although their regular attendance amounted to only ¹⁴¹ A. E. C. W. Spencer, Notes on the Statistics of the Dioceses of England and Wales ( Taunton, 2005), 2. This is a published version of a mimeo edition prepared for the Newman Demographic Survey in 1960 that was kindly made available to me by the author. ¹⁴² Jackson, The Irish in Britain, 146; Oliver Reilly, ‘A Worker in Birmingham’, The Furrow, 9, no. 4 (1958), 219–20. ¹⁴³ As recounted in Anne O’Grady, Irish Migration to London in the 1940s and 1950s (London, 1988), 13.

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100 or so. So we decided on a campaign of prayer to Our Lady. Suffice it to say that our prayers were answered and in August last we acquired the church in exchange of our small church and £35,000. As the funds were not too strong, it was decided to do as much of the work of renovation as possible by voluntary labour. Evening after evening and whenever they were free, our parishioners came, men and boys from the four corners of Ireland.¹⁴⁴

Outside of the south-east, in Birmingham, where the Catholic Irish were heavily concentrated in a few districts close to the city centre, church building was at a more modest level, and mainly confined to the expanding outlying suburbs.¹⁴⁵ Coventry, on the other hand, witnessed a threefold expansion of Catholic churches after the Second World War that catered not only for the Irish but also for Polish and Ukrainian arrivals, who had their own places of worship.¹⁴⁶ Even in Leeds, where the numbers of Irish arriving were relatively small, more new parishes were created in the 1950s than in any other decade since the 1790s. In part this was due to the expansion of the outer suburbs, but also to cater for the increasing Catholic population, many of whom were now located beyond the traditional parish boundaries.¹⁴⁷ The shifting demographic patterns were further complicated by the growth of the suburbs and satellite towns on the outskirts of London such as Dagenham, Staines, and West Drayton.¹⁴⁸ For instance, Luton had only two Catholic churches prior to the Second World War, but with rapid growth in the number of Irish Catholics needed eight additional churches by the late 1970s.¹⁴⁹ Religion was about more than bricks and mortar, and since the midnineteenth century the provision of Catholic education for children was viewed as the overriding objective by prelates and priests. At the core of ¹⁴⁴ Letter to the editor from Fr George Grove, parish priest of Tollington Park, London, published in The Furrow, 11, no. 1 (1960), 60–1. ¹⁴⁵ Anthony Sutcliffe and Roger Smith, History of Birmingham, III: Birmingham, 1939–1970 (Birmingham, 1974), 260. ¹⁴⁶ Bill Lancaster, ‘Who’s a Real Coventry Kid? Migration into Twentieth-Century Coventry’, in Bill Lancaster and Tony Mason (eds.), Life and Labour in a TwentiethCentury City: The Experience of Coventry (Coventry, 1996), 73; Russell King, Ian Shuttleworth, and Alan Strachan, ‘The Irish in Coventry: The Social Geography of a Relict Community’, Irish Geography, 22 (1989), 69–70. ¹⁴⁷ Robert E. Finnigan, ‘The Parishes of Leeds’, in Finnigan and Bradley (eds.), Catholicism in Leeds, 34–7. ¹⁴⁸ Hickey, The Irish Rural Immigrant and British Urban Society, 29. ¹⁴⁹ Bronwen Walter, ‘Ethnicity and Irish Residential Distribution’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, new ser., 11 (1986), 135–8.

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this was the fundamental value that ‘belief in God’ was the ‘unshakeable foundation of all social order and all responsibility on earth’, according to Cardinal Hinsley when he outlined the basic principles of Christian education.¹⁵⁰ But this education was to be specifically Catholic rather than Christian more generally. Separate schools would ensure the ‘preservation of the faith and morals of children, and the education of parents into a sense of responsibility’, and much of the efforts of church leaders throughout the twentieth century were concerned with this issue; it was the area in which Catholic bishops clashed most publicly with the state.¹⁵¹ The Butler Education Act of 1944 was widely perceived by Catholics at the time of its introduction to be detrimental to the maintenance of a distinctive ethos in local schools, and in effect the preservation of a separate identity. Cardinal Griffin, who in November 1943 was translated to the archdiocese of Westminster after Hinsley’s death in March of that year, solemnly declared that it was ‘intolerable that we should be regarded as obstacles to progress in education, simply because we refuse to accept a death sentence for our schools’.¹⁵² The church’s demand for full state funding for ‘voluntary-aided’ schools was rejected, and the shortfall in terms of capital investment had to be made up from other sources, placing a huge strain on resources, much of which would have to be ‘sweated out of the working men’.¹⁵³ Secondary schools could rarely be organized on a parochial basis and needed to draw on a wider geographical area.¹⁵⁴ But, as Adrian Hastings has pointed out, while the financial burden was considerable, the effects of this legislation were far-reaching in that a higher proportion of children attended Catholic grammar schools, the quality of the education was undoubtedly improved, and this paved the way for the growth of the Catholic middle class in the 1950s and 1960s, many of whom subsequently attended university.¹⁵⁵ These monumental ¹⁵⁰ Quoted in Norman, Roman Catholicism in England, 129. ¹⁵¹ Ibid. 121. ¹⁵² Quoted in Holmes, ‘English Catholicism from Hinsley to Heenan’, 49. ¹⁵³ A. C. F. Beales, ‘The Struggle for Schools’, in Beck (ed.), The English Catholics, 393–403; Coman, Catholics and the Welfare State, 47–59; Hickman, Religion, Class and Identity, 239–41; quotation from Norman, Roman Catholicism in England, 123. For the inept political manoeuvres of Hinsley and other Catholic bishops prior to the introduction of the Act, see Moloney, Westminister, Whitehall and the Vatican, 160–7. ¹⁵⁴ Norman, Roman Catholicism in England, 121. ¹⁵⁵ Hastings, A History of English Christianity, 421. Under the Education Act of 1959 the state contribution to the maintenance and improvement of denominational schools

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changes, according to one sociologist, A. E. C. W. Spencer, writing in the early 1970s, ‘facilitated the upward social mobility of those who aspired to the higher social status which took them out of the ghetto’.¹⁵⁶ As we have seen, the growth in the post-war Catholic population was, for the most part, a consequence of the arrival of large numbers of Irish migrants. By the mid to late 1950s these people were getting married after a couple of years in Britain. The Newman Demographic Survey found that over half of the Catholic marriages conducted in the Westminster diocese between 1948 and 1954 involved Irish-born partners.¹⁵⁷ Irish Catholics, whether living in Ireland or abroad, traditionally had larger families, and this was reflected in the peak in baptisms in the early 1960s.¹⁵⁸ All these children needed schools, and during this decade an intensive programme of investment was required to meet the rise in numbers as the Catholic school population grew by 25 per cent.¹⁵⁹ In the early 1960s, Cardinal John Heenan had declared that ‘our greatest preoccupation is school building’, and by 1967 roughly one in ten of all schoolchildren attended a Catholic school.¹⁶⁰ In the diocese of Southwark, for example, 72 new schools were opened between 1952 and 1964.¹⁶¹ Yet the demand for places for children significantly exceeded the available capacity, and, according to one source, by the mid-1960s only 60 per cent of English Catholic children had a Catholic school to attend.¹⁶² That the generation of Irish who arrived from the 1940s predominantly chose to educate their children at Catholic schools is not that surprising given the emphasis placed on denominational education by both Irish and British Catholicism. At these schools, however, it appears was increased to 75 per cent and this subsequently rose to 80 per cent for both existing schools and new ones in legislation introduced in 1967 (ibid. 561). ¹⁵⁶ Spencer, ‘The Catholic Community as a British Melting Pot’, 129. ¹⁵⁷ A. E. C. W. Spencer, ‘The Post-War Growth of the Catholic Child Population of England and Wales’, in Catholic Education Council, Catholic Education: A Handbook, 1960/61 (London, 1960), 20. ¹⁵⁸ Spencer, ‘The Catholic Community as a British Melting Pot’, 129. ¹⁵⁹ Bernard Sharratt, ‘English Roman Catholicism in the 1960s’, in Adrian Hastings (ed.), Bishops and Writers: Aspects of the Evolution of Modern English Catholicism (Wheathampstead, 1977), 129. Sharratt cites the example of the Archdiocese of Birmingham Building Fund, which between 1952 and 1970 spent £ 21 million of which 99.7 per cent was devoted to schools. ¹⁶⁰ Quoted in Norman, Roman Catholicism in England, 121; Hastings, A History of English Christianity, 561. ¹⁶¹ Text of Talk to Irish Congress on Emigration by Bishop Brian Foley (Lancaster), 1 Apr. 1964, 4, AB8/B/XXIX, McQuaid Papers, DDA. ¹⁶² Sharratt, ‘English Roman Catholicism in the 1960s’, 130.

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that teaching about faith rather than fatherland predominated, and that communicating the distinctive features of Catholicism was the overriding objective. Whether this was the continuation of the twin processes of ‘denationalization’ and incorporation that Mary Hickman has described for the nineteenth century is quite another matter. On the face of it, English Catholic schools certainly did nothing to encourage the articulation of Irish identities, and much of this type of socialization occurred within the private sphere of the family home or when participating in particularly ‘Irish’ activities such as dancing or Gaelic sports.¹⁶³

3 . B R I G H T L I G H TS , B I G C I T Y British towns and cities offered anonymity to the Irish who arrived in the 1940s and 1950s. Within large urban centres the traditional restraints of social control that operated with such great effect back at home had no counterpart. The pace of city life was hectic compared with the relaxed lifestyles of rural Ireland, and there seemed so much more to do in the big cities of industrial Britain. Irish people could almost sink without a trace in Britain and become ‘lost’, as testified by the numerous requests to Irish Catholic welfare agencies to locate missing husbands or relatives who simply disappeared.¹⁶⁴ The hard stories that punctuated the numerous guides for emigrants, inevitably couched in patronizing tones, told what could happen to the naive Irish newcomer in the city, reflecting a concern dating from the Victorian period that the urban environment was dangerous and something to be feared.¹⁶⁵ And its citizens were even worse: according to one guidebook produced by the Catholic Truth Society of Ireland and sold on the boats leaving Dublin in the mid-1950s, the average Englishman [sic] ‘does not live by fixed principles and beliefs’.¹⁶⁶ Even Cardinal Godfrey, while at some pains to point to the positive aspects of the purported English ‘character’, was unequivocal about the nature of this society when writing in 1956 for an Irish clerical journal: ¹⁶³ Hickman, Religion, Class and Identity, 158–202. ¹⁶⁴ Thomas Fitzgerald, ‘The Irish Parish and the Emigrant’, Christus Rex, 10, no. 4 (1956), 356–7; Hopkins, ‘Irish Workers in England’, 21. ¹⁶⁵ See, for instance, Olive Mary Garrigan, ‘ ‘‘So You are Going to England’’: An Open Letter to Irish Girls about to Emigrate’, Christus Rex, 3, no. 2 (1949), 49–57. ¹⁶⁶ Catholic Truth Society of Ireland, A Catholic Handbook for Irish Men and Women Going to England (Dublin, 1955), 9, quoted in Jackson, The Irish in Britain, 150.

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The immigrant should not be scared of the company of the average nonCatholic in England. The young Irish man or woman coming to England will find that, on the whole, the English are decent, fair and steady. If they come with an idea of ‘pagan England’ they may be surprised to find that the non-Catholics they meet are such decent folk. Yet, on the other hand, it is true to say that as far as church-going and prayer are concerned these people are practically without religion.¹⁶⁷

Ironically, rather than creating panic or anxiety such statements may have indirectly increased curiosity about life in ‘immoral’ England. The main dangers, in order of decreasing importance and in the urgency of the terms in which they were couched, were betraying the Catholic faith, immoral behaviour of any form, getting into trouble—a euphemism for becoming pregnant—marrying a non-Catholic, coming under Communist influence, or being sucked into a lifetime of criminality. From the late 1940s there was widespread concern among Irish church leaders and, to a lesser degree, politicians and civil servants that the new wave of young migrants who travelled to British cities seemed less concerned with maintaining their Catholic faith than those who opted to stay at home. As we have seen, the church in Britain had long experience of dealing with its wayward Irish flock who were less than keen to be fully integrated into the strict rhythms of Catholic life. For most contemporaries attendance at weekly mass was the basic measure of the extent of religious observance, and a plethora of estimates were produced by a range of individuals from a variety of locations to demonstrate the extent of ‘falling off’, or lapsation, as non-attendance was frequently characterized. An early impressionistic investigation in 1948 suggested that less than half of the Irish men in British cities went to church on a regular basis, whereas females tended to be more likely to attend.¹⁶⁸ The higher rate of pay available for Sunday work was advanced as the main explanation for this parlous state of affairs.¹⁶⁹ Foley’s account of the Irish in the twilight zones of Birmingham, completed in the early 1950s, outlined some disturbing cases of widespread indifference to regular religious practice, including one hostel of over 300 workers where less than one in ten attended church.¹⁷⁰ He identified the trend ¹⁶⁷ William Godfrey, ‘The Irish Emigrant: Apostle of the Faith in England’, Christus Rex, 10, no. 4 (1956), 362. ¹⁶⁸ Hopkins, ‘Irish Workers in England’, 18–19. ¹⁶⁹ Ibid. ¹⁷⁰ ‘Some Notes on the Situation of Irish Workers in Birmingham’, Report Prepared by Maurice Foley, Young Christian Workers’ Association, [July] 1951, DFA 402/222, NAI.

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where ‘many Irish lads and girls, who while at home attended their duties regularly, are now content to receive the sacraments once a year’.¹⁷¹ While Foley was essentially dealing with a group of recently arrived migrants, a couple of years later an Oblate priest attached to a parish in Birmingham optimistically reckoned that roughly one in five of the Irish ‘ceased to practise their religion’ and that the image of Birmingham as a city ‘where one automatically lost the habit of one’s religion’ was unjustified.¹⁷² Another priest, writing in the mid-1950s, sought to identify a general pattern, albeit on impressionistic evidence, and his findings can hardly have endeared him to his fellow clergy in either Britain or Ireland: Statistics are said to be a very bad guide and not least in the matter of the lapsing from the faith of the Irish in England. Still, we must face the facts and realize that reliable priests who have worked for years among the emigrants would give a rough estimate something like this: of those born in Ireland, 50 per cent practise their religion while 50 per cent do not, with probably all but 5 per cent wishing to die with the sacraments; of their children 25 per cent practise their religion, with perhaps 60 per cent in all who would like to die with the sacraments.¹⁷³

Other parish-based surveys from Chingford in suburban Essex and a large housing estate on the outskirts of Bristol arrive at similar conclusions, though the proportions of Irish who had ‘lapsed’ were lower.¹⁷⁴ An unnamed parish priest in northern England, where there was a strong Irish presence, helpfully distinguished between the lapsed, who ‘are for the most part unlikely to send for the priest even in danger of death’, and the ‘slack’, who frequently missed mass but maintained some links with the local church; the two groupings accounted for two-fifths of the total Catholic households, according to the records compiled by the priest when he visited every house in the parish in the mid-1950s.¹⁷⁵ A report on the Irish in Birmingham prepared in 1955 concluded that ‘the number who miss mass, though still a minority, is truly alarming’.¹⁷⁶ ¹⁷¹ Ibid. ¹⁷² Report prepared by Valentin Iremonger (Irish Embassy, London) on the Irish in Birmingham, [7] Aug. 1956, DFA 402/222, NAI. ¹⁷³ M. D. Campbell, ‘Irish Men and Women Going to England’, Christus Rex, 9, no. 1 (1955), 46; also quoted in part by Jackson, The Irish in Britain, 148. ¹⁷⁴ Thomas Lane, ‘The Irish in an English Parish’, The Furrow, 6, no. 4 (1955), 211–14; Eamonn Gilmartin, ‘The Irish in a London Parish’, The Furrow, 6, no. 11 (1955), 667–70. ¹⁷⁵ Parochus, ‘A Parish Survey’, Clergy Review, 42, no. 8 (1957), 449–56. ¹⁷⁶ Fitzgerald, ‘The Irish Parish and the Emigrant’, 346.

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Another document, with the emotive title of how many Irish migrants ‘betray the faith’, prepared for McQuaid by an experienced Columban priest sent to Britain in 1956 to investigate the situation, painted the gloomy picture that between 30 and 40 per cent were ‘a cause of concern’.¹⁷⁷ The author identified three types of ‘leakage’: first, the grossly negligent who were ‘complete failures’, then the ‘tepid’ who failed even to fulfil the minimum requirements, and lastly, those who were content with the ‘bare minimum’.¹⁷⁸ Some time later a detailed survey undertaken between April 1962 and May 1964 found that roughly half of the Irish-born Catholic population in six parishes in the south-east of England attended mass regularly.¹⁷⁹ Religious practice also depended on the length of time in Britain, and one major sociological study estimated that only half of the recent arrivals in the early 1970s attended mass regularly, adding to the view held among the older generation of migrants that the ‘new’ Irish lacked ‘moral fibre’.¹⁸⁰ The irony was that the 1950s witnessed the high point of popular Catholicism in Ireland and that the society that these people left was infused with a whole range of devotional religious practices which involved adults and children. So why did so many people, to use the parlance of the day, fall by the wayside? Few contemporaries doubted the stern challenge that moving to Britain posed for Catholic religious practice, but numerous and often competing ‘causes’ for this falling off were identified throughout the post-war years. There were few widely agreed explanations as such, and, as so often the case in similar circumstances, everybody blamed everybody else. One explanation much favoured by the Irish clergy was that little effort was made by the English church to accommodate their co-religionists and that young Irish people found ‘the religious atmosphere of their new world bleak and unfriendly’.¹⁸¹ On encountering this new world with its muted and conditional welcome, the once pious and devout Irish gradually slipped off into the deeper ravines of ‘pagan’ England, lost to the faith forever. As we have seen, there is some degree of truth to this assertion, and even the character of the services was singled out by one commentator as being ¹⁷⁷ Fr Edward MacElroy, ‘How Many Irish Emigrants in Great Britain Betray The Faith’, n.d. [Jan. 1957], AB8/B/XXIX, McQuaid Papers, DDA. ¹⁷⁸ Ibid. ¹⁷⁹ L´eon de Saint Moulin, ‘Social Class and Religious Behaviour in England’, Clergy Review, 53, no. 1 (1968), table 3, 25. ¹⁸⁰ Ryan, ‘Religious Practice among Irish Emigrants’, 221. ¹⁸¹ David O’Leary, ‘Irish Catholics in Britain’, The Furrow, 1, no. 8 (1950), 411.

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‘novel and foreign’ to those accustomed to the rituals of post-famine Irish Catholicism: Such things as the evening service—the very name itself is suspect—with its service-cum-concert atmosphere, the possible equiparation in importance of this same Sunday evening service and Sunday morning mass, the emphasis on singing and congregational forms of devotion to the exclusion of private prayer, the overdone preoccupation with the niceties of liturgical dress, the rather frequent attempts made in my time to introduce the liturgy in English, the general impression that the inspiration for these and other such practices came from high Anglican sources—all in the aggregate combined to give our average Irish Catholic the feeling that he [sic] had found in England a none-too-orthodox brand of Catholicism.¹⁸²

Others stressed the difficulties of incorporating the newly arrived Irish into the established social life of an English parish, much of which was anathema to the average working-class migrant, and many ended up on the fringes of parish life.¹⁸³ Even when migrants did attend, the physical location of the Irish at the back of the church was symbolic of their marginal status. A thoughtful editorial on the ‘exiled Irish’, published in the English Dominican monthly Blackfriars in 1955, described a common sight in British Catholic churches: You may see them any Sunday, standing in the back at the last Mass, in new raincoats, with rosaries in their hands. And you wonder afresh at the fidelity of so many of the Irish, in a strange land, clinging to the loyalties that meant so much at home, which in England, they soon discover, can mean nothing at all. The others you do not see: and it is idle to ignore the sad fact that thousands of Irish exiles are lost to the church, caught up soon in the world of their fellows at work, of the people in the streets.¹⁸⁴

While unwittingly implying a degree of simplicity in the religious practice and the reification of a complicated belief system, these observations point to the essential differences in the atmosphere of worship. The ‘devotional revolution’ in post-famine Irish Catholicism that, according to Emmet Larkin, occurred between 1850 and 1875 placed popular religious activities at the centre of Catholic life.¹⁸⁵ The cult of Mary, with an emphasis on shrines, grottoes and pilgrimages, was at its height ¹⁸² Ibid. 411–12. For the liturgy in England, see Hastings, A History of English Christianity, 484. ¹⁸³ Thomas Lane, ‘The Irish in Britain’, The Furrow, 5, no. 4 (1954), 234. ¹⁸⁴ ‘The Exiled Irish’, reproduced in The Furrow, 6, no. 5 (1955), 299. ¹⁸⁵ Larkin, ‘The Devotional Revolution’.

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in the mid-twentieth century, and numerous confraternities and sodalities sought to involve the laity in a range of activities from indulgences to public processions to open-air benediction and frenetic parish missions.¹⁸⁶ The Holy Year in 1950 and the definition of the assumption of Mary in the same year witnessed widespread displays of popular Catholicism.¹⁸⁷ Fr Peyton, the Irish American who initiated a global ‘rosary crusade’, was given extensive publicity in Ireland during the late 1940s and the saying of the rosary was given an additional impetus by his tour in 1954 when huge numbers attended rallies across the country.¹⁸⁸ Autobiographical accounts of growing up in Ireland during the 1950s illustrate the sheer range of devotional activities and the fact that popular Catholicism was an accepted element of everyday popular culture.¹⁸⁹ It was no wonder that outside observers were impressed by this piety and religious devotion on visits to the country that seemed to be the ‘most observant Catholic country in the world’, and the clergy were understandably proud of the fidelity of their flock.¹⁹⁰ According to Eamon Duffy, who was raised in the border town of Dundalk, County Louth in the 1950s, Catholicism was ‘like breathing out and breathing in, part of the landscape, a given’.¹⁹¹ Why, then, when the ‘faithful’ moved to Britain did this fidelity seem to melt away? For some commentators, the answer was simple: these rituals of religious piety concealed a limited understanding of the essential teachings of Catholicism, and when removed from a set of cultural and social frameworks infused with such religious observance, practice fell away. What was described in a derogatory way as ‘bog Irish Catholicism’ was all about appearances and less to do with conviction.¹⁹² Influential English Catholics identified religious instruction at home as the fundamental weakness in the preparation of Irish Catholics for life in a secular society. In a private comment to Archbishop O’Hara, the apostolic delegate, Cardinal Godfrey remarked, in the course of a ¹⁸⁶ James S. Donnelly, Jr., ‘The Peak of Marianism in Ireland, 1930–1960’, in Stewart J. Brown and David W. Miller (eds.), Piety and Power in Ireland, 1760–1960 (Belfast, 2000), 262–3; Fuller, Irish Catholicism Since 1950, 20. ¹⁸⁷ Fuller, Irish Catholicism Since 1950, 24; Cooney, John Charles McQuaid, 250–1. ¹⁸⁸ Donnelly, ‘The Peak of Marianism in Ireland’, 262–3; Fuller, Irish Catholicism Since 1950, 25. ¹⁸⁹ See, for example, Eamon Duffy, Faith of Our Fathers (London, 2004), 11–14, 20–8. ¹⁹⁰ Lane, ‘The Irish in Britain’, 231; Fuller, Irish Catholicism Since 1950, 19–20; quotation from Duffy, Faith of Our Fathers, 23. ¹⁹¹ Duffy, Faith of Our Fathers, 12. ¹⁹² Quoted ibid. 27.

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discussion of a detailed memorandum prepared by the Irish bishops on migrants in Britain in 1959, that the issue was the ‘importance of adequate preparation in Ireland for conditions in England’.¹⁹³ O’Hara commented that the Irish bishops had a tendency to paint ‘something of a rose coloured picture’ when it came to the levels of religious practice of their migrant flock in Britain.¹⁹⁴ A similar observation was made in the editorial in Blackfriars already quoted: ‘. . . the accepted pattern of Irish Catholicism, however valid it may still be for those who remain at home, is scarcely equal to the strains of life in a secularized society’.¹⁹⁵ A number of clerics also acknowledged that religious teaching in Irish schools did not seem to withstand the challenges of living in a country ‘which, in spite of the excellence of very many of its people, has an atmosphere that is materialistic and godless’.¹⁹⁶ But this message was not welcomed by the Irish prelates who believed that any comments about the inadequacy of religious preparation were a slur on the reputation of the church in Ireland. When the Newman Demographic Survey was commissioned in 1959 to prepare a detailed report on the arrangements for the reception and integration of Irish Catholics in England and Wales for presentation at the International Catholic Migration Commission in Ottawa in 1960, the fault lines emerged.¹⁹⁷ The author was the director of the Newman Demographic Survey, A. E. C. W. Spencer, a sociologist whose work on English Catholicism was widely respected.¹⁹⁸ In the course of his discussion, Spencer suggested that the conditions at home in Ireland explained the problems that arose when it came to integrating Irish Catholics into wider British society.¹⁹⁹ Beneath the veneer of public respect for the priest was a latent anti-clericalism which was only held in check by the theocratic ethos of Irish society, and since the basic tenets of Catholic belief were abandoned on settling in Britain, this suggested ¹⁹³ Godfrey to O’Hara, 27 Nov. 1959, Godfrey Papers, AAW. ¹⁹⁴ O’Hara to Godfrey, 20 Nov. 1959, Godfrey Papers, AAW. ¹⁹⁵ ‘The Exiled Irish’, 50. ¹⁹⁶ Gaynor, ‘The Irish in Britain’, 238; Fitzgerald, ‘The Irish Parish and the Emigrant’, 347–50; quotation from Lane, ‘The Irish in Britain’, 229. ¹⁹⁷ Spencer had earlier flagged up that the Newman Demographic Survey had been commissioned to prepare this report, in The Tablet, 22 Aug. 1959. ¹⁹⁸ For the history of the Newman Demographic Survey written inevitably from a personal perspective, see A. E. C. W. Spencer, ‘The Newman Demographic Survey, 1953–1963: Reflection on the Birth, Life and Death of a Catholic Institute for Socio-Religious Research’, Social Compass, 11, nos. 3–4 (1964), 31–7. ¹⁹⁹ Daly, The Slow Failure, 304.

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only a superficial knowledge of the main teachings of the church.²⁰⁰ The underlying message was that the failure of Irish Catholics to maintain the same levels of religious practice was an outcome of their previous instruction in Ireland. Unsurprisingly, when McQuaid was shown this report he was furious and contacted Cardinal Godfrey to intervene. The report itself was subjected to sustained criticism at a meeting in London in June 1959 by Monsignor Cecil Barrett, the chairman of the Catholic Social Welfare Bureau, Henry Gray, the director of the emigrants’ section of the same body, and Father Edward McElroy, the Columban priest working in England, all trusted advisers of McQuaid.²⁰¹ Eventually Spencer’s report was suppressed and another paper by the sociologist John Hickey was deemed to be more acceptable, although still with reservations. This was not the first time that McQuaid had had to intervene to maintain the reputation of the Irish church. Some twenty years earlier, when a future archbishop of Westminster, John Heenan, visited Dublin in 1941, he wrote a series of articles for the Catholic Herald which inter alia suggested that many young people he had talked to in the city were anti-clerical and additionally that the level of religious instruction was far below the standard required and that when they went abroad they would not be ‘in a position to defend and sustain the faith’.²⁰² In November 1941 McQuaid wrote to Godfrey, who was then the Apostolic Delegate to Britain, to complain about the article, which he thought was ‘a scandalously offensive calumny’ against Catholic Dublin.²⁰³ Godfrey diplomatically refused to do anything and politely suggested to McQuaid that he should raise the matter with the papal nuncio in Ireland.²⁰⁴ There is little doubt that thousands of Irish in Britain who took only a marginal interest in religion after they had arrived were the source of acute embarrassment to Irish church leaders. Often referred to as the ‘problem’, it featured more or less continually in Irish religious periodicals throughout the 1950s and into the early 1960s, as a diverse group of clerics and interested lay people tried to make sense of the phenomenon of lapsing, variously described by contemporaries as ‘leakage’ or ‘seepage’. In fact, it was a problem that had concerned the ²⁰⁰ Daly, The Slow Failure, 304–5. ²⁰¹ Ibid. 304. ²⁰² This material draws on the account in Cooney, John Charles McQuaid, 160–1; see also J. C. Heenan, Not the Whole Truth (London, 1971), 242–3. ²⁰³ Godfrey was appointed Apostolic Delegate for Great Britain in 1939 (Moloney, Westminster, Whitehall and the Vatican, 99). ²⁰⁴ Cooney, John Charles McQuaid, 161.

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Catholic church since the early nineteenth century.²⁰⁵ The increased number of mixed marriages was identified as the ‘chief cause of the leakage’—not just among Irish Catholics but also among Polish and Italians living in Britain—and was seen as demonstrable evidence of the ramifications of the falling away from the ‘one true’ faith in the 1950s.²⁰⁶ Even reported cases of the Irish migrants shunning Catholic clergy caused deep anxiety. One account from Birmingham in the mid-1950s showed that deference had become indifference: During the past few years there has been a growing estrangement between Irish boys and an increasing shyness towards the priest. Formerly, the Irish boys and girls were pleased to greet the priest in the street or in any public place. Now they appear to avoid the priest in public.²⁰⁷

Traditional certitudes no longer applied. Involvement in the Connolly Associations of the 1940s and 1950s was also a direct challenge to the authority of the church, which had condemned this body as a Communist front organization.²⁰⁸ While, as we shall see in the next chapter, this was a marginal political activity for the Irish in post-war Britain, the fact that clerics were concerned about the growing attraction of such left-wing groups indicates a foreboding sense of losing their grip on the mindsets of these wayward young Irish migrants. Complaints about the rampant materialism and secularism of the Irish arrivals were often illustrated by the desire to work on Sundays for extra pay, thereby missing mass.²⁰⁹ But this all can be looked at in an alternative way. A substantial proportion of those who travelled to Britain were over time simply conforming to the norms of the host society, and, far from being conclusive evidence of a ‘problem’, these changes in patterns of behaviour and outlook were signs of adjustment to life in the ‘strange land’ rather than a form of deviancy. Sporadic worship—if at all—was typical in Britain, and forming partnerships regardless of religious denomination was far from exceptional. The pressure to conform or at least not to stand out by not attending mass, by marrying a non-Catholic, and by working on a Sunday may have influenced patterns of behaviour. Ironically the ²⁰⁵ Gilley, ‘The Roman Catholic Church and the Nineteenth-Century Irish Diaspora’, 198. ²⁰⁶ Bernard Doyle, ‘Mixed Marriages in England and the Immigrant’, Christus Rex, 11, no. 3 (1957), 610; see also Leonard Shiel, ‘Marriage and the Leakage’, The Furrow, 9, no. 9 (1958), 522–9. ²⁰⁷ Fitzgerald, ‘The Irish Parish and the Emigrant’, 346. Emphasis as in original. ²⁰⁸ Jackson, The Irish in Britain, 125–6. ²⁰⁹ Fitzgerald, ‘The Irish Parish and the Emigrant’, 346.

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church preached that the Irish must make efforts to integrate, while at the same time retain a distinctive religious identity. Such a contradictory message was bound to create confusion. And what was often neglected was that a very significant proportion did continue to go to church and retain links with other Catholics—but it was those who did not who generated so much interest, since they were an acute embarrassment to church leaders and politicians in Ireland. Cultural dissonance, class and background differences, and the variety in religious cultures worked against the much-hoped-for fusion of Irish and British Catholicism in the post-war years. The sociologist Michael Hornsby-Smith argued in 1979 that over time there would be ‘a gradual process of assimilation of Irish immigrants to the norms and values of British society and the adoption of the style of English Catholicism once the process of geographical and social mobility takes place’, but his findings relate to the 1970s and presuppose that all migrants would either eventually assimilate or remain segregated, an assumption that is now more or less universally acknowledged to be erroneous.²¹⁰ An astute discussion of the failure of religion to ‘bridge the gap’ between Irish and English Catholics was published in the late 1950s. The author, Desmond Fisher, was the London editor of the nationalist newspaper, the Irish Press, and was therefore ideally placed to observe these interactions. As he argued, even though both groups subscribed to the same doctrines, attended the same churches, and participated in the same sacraments, they were ‘poles apart in mutual understanding’.²¹¹ The trouble stems from the difference in outlook on religion. The English Catholic’s approach to his faith is based on intellectual acceptance of its tenets and punctilious observance of the duties this acceptance involves. For the average Irish Catholic, religion is a matter between himself and God. He regards prayer as his direct method of communication with the Almighty, not as a corporate act of worship as the Englishman does. ²¹⁰ Michael P. Hornsby-Smith, ‘Irish Catholics in England: Some Sociological Perspectives’, Social Studies, 6, no. 2 (1979), 185. On the segregation/assimilation model and its inherent problems, see Mary J. Hickman, ‘Alternative Historiographies of the Irish in Britain’, in Roger Swift and Sheridan Gilley (eds.), The Irish in Victorian Britain: The Local Dimension (Dublin, 1999), 236–53, and id., ‘Migration and Diaspora’, in Joe Cleary and Claire Connolly (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish Culture (Cambridge, 2005), 122. ²¹¹ Desmond Fisher, ‘The Irish in England’, The Furrow, 9, no. 4 (1958), 232. As the author acknowledged, his article was ‘full’ of generalizations, but, given his brief to discuss whether the ‘average Irishman in Britain is a misfit, and, if so, why?’ (p. 230), this was perhaps understandable.

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This may explain why the Irish Catholic does things which shock and hurt English Catholics. He comes late to mass and leaves before it is over. He ignores the frequent requests from the pulpit that he should come in time and wait until the priest has left the altar. He will stand at the back of the church though there are plenty of seats up in front. He shows less reverence in church than does the English Catholic and he takes little or no part in parish activities.²¹²

When the Irish dominated the congregation, as they did in the appropriately named Harp Mass Centre in the working-class district of Sparkbrook in Birmingham, observed in a famous study by the sociologists John Rex and Robert Moore in the mid-1960s, the atmosphere was much more like ‘home’. The service was virtually unrecognizable to an English Catholic, who would have found it ‘alien’.²¹³ An Irish priest from Clare presided over the packed ceremony, which was punctuated by continuous noise from the congregation, while the short sermon and announcement of news about Irish events in the city or requests for prayers for deceased Irish family members and the availability of provincial newspapers all added up to ‘an Irish social event, after which football pools and drink are discussed as the congregation storms the exit doors’.²¹⁴ Rex and Moore concluded that this was ‘in many respects a parish of the Irish church’, despite their optimistic statement that the number of English priests on the parish staff indicated the ‘possibility of the Irish moving towards a more English form of religion’.²¹⁵ This was unlikely as it was precisely because it was like a mass at home that the Irish attended this centre in such large numbers. Mass here, as in so many other churches with large Irish congregations, was an opportunity to socialize in a familiar milieu, rekindle old friendships, and catch up on the news. One migrant who arrived in London in the early 1950s remembered that ‘after Mass on a Sunday was the best time to meet Irish people’.²¹⁶ In Cricklewood, for instance, the Church of the Sacred Heart, Quex Road, apparently accommodated 12,000 people in the late 1960s in an astonishing series of twelve services each Sunday to cater for the huge Irish population living in this area.²¹⁷ ²¹² Ibid. 233. ²¹³ John Rex and Robert Moore, Race, Community and Conflict: A Study of Sparkbrook (London, 1967), 175. ²¹⁴ Ibid. 176. ²¹⁵ Ibid. ²¹⁶ O’Grady, Irish Migration to London, 13. ²¹⁷ Reginald Richard Hall, ‘Irish Music and Dance in London, 1890–1970: A Social and Cultural History’ (unpub. D.Phil. thesis, University of Sussex, 1994), 311.

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4. ISLANDS OF IRISHNESS And it was not just in the religious sphere that the Irish adjusted to life in Britain by re-creating the heady atmosphere of home rather than conforming to expected ‘English’ patterns of working-class behaviour—if such patterns existed. Across England and Wales dancehalls sprang up which catered for the migrant Irish in an environment in which they could socialize and mix, without fear of offending the native population, or perhaps act more freely precisely because the ‘English’ were not there. In London, Birmingham, and other centres of post-war settlement, the Irish dancehall was the focal point for communal entertainment. Personal testimonies are replete with accounts of the glorious days of the Irish dancehall of the 1950s and 1960s, with venues such as the Galtymore Club in Cricklewood Broadway, the Tara Club in Brixton, the Banba in Kilburn, and the Harp or the Shamrock in Birmingham featuring prominently in the memories of those who danced the night away in the company of others.²¹⁸ The famous Galtymore opened in 1957 and is still in existence today; it had two halls, one for traditional Irish dancing and the other for ‘modern’ dancing, thereby cleverly capturing both ends of the market.²¹⁹ Dancehalls were unlicensed until the early 1960s but they were located near to pubs and run by Irish entrepreneurs who had a keen sense of the expectations of the clientele. All the stars of the 1950s appeared at these dancehalls, including ‘The Queen of Connemara’, Delia Murphy, and Bridie Gallagher, known as ‘The Girl from Donegal’; they were supplanted in the early 1960s by the glamour and glitz of the Irish showbands, with popular singers such as Brendan Boyer.²²⁰ Despite initial efforts by some well-meaning Irish clerics to organize and control such events, including sorting out the inevitable fracas that accompanied congregations of drink-laden Irish expatriates, commercial concerns dictated the way in which the Irish dancehalls were run. In addition, the events organized by the church only took place at weekends, when many preferred to ‘get away from the priests’.²²¹ An Irish migrant from Waterford, Paddy Fahey, vividly ²¹⁸ O’Grady, Irish Migration to London, 15; Rex and Moore, Race, Community and Conflict, 149. ²¹⁹ Hall, ‘Irish Music and Dance in London’, 337. ²²⁰ Ibid. 335–6. ²²¹ Kaja Irene Ziesler, ‘The Irish in Birmingham, 1830 − 1970 (unpub. Ph.D. thesis, University of Birmingham, 1989), 203; ‘Some Notes on the Situation of Irish Workers in Birmingham’.

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captured the world of the Irish dancehall in post-war London, in a collection of unique photographs that offer tantalizing glimpses of a bygone world that has more or less disappeared.²²² These ‘ballrooms of romance’ could be tritely dismissed as sites of nostalgia where home was re-created for a couple of hours. Nonetheless, they served a crucial function in aiding adjustment to life in Britain, often being the place to meet potential Irish spouses, catch up on the news from home, chat with friends, or simply have some fun in the reassuring company of fellow migrants. They were patronized predominantly by the young arrivals, although, unlike similar ballrooms in England, there was no social stigma attached to older people attending.²²³ Sometimes fighting occurred as personal or regional enmities erupted into ritualistic violence, invariably fuelled by heavy drinking, but this was in itself a taste of home. After the pubs and dancehalls closed on a Saturday night, Kilburn High Road was reputedly a dangerous place to be as fights broke out, again a common occurrence on the main streets of towns and cities across post-war Ireland.²²⁴ Similarly, at the end of an evening in Birmingham in 1957, a young volunteer from the Irish rural development organization, Munitir na T´ire, watched the inevitable fights develop on the streets as he left the pub: From there we went to a dance in an Irish hall not far away. Here and there as we went we saw the lads having a bit of a scrap, but the police cleared the streets. There are no rows or fights inside pubs or halls or clubs, for the simple reason that each has a dangerous weapon in the shape of a chucker-out. Big fifteen-stone six-footers, who smile broadly but hit mightily. Hence the fights in the streets but their [sic] fights are mostly tame affairs . . . Everyone dances, everyone drinks and from time to time everyone fights and I do mean both sexes, but the fights are not vicious or prolonged.²²⁵

Tame perhaps to Irish eyes accustomed to this ritual street theatre—but the horrified English onlooker had a different impression of such a pugilistic pastime, and it served to reinforce traditional stereotypes of the Irish as ‘rough’, unpredictable, and prone to violence. As a priest working in Birmingham remarked, ‘too frequently rows and disturbances occur in and around these places [pubs and dancehalls] ²²² Finbarr Whooley, Irish Londoners: Photographs from the Paddy Fahey Collection (Stroud, 1997), 71–100. The original collection, which covers a wide range of topics, is now housed at the Brent Archive, and includes over 5,000 photographs. ²²³ Hall, ‘Irish Music and Dance’, 331. ²²⁴ Ibid. 306. ²²⁵ Oliver Reilly, ‘A Worker in Birmingham’, The Furrow, 9, no. 4 (1958), 220–1.

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and it only needs a few Irishmen to be involved, which unfortunately happens, to give all the Irish a bad name’.²²⁶ For those who wished to burn off their physical energy in more formal circumstances, the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) was organized across Britain from the end of the nineteenth century and provided an outlet for the Irish arrivals to participate in or watch Gaelic games. In the mid-1960s nearly sixty GAA clubs were in existence in London, continuing a long tradition of sporting activity in the centres of Irish settlement overseas. Matches at Mitcham in Surrey or Eltham could attract thousands.²²⁷ Birmingham had its own Gaelic football league, with numerous fixtures, and a county board for Warwickshire was formed prior to the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939. The post-war arrivals set in train an enormous expansion in the number of clubs.²²⁸ Most of the Irish county teams in the 1950s and 1960s had players based in England, adding to the vitality of the organization, as did its role in hosting benefit dances and other entertainment.²²⁹ The GAA also organized matches involving county teams from Ireland, including high-profile games such as the Dublin–Kerry football fixture held in 1959 in Birmingham which attracted thousands of spectators.²³⁰ As well as providing for leisure activities, the GAA also opened up a world of valuable contacts for recent arrivals looking for jobs.²³¹ Another element in the associational cultures of the Irish in post-war Britain were the numerous organizations and bodies that developed in the early 1950s to provide social outlets, offer assistance to those in need of help, and generally cater for Irish interests. In particular the County Associations that sprang up across Britain arranged ‘socials’ or ‘dances’, and were heavily involved in welfare work through fundraising to establish hostels and other forms of support for needy fellow country men or women. Many were formed on the basis of individual initiatives, with moral support from the Irish Embassy and clerics, and formally brought together in the Federation of Irish Societies in 1964.²³² These ²²⁶ Eugene Hopkins, ‘Irish Catholics in Britain’, The Furrow, 1, no. 8 (1950), 399. ²²⁷ Whooley, Irish Londoners, 34. ²²⁸ Rex and Moore, Race, Community and Conflict, 154; Carl Chinn, Birmingham Irish: Making Our Mark (Birmingham, 2003), 148–51; Ziesler, ‘The Irish in Birmingham’, 241–2. ²²⁹ Paddy Fahey, The Irish in London (London, 1991), 35. ²³⁰ Ziesler, ‘The Irish in Birmingham’, 242. ²³¹ O’Grady, Irish Migration to London, 15–16. ²³² O’Connor, The Irish in Britain, 161.

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associations sought to foster regional identities among those living in Britain, whilst at the same time drawing in a more diverse membership in terms of social class, and providing a more ‘respectable’ face for wider public consumption.²³³ But, as the journalist Donal Foley remarked, the ‘great mass of the Irish in Britain stood aloof from organizations’ and ‘any hope of organizing the Irish into a mass movement in Britain was a forlorn one’.²³⁴ Traditional music and dancing were also features of the Irish social scene, and certain pubs were known as the places to go to hear musicians, many of whom were living in Britain but who also included those visiting from Ireland.²³⁵ Often starting out in the 1940s as informal gatherings of like-minded musicians, a more elaborate network of public venues developed in London throughout the following decade.²³⁶ In Donnellan’s documentary on The Irishman, a number of the scenes are set against the backdrop of apparently spontaneous music-making in an unspecified Irish hostelry. As with so much else, the forum for music and dancing was the public house, a long-standing element of the social landscape of Irish migrants in Britain, particularly for young unmarried males, who earned good wages and had few other outlets for leisure activity in the evenings and weekends, and little wish to spend time in their often unsavoury lodgings or boarding houses. Reports of excessive drinking alarmed contemporaries at home in Ireland, as, without the degree of social control exercised by family members or local notables such as the priest, they were ‘relatively free agents, living by values acceptable to their peers’, and not answerable to parents or the wider society.²³⁷ Pubs that were dominated by Irish patrons offered an environment in which obvious elements of the ‘old’ country could be re-created. A description from the mid-1960s of an ‘Irish’ pub in Birmingham captures the flavour of this world: Nearly all the pubs include Irishmen amongst their clientele, but in some, such as the Black Horse, the Irishness is overwhelming. One may buy draught Guinness, or Sweet Afton cigarettes. A notice tells of a cheap week-end trip to Dublin arranged by the pub’s own social club and it is not uncommon for someone to come round selling Irish political newspapers or tracts. Here, too, one night we met an Irish ballad-monger selling the ‘recitations’ which he had ²³³ 154. ²³⁴ ²³⁵ ²³⁷

Jackson, The Irish in Britain, 129: Rex and Moore, Race, Community and Conflict, Donal Foley, Three Villages: An Autobiography (Dublin, 1977), 66. Hall, ‘Irish Music and Dance’, 307–10. ²³⁶ Ibid. 315–22. Ibid. 314.

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written to celebrate Kennedy, Chessman, and others, who in accordance with Irish experience had been shamefully and wrongly done to death.²³⁸

How a pub with the name of the ‘Black Horse’ could become a meeting place for the displaced Irish is less obvious, although Irish landlords or a heavy concentration of Irish living locally, or indeed a receptive English landlord, conscious of the probable effects on takings, were contributory factors that aided this colonization. Pubs also acted as informal labour exchanges, especially for those involved in construction, and apparently even some wages were paid over in this sacred space.²³⁹ But, as Liam Ryan has argued, the principal reason why so many migrants frequented Irish pubs was that it ‘was the one place where they could find the warm, relaxed atmosphere that becomes a substitute for home’.²⁴⁰ With the gradual decline of all-male establishments in the late 1950s and the introduction of music, the pub was also ‘one of the few places where Irish men could meet Irish girls; in short, a place to meet both old friends and new’.²⁴¹ As well as conviviality in an ostensibly familiar environment, such pubs allowed the migrant to relax without fear of offending the ‘natives’ or breaking some unspoken convention. Unlike the Irish clubs run by church, sporting, or welfare organizations, there was no latent purpose to the pub: many of these clubs ‘had an added moral purpose of not just entertaining the Irish but of unifying them or educating them or protecting them or helping along some great cause or another’.²⁴² Throughout the 1950s and 1960s the archetypal Irish pub, with its music sessions, became a familiar element of the social landscape across London and other major British cities, before its eventual assimilation into a global brand from the 1990s onwards. The leisure activities on offer to the young Irish migrant in Britain were an embarrassment of riches to the generation who arrived after the end of the Second World War. It is no small wonder that when one female migrant was asked in the late 1940s if she would consider returning home during a short holiday back in Ireland, she responded that she had ‘a better life in Croydon than Sligo’ with dances two nights a week, higher pay, and enhanced marriage prospects.²⁴³ Disposable ²³⁸ Rex and Moore, Race, Community and Conflict, 148. ²³⁹ Fahey, The Irish in London, 28. ²⁴⁰ Liam Ryan, ‘Irish Emigration to Britain Since World War II’, in Richard Kearney (ed.), Migrations: The Irish at Home and Abroad (Dublin, 1990), 56. ²⁴¹ Ibid. ²⁴² Ibid. ²⁴³ S.4, Rural Survey of Leitrim and Donegal, 23–25 Sept. 1948, Marsh Papers, TCD MS 8306. Although the interviewee was in Leitrim, she was actually from Sligo.

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income allowed the migrant to taste this hedonistic environment of dancing, socializing in pubs, and being part of an essentially youthful subculture, which compared favourably with the drab and dull character of many parts of rural Ireland. But the other element that emerges clearly is the extent to which the process of adjustment relied heavily on what were in essence Irish-dominated spaces, from the parish church to the pub to the dancehall, to the GAA grounds. For many this was largely an outcome of seeing their time in Britain as a temporary stay. Perhaps rather sternly, Fisher pointed to the implications of this viewpoint, when he argued that it inculcated a ‘deep sense of ‘‘not belonging’’ ’: Very many Irish people will not put down permanent roots in England, such as buying a house, since they think that sooner or later an opportunity of returning to Ireland will arise. It is this feeling of ‘not belonging’ which more than anything else makes so many Irish people in England depend for conviviality on public house company and seek solace for the pangs of ‘exile’ in the bottom of a glass.²⁴⁴

But ‘belonging’ could mean different things to different people. The predominantly young migrants sought out other Irish exiles to socialize with in their hard-earned leisure time, in pubs, sporting venues, and dancehalls across Britain. This does not imply that they did not belong, but rather that the draw in the first instance was to essentially Irishdominated spaces outside of work. It was an inevitable stage in the process of adjustment that the familiar—a world that was neither truly Irish or British but somewhere in between—would offer migrants solace after the displacement of emigration. ²⁴⁴ Fisher, ‘The Irishman in England’, 234.

5 A Sense of Self English life is going through a violent transition both physically and morally . . . Morally, traditional roles are being overthrown. There is a new ‘morality’, which is advocating complete freedom and laxity of behaviour; people are rootless and mixed-up, pursuing all the while external material substitutes for the things of the spirit. There is a wave of crime among the young. All these things are bound to affect the Catholic and Irish family in England.¹

When an English Catholic bishop of Irish descent, Brian Foley, spoke in Dublin in April 1964 to a group of priests concerned with emigrants, he warned his clerical audience of the impending storm clouds looming. In Britain during the 1960s the moral code was challenged by a plethora of counter-cultural movements, from second-wave feminism to the advocacy of the relaxation of traditional sexual mores. Things were changing and clearly not for the better in his view. While his clerical audience may have been horrified at this prospect, they could perhaps seek solace in the widely shared view that such changes were on the distant horizon in independent Ireland—although, as it happened, many came sooner than anyone expected.² One outcome was the dissolution of a distinctive Catholic subculture in England, which had implications for the large number of Irish Catholics.³ A further consequence of the upheaval and transformations of the 1960s was the altered relationship with traditional sources of authority, especially ¹ Text of Talk to Irish Congress on Emigration by Bishop Brian Foley (Lancaster), 1 Apr. 1964, 2–3, AB8/B/XXIX, McQuaid Papers, DDA. ² The best available accounts of social and cultural change in independent Ireland in the 1960s can be found in Diarmaid Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland, 1900–2000 (London, 2004), 536–622, and Terence Brown, Ireland: A Social and Cultural History, 1922–1985, 2nd edn. (London, 1985), 241–311. ³ See M. P. Hornsby-Smith, Roman Catholics in England: Studies in Social Structure Since the Second World War (Cambridge, 1987), 208–14.

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the relationship between the state and its citizens, most obvious in Northern Ireland where the second-class citizenship of Catholics under the Stormont regime generated civil conflict from the mid-1960s. And, as immigration from the ‘New’ Commonwealth was effectively cut off in 1962 by the Commonwealth Immigrants Act, the politics of race and national identity were raised to another level, from the issue of simply controlling entry to the promotion of ‘race relations’ in the 1960s and 1970.⁴ All of these developments in post-imperial Britain had important ramifications for the Irish, as traditional certainties began to unravel and identities of all forms were subject to renegotiation and reinvention.

1. CITIZENS In Britain across the twentieth century the concept of citizenship with its rights and responsibilities was increasingly prominent as the symbiotic relationship between the state and its people was fundamentally altered by the heavy sacrifices endured during the Second World War.⁵ The range of measures introduced afterwards by the Attlee government in 1945–51, in particular the establishment of the welfare state in the late 1940s, strengthened the basis of social democracy and, in Richard Weight’s view, ‘made the idea of the nation more closely synonymous with that of the people’.⁶ Public information campaigns co-ordinated by the Ministry of Information during the ‘People’s War’ had sketched out the broad parameters of ‘how the nation could be once the war was over’.⁷ Films played at cinemas offered compelling visions of this brave new world, and one message was clear: there would be ‘no return to the past’.⁸ A pivotal figure within this new world was the ‘responsible’ citizen. The vocabulary that was developed by the BBC during the war placed an emphasis on the active citizen ‘with both duties to the state ⁴ See Robert Colls, Identity of England (Oxford, 2002), 149–53. ⁵ For a recent review of the expanding literature on this subject, see Edmund Neill, ‘Conceptions of Citizenship in Twentieth Century Britain’, Twentieth Century British History, 17, no. 3 (2006), 424–38. ⁶ Richard Weight, Patriots: National Identity in Britain, 1940–2000 (London, 2002), 208. ⁷ Colls, Identity of England, 128. ⁸ Wendy Webster, Imagining Home: Gender, ‘Race’ and National Identity, 1945–64 (London, 1998), 3.

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and rights deriving from these duties’.⁹ Citizenship, moreover, took on more complex meanings over the course of the 1940s and 1950s: from the place of the individual in a democratic society, to the more restrictive understanding of ‘equal right to certain benefits and services ensured by legislation’.¹⁰ T. H. Marshall, the influential sociologist, advanced a conception in 1950 that centred on the state’s role in the creation of this equality, a model that was subsequently used in the mid-1960s in the embryonic stages of the development of British race relations to assess the degree to which migrants had the same rights as other citizens.¹¹ According to Julia Stapleton, this view reinforced the authority of the state and underscored its role in the achievement of social equality: Citizenship, in its final, mature phrase in mid-twentieth-century Britain, was a form of social integration based not on the ‘sphere of sentiment’ which prevailed in the kinship system of pre-feudal societies, nor the ‘patriotic nationalism’ engendered by political reform, but a common level of ‘material enjoyment’. Marshall’s conception of citizenship accorded well with the authority which the British state enjoyed in the immediate postwar period, eclipsing the various component nationalisms within the United Kingdom.¹²

For left-wing intellectuals such as R. H. Tawney and Harold Laski, citizenship was more than simply a matter of equal rights, and, in opposition to Victorian liberalism, they argued that it encompassed more than the responsibilities of paying taxes, voting, and the defence of the nation, since it ‘expressed a dynamic social relationship; it was an activity as much as a status that entailed the discharge of a wide range of duties’.¹³ Patriotism was quite another matter. It was often seen as a contradictory force that ‘emphasized the primacy of the nation over the state’, and was popularly understood to be an attachment to a unitary English national ⁹ Siân Nicholas, ‘From John Bull to John Citizen: Images of National Identity and Citizenship on the Wartime BBC’, in Richard Weight and Abigail Beach (eds.), The Right to Belong: Citizenship and National Identity in Britain, 1930–1960 (London, 1998), 45. ¹⁰ Julia Stapleton, ‘Citizenship Versus Patriotism in Twentieth-Century England’, Historical Journal, 48, no. 1 (2005), 171. ¹¹ T. H. Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class (Cambridge, 1950); E. J. B. Rose et al., Colour and Citizenship: A Report on British Race Relations (London, 1969), 17, 27. ¹² Stapleton, ‘Citizenship Versus Patriotism’, 171. Emphasis as in original. ¹³ Richard Weight and Abigail Beach, ‘Introduction’, in Weight and Beach (eds.), The Right to Belong, 2.

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identity, or less commonly a vague sense of Britishness, although the boundaries between the two were never fixed and shifted over time.¹⁴ Contemporary debates about citizenship and patriotism influenced how the Irish were seen in post-war Britain, and how they saw themselves. The general view was that the Irish were good, if somewhat indifferent, patriots, but bad citizens. Unlike their American cousins, naturalization was rarely a path pursued since, as we have seen, Irish citizens had virtually the same rights as those born in Britain.¹⁵ This unique position also reflected a mindset that even though they were physically located in Britain, they were in many ways set apart from that society. Situated in this ‘half-way’ house between Britain and Ireland, the Irish ‘middle nation’ occupied an ambiguous position by retaining ‘a foot in both camps—with obligations to each’.¹⁶ The hope was that the Irish would become model citizens in Britain and reflect well on their country of origin, yet at the same time ‘not give up their primary loyalty to Ireland’.¹⁷ The sociologist Liam Ryan, writing in the early 1970s, captured this contrasting and often contradictory set of expectations with characteristic insight: there is widespread acceptance of the assumption that Irish immigrants occupy a half-way house between Britain and Ireland whose proximity is presumed to reinforce kinship, local and political ties. Immigrants have been praised for preserving their cultural and Catholic identity in an alien and pagan environment, or have been blamed for contributing economically but not socially, for gaining monetarily but not humanly in the new society.¹⁸

By the mid-1960s at least some contemporaries realized that this was an untenable position, as presumably did thousands of Irish citizens who had been living in Britain since the late 1940s. When the Minister for Health, Donogh O’Malley, addressed the National University of Ireland ¹⁴ Stapleton, ‘Citizenship Versus Patriotism in Twentieth-Century England’, 152–4; see also Miles Taylor, ‘Patriotism, History and the Left in Twentieth-Century Britain’, Historical Journal, 33, no. 4 (1990), 971–87. ¹⁵ The obvious exception being the power of deportation introduced under the Commonwealth Immigration Act, 1962; for the initial implementation of this provision see J. A. Jackson, ‘A Note on Irish Deportations’, Institute of Race Relations Newsletter, Nov. 1962, 29–31. ¹⁶ John A. Jackson, ‘The Irish’, in Ruth Glass (ed.), London: Aspects of Change (London, 1964), 306. ¹⁷ Liam Ryan, ‘Irish Emigration to Britain Since World War II’, in Richard Kearney (ed.), Migrations: The Irish at Home and Abroad (Dublin, 1990), 67. ¹⁸ William Ryan, ‘Assimilation of Irish Immigrants in Britain’ (unpub. Ph.D thesis, St Louis University, 1973), 58–9.

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Club on St Patrick’s Day in 1966, he urged his displaced compatriots to integrate more fully in ‘their adopted society’ and cautioned that ‘they cannot be true citizens of Britain and Ireland simultaneously’; with greater involvement in the European Economic Community, he predicted that ‘the tide of history [was moving] towards European citizenship’.¹⁹ For one journalist, Kevin O’Connor, his speech was finely timed, since by the mid-1960s the Irish in Britain had ‘become assured and settled’.²⁰ Many had been living there for nearly two decades and ‘reluctantly they were beginning to realize that for most of them there would be ‘‘no going home next year’’; that they were here to stay’.²¹ One measure of the limited degree of integration, in O’Malley’s view, was the marginal role that the expatriates played in British politics, which was not commensurate with the size of the Irish population.²² Since the 1950s Irish officials at the London Embassy had been lamenting this absence of involvement in the British political system, which would have given Irish issues a greater prominence. When some contemporaries lamented the Irish lack of ‘social responsibility’, what in effect they were saying was that substantial numbers were ‘anti-citizens’, with a poor grasp of accepted codes of behaviour or social mores, and virtually no attachment or loyalty to the British state, and even less to any amorphous English or British nation.²³ The most frequently cited evidence for this weakly developed understanding of the rights and responsibilities of citizenship was a purported tendency of Irish males towards criminality. Male delinquency was a key concern for policymakers and professionals throughout the 1950s and early 1960s. The stated aim of public policy was to ‘transform ‘‘anti-citizens’’ into citizens, and boys into men’, and the interest in Irish males reflected the concerns of a much broader debate.²⁴ Such perceptions had long-standing historical associations since at least the ¹⁹ Copy of Address by Donogh O’Malley, Minister for Health, to the National University of Ireland Club, Grosvenor House, London, on St Patrick’s Day, 1966, DT S 96/6/437, NAI. ²⁰ O’Connor, The Irish in Britain, 99. ²¹ Ibid. 99–100. ²² Copy of Address by Donogh O’Malley, Minister for Health, to the National University of Ireland Club, Grosvenor House, London, on St Patrick’s Day, 1966, DT S 96/6/437, NAI. ²³ For the notion of anti-citizen as it applied to those who did not respect the countryside, see David Matless, ‘Taking Pleasure in England: Landscape and Citizenship in the 1940s’, in Weight and Beach (eds.), The Right to Belong, 184–5. ²⁴ Abigail Wills, ‘Delinquency, Masculinity and Citizenship in England, 1950–1970’, Past and Present, 187 (2005), 159.

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early eighteenth century, and the image of the Irish criminal as a parasite living off the noble and hard-working citizens of this adopted land fed into negative ethnic stereotypes.²⁵ No other topic attracted as much interest throughout the post-war years, and one of the arguments for control of Irish immigration in the early 1960s was the apparent high rate of delinquency.²⁶ The chairman of the London Sessions memorably commented in 1957 that ‘this court is infested with Irishmen who come here to commit offences and the more that can be persuaded to go back the better’.²⁷ Experts who looked into the matter of Irish criminality found there was no obvious explanation. The bald statistics, however, told a sorry tale. In 1961 Irish males accounted for 8 per cent of the total prison population, with females a little higher at 9 per cent, so that, taking account of the size of the Irish population, the numbers in prison were ‘disproportionately large’.²⁸ A detailed analysis of convictions for robberies in London in the 1950s showed that the proportion of Irish offenders increased very significantly over the course of that decade, although the total numbers involved were very small.²⁹ Another study of crime in Birmingham in the mid-1960s found that 20 per cent of those who committed indictable offences were born in Ireland.³⁰ In Birmingham the Irish made up half of the people arrested for the offence of being drunk and disorderly—which, it should be said, was truly an Irish pastime.³¹ In the early 1950s on one Monday morning, of the 75 people appearing before magistrates for drunkenness, 48 were Irish: drink made the otherwise congenial Celt ‘more argumentative and very ²⁵ David Fitzpatrick, ‘ ‘‘A Peculiar Tramping People’’: The Irish in Britain, 1801–70’, in W. E. Vaughan (ed.), A New History of Ireland, Vol. 5: Ireland Under the Union, I (1801–70) (Oxford, 1989), 646–9; id., ‘The Irish in Britain, 1871–1921’, in W. E. Vaughan (ed.), A New History of Ireland, Vol. 6: Ireland Under the Union, II (1870–1921) (Oxford, 1996), 667–70; John Archer Jackson, The Irish in Britain (London, 1963), 58–62; Roger Swift, ‘Crime and the Irish in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, in Roger Swift and Sheridan Gilley (eds.), The Irish in Britain, 1815–1914 (London, 1989), 163–82. ²⁶ Mary Hickman, ‘Reconstructing Deconstructing ‘‘Race’’: British Political Discourses about the Irish in Britain’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 21, no. 2 (1998), 302. ²⁷ Manchester Guardian, 4 May 1957, quoted in Jackson, The Irish in Britain, 157. ²⁸ Matthew Russell, ‘The Irish Delinquent in England’, Studies, 53 (1964), 139. ²⁹ F. H. McClintock and Evelyn Gibson, Robbery in London (London, 1961), 50–2, summarized in A. E. Bottoms, ‘Delinquency Amongst Immigrants’, Race, 8, no. 4 (1967), 358–60. ³⁰ John R. Lambert, Crime, Police, and Race Relations: A Study in Birmingham (London, 1970), 125. ³¹ Ibid.

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prone to fighting’.³² After reviewing a study of crimes involving violence in the 1950s, the distinguished criminologist Terence Morris concluded that when it came to pub brawls, the Irish ‘maintained . . . their almost traditional pre-eminence’.³³ Interestingly, police officers in the city—many of whom were of Irish origin—were keen to point to the positive attributes of the Irish: ‘For the policeman, the Irishman typically causes no ‘‘trouble’’ and shows ‘‘respect’’, is generally compliant, and often fairly disarming when questioned; if and when he comes to fighting in a drunken brawl and gets a hiding, there is no suggestion of brutality or viciousness; Irish roguery is mild and basically honest.’³⁴ Detailed information on the numbers of Irish people in prison in England and Wales in the 1960s again shows a disproportionate level of incarceration.³⁵ Rates of recidivism were also about twice what would be expected given the size of Britain’s Irish population.³⁶ Criminologists such as Anthony Bottoms were puzzled by these high rates of offending, especially since crime levels in independent Ireland at this time were unusually low. The two explanations that were offered by contemporaries were the profile of the Irish migrant population, and the absence of social controls in Britain that so effectively restrained such ‘deviance’ at home. The typical offender was a young single male, from a poor background, either unemployed or with casual employment, and usually living in the socially deprived twilight zones of urban centres.³⁷ But even allowing for the age and social profile, one study concluded that there is still ‘a greater propensity for crime among Irish immigrants than among other immigrants and than among the native English population’.³⁸ Alcohol was often involved when it came to public order incidents, and heavy drinking was in itself an indication of problems in adjusting to life in Britain. According to a thoughtful, if rather general, assessment based on interviews with officials and clerics in the early 1960s, drink was the chief cause of criminal behaviour: The reputation of the Irish as being on the whole a people addicted to drinking to excess is as strong today in England as it was then [in the mid-nineteenth ³² ‘Some Notes on the Situation of Irish Workers in Birmingham’, Report Prepared by Maurice Foley, Young Christian Workers’ Association, [July] 1951, DFA 402/222, NAI. ³³ Terence Morris, quoted in Bottoms, ‘Delinquency Amongst Immigrants’, 364. ³⁴ Lambert, Crime, Police and Race Relations, 187. ³⁵ Ryan, ‘Irish Emigration to Britain’, 64–5. ³⁶ Bottoms, ‘Delinquency Amongst Immigrants’, 361. ³⁷ Ibid. 364. ³⁸ Lambert, Crime, Police, and Race Relations, 126.

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century]. It is a view which I found shared by everybody with whom I came in contact in England, cleric or layman, official and civilian, Irish as well as English. All were unanimous in declaring that drink lies at the root of the great bulk of Irish crime in England to-day . . . The Irishman’s main trouble is drink. This will bring him into contact with the law, either directly (charged with drunkenness) or indirectly (crimes of violence committed while inflamed by drink, or thefts committed either while under the influence of alcohol or with a view to getting some money for drink or to balance a budget depleted through over-spending on drink) . . . Premeditated crimes of violence or dishonesty are rare among them. Irishmen will beat up somebody outside a public house, often savagely; but they will not lie in wait for him the next day: Irishmen scarcely ever figure among dope pedlars or safe-blowers, confidence tricksters or forgers. Naïveté, not vice or cunning, is the characteristic of the average Irish delinquent.³⁹

Attributing such criminality to naivety and alcohol-fuelled irrationality was a compassionate if somewhat simplistic view, since such patterns of behaviour did not suddenly spontaneously come into being on arrival in Britain. Another factor that undoubtedly explained the higher levels of crime was the practice of Irish judges and police officers of ordering offenders or potential offenders to the boat to leave for ‘England’, or face imprisonment or other sanctions.⁴⁰ This was a typically Irish solution to a social problem by ‘exporting’ those most likely to become involved in a lifetime of petty crime. It was no wonder that crime rates were so low in independent Ireland if all the prospective criminals were encouraged to leave. By the late 1950s British magistrates were returning the favour by recommending for deportation those convicted of an offence who were born in Ireland.⁴¹ Under the Commonwealth Immigrants Act, 1962, this sanction was institutionalized, as anyone from independent Ireland or the Commonwealth who was convicted and had been resident for less than five years could be recommended for deportation. This discretionary power was increasingly used by magistrates, causing some concern in Ireland about the nature of the potential return flow from across the water. For some, the prospect of being sent back to Ireland was less preferable than a prison sentence, since not many were keen on an involuntary return to a frosty reception from family members.⁴² And there was nothing to stop a deportee from returning to Britain on the next boat, as the border controls were virtually non-existent. It ³⁹ Russell, ‘The Irish Delinquent in England’, 140. ⁴¹ Jackson, The Irish in Britain, 183–4, n. 12. ⁴² Russell, ‘The Irish Delinquent in England’, 147.

⁴⁰ Ibid. 146.

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is unclear how many tried their luck at returning, unobserved by the authorities on both sides of the Irish Sea. One of the arguments advanced in the 1960s for the high levels of crimes committed by the Irish was that delinquency occurred in this ‘more flexible and fluid society’ with the removal of the traditional controls imposed by the family and church at home:⁴³ A close-knit family life and the overarching influence of the Catholic church undoubtedly exert potent controls against wrong-doing and law-breaking. The process of immigration removes these controlling influences. For some families they are replaced by the new controls of the host society in areas where family and church continue to enhance the sense of community, security, and stability for the members. For others the loss is more total and release from the stringent controls of the home society provides something of a reaction which finds expression in relatively greater crime and disorder, theft, drunkenness—the expression for those for whom immigration has not brought economic security, stable family relations, and other signs of success in the new country.⁴⁴

Attractive as this may be as a cultural explanation, it does not explain why this moral code which deeply influenced patterns of behaviour in Ireland was so quickly jettisoned in the early years of settlement in Britain. Social deprivation and location in poor urban areas rather than nationality or some perverse Irish tendency towards crime are more convincing explanations for these levels of crime. Writing in 1971, the Labour MP for Birmingham Sparkbrook, Roy Hattersley, cited the example of two adjacent districts of Birmingham, both with large Irish concentrations. Sparkhill was ‘more Irish than almost any other area in England’ and ‘uniformly law-abiding’; Sparkbrook, a deprived slum less than a mile down the road, had high rates of crime across all ethnic groups. Hattersley underlined the essential difference: the levels of crime in Sparkbrook had little to do with nationality: ‘. . . their crimes are not the crimes of the Irish: they are all the misdemeanours of the hopeless poor’.⁴⁵ As David Fitzpatrick concluded for the period before 1921, the high proportion of crime committed by the Irish in Britain was evidence of ‘persistent social alienation’.⁴⁶ Social deprivation, poor housing, a ⁴³ Bottoms, ‘Delinquency Amongst Immigrants’, 365. ⁴⁴ Lambert, Crime, Police and Race Relations, 127; for a similar explanation, see Bottoms, ‘Delinquency Amongst Immigrants’, 365, citing T. C. N. Gibbens and R. H. Ahrenfeldt (eds.), Cultural Factors in Delinquency (London, 1966), 140–2. ⁴⁵ Roy Hattersley, ‘The Irish: Moving Up the Social Pyramid’, The Times, 16 Feb. 1971. ⁴⁶ Fitzpatrick, ‘The Irish in Britain, 1871–1921’, 670.

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transitory population, and limited economic opportunities rather than nationality or birthplace are the more persuasive explanations for the high levels of criminality among the Irish in post-war Britain. As Lambert observed in 1970, the Irish were ‘over-represented among the urban poor and so over-represented among the ranks of offenders’.⁴⁷ If a substantial minority of the Irish were viewed as poor citizens, this was because these people had experienced few of the positive benefits of belonging to this adopted society, and such social problems were evidence of failure to adjust to life in Britain.

2 . PAT R I OTS No one seemed to doubt the innate patriotism of the Irish in post-war Britain to Mother Ireland, although this only rarely involved any form of political activity and generally consisted of defending cherished notions to interlocutors—especially important when it came to neutrality during the Second World War, a stance that few Britons understood in the 1940s.⁴⁸ Patriotism could also take on visceral forms such as singing rebel songs on a Saturday night or, less imaginatively, engaging in late night taunting of the ‘English’. The week-long golden jubilee of the 1916 Easter Rising brought large crowds of Irish onto the streets of major British cities in 1966 to watch marches with the Old IRA featuring prominently: thousands attended a rally in Trafalgar Square, where the proclamation of the republic was read in a self-conscious celebration of pride in Irish nationalism.⁴⁹ Holy days and especially St Patrick’s Day could bring out similar nostalgic feelings for the motherland. For instance, Dónall Mac Amhlaigh recorded in his diary his atavistic pride in being Irish on the celebration of the national saint’s day in 1957: I feel as light-hearted as a lark every St Patrick’s Day and when the congregation started to sing ‘Hail Glorious St Patrick’ my heart swelled out with pride for my race. Hundreds of thousands of people all around the world will be wearing the shamrock today in the saint’s honour and in honour of the country that gave them birth and who can say that the empire that we, the Irish people, have ⁴⁷ Lambert, Crime, Police and Race Relations, 127. ⁴⁸ See Weight, Patriots, 147; Anne O’Grady, Irish Migration to London in the 1940s and 1950s (London, 1988), 11. ⁴⁹ This event was documented, in pictorial form, by Paddy Fahey and reproduced in Finbar Whooley, Irish Londoners: Photographs from the Paddy Fahey Collection (Stroud, 1997), 106–7.

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built is not greater and nobler in the four corners of the world than the one that John Bull built with the help of his guns?⁵⁰

Such occasions apart, as he was to reflect sardonically in his later years, much of this thinking was driven by sentimental visions of Ireland rather than ‘true’ patriotism: True patriotism of the kind that could maybe make a success of independence was somewhat in short measure. Much of what passed for patriotism was spurious, public house sentimentality . . . I’ll always remember the scene in an Irish dancehall in the late fifties, everyone out on the floor waltzing to the air of Seán South from Garryowen—Seán South who was killed while making an armed attack on the Border. That was fine, should they not celebrate the heroism of a man prepared to lose his life for the old cause of Irish freedom? No reason at all except that most of those people the following morning would be aghast if you approached them with a petition asking that they put their name and address to a demand that the British get out of Ireland.⁵¹

As Mac Amhlaigh readily acknowledged, few of his contemporaries were concerned with partition or with reinvigorating the cause of Irish nationalism in Britain that had been a significant, if perhaps overrated, force before 1921. The Anti-Partition League (APL) was an organization established in 1945 to press the case for the ending of the partition of Ireland on the international stage, and by the late 1940s many branches were set up across the world in areas with large populations of Irish descent such as the United States and Australia.⁵² In Britain the APL had a high profile throughout the 1950s with reputedly over 90 branches, and it also organized annual marches to protest against the continuance of partition and sought to attract publicity to the injustices suffered by Catholics in Northern Ireland.⁵³ The ‘sore thumb’ campaign to right the perceived wrong of partition was spearheaded in the 1940s by the same Irish politicians who were widely blamed for presiding over the dismal conditions at home that forced thousands to leave. After his defeat in the general election in 1948, de Valera toured the United ⁵⁰ Mac Amhlaigh, An Irish Navvy, 132–3. See also Donal Foley, Three Villages: An Autobiography (Dublin, 1977), 84, for similar sentiments on St Patrick’s Day. ⁵¹ Dónall Mac Amhlaigh, ‘Documenting the Fifties’, Irish Studies in Britain, 15 (1989), 12–13. ⁵² John Bowman, De Valera and the Ulster Question, 1917–1973 (Oxford, 1982), 258; Mary E. Daly, ‘Nationalism, Sentiment, and Economics: Relations between Ireland and Irish America in the Post-War Years’, Éire-Ireland, 37, nos. 1–2 (2002), 82–3; Bernadette Whelan, Ireland and the Marshall Plan, 1947–57 (Dublin, 2000), 28–30. ⁵³ For the number of branches, see O’Grady, Irish Migration to London, 16.

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States, Australia, and Britain, and many of his speeches were devoted to the anti-partition cause.⁵⁴ In the United States his message was warmly received by the established American Irish.⁵⁵ The reaction in Britain to this campaign was ‘polite but cool’ and driven by sentiment and emotion ‘rather than the beginning of a new political movement’.⁵⁶ A rally held in London at which de Valera spoke attracted over 6,000 people.⁵⁷ Nevertheless, the four anti-partition candidates who stood for election in 1950 all lost their deposit.⁵⁸ Exasperated activists could do little more than lament this decline of ‘national sentiment’. Tadhg Feehan, the national organizer of the APL in the 1950s, was quoted as saying that the middle-class Irish were ‘primarily concerned with securing a good social standing in their particular milieu’, and while they were happy to be identified as Irish at social functions, partition or other issues were not perceived as pressing problems.⁵⁹ For the working-class Irish a similar ambivalence was evident and the primary concern was ‘to make a living’.⁶⁰ After years of trying to engender interest in Irish politics, another, unnamed activist remarked rather unkindly in the late 1960s that ‘all they’re good for now is cursing the English on Saturday night with their free National Health teeth’.⁶¹ Life in England had apparently taken its toll on the national fervour of the displaced migrants. An explanation for this apathy can be found across the Atlantic. Irish officials in the United States observed in the mid-1950s that the new generation of arrivals after the Second World War were ‘rather less zealous and less interested in the anti-partition movement than one might expect or even hope’, and, in the view of the Irish Consul-General in New York, this was a cause of conflict with the established American Irish.⁶² ⁵⁴ Cornelius O’Leary, ‘Northern Ireland, 1945–72’, in J. J. Lee (ed.), Ireland, 1945–70 (Dublin, 1979), 155; Daly, ‘Nationalism, Sentiment, and Economics’, 82–3; for more details see Bowman, De Valera and the Ulster Question, 273–5. ⁵⁵ Daly, ‘Nationalism, Sentiment, and Economics’, 82. ⁵⁶ O’Leary, ‘Northern Ireland, 1945–72’, 155; Foley, Three Villages, 66. ⁵⁷ Foley, Three Villages, 66. ⁵⁸ Fielding, Class and Ethnicity, 130 ⁵⁹ Quoted in O’Connor, The Irish in Britain, 92. Feehan had long experience of working with the Irish in post-war Britain. Originally a school teacher based in Yorkshire, he became the national organizer of the APL in the 1950s. He was subsequently appointed in 1961 as a ‘local advisory officer’ with the Irish Embassy in London with a brief to promote Irish associations (Mary E. Daly, The Slow Failure: Population Decline and Independent Ireland, 1920–1973 (Madison, 2006), 315) and features prominently in a number of photographs of Irish events in London taken by Paddy Fahey (see Whooley, Irish Londoners, 8, 10, 12, 18, 21). ⁶⁰ O’Connor, The Irish in Britain, 92. ⁶¹ Ibid. 119; also quoted by Fielding, Class and Ethnicity, 131. ⁶² Quoted in Daly, ‘Nationalism, Sentiment, and Economics’, 84.

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One reason for this I think is that the attitude of people who grew up in an independent Ireland is different to that of people who knew Ireland before 1922, or perhaps only by hearsay. I think a great deal of the sentimentalism and romanticism of so many Irish-Americans grates on the younger people coming to this country. I think they are also at times irritated by the assumption which prevails in some quarters that they know nothing and I certainly know some who resent very much being told that it was the Irish Americans who won the war for independence in Ireland. On this account there is a clash.⁶³

A conspiratorial reading would suggest that this renewed emphasis on partition in the late 1940s and early 1950s as the great unresolved issue in British–Irish relations was cynically designed to deflect attention away from the more pressing economic problems that Irish society faced in the immediate post-war decades. Politicians perceived that appealing to the traditional founding tenets of Irish nationalism, whether at home or abroad, would mask the inadequacies of the policies pursed by the governing élite since 1922, who ultimately were responsible for the large-scale migration that occurred after independence. And partition was never perceived as such a grievance as to generate large-scale political mobilization, whether in Ireland or abroad. While the APL was supported broadly across the mainstream political spectrum at home in Ireland, the other major political grouping, the Connolly Association, was not. Founded in London in 1938 as the Connolly Club, in the fertile imagination of Catholic clerics it was nothing more than simply a Communist-front organization; in reality it sought to combine traditional Irish republicanism with socialism to appeal to a working-class constituency. It had Communist Party members within its leadership ranks, but the organization consistently denied it was a Communist front—a denial that few observers accepted.⁶⁴ Irish and British Catholic priests often exaggerated the appeal of the Connolly Association, since this message resonated in the deeply anti-Communist environment of post-war Ireland and was yet further evidence of the grave moral dangers posed by living in Britain.⁶⁵ Branches were organized across the major British cities and towns, and it published the Irish Freedom from January 1939, renamed the Irish ⁶³ Paul Keating, Irish Consul-General in New York, quoted ibid. ⁶⁴ Report on the Connolly Association and Irish Self-Determination League prepared by Tadgh Feehan, 20 Jan. 1962, DT 97/6/310, NAI. ⁶⁵ See, for example, the ‘warnings’ of Bishop Lucey of Cork, reported in Irish Press, 18 Apr. 1961.

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Democrat in 1945.⁶⁶ For instance, in Birmingham in the mid-1950s the Connolly Association was actively encouraging Irish workers to become involved by selling the Irish Democrat outside church doors and in pubs and even meeting the trains arriving in the city.⁶⁷ A confidential report on the association prepared by Feehan in 1962 concluded that while it had a small but determined core of active members in London and other major cities, it had ‘little support’ among the Irish in Britain more generally.⁶⁸ This was the most visible organization for the working-class Irish in Britain, with regular platform meetings at Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park, but such activity was the preserve of the committed few and enjoyed only ‘modest success’.⁶⁹ While the traditional republican sentiments it espoused may have been well received, only a tiny minority ever became directly involved, and the condemnation of the organization as ‘Communist’ by the Catholic church effectively sealed its fate. Such apparent apathy was the result of a combination of factors, which changed over time and varied across classes. For those who arrived in the 1940s and early 1950s and initially envisioned only a short stay, political activism in Britain did not make much sense. If you intended going home in the near future, why bother to waste valuable time becoming involved in organizations based in Britain, when you could be working overtime instead?⁷⁰ This was a completely rational strategy, the effects of which continued to linger on as the years went by. But it was more than just plain indifference. Bitterness towards the Irish body politic was frequently expressed by migrants, and it was widely perceived that it was the inadequate policies of successive governments which had forced thousands to leave in the first place.⁷¹ As O’Connor noted, Irish nationalism had served this post-war generation badly: ‘Tri-colour flag waving and lip-service to the sacred cows of the Republic, after all, had not provided them with the means to earn a living there, and many of the young immigrants were impatient with such rhetoric.’⁷² ⁶⁶ Jackson, The Irish in Britain, 125. ⁶⁷ Report prepared by Valentin Iremonger (Irish Embassy, London) on the Irish in Birmingham, [7] Aug. 1956, DFA 402/222, NAI. ⁶⁸ Report on the Connolly Association and Irish Self-Determination League prepared by Tadgh Feehan, 20 Jan. 1962, DT 97/6/310, NAI. ⁶⁹ Steven Fielding, Class and Ethnicity, 130; Jackson, The Irish in Britain, 125–6; O’Connor, The Irish in Britain, 113. ⁷⁰ O’Grady, Irish Migration to London, 16. ⁷¹ Ibid. 14. ⁷² O’Connor, The Irish in Britain, 92.

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For the aspiring middle classes becoming involved in nationalist political activities was perceived to be counterproductive: one way in which they sought to distinguish themselves from the lumpenproleteriat was by maintaining distance from the unthinking nationalism that seemingly emerged so instinctively from Hibernian lips. Career-wise or socially, any mention of the long-standing grievance of partition in ‘mixed’ company was impolite, a bit like mentioning an awkward aunt at a family occasion. The Irish Club, for instance, prided itself on the absence of political discussion within its environs.⁷³ Class ensured that distinct worlds were inhabited, and respectability and status were the overriding considerations for doctors, lawyers, and other white-collar professionals. Jackson’s description of the milieu of the middle-class Irish in London in the early 1960s illustrates these differences: there are the Irish middle-class organizations limited almost exclusively to the white-collar members of the Irish community. Irish doctors, lawyers, teachers, civil servants, engineers and clerks, while not limited to these organizations, find a common meeting ground that in many cases is only Irish by definition, for the extremes of Irish interest are carefully avoided or played down and social and cultural activities are promoted at the expense of religion and politics. The atmosphere is Irish so far as draught Guinness and pictures of the Mountains of Mourne can make it so, but it is a middle-class Ireland essentially different from the Ireland of the working-class immigrant. Consciousness of status and the need for respectability serve to inhibit any close association with the often deliberately partisan, left-wing and extremist elements which are found in the organizations of the working-class Irish.⁷⁴

The lack of interest in achieving a full thirty-two-county state was also an outcome of the political climate at home. Over time the constitutional settlement of 1921–22 was rectified, and by the mid-1950s the pressing issue was simple economic survival; and while isolated incidents such as the funerals of IRA members Sean South and Fergal O’Hanlon after an attack on Brookeborough RUC barracks in February 1957 provoked widespread sympathy, the hollow rhetoric of Irish republicanism was gradually replaced by the rhetoric of economic progress during that decade.⁷⁵ It was only with the civil rights movement and the resurgence of communal violence in Northern Ireland in the mid-1960s that the plight of northern Catholics again took centre stage both for the Irish ⁷³ Jackson, The Irish in Britain, 130. ⁷⁴ Jackson, ‘The Irish’, 293. ⁷⁵ On the funerals, see Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland, 488.

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at home and for those living overseas. In addition, migrants shrewdly distinguished between being patriotic to the Irish ‘nation’ or imagined homeland and any form of allegiance to the Irish state. Personal testimonies are full of statements of pride in being Irish and deep attachment to the homeland: one migrant declaring, with a degree of certitude rarely witnessed in the post-modern world, that ‘Ireland is the best country in the world and the Irish are the best people’.⁷⁶ Writing in 1989, Mac Amhlaigh pointed to the ambivalence that characterized views on loyalty to this political entity: Part of our confusion it seems to me derived from the fact that we never had much affection for, or loyalty to, the twenty-six county state: Ireland yes, our own portion of it particularly, the notion of being Irish and proud of it—but no discernible affection for the state that had come about through the Anglo-Irish war, no awareness of it as a political entity nor great respect for its figurehead president, certainly not in the way that Americans respect the office in their country.⁷⁷

If Irish politics did not engender much interest regardless of class differences, what about British national politics? Little is known about the voting preferences of the new arrivals in the 1940s and 1950s except that there was a widespread presumption that Labour was the natural home of the Irish on the British political spectrum. Patrick Joyce remembers his childhood awakening to the world of politics as a constant diet of Labour and the Daily Mirror: ‘In the London of the 1950s the Irish, if political in the English ways, were resolutely Labour in sympathy, and the rhetoric I heard was that to do with ‘‘the labouring man’’—it was the Daily Mirror in its old Labour form that first gave me a sense of there being a political world outside.’⁷⁸ After the First World War the traditional Irish support for the Liberals was rapidly supplanted with allegiance to the Labour Party, and writing in 1963 Jackson concluded that ‘the majority of the Irish in Britain have remained politically identified with the Labour Party ever since’.⁷⁹ The Irish ambassador to London, Hugh McCann, who was better placed than most to offer observations on the British political scene, cited the dictum in 1959 that ‘the Irish in England vote in accordance ⁷⁶ See, for example, Pam Schweitzer (ed.), Across the Irish Sea, 2nd edn. (London, 1991), 152; Anne Lynch (ed.), The Irish in Exile: Stories of Emigration (London, 1988), 24; quotation from O’Grady, Irish Migration to London, 14. ⁷⁷ Mac Amhlaigh, ‘Documenting the Fifties’, 12. ⁷⁸ Patrick Joyce, ‘More Secondary Modern than Postmodern’, Rethinking History, 5, no. 3 (2001), 369. ⁷⁹ Jackson, The Irish in Britain, 124.

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with their interests as English residents and not as Irish nationalists’.⁸⁰ Moreover, the extent to which the Irish exercised the right to vote in parliamentary elections is another imponderable. The transient nature of the early years of settlement worked against voter registration, as did the perception of a pending, if unspecified, return to Ireland. For example, in Sparkbrook in the mid-1960s just over half of the Irish living there were registered to vote.⁸¹ In the St Paul’s district of Bristol less than a third of the Irish living there voted in the 1964 election.⁸² In areas of established settlement, however, such as Manchester, the Irish working-class vote since the interwar years was solidly Labour.⁸³ Over the course of the 1940s and 1950s it appears that Labour remained the party of choice by a long distance for Irish voters. In fact, one of the justifications for making special provision for its citizens after Ireland left the Commonwealth in 1949 was the perception among senior Labour politicians that its core vote would be adversely affected by a wholesale disenfranchisement of Irish people living in Britain.⁸⁴ Even its political opponents agreed: more than a decade later, when the possibility of immigration controls was being discussed in the 1950s, one of the reasons advanced by Conservative Central Office for a restriction on Irish entry was that this group boosted Labour support: a Conservative working party concluded in 1957 that ‘the Southern Irish element was automatically an almost fanatical addition to the socialist following’.⁸⁵ Opinion polls from the March 1966 election showed that over two-thirds of the Irish questioned in a large sample of nearly 6,000 people intended to vote Labour, with a further quarter opting for the Conservatives; as one contemporary analyst concluded, the Irish lived up ‘to their reputation for supporting Labour’.⁸⁶ Similarly, in the 1970 ⁸⁰ Report on the Irish in Britain and Some Observations on Anglo-Irish Relations, prepared by Hugh McCann, 29 Jan. 1958, DT S 97/6/611, NAI. ⁸¹ John Rex and Robert Moore, Race, Community and Conflict: A Study of Sparkbrook (London, 1967), 196. ⁸² Anthony Richmond, Migration and Race Relations in an English City: A Study in Bristol (London, 1973), 108. ⁸³ Fielding, Class and Ethnicity, 105. ⁸⁴ Hickman, ‘Reconstructing Deconstructing ‘‘Race’’ ’, 296. For more details on the Irish and the British labour movement more generally over the twentieth century, see Michael MacDermott, ‘Irish Catholics and the British Labour Movement: A Study with Particular Reference to London, 1918–1970’ (unpub. MA thesis, University of Kent, 1979). ⁸⁵ Quoted in Dennis Dean, ‘The Conservative Government and the 1961 Immigration Act: The Inside Story’, Race and Class, 35, no. 2 (1993), 69. ⁸⁶ Sheila Patterson, Immigration and Race Relations in Britain, 1960–1967 (London, 1969), app. VII, prepared by N.D. [Nicholas Deakin], 422.

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general election 80 per cent of the Irish who voted supported Labour. But, as Steven Fielding points out, this support was not confined to Irish working-class voters, as Catholics, regardless of class, were ‘more likely to vote Labour than their non-Catholic counterparts’.⁸⁷ Despite the traditional animosity of the Catholic clergy towards socialism, the faithful, both Irish and British, were solid Labour. Even so, the relationship between the Catholic church and the Labour Party was at times tense, particularly on what bishops perceived to be the growing role of the state in spheres which were the church’s preserve, such as education and welfare. With the advent of the welfare state in the late 1940s, when the question of the control of Catholic hospitals came up, Cardinal Griffin reputedly threatened to forbid any Irish nurses working in the National Health Service if the independence of these voluntary hospitals was not maintained.⁸⁸ After protracted negotiations with Griffin in 1946 and 1947, the Labour Health Minister, Aneurin Bevan, eventually decided to withdraw the small number of Catholic hospitals from the National Health Service prior to its introduction in 1948.⁸⁹ Similarly the Labour government elected in 1964 set about introducing what were then depicted as ‘permissive’ moral reforms, many of which Catholics vehemently opposed, yet they continued to support Labour.⁹⁰ Up to the 1970s, religion as well as nationality shaped voting patterns. On the ground the Irish presence within the ranks of Labour Party activists and trade unions was more apparent in the 1960s than ever before. In Sparkbrook the Irish dominated the local Labour Club in the mid-1960s, where the ‘impression of Irishness was overwhelming’, and natives of Birmingham ‘seemed to stand out as foreigners’.⁹¹ Irish candidates initially secured seats on local councils in areas where large numbers of Irish had settled; the election of an Irish-born Labour MP, Michael O’Halloran, to the constituency of Islington North in a by-election in October 1969 was described by one commentator as a ‘breakthrough of the Irish immigrant into the constitutional life of the ⁸⁷ Fielding, Class and Ethnicity, 130. ⁸⁸ Dennis Sewell, Catholics: Britain’s Largest Minority (London, 2001), 182; Joan Keating, ‘Faith and Community Threatened? Roman Catholic Responses to the Welfare State, Materialism and Social Mobility, 1945–62’, Twentieth Century British History, 9, no. 1 (1998), 99, n. 79. ⁸⁹ Peter Coman, Catholics and the Welfare State (London, 1978), 60–1. ⁹⁰ Fielding, Class and Ethnicity, 130. ⁹¹ Rex and Moore, Race, Community and Conflict, 196.

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nation’.⁹² But the attitude towards Irish people within the Labour Party varied considerably and was to a large degree shaped by numbers and location. Despite the fears of activists about the creation of ‘English chapters of Tammany Hall’, Irish involvement in the Labour Party was more circumspect.⁹³ On moving down from Manchester to St Albans in 1959, one woman who had Irish parents found that the local Labour Party had few Irish members and even less interest in the issue of Northern Ireland.⁹⁴ Irish involvement in the Labour Party and support for its candidates at elections were based on pragmatic reasons and a concern for social justice rather than any deep attachment to the finer points of the philosophy of socialism. Labour offered the ‘main hope’ for the working-class Irish in Britain, and even though party activism was a minority pursuit, support at elections was strong from the 1960s onwards. O’Connor viewed this as essentially a functional relationship: the Irish have ‘traditionally voted Labour because that party traditionally reflected what the Irish deemed to be most close to their own material interests in Britain’.⁹⁵ The Conservative Party, with its track record on the Irish question and traditional ties to Ulster Unionism, was always going to be a different matter. Middle-class Irish migrants were more likely to vote Conservative since this political outlook better served their economic interests. In his report, completed in 1959, McCann noted the preference of the middle-class Irish to support the Conservatives. He singled out Irish doctors as a group who, ‘although making a good living under the National Health Service, complain as bitterly as the English middle-class of high taxation and a falling standard of living vis-à-vis the workers and are as likely as not to vote Tory’.⁹⁶ A Gallup poll taken before the March 1966 election found that roughly one-quarter of the Irish intended to support the Conservatives.⁹⁷ After decades of writing off the Irish vote as ultimately destined for Labour, greater efforts were made in the late 1960s to appeal to this constituency. The Irish Conservative Association, founded in 1970 by the businessman Paul Dwyer, sought ⁹² O’Connor, The Irish in Britain, 100. The Irish ‘ethnic vote’ is considered in some detail by O’Connor, reflecting a preoccupation of the early 1970s, ibid. 96–108. ⁹³ Hattersley, ‘The Irish’. ⁹⁴ Mary Lennon, Marie McAdam, and Joanne O’Brien, Across the Water: Irish Women’s Lives in Britain (London, 1988), 152–3. ⁹⁵ O’Connor, The Irish in Britain, 103. ⁹⁶ Report on the Irish in Britain and Some Observations on Anglo-Irish Relations, prepared by Hugh McCann, 29 Jan. 1958, 12, DT S 97/6/611, NAI. ⁹⁷ Patterson, Immigration and Race Relations in Britain, 422.

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to improve ‘the communication between the Irish in Britain and the Conservative party’.⁹⁸ Events in Northern Ireland, in particular Bloody Sunday in January 1972, had fatal implications for this initiative. From then on, Tory policy on Northern Ireland, with its stated support for Ulster Unionists, ensured that its support base within Britain’s Irish population was limited, and primarily reflected the interests of class.

3 . C L A S S C U LT U R E S The widespread perception that the Irish were a proletarian people was an enduring stereotype that conditioned attitudes and responses throughout the post-war period. Other migrant groups were also lumped together with convenient homogenous labels: such catch-all descriptions rarely allowed for fine-grained distinctions based on social class, education, and background.⁹⁹ The reality was that those born in independent Ireland who came to Britain from the mid-1940s until the early 1970s reflected the diverse social profile of the society that they had left. ‘Irish society was not homogeneous, and neither was its emigration’, as David Fitzpatrick observed for the late nineteenth century, and this applies with equal force to the mid-twentieth-century exodus.¹⁰⁰ Behind closed doors and in the public sphere, the recurring emphasis on the intractable social problems that the exiled Irish faced focused attention on the visible minority who for a complex range of reasons came under the scrutiny of officials, clerics, magistrates, and social workers.¹⁰¹ Invariably the available unpublished documentation concentrates on these ‘problems’: from the new arrivals crammed into multi-occupancy lodging houses in Birmingham in the early 1950s, to the thousands of unmarried mothers who had left Ireland pregnant, fearful of the sanction of family, the church, and wider community, to the aggressive young male arrested ⁹⁸ Quoted in O’Connor, The Irish in Britain, 106. This section draws heavily on ibid. 105–8. ⁹⁹ See Sheila Patterson, Dark Strangers, abridged edn., (London, 1965), 35; Marcus Collins, ‘Pride and Prejudice: West Indian Men in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain’, Journal of British Studies, 40, no. 3 (2001), 401–2. ¹⁰⁰ David Fitzpatrick, ‘Irish Emigration in the Later Nineteenth Century’, Irish Historical Studies, 32, no. 86 (1980), 134. ¹⁰¹ See, for example, the discussion of the Irish in Juliet Cheetham, Social Work with Immigrants (Oxford, 1972), 17–19, or the much less balanced account in B. M. Spinley, The Deprived and the Privileged: Personality Development in English Society (London, 1953), 39–40.

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for drunkenness on a Saturday night after over-indulging in drink. But a much larger group, the faceless majority, rarely left a trace in the archive. They were simply getting on with adjusting to life in Britain, quietly and without much fanfare or comment, overcoming daily difficulties, and trying to get to grips with their new lives in Britain. By the mid-1960s those who had arrived at the end of the Second World War had spent nearly twenty years living in Britain and had settled down to the mundane realities of everyday existence. In this way, the Irish became ‘invisible’ in post-war Britain, as they receded from public consciousness.¹⁰² It is often wrongly assumed that since class divisions rarely achieved political prominence, they were somehow less important in independent Ireland than in other western European societies. In everyday life nothing could be further from the truth. Distinctions based on parents’ occupational background, social status, education, and notions of respectability were central to the way in which the generation who grew up in post-war Ireland saw themselves, and how they were viewed by others, including compatriots, whether they lived at home or overseas.¹⁰³ Such mentalities likewise transferred across the Irish Sea as migrants sought to make sense of the worlds that they now occupied. Class, according to Richard Weight, was ‘not simply a source of difference in Britain, it was a fundamental part of the nation’s identity’.¹⁰⁴ Moreover, post-war Britain was changing rapidly in the 1950s and 1960s in this ‘age of affluence’, as living standards rose dramatically for the industrial workforce, although the benefits were far from evenly distributed across classes.¹⁰⁵ Class boundaries were, of course, rarely fixed or set in stone, and throughout the 1950s and 1960s, with this increasing prosperity of the skilled worker, there was a considerable degree of blurring around the edges, as upward social mobility both within and across generations ¹⁰² For the invisibility of Irish women in particular, see Bronwen Walter, Outsiders Inside: Whiteness, Place and Irish Women (London, 2001), esp. ch. 3. ¹⁰³ The petty snobbery of independent Ireland is well documented in both works of fiction by authors such as Tom Murphy and John B. Keane and memoirs, most famously in Frank McCourt, Angela’s Ashes (London, 1996). An original and innovative history of twentieth-century Ireland places social class at the heart of its analysis: see Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland. ¹⁰⁴ Weight, Patriots, 377. ¹⁰⁵ The classic work here is Vernon Bogdanor and Robert Skidelsky (eds), The Age of Affluence, 1951–1964 (London, 1970); for a much more sceptical recent assessment, see Lawrence Black and Hugh Pemberton (eds.), An Affluent Society? Britain’s Post-War ‘Golden Age’ Revisited (Aldershot, 2004).

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emerged as one of the defining features of the ‘new’ Britain.¹⁰⁶ As the work of Ross McKibbin on England in the first half of the twentieth century has illustrated, class as a cultural construct shaped patterns of behaviour from housing, leisure activities, and consumption right through to political identities.¹⁰⁷ Within the broader categories of working class and middle class there was significant differentiation across occupations and incomes, and such differences also applied to the Irish. For instance, a skilled construction worker who was married and lived in a privately owned house in the suburbs and an unskilled labourer staying in a twilight zone inner-city lodging house would both be categorized as working class, yet their lifestyles, outlooks, and attitudes considerably diverged. Within the middle classes, the world of a newly arrived while-collar clerical worker who lived in rented accommodation was poles apart from that of an established doctor who had trained in Ireland and thereafter lived a comfortable existence working within the National Health Service. Very often in the 1950s and 1960s the middle-class Irish were singled out as a group who had made their way with relative ease within British society, although in some spheres, such as medicine, even they encountered difficulty in achieving the top jobs, since that was where the competition was ‘keenest’ and the ‘religious factor begins to be of importance and to some extent the ‘‘old school tie’’ mentality’.¹⁰⁸ Penetrating the upper echelons of the British establishment was difficult without the right schooling and the correct accent.¹⁰⁹ The professional Irish easily integrated within the Catholic church in Britain. They were often viewed as ‘exemplary’ Catholics, never attracted any adverse comment, and were praised as pillars of respectability, that all-important middle-class value. F. X. Martin, writing in the mid-1950s, admittedly from the comfortable environs of a Cambridge college, reflected on this group: The educated Irish are little cause for worry. In fact they are generally a godsend to Catholic parishes here. They have an intellectual basis for their faith, they know some of the answers—or sufficient of them, they generally come over mature, after some university course or years at a teaching diploma. Teachers have an advantage in that they often go into Catholic schools. At Bury and the ¹⁰⁶ Weight, Patriots, 377–8. ¹⁰⁷ Ross McKibbin, Class and Cultures: England, 1918–1951 (Oxford, 1998). ¹⁰⁸ Report on the Irish in Britain and Some Observations on Anglo-Irish Relations, prepared by Hugh McCann, 29 Jan. 1958, DT S 97/6/611, NAI. ¹⁰⁹ On the importance of accent, see McKibbin, Classes and Cultures, 509–11.

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surrounding parishes the Irish Catholic doctors and dentists have always been a source of consolation.¹¹⁰

Martin concluded that as far as religious practice was concerned, it was ‘the semi-educated who really constitute the problem’.¹¹¹ Detailed surveys of religious practice bear out his impressionistic observation: the middle-class Irish were far more likely to attend weekly mass, whereas at the other end of the social scale, the rates were lowest for unskilled manual workers.¹¹² The situation differed from that of other migrant groups who had settled in British society, such as East European Jews, in that the middle-class Irish failed to act as potential leaders, as the established Anglo-Jewry did, and preferred to remain aloof from their less privileged and less educated compatriots. For John Jackson writing in the early 1960s, the ‘division by social class is probably one of the chief factors preventing the Irish immigrants from forming a close community’.¹¹³ Irish centres or dancehalls in London, Birmingham, or Nottingham, full of ‘rough’ manual workers, were places to be avoided, and nationalist political activity, above all, was to be shunned at all costs for fear of causing offence to the ‘English’. By maintaining social distance from other, less educated migrants, the inevitable danger of being lumped together as simply ‘Irish’ could be avoided: the objective was to present a ‘respectable’ face for wider public consumption to differentiate themselves from the ‘irresponsible’ Irish who so often featured in discussions as a ‘problem’. It was recognized by contemporaries that this lack of leadership provided by the middle classes living in Britain was one of the reasons for the limited progress in developing an effective Irish voice in political circles. Unlike Irish America, which witnessed ethnic mobilization that cut across class boundaries in the second half of the nineteenth century, the Irish-British were a fragmented and socially divided grouping.¹¹⁴ By the early 1960s, to speak of a homogenous and self-conscious ¹¹⁰ Fr Frank [F. X.] Martin [Cambridge] to Liam Martin, n.d. [1954], AB8/B/XXIX, McQuaid Papers, DDA. ¹¹¹ Ibid. ¹¹² Léon de Saint Moulin, ‘Social Class and Religious Behaviour in England’, Clergy Review, 53, no. 1 (1968), table 3, 25. ¹¹³ Jackson, ‘The Irish’, 305. ¹¹⁴ See Dale B. Light, ‘The Role of Irish-American Organisations in Assimilation and Community Formation’, in P. J. Drudy (ed.), The Irish in America: Emigration, Assimilation and Impact (Cambridge, 1985), 113–41.

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‘community’, in the traditional understanding of the term, fails to capture the degree of diversity among the Irish-born population.¹¹⁵ As O’Connor argued in the early 1970s, a sense of community among the Irish in Britain was ‘a comparatively recent development’ and ‘they had, hitherto, been regarded as a community more by their hosts than by themselves’.¹¹⁶ The publication from 1970 onwards of the weekly newspaper, the Irish Post, served to strengthen this communal identity ‘not least in its reflection of the community to itself ’.¹¹⁷ Whatever the inhibitions of the professional Irish, middle-class English Catholics were even less inclined to act as leaders of a wider Catholic community that cut across social distinctions. Most were undoubtedly deeply embarrassed by the simple piety and uncouth behaviour of some of their co-religionists from across the water, and went to great lengths to mark themselves out as a distinctive religious grouping. In a confidential assessment, Hugh McCann, the Irish ambassador, reckoned in the late 1950s that English Catholics were more likely to display ‘resentment of the Irish on religious grounds’ than non-Catholics, ‘the ostensible reason being the allegedly non-intellectual and narrow nature of the Irish church, but jealousy of their distinctive position as a select minority and mere social snobbery also play a part’.¹¹⁸ But many of the ‘poor’ Irish were not to remain poor for long, as the rising affluence of the working classes was reflected in the disposable income available for personal consumption in the 1950s and 1960s. Reckless spending and an inability to save were identified as common responses to this newly-acquired wealth. Such rampant consumerism was anathema to observers, especially as the Irish had come from a society where the simple pleasures of life were idolized over the shameful materialism that apparently characterized British society. A distaste for materialism was an element of English Catholic thought at this time also.¹¹⁹ For the young migrant, spending the hard-earned cash was understandable, since this was the obvious benefit of working and living in Britain: as one sympathetic observer concluded, ‘for the first time in their lives, and often while they are still in their late teens, they find ¹¹⁵ For a contrary argument, which argues that diversity and hybridity are features of an Irish ‘imagined community’, see Mary Hickman, The Irish Community in Britain: Myth or Reality (London, 1996), 9–16. ¹¹⁶ O’Connor, The Irish in Britain, 160. ¹¹⁷ Ibid. 126. ¹¹⁸ Report on the Irish in Britain and Some Observations on Anglo-Irish Relations, prepared by Hugh McCann, 29 Jan. 1958, DT S 97/6/611 NAI. ¹¹⁹ See Keating, ‘Faith and Community Threatened?’ for more details.

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themselves earning perhaps £10 more or less a week’.¹²⁰ F. X. Martin explained this consumerism by underlining the short-term intentions of those who had arrived: Very large numbers of Irish come over here with the one idea of making money rather than of settling down in this country. The intended temporary nature of their sojourn here tends, in my opinion, to produce that lack of stability and responsibility that characterizes so many. They seem to dislike the commercial outlook so prevalent here, but their own reaction to it is to ‘sow their wild oats’ for a time. In the doing of this they waste money and they waste opportunity of advancement. They end up by remaining on in Britain.¹²¹

An English priest based in the parish of Handsworth in Birmingham concluded a decade later that in his experience the Irish who came to the city had ‘no value of money’: They come to England in need to get employment in a factory or in transport etc., and very soon the goodly wage packets come rolling in. They do not know how to spend or how to save. In a different country, away from home, surrounded by the glare of the cinema, the dance hall, the bingo clubs etc., they spend their money recklessly and many of them have no idea of saving for a rainy day or to provide for the future.¹²²

Moreover, even with an abundance of disposable income, few seemed anxious to ‘support the church’.¹²³ The spending patterns of the working classes were a common middle-class concern in mid-twentiethcentury Britain: as the wage levels for manual workers rose, so too did the perception of the ‘unfitness of the newly wealthy to spend their wealth wisely’.¹²⁴ Back in Ireland the successful migrants at home on holidays with the outward trappings of affluence were often looked upon with disdain by their social superiors.¹²⁵ Even for those from poorer backgrounds who did eventually return home with substantial savings and bought land, a farm, or a pub, this money was seen as ‘tainted ¹²⁰ Fr Frank [F. X.] Martin [Cambridge] to Fr Liam Martin, n.d. [1954], AB8/B/ XXIX, McQuaid Papers, DDA. ¹²¹ Fr Edward MacElroy, ‘How Many Irish Emigrants in Great Britain Betray The Faith’, n.d. [Jan. 1957], AB8/B/XXIX, McQuaid Papers, DDA. ¹²² Irish Immigrants in the Parish of St Francis, Handsworth, Birmingham, text of speech to be delivered by Canon Augustine Emery on 1 Apr. 1964 at the Easter Emigrant Congress, Clonliffe College, Dublin, AB8/B/XXIX, McQuaid Papers, DDA. This talk was not actually delivered as a family bereavement prevented him from travelling to Dublin. ¹²³ Ibid. ¹²⁴ McKibbin, Classes and Cultures, 105. ¹²⁵ Delaney, Demography, State and Society, 184–5.

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by the sins of England’: they were often shunned by the local middle classes.¹²⁶ If the consumption patterns of the working-class Irish confounded middle-class sensibilities, this reflected a long-standing perception that immigrants who travelled to advanced capitalist economies enthusiastically embraced the acquisitive nature of these societies.¹²⁷ There was an irrational expectation that those from predominantly poor backgrounds in Ireland would save any additional money in preparation for a unspecified return home or send it directly back to relatives. The Irish working classes were simply using disposable income to create a lifestyle that it was impossible to have at home. That these factory workers or unskilled labourers quickly became consumers of commercialized leisure or purchased luxuries that they could never afford in Ireland was to be expected. To presume that the migrant would remain insulated from the cultural patterns of British society was yet another unrealistic expectation that was imposed on the exiled Irish: they were exhorted to work hard and save money in a strange land; to maintain their religious practice in a society where this was the preserve of the few; to reject materialistic and secular values over the simple pure pleasures of communal rural life; and to refrain from any form of commercialized leisure activity which they might actually enjoy, when they had little else to do outside of work, apart from going to dances or pubs. As Liam Ryan sardonically concluded, the overall message was one based on the ethnocentric attitude that the Irish ‘may not be the political or economic equal of Britain but by God we are morally and religiously superior’.¹²⁸ Migrants left post-war Ireland with ‘not merely the ten but five hundred other commandments as well’ ringing in their ears.¹²⁹ Many chose to reject this ‘advice’ and embrace the lifestyle that their fellow-workers enjoyed. This lifestyle was one of the principal attractions of coming to Britain in the first instance, and something that could never be obtained at home. This desire for ‘better times’ was intimately associated with improved social and occupational status in the migrant mindset. The American ‘dream’, the promise held out by the United States for the millions who arrived from Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth ¹²⁶ Ryan, ‘Assimilation of Irish Immigrants in Britain’, 116. ¹²⁷ See John Bodnar, The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America (Bloomington, 1985), xvi. ¹²⁸ Ryan, ‘Assimilation of Irish Immigrants in Britain’, 143. ¹²⁹ Ryan, ‘Irish Emigration to Britain’, 67.

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centuries, was an attractive one that involved responsibilities as well as expectations, as pithily described by the American historian John Bodnar: Leave your impoverished household, modify your culture, work diligently, and the fruits of a new economic order will be within easy reach. A lowly status would be abandoned for a higher one, income would rise, material possessions would accumulate, and the hopelessness of the old world would be replaced by the boundless optimism of a new one.¹³⁰

The classic American immigrant saga of ‘rags to riches’ was rarely played out in the British context. Stories abound of labourers who came to Britain who twenty years later owned large construction companies, or lorry drivers who over time became haulage contractors, or trainee nurses who ended up as matrons. These were the people who ‘got on’, to use the colloquialism.¹³¹ Such success stories were, however, exceptional, as detailed studies indicate that the Irish-born population in post-war Britain experienced only a limited degree of upward mobility.¹³² As Jackson concluded in the mid-1960s, after reviewing the findings of a detailed survey of over 100 individuals who left west Cork for Britain, ‘emigration only represents to a very slight degree an avenue of direct social mobility’, a conclusion that was borne out in a whole range of studies.¹³³ It was the next generation, the children of these migrants, born, reared, and educated in Britain, who in the 1970s and 1980s were the ones to achieve demonstrable upward mobility. Why then did upward mobility prove elusive for the post-war generation? Even when educational qualifications were controlled for, the Irish still fared badly compared with those born in Britain. A range of explanations have been advanced for their below-average performance. A report prepared for the Irish government pointed to the limited degree of integration of significant numbers and that invariably ‘ ‘‘success’’ for Irish people required almost full-scale cultural absorption’.¹³⁴ The stated ¹³⁰ Bodnar, The Transplanted, 169. ¹³¹ Hattersley. ¹³² B. J. Whelan and J. G. Hughes, ‘A Survey of Returned and Intending Emigrants in Ireland’ (Unpublished Report Prepared for the EEC Study of Housing Conditions of Migrant Workers by the Economic and Social Research Institute, Dublin 1976), 30. Copy available at the ESRI Library, Dublin. ¹³³ John A. Jackson, Report on the Skibbereen Social Survey (Dublin, 1967), 38. ¹³⁴ National Economic and Social Council, The Economic and Social Implications of Emigration (Dublin, 1991), 215.

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intention of eventually returning to Ireland and the desire to earn money quickly in highly paid but low-status jobs such as construction work and to forgo training or acquiring additional qualifications ensured that many people remained working in the same form of employment. The absence of personal contacts in key industries was also cited as a barrier to social mobility, as indeed was knowledge of the informal workings of the British industrial economy for people coming from a predominantly agricultural society.¹³⁵ Needless to say, there is no one overarching explanation, and the answer is partly to do with the structural barriers, whether in the form of the requirement for cultural identification, access to information, or deeply ingrained hostility towards Irish workers. But it also relates to the outlook, motivations, and expectations of the migrants themselves. Irish parents raising children in Britain almost universally stated that they hoped their offspring would achieve entry to the professions, according to Jackson’s study of Skibbereen migrants.¹³⁶ This was certainly not the first time that a generation placed high expectations on the shoulders of the next generation. One group whose migration did materially enhance their status were the thousands of young females who came to Britain to train as nurses, following a career path that was not available to them in Ireland, as places were limited, educational requirements were higher, and a fee was charged for training.¹³⁷ From the late 1940s onwards Irish nurses accounted for roughly one in ten of the total, although the proportions varied over time.¹³⁸ Back at home, nursing was viewed as the respectable middle-class career for young women, hence its attraction to Irish females when the status of nursing as a profession was declining in Britain, as it was perceived to be poorly paid and arduous work.¹³⁹ In the early 1970s, when large numbers started returning to Ireland, the disproportionate number of professional females in the official statistics was incontrovertible evidence of the improved status of the thousands of women who had trained in Britain.¹⁴⁰ ¹³⁵ M. P. Hornsby-Smith and Angela Dale, ‘The Assimilation of Irish Immigrants in England’, British Journal of Sociology, 39, no. 4 (1988), 525–6. ¹³⁶ Jackson, Report on the Skibbereen Social Survey, 37. ¹³⁷ Daly, The Slow Failure, 172; Walter, Outsiders Inside, 180. ¹³⁸ Mary Daniels, Exile or Opportunity: Irish Nurses and Midwives in Britain (Liverpool, 1993), 5–6. ¹³⁹ See Brian Abel-Smith, A History of the Nursing Profession (London, 1960), chs. 12–13. ¹⁴⁰ James A. Walsh, ‘Immigration to the Republic of Ireland, 1946–71’, Irish Geography, 12 (1979), 109.

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These diverse cultures were the outcome of the negotiation of past and present, as migrants sought to blend their old lives in Ireland with the opportunities to re-create an Irish social landscape in Britain. For the working classes, the conviviality of the Irish ‘pub’, with music and dance, was an echo of the communities that they had left, as were the dancehalls and other social gatherings. As we saw in the previous chapter, this was for the most part an Irish world, even to the extent that when at home on holidays the tales of the young migrants centred on the ‘adventures and achievements’ of the Irish, creating the impression that ‘they owned England’.¹⁴¹ The more select middleclass associations were based on the same assumption of rigid class differentiation that characterized life at home in education, politics, and leisure pursuits, yet still provided a bridgehead into the higher echelons of British society. The impetus for adaptation was stronger for the middle-class Irish, who, by virtue of employment, residence, and pastimes, had a wider range and frequency of interactions with their British counterparts. Unlike the Irish working classes, with the election of the Labour government in 1964 the middle classes had at least the semblance of access to the informal networks of power and authority that dominated British society. On St Patrick’s Day during the mid-1960s Labour cabinet ministers often made the annual pilgrimage to events in smart London hotels to toast the patron saint in the company of the well-heeled metropolitan Irish middle class.¹⁴² This grouping was less anxious about displaying patriotic devotion to the ‘motherland’ or righting the wrongs of British–Irish relations. Many were more concerned with understanding the Byzantine machinations of polite social intercourse, ‘preferring gently to absorb, and be absorbed into, the rituals of middle class and upper middle-class English life’.¹⁴³ When Donogh O’Malley spoke at the NUI Club in London in 1966 on the virtues of full integration within British society, he was preaching to the converted, as this body was composed of university graduates, including teachers, doctors, dentists, and engineers.¹⁴⁴ The price of this integration, however, was subsuming Irish identities within a broader set of overlapping class and religious cultures. ¹⁴¹ Ryan, ‘The Assimilation of Irish Immigrants’, 118. ¹⁴² O’Connor, The Irish in Britain, 98. ¹⁴³ Ibid. 166. ¹⁴⁴ For pictorial representations of the NUI Club photographed by Paddy Fahey, including a group of members en route to a garden party in Buckingham Palace in 1955, see Whooley, Irish Londoners, 22.

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4 . O U TS I D E R S While those born in independent Ireland may have been collectively lumped together as ‘Irish’, or indeed more disparagingly as ‘Paddies’ or ‘Micks’, the extent to which ‘Irishness’—itself a vague and fluid concept—constituted an important component of individual identity for the Irish in post-war Britain is not as straightforward as might be presumed. One of the more startling findings that emerged from a revealing sociological study, undertaken by John Jackson in the mid1960s of migrants from the town of Skibbereen in west Cork, was that roughly one-seventh of the interviewees living in Britain considered themselves more ‘English’ than Irish, while a further 7 per cent were uncertain on this point.¹⁴⁵ Nearly a quarter stated that they did not in any way ‘miss Ireland’.¹⁴⁶ On the basis of his findings with this group, Jackson underscored the diversity that was emblematic of the Irish experience in Britain: The progress of adaptation is gradual and varies greatly from individual to individual. For some the escape from Ireland is almost complete. Gradually they come to consider themselves more English than Irish, they increasingly have English friends, they marry an English wife, their children go to English schools and learn to speak with English accents . . . For others quite the opposite is the case; they are physically in England but their hearts and thoughts and their way of life remains fundamentally in tune to things Irish. They have married an Irish spouse, they worship together in a church with a predominantly Irish congregation, and probably an Irish priest, they belong to Irish clubs and have Irish friends. As to their children, they will do their best to ensure that their children know about Ireland and even learn Irish. They will probably go and stay with relatives and identify as closely as possible with Irish culture and custom in their homes, and in their newspaper reading. Of course, concessions will have to be made to life in England but they will be as few as possible.¹⁴⁷

As Jackson also acknowledged, these were extreme characterizations, and the majority ‘lie somewhere between the two extremes’: many were remarkably adaptable to their circumstances since they were ‘able to return home and to slip on the old ways as easily as they slip on an old coat, but when in England exhibiting an ability and a practical accommodation which might contrast markedly with the role they ¹⁴⁵ Jackson, Report on the Skibbereen Social Survey, 39–40. ¹⁴⁷ Ibid. 38–9.

¹⁴⁶ Ibid. 41.

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play at home’.¹⁴⁸ There was no one all-encompassing Irish identity in post-war Britain. How people saw themselves and how they wished to be perceived by others varied considerably between individuals. The fluidity of identities is also central to any understanding of this migrant group: people’s perceptions changed over time, and the worldview of a new arrival in 1950 would have been considerably altered by 1970 after twenty years living in Britain. The sense of Irishness that was articulated by migrants in post-war Britain ranged from a simple description of nationality or birthplace, to a complete worldview that encapsulated a nationalist political outlook as well as an explicit desire to maintain obvious indications of an overt Irish identity, including reading Irish newspapers or involvement in sporting or cultural activities. An ethnographic study completed in the early 1970s by the sociologist Liam Ryan found that the ‘Irish had achieved a high degree of integration within British society’.¹⁴⁹ According to Ryan, even though some migrants had encountered problems in adapting to life in Britain, most had made the transition with relative ease: Today the Irish-born in Britain present the following picture: approximately a third are at various levels of the process of accommodation, and of these a small group have failed to negotiate successfully even the more elementary stages; a further third have achieved integration into British society both at economic and social levels; while a final third are well on the way towards identificational and cultural assimilation with the new society.¹⁵⁰

By the early 1970s the proportion of Irish marrying non-Irish partners was steadily rising, itself evidence of a greater degree of integration.¹⁵¹ One common theme that does emerge is that of being ‘different’ to the ‘English’. The perceived difference was accentuated by varying degrees of attachment to a religious faith that was not only distinctive in itself in a British context, but where going to church was atypical behaviour for the working classes. The rural origins of many migrants coming to a society that was heavily urbanized also served to mark the Irish out from the broader population. As the editors of one collection of interviews with Irish women put it, ‘many women felt that England was now their home, but nevertheless this did not diminish their sense ¹⁴⁸ Ibid. 39. ¹⁴⁹ Ryan, ‘Assimilation of Irish Immigrants’, 59. ¹⁵⁰ Ibid. ¹⁵¹ Brendan Caulfield and Ashok Bhat, ‘The Irish in Britain: Intermarriage and Fertility Levels, 1971–1976’, New Community, 9, no. 1 (1981), 83; Ryan, ‘Irish Emigration to Britain’, 62–3.

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of being Irish’.¹⁵² The perception that you ‘have to keep quiet’, and refrain from expressing nationalist opinions to the ‘English’ for fear of causing offence or attracting attention, ensured a certain reserve was always maintained in social interaction.¹⁵³ A number of autobiographies are quite perceptive about these attitudes. The writer John B. Keane, who spent two years in Northampton in the early 1950s, observed that ‘the behaviour of seventy-five per cent of Irish emigrants is unquestionably exemplary but the other twenty-five per cent nullifies the advantage’.¹⁵⁴ Keane also reflected on the relations between the Irish and the English: ‘The attitude of the average Englishman towards the Irish is a friendly one. He resents the Welshman and tolerates the Scot but he is prepared to enjoy the Irishman and will always meet him half-way.’¹⁵⁵ Mac Amhlaigh was also keen to point to notions of English tolerance and ‘fair play’: ‘Everybody gets fair play in this country and, if anyone wants to advance himself, nobody at all will try to stop him.’¹⁵⁶ Needless to say, such views display the universal tendency to group people of similar ethnic background together in the all-encompassing categories of ‘Irish’ or ‘English’. Interestingly, such values as ‘fair play’ and ‘tolerance’ also featured in self-perceptions of the English ‘national character’ in the 1950s.¹⁵⁷ Self-identities centred on this sense of being ‘different’ in terms of background, mentalities, cultural practices, and religion. A migrant who arrived in the 1950s captures with some precision the same sentiment: ‘I wake in the morning and I’m conscious all the time of being Irish. I don’t know whether that’s good or bad or indifferent but I am conscious of it . . . We always knew [that] we were different, we openly discussed it, it was taken for granted.’¹⁵⁸ The theme of difference permeates many of the personal testimonies. According to one respondent, ‘although Irish and English people speak the same language, they think differently’.¹⁵⁹ ‘The English people by temperament are inclined to be reserved’, one priest wrote in the late 1950s, indulging in the same stereotyping that Irish observers often complained of when it was applied to their own ¹⁵² Lennon, McAdam, and O’Brien, Across the Water, 16; see also Sharon Lambert, Irish Women in Lancashire, 1922–1960 (Lancaster, 201), 102. ¹⁵³ Lambert, Irish Women in Lancashire, 94. ¹⁵⁴ John B. Keane, Self-Portrait (Cork, 1964), 45. ¹⁵⁵ Ibid. ¹⁵⁶ Donáll Mac Amhlaigh, An Irish Navvy: The Diary of an Exile, trans. from the Irish by Valentin Iremonger (London, 1964), 58. ¹⁵⁷ Geoffrey Gorer, Exploring English Character (London, 1955), ch. 15. ¹⁵⁸ Lynch, The Irish in Exile, 24. ¹⁵⁹ Quoted in O’Grady, Irish Migration to London, 14.

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national character.¹⁶⁰ These differences could apparently even extend to humour. Another migrant observed that Irish humour was much more ‘oral’, whereas ‘the English are more reserved’ and ‘worry more about what they’re going to say’.¹⁶¹ English indifference, or lack of interest, was perhaps the worst sin, as the ‘old country’ was the centre of the universe in many minds. Such indifference could be misinterpreted as hostility, leading to misunderstandings: Some immigrants are likely to mistake English indifference for English hostility. Of course, there are many Irishmen [sic] in England who have met with rudeness and insolence . . . In angry or irrational argument the Irish may get called ‘bloody Micks’ or ‘bog-Irish’ or a ‘bunch of Paddies’ but in England there really is no rude word for the Irish. If the English do have a fault, it is their ability to take the Irish seriously, and this can often cause friction and resentment.¹⁶²

Identities were also heavily gendered.¹⁶³ Expressions of strong masculinity featured heavily in self-perceptions as the ‘invincible’ Irish. The stereotype of the rootless ‘rough’ Irish building worker, with an insatiable thirst for drink and an inclination towards violence when drunk, was a lasting one. This was a partly a figment of the popular imagination, yet Irish males prided themselves on the ability to do heavy work that others avoided and take on arduous tasks that others shunned, and any signs of physical weakness were often scorned on building sites.¹⁶⁴ Whereas the Caribbean male was perceived to be ‘a slave to his passions’, Irish males were renowned for physical strength, thick boots, and ‘thick accents’.¹⁶⁵ Females, on the other hand, were often required to have a greater degree of interaction with the wider society, at work or, as mothers, with the institutions of British officialdom such as schools, hospitals, or doctors, and this required an ability to adapt.¹⁶⁶ Within the privacy of the family home, fostering an Irish cultural identity among children was a key function for mothers. Often Catholicism emerges as ¹⁶⁰ Fr Edward MacElroy, ‘How Many Irish Emigrants in Great Britain Betray The Faith’, n.d. [Jan. 1957], AB8/B/XXIX, McQuaid Papers, DDA. ¹⁶¹ Interview with Des Cusack (b. 1942), Millennium Memory Bank, C905/49/01, NSA BL. ¹⁶² Ryan, ‘Assimilation of Irish Immigrants’, 139. ¹⁶³ For a full discussion of this issue, see Bronwen Walter, Outsiders Inside. ¹⁶⁴ See, for example, Ryan, ‘Irish Emigration to Britain’, 57–8. ¹⁶⁵ On the stereotype of the Caribbean male, see Marcus Collins, ‘Pride and Prejudice: West Indian Men in Mid-Twentieth-Century-Britain’, Journal of British Studies, 40, no. 3 (2001), 405–10. ¹⁶⁶ Lennon, McAdam, and O’Brien, Across the Water, 16.

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a defining feature of female identity, as does the vital role of maintaining contact with home.¹⁶⁷ Migrants frequently acknowledged the absence of certainties: for one who was interviewed in the late 1990s, being Irish and living in England created ‘an identity crisis’, and ultimately he felt ‘a stranger in both places’.¹⁶⁸ Home was now an abstract state of mind rather than a rapidly changing nation-state. Decades in Britain had also created a sense that they were no longer even entirely at home in Ireland, as the mythical homeland was now receding into the deeper reaches of memory. For one woman who had settled in Lancashire, she was after some forty years ‘a bit different from people who never left there’.¹⁶⁹ The Irish in post-war Britain, who often regarded themselves as outsiders, living on the margins of mainstream British society, over time developed an ambiguous relationship with their native land. One Irish woman interviewed in the early 1990s neatly captured this sentiment: ‘I like being near home, but not at home.’¹⁷⁰ This was the truly the predicament of a displaced people. Located somewhere between two worlds, they were never fully part of either one. ¹⁶⁷ See Lambert, Irish Women in Lancashire, 100–2. ¹⁶⁸ Interview with Noel Reilly (b. 1945), Millennium Memory Bank, C900/01090/ C1, NSA BL. ¹⁶⁹ Lambert, Irish Women in Lancashire, 98. ¹⁷⁰ Daniels, Exile or Opportunity, 21. Emphasis as in the original.

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(ii) United Kingdom Report of the Committee on Housing in Greater London, XVII, 1964–65, Cmd 2605. Seventh Report of the Overseas Migration Board, XVIII, 1961–62, Cmd. 1586.

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Index Act of Union (1800) 11 Admiralty 96 affluence 99, 196, 199 Africa 95 agriculture 18, 39, 188 in Britain 115–6 variations within Irish 30 see also farming agricultural labourers 30, 34 Aiken, Frank 80 Aliens Act (1905) 70 All Hallows College 145, 147 ‘American fever’ 18 ‘American money’, see remittances Anglican church 133 Anglo-Irish Treaty (1921) 70 Anglo-Irish War (1919–21) 38 Anglo-Jewry 198 ‘Anglo-Saxons’ 87, 125 anti-Catholicism 133 Anti-Partition League (APL) 186–7 Aran Islands 26 Arensberg, Conrad M. 28, 38–9 Attlee, Clement 177 Austin factory, Birmingham 97 Australia 78, 82 Anti-Partition League 186 Irish emigration to 10, 12, 15, 67 see also migration autobiographies 39, 46, 114, 164 Balsall Heath 102 Banba Club 170 Banton, Michael 124 BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) 21, 177 The Irishmen 47 Barnes, Peter 119 Barrett, Revd Cecil 166 Becontree 107 Bedford 106, 118, 143 Bedfordshire 113 Belgravia 94 Bevan, Aneurin 193 Biggs-Davison, Sir John 78

Birmingham 23, 24, 26, 51, 95, 96–103, 104, 114, 117, 118–19, 121, 122, 124, 128, 141, 145, 146, 156, 160, 161, 167, 169, 170, 172, 173, 181, 189, 193, 198, 200 Birmingham Infirmary 97 Birmingham Oratory 150 Birmingham Young Conservatives 76 ‘Black Irish’ 116 Bloody Sunday (1972) 195 Bodkin, Revd Mathias 140, 141 Bodnar, John 6, 127, 202 Boland, F. H. 96 B¨oll, Heinrich 24 Bottoms, A. E. 182 Boyer, Brendan 170 Bradford 78 ‘brain drain’, see migration Brent 90, 92 Bristol 111 British Nationality Act (1948) 72, 73 British Sugar Corporation 115 Brixton 110, 111, 120, 121–2, 170 broadcasting, see BBC; radio; Radio ´ Eireann; Radio Luxembourg Brody, Hugh 24, 60 Brompton Oratory 150 Brooke, Sir Basil 79 building, see industry ´ Bunreacht na hEireann, see Irish constitution (1937) Bury 198 Butler, R. A. 77, 79, 157 Cambridge 144 Camden, borough of 90, 92 Camden Town 51, 92 Campbell, Archbishop Donald 138 Canada 78, 82 Irish emigration to 12, 67 see also migration Cardiff 145 Caribbean, migrants from 2–3, 19–20, 54, 61, 95, 101, 117, 121, 125, 208

224 Caribbean, migrants from (cont.) see also Jamaica, West Indies Carlyle, Thomas 87 Catholic church: anti-communism of 188 church building 132, 153, 154, 155–6 clergy 134 communal life 132–3, 153–4 Connolly Association 188–9 devotional practices 150, 154 Education Act (1944) 137, 157 England and Wales 129, 130, 153, 176 female migrants 58 ‘hibernicization’ of 131, 147, 149 identity of adherents 132, 151, 157, 159, 168, 179 incorporation of Irish Catholics 137–8, 144, 146, 149, 159, 162–3, 165, 197 Irish influence on 130–1, 147, 149 Irish priests 129, 130–1, 140, 141–3, 144, 145–6, 169 ‘leakage’ from 37 Labour party and 193 missions for Irish Catholics 138–41, 146–7 morals and 41, 58, 135, 152, 160, 193 numbers in Britain 131–2, 134, 151, 153, 155, 156 parish as the basic unit 153–4 popular piety 150, 152–3, 154–5, 162, 163–4 religious practice 37 152–3, 160–9, 198, 201 Scotland 133, 138, 153 sexual morality 37, 176 spiritual role of 128, 133, 168 reaction to secularism 58 refusal to create separate structures for the Irish 146 relations between British and Irish Catholics 129–31, 132, 142–4, 199 religious instruction 164–6 schools 132, 133, 150, 151, 156–9, 193 Wales 133, 147, 154 welfare of the Irish in Britain 132, 134, 146, 160

Index worldwide policy on caring for migrants 148, 149 Catholic Herald 166 Catholic Social Welfare Bureau 53–4, 135–6, 166 Catholic Truth Society of Ireland 159 Catholic Women’s League 53–4 Cavan, County 31 censorship 22 Chamberlain, Mary 20, 54, 144, 151 Charlestown, County Mayo 27 Charlton, Barbara 143 Chelsea 90 Cheshire 52 Chingford 161 Christian Brothers, and the teaching of Irish history 56 Church of Scotland 133 Churchill, Sir Winston 57 cinema 21–2, 24, 55, 177, 200 citizenship 82, 177–9 Irish and 82, 83–4 Clare, County 28, 38, 169 class 29–30, 36–7, 40, 89, 92–4, 112, 173, 189, 190, 194, 195, 195–204 Catholicism and 145, 154, 163, 168 migration and 31–5 Clonliffe College 148 coal-mining 31, 48, 117, 118 Cold War 151 Commission on Emigration and Other Population Problems (1948–54) 10–11, 20, 22, 27, 41, 68 Commonwealth 54, 72, 73, 183 Ireland’s departure from 57, 72, 78, 192 see also ‘New’ Commonwealth, Old Commonwealth Commonwealth Immigrants Act (1962) 76–82, 120, 177, 183 Commonwealth Relations Office 80 Communist party 188 Congested Districts Board 39 Connemara, County Galway 47 Connolly Association 167, 188–9 Connolly clubs see Connolly Assocation Conservative party 108 immigration and 75–6, 120 Irish in Britain and 77–9, 192 consumerism 23, 199–200

Index consumption, patterns of 40, 43, 197, 199 Corby 104 Cork, city 46, 48, 50, 61, 63, 69 Cork, County 28, 202 Costello, John A. 57, 74 Coventry 51, 95, 103, 104, 118, 156 IRA bombing (1939) 119 council houses 101, 102, 103, 107, 109, 110, 111, 122 see also local authorities County Associations 172–3 courts, British 183 courts, Irish 183 Crewe 52 Cricklewood 92, 169, 170 Croydon 91, 174 Cullen, Cardinal Paul 153 custom controls 51 Dagenham 89, 91, 107, 156 ´ D´ail Eireann 37, 74 Daily Mirror 191 Daly, Mary E. 42–3, 149 dancehalls 128, 170–2, 198, 200, 204 dancing see Irish dancing delinquency 180–1 Department of External Affairs 49 Consul-General New York 187 Irish Embassy London 79, 94, 101, 172, 180 de Valera, Eamon 74 anti-partition tour 186–7 causes of emigration 23, 36 Irish in Birmingham 23, 99–100 Irish in Coventry 104 visions of national self-sufficiency 57, 70 nationalist ideology of 57 ‘devotional revolution’ 153, 163 diasporic imagination 65 discrimination see racial discrimination doctors, Irish 33, 48, 89, 92, 93, 190, 194, 197, 198, 204 Dolan, Jay 141 domestic service 15, 31, 48 domesticity, values of 99, 101, 106–7, 112, 116 Donnellan, Philip 47, 62, 173 Dublin, city 26, 40, 46, 48, 54, 59, 62, 69, 135, 153, 166, 176 Dundalk, County Louth 164 Duffy, Eamon 164

225 Dun Laoghaire 46, 49–50 Dwyer, Paul 194 Ealing 90 Easter Rising, golden jubilee (1966) 185 Eden, Anthony 75 Edinburgh 96 education 30–1 teaching of Irish history 55–6 Education Act (1944) 137, 157 elections, general: 1964 192 1966 192, 194 1970 193 Elizabeth II, coronation of (1953) 61 Eltham 172 Empire Windrush 94–5 Engels, Friedrich 87 Essex 107 European Economic Community (EEC) 79–81, 180 European Volunteer Workers 117–18 Euston, railway station 53–4, 60, 61, 92 Exsul Familia (1953) 148 External Relations Act (1936) 73 Faber, Revd F. W. 149–50 factory work 31, 61, 96 Fahey, Paddy 47, 170 fair play, English notions of 207 Faith of our Fathers 149 famine see Great Famine farming 30–1, 38–9 small farm economy 28, 38, 115 farm labourers see agricultural labourers farm servants 30, 31 Federation of Irish Societies 172 Feehan, Tadgh 187, 189 Feldman, David 122 Fianna F´ail 36, 72 Fielding, Steven 154, 193 film industry, see cinema; Hollywood Fishguard 50, 59 Fitzgerald, Alexis 35 Fitzpatrick, David 12, 29, 56, 87, 116, 131, 184, 195 First World War 12, 107, 191 Fisher, Desmond 168 Foley, Bishop Brian 176 Foley, Donal 47, 50, 51, 173

226 Foley, Maurice 97–9, 160–1 Ford Motor Company 91 Foster, Roy 89 Gabaccia, Donna 99 Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) 153 football 128, 172 hurling 128 in Britain 159, 172 Gaelic language see Irish language Gaelic sports see Gaelic Athletic Association Gaeltacht 47 Gaitskell, Hugh 77 Gallagher, Bridie 170 Gallup 194 Galway, city 99 Galway, County 62 Galtymore Club 92, 170 gender 2, 6, 20, 23, 91–2, 129, 208–9 ghetto, fear of 8, 34, 86, 87, 121 Gilley, Sheridan 128, 130, 131 Glasgow 51, 86, 95, 96, 108, 109 Glover, Sir Douglas 78 Glynn, Se´an 15 Godfrey, Cardinal William 138, 145, 159, 165, 166 Goon Show 84 Gorbals 109 Government of Ireland Act (1920) Gray, Henry 166 Great Depression (1929–31) 14 Great Famine (1845–1852) 1, 12, 38, 96, 150 Griffin, Cardinal Bernard 138, 141, 143, 146, 149, 151–2, 157, 193 Grimshaw, Archbishop Francis 146 Gutman, Herbert G. 60 Hammersmith 89, 90, 92 Hampstead 90 Handlin, Oscar 127 Handsworth 102, 200 Hannan, Damian F. 12, 20 Hansen, Randall 78 Hastings, Adrian 157 Hattersley, Roy 114, 184 health inspections 48–9 Healy, John 27 Heenan, Cardinal John 158, 166 Hibernia 50 Hickey, John V. 166 Hickman, Mary 79, 159

Index Hinsley, Cardinal Arthur 154, 157 Hobsbawn, Eric J. 1, 2 Hoffman, Eva 64 Holland, Sir Edward Milner 108 Holborn 90 Hollywood 21–2 Holmes, Colin 4 Holyhead 50, 51–2, 53, 59 home ownership 110–12 Hopkins, Revd Eugene 100 Hornsby-Smith, Michael 168 hospitals see doctors; nursing households, migration and 37–43 housing 43, 107–8, 120–22, 124 see also Irish population in Britain humour, Irish sense of 208 Hyde Park 189 hydro-electric schemes 113, 114, 138 Immigration Act (1971) 81 immigration controls 3, 17, 51, 70 policy 75–82 race and 81–2 India, migrants from 95, 117, 118 see also South Asia individualism 38, 40 industry 118 construction 15, 16, 31, 93, 97, 104, 112, 113, 114, 124 electrical 103 engineering 16, 97, 103 motor-car manufacturing 16, 91, 97, 101, 103, 105 Inis M´or 26 Inishfallen 50 International Catholic Migration Commission 148, 165 IRA see Irish Republican Army Ireland Act (1949) 72, 73 Irish centres 198 Birmingham 102 London 92 Irish Club 92, 140 Irish Conservative Association 194 Irish constitution (1922) 72 Irish constitution (1937) 37 Irish dancing 159, 172 Irish Democrat 188–9 Irish Embassy, London, see Department of External Affairs Irish ‘fever’ 96 Irish Freedom 188 Irish language 47, 55

Index Irish music 172 Irish Nationality and Citizenship Act (1935) 72 Irish population in Britain: acceptance of 1–2, 125–6 adaptation 64, 127–8, 205 affluence and 199 alcohol consumption 51, 114, 170, 173, 181–3 allegiance to Irish state 191–3 ‘anti-citizens’ 180 anti-Irish prejudice 116, 119, 123–6 assimilation 1, 4, 111, 127, 168, 206 belonging, sense of 175, 185 British politics 180, 191–5 children of 66, 68, 69 citizens 179–80 class 89, 92–4, 112, 173, 189, 190, 194, 195–204 collective memory 25, 92, 114, 123 Commonwealth Immigrants Act (1962) 76–82, 183 comparisons with other migrant groups 125 community, sense of 199 crime 143–4, 160, 180–5 cultural absorption 202–3 deportation 183–4 ‘denationalization’ of 159 deracialization of 76 different, sense of being 207–8 disease and 96 displacement 24–5, 35, 45, 175, 209 diversity within 5–6, 198–9, 204 education 32, 158–9, 195, 196, 197, 202 emotions 8–9, 46, 61–3 employment 114–16 exile, sense of 25, 43, 70 experiences 6–8, 23, 45–6 family size 158 first impressions of Britain 51–63, 152 gender 52, 91–2 ‘ghettos’ 34, 86–8 ‘half-way’ house, in a 179 holidays back in Ireland 10, 24, 27, 28, 34, 39, 42 68, 200, 204 ‘honorary Anglo-Saxons’ 125 households 66 housing 86–7, 101–2, 104, 105, 109–12, 124, 155

227 identities 64, 85, 168, 179, 190–1, 198–9, 204, 205–9 images of Britain before arrival 55–8, 152 integration 64, 84, 165, 168, 180, 204, 205 journey to Britain 49–54, 136 legal status 72–4, 76–83, 118–20 links with home 3, 8, 9, 10, 19, 25–6, 39–40, 41, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 84, 179–80, 205, 209 living conditions 23, 98–101, 109–10 marriage patterns 69, 105, 110, 158, 167 mentalit´e 7, 16, 22, 29, 62, 64, 66, 94, 128, 196 masculinity 114, 208 ‘middle nation’ 179 mobility 112–16 ‘moral fibre’ of 162 nationalism 186, 187, 189–91 ‘No blacks, no Irish’ signs 123 ‘No Irish need apply’ signs 119 nostalgia of 64, 171, 185 numbers 2, 17, 80, 89, 92, 95–6, 103–4, 119 occupations 91–2, 112–16, 190, 196 outsiders 205–9 patriotism 55–7, 179, 185–91, 204 physical environment 59–62 Prevention of Violence Act (1939) 118–19 race 76, 133 recreation of atmosphere at home 174 relationships with English 185, 207 relationships with other migrant groups 101, 121, 125 republicanism 188–9 respectability 35, 37, 90, 112, 122, 173, 190, 196, 197 second-generation 3, 68 self-perception 83, 198–9, 206, 207 sentimentality 83, 186 settlement patterns 86–92, 95–106, 108–9, 116, 155 skills 31, 33–4, 91, 115 spending patterns 199–200 social landscape 9, 24, 169, 172, 173–4, 204

228 Irish population in Britain: (cont.) social mobility 168, 202–3 social networks 5, 14, 24–5; 28–9; 109, 172 social profile 87, 89, 92 social responsibility of 143, 180, 198 stereotypes 86, 87, 93, 114–15, 171–2, 180–1, 195, 208 suburbanization 106–12 transience 116 visibility 75–117, 125–6 vision of return 63–70, 84, 85, 110 voting preferences 182, 191 voting registration 192 upward social mobility 202–3 welfare 52 see also Catholic church Irish Question 1, 194 Irish Republican Army (IRA) 38 bombing campaign (1939–40) 71, 118–19 bombing campaign (1970s) 2, 125 Isle of Grain 139 Islington 89, 193 Italy, migrants from 115, 117–8, 167 Irish Post 199 Irish Press 168 ‘jacking’ 113 Jackson, John Archer 4, 13, 19, 68, 85, 90, 91, 93, 115, 124, 128, 191, 202, 205 Jacobson, Matthew Frye 65 Jamaica, migrants from 95 see also Caribbean Jewish immigrants 65, 198 Johnson-Reed Act (1924) 13 Joyce, Patrick 45, 65–66, 191 Keane, John B. 28, 47, 51, 207 Keaney, Brian 66 Kilburn 51, 92, 170, 171 Kimball, Solon T. 28, 38–9 Kensington 90, 110 Kentish Town 45 Kerry, County 47 Labour party 103, 204 Commonwealth Immigrants Act (1962) 77

Index housing policy 108 Ireland’s withdrawal from the Commonwealth 192 Irish in Britain and 77, 137, 191–3 Irish involvement in 193–4 labour shortage 48, 117 Lahardane, County Mayo 41 Lamming, George 58 Lancashire 95, 133, 209 Larkin, Emmet 163 Laski, Harold 178 Lee, J. J. 36 Leeds 51, 106, 145, 156 Legion of Mary 53, 135, 143 Leicester 95, 104, 118 Leinster 30 leisure activities 21, 43 , 170–5 Lemass, Se´an 36 Liberal party 191 local authorities: attitudes towards migrants 101–2, 110, 120–21 central government and racial discrimination 122 housing provision 104–5, 107, 110, 122 see also council houses Limerick, County 30, 34 Listowel, County Kerry 47 Liverpool 50, 52, 59, 86, 88, 95, 96, 99, 108, 144, 145 Liverpool Vigilance Association 52 London 24, 47, 61, 62, 66, 67, 83, 95, 102, 108, 114, 117, 121, 122, 128, 130, 133, 144, 145, 150, 155, 170, 172, 173, 187, 198 settlement of migrants 59–63, 88–95, 108, 156 underground network 60 Lucas components factory, Birmingham 97 Luton 89, 105–6 Lydon, John 123 ‘McAlpine’s Fusiliers’ 114 MacAmhlaigh, Don´all 52, 59, 83, 185, 207 McCann, Hugh 94, 191, 194, 199 McElroy, Revd Edward 166 McGrath, Revd Aedan 143, 144

Index McGrath, Archbishop Michael 147 McKibbin, Ross 107, 197 Macmillan, Harold 77 McQuaid, John Charles 7, 134–5, 136, 137, 138, 141, 144, 146, 148, 162, 166 Manchester 48, 87, 88, 95, 96, 99, 108, 109, 124, 130, 192, 193 Manning, Cardinal Henry 132 marriage see Irish population in Britain Marshall, T. H. 82, 178 Martin, F. X. 144, 197–8, 200 Marylebone 90 Mass Observation 90 materialism 23, 38, 63, 201 Catholic views on 58, 151, 165, 167, 199 Maynooth College 147 Mayo, County 27, 69 medical examination see health inspections Melly, George 92 memoirs 8, 46 Mexico 19 Middleton, County Cork 28 Midlands 16, 23, 52, 95, 99, 101, 103, 107, 118, 155 see also West Midlands migration, from Ireland 10–44 assisted schemes 27, 48, 71, 99–100, 118 causes 18–24, 43 class 32–5, 36–7 choice of destinations 12–16, 67 collective memory 25, 61, 114, 123 consequences 37 gender 31–2, 52 graduate 33–4 households and 37, 38–9 inevitability of 12, 35 numbers 12–13 patterns 11–16 return movement 14, 16, 28, 63–70 as a rite of passage 12–13 seasonal movement 44, 115–16 social profile 31–6 see also Australia, Irish in Britain; New Zealand; remittances; United States Milligan, Spike 84 Ministry of Information 177

229 Ministry of Labour 52, 71, 136 Mitcham 172 modernity 53, 60, 61 cinema and 21–2 Moore, Robert 102, 169 moral code 129, 152, 176, 184 Morris, Terence 182 ‘Mother Country’, Britain as 54, 62 Muintir na Tir´e 101, 171 Munster 30, 50 Murphy, Delia 170 music see Irish music myth of return 66 ‘national character’, English 159–60, 207 National Health Service (NHS) 33, 97, 118, 193, 194, 197 see also welfare state national insurance scheme 119 National University of Ireland (NUI) Club 92–3, 179, 204 naturalization 179 navvies 41, 112–16, 139 neutrality, Irish 119, British attitudes towards 57, 185 ‘New’ Commonwealth 75, 104, 117, 119–20, 122–3, 177 New Ross, County Wexford 20 New York City 54, 171 New Zealand 78, 82, 153 Irish emigration to 67 Newman, Bishop Jeremiah 142 Newman, Cardinal John Henry 150 Newman Demographic Survey 158, 165 newspapers 20–1, 22, 24, 55, 66, 76, 77, 99 Northampton 53, 59, 104, 106, 144, 207 Northern Ireland 17, 21, 125, 194, 195 Commonwealth Immigrants Act and (1962) 78–9, 81 opposition to immigration controls 73–4 position of Catholics in 177, 186, 190–1 Notting Hill 76, 116 Nottingham 104, 105, 198 riots in 76 North Wall, Dublin 50

230 nursing 31, 54, 65, 91–2, 124, 193 training 29, 48, 97, 202, 203 O’Brien, Matthew J. 14 O’Connor, Kevin 84, 180, 189, 194 O’Donoghue, John 51 O’Faolain, Se´an 74 O’Halloran, Michael 193 O’Hanlon, Fergal 190 O’Hara, Archbishop Gerald 164–5 O’Malley, Donagh 83–4, 179, 204 ´ Tuathaigh, M. A. G. 130, 132 O old age pension 42 Old Commonwealth 77–8, 82 see also Australia; Canada; New Zealand Orsi, Robert 8–9, 46 oral history 39, 46, 123 owner occupation see home ownership Paddington, borough of 90 Paddington, railway station 53–4, 60, 90 Pakistan, migrants from 54–5, 95, 117, 118 see also South Asia patriotism, Irish 55–7, 178–9 see also Irish population in Britain Patterson, Sheila 112, 122 Paul, Kathleen 72–3 personal testimony 8, 46, 66, 123, 170, 191, 207 ‘permissive’ society 129, 193 Peyton, Revd Patrick 164 Poland, migrants from 65, 117–18, 156, 167 used as a generic description 83 police 49, 71, 119, 171, 182, 183 poverty, sanctity of 82 Powell, Enoch 82 Power, Richard 26, 53 Prevention of Violence Act (1939) 71, 118 Priestley, J. B. 88 Princess Maud 50 prison 182, 183 pubs, Irish 51, 170, 171, 173–4, 175, 189, 201, 204 quotas, immigration 14–15

Index race 73, 76, 88 and immigration 75 and politics 177 ‘relations’ 11, 121, 124, 177, 178 riots 76 Rachmanism 108 racial discrimination 54, 122, 124 racism 54, 125 radio 20–1, 22, 24 ´ Radio Eireann 21, 66 Radio Luxembourg 21 railways 24, 52–3, 59, 112 railway stations as scenes of departure 46–7, 135 Irish arrivals at 29, 52, 53 Reading 51 remittances 20, 28, 37, 41–3 republicanism, Irish 188–9, 190 Rex, John 102, 169 riots 76 Rockett, Kevin 22 Roman Catholic church see Catholic church ‘rosary crusade’ 164 Rosslare, County Wexford 46, 47, 50 Rowntree, Seebohm 150–1 Rugby 53, 59 rural communities, decline of 26–7 Russell Square 144 Ryan, Liam 7, 15, 26, 64, 111, 116, 146, 174, 179, 201, 206 Salford 145 Samuel, Raphael 132 Sandys, Duncan 78 St Albans 194 St Columba 149 St Pancras 90 St Patrick 129–30 St Patrick’s Day 185, 204 St Patrick’s Society 150 St Paul’s, Bristol 111, 192 schooling 31, 32, 55, 56, 69, 106, 197 see also Catholic church Schrier, Arnold 18 Scotland, Irish in 17, 96, 115 Second World War 3, 6, 12, 15, 16, 17, 43, 48, 59, 71, 77, 94, 99, 103, 104, 108, 109, 115, 128, 134, 172, 174, 177, 185 secularism 41, 150, 151, 164, 166 201

Index secularization, effect of urban living on 40–1, 165 Sex Pistols 123 Shaw, George Bernard 93 Shiel, Revd Leonard 138, 141 Skibbereen, County Cork 203, 205 Sligo, County 174 Slough 51, 89 slum clearance schemes 107, 108–9 social democracy 177 social imaginaries 64–5, 84 social mobility 32, 158, 196–7 see also Irish population in Britain social security see social welfare social welfare South Asia, migrants from 2–3, 101, 120, 121, 125 see also India; Pakistan Southampton 53 South, Se´an 186, 190 Southwark 158 Sparkbrook 102, 110, 121, 124, 169, 184, 192, 193 Sparkhill 102, 184 Spencer, A. E. C. W. 158, 165–6 Staines 91 Stapleton, Julia 178 Staunton, Bishop James 140 Stevenson, John 108 Stevenson, Revd Robert 139 suburbs 98, 102, 105, 106–10, 156 Surrey 60 Tara Club 170 Tawney, R. H. 178 Taylor, Charles 64–5 teaching of Irish history see education Teddy boys 53, 121 television 61, 76 The Furrow 100, 142 Thompson, F. M. L. 107 Times, The 77 Tipperary, County 61 tolerance, British tradition of 207 Tollington Park 155 trains see railways transnationalism 24 travel identity cards 71 travel permits 49, 51, 71 Trinity College Dublin 33

231 Tunbridge Wells 143 ‘tunnel tigers’ see navvies Ukraine, migrants from 156 Ulster 17 Ulster Unionism 194, 195 unemployed 37 United States 67 American ‘dream’ 201–2 American Irish 187–8, 198 Anti-Partition League 186–8 historiography of immigration 6 immigrant adjustment 60, 99, 127 Irish emigration to 12–16, 19 Johnson-Reed Act (1924) 13 ‘No Irish need apply’ signs 123 restriction of immigration 13–16, 70 universities 33 graduate emigration 33–4 University College Dublin 33 urbanization 40–1, 62–3 Vauxhall plant, Luton 105–6 visas 49, 71 Wales, Irish in 17, 89, 92, 133–4, 147, 170, 182 Wall Street Crash (1929) 14 Walsh, Archbishop James 140 Walsh, John 82–3 Walter, Bronwen 105 Walthamstow 66 Warwickshire 172 Waterford, city 47, 59, 170 Waterloo, railway station 60 Waters, Chris 121 Waugh, Evelyn 144 Weight, Richard 125, 177, 196 welfare payments 37, 42 welfare state 177, 193 West Drayton 91 West Indians, migrants from 95, 116, 118, 120–2 see also Caribbean Westland Row, railway station 46, 135 West Midlands 52, 96 Westminster, borough of 54, 90, 92 Wexford, County 20

232 Whyte, J. H. 152 Willesden 89 women 3, 4, 20, 23, 29, 31–2, 36, 48, 61, 90, 91–2, 95, 96, 97, 135, 136, 138, 172, 203, 206, 208 working hours 97 Sunday work 160, 167

Index Young Christian Workers’ Association 97, 100 youth 11, 13, 18, 19, 20, 25, 26, 27, 28, 37, 44, 47, 129, 136, 151, 166, Zweig, Ferdynand 64