Paddy in the Smoke: Irish Dance Music from a London Pub is a
2003 re- press of a 1967 live recording made during atmospheric Sunday morning
sessions at one of London ’s most
celebrated Irish pubs, The Favourite in Holloway. It features highly regarded
members of the London Irish community such as Martin Byrnes, Bobby Casey, Julia
Clifford and Jimmy Power, in fiddle solos, duets and trios. You can clearly
hear the pub crowd in the background, people laughing, stomping feet, coming
& going. You can even hear the bell go at the bar at a couple of points:
last orders! After listening to this album for half an hour or so, you feel
distinctly pissed, and quite merry from the fine authentic Irish traditional
music. I have posted up two tracks with a few images:
Yellow Tinker (1:55 )
Jenny Picking Cockles (2:00 )
Many of the Irish communities in the big English cities
derived from immigrants fleeing the potato famine. The men were quickly
exploited as a ready labour source for the burgeoning industrial revolution. Many
of the navvies employed building the canals and railways in England in
the early part of the 19th century had to live in squalid temporary
accommodations. The navvies working on the Liverpool
and Manchester Railway were paid daily and their pay reputedly went
on ale, leaving little for food. When the workers were unfit to work,
monies were subtracted from their wages and meal tokens were issued. These
tokens could be handed in at meal caravans for a bowl of soup and a
portion of bread. At first the token was a slip of paper called a
"flimsy" because of its thickness. In today's terms it would be
similar to a grade called "bank paper". As these tokens could be
copied by the forgers, the Liverpool and Manchester
Railway supplied its contractors with six-sided food tokens that were
surrendered for meals. These were cut from brass and had the initials
LMR stamped upon them. This reduced the problems of drunken navvies and
eliminated the local farm labourers freeloading from the food caravans. Tokens
and a description of their use can be found in the Museum of Science &
Industry in Manchester .
Into the picture steps Frederick Engels. In 1842, his
parents sent the 22-year-old to Manchester ,
by now an established manufacturing hub. He was to work in Weaste in the
offices of Ermen and Engels' Victoria Mill, which made sewing
threads. Engels' father thought that working at the Manchester
firm might make his son reconsider some of his liberal opinions.
Engels in his early 20's
While observing the slums of Manchester
in close detail, Engels took notes of its horrors, notably child labour,
the despoiled environment, and overworked and impoverished laborers. By
that point roughly 10% of Manchester ’s
population was Irish. Engels sent a trilogy of articles to Marx. These were
published in the Rheinische Zeitung and then in
the Deutsch–Französische Jahrbücher, chronicling the conditions among the
working class in the city. He later collected these articles for his
influential first book, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845). Written
between September 1844 and March 1845, the book was published in German in
1845. In the book, Engels described the "grim future of capitalism and the
industrial age", noting the details of the squalor in which the
working people lived.
The most heinous of the slums was known as “Little Ireland”
inhabited for about 20 years from about 1827 to 1847 and was given its name
from the presence of many poor Irish immigrants. It was south of Oxford
Road railway station and enclosed by the
railway line and the loop in the river. I used to live round the corner from there at Student Village, a converted warehouse on Lower Chatham Street. Containing mainly poorly skilled Irish
immigrants Little Ireland became Manchester 's
oldest, smallest and most short lived Irish slum. In the 1820s the first
immigrants moved there, however, by the mid-1840s they were moved on and the
area was later demolished to make way for the industrious Victorian capitalists
in their attempts to build the Manchester South Junction Railway line, which
remains there to this day. Was Engel’s shaming book responsible for the final
demise of Little Ireland? Perhaps, but the book was only published in English in 1887.
When not cruising the seedier areas of Manchester, the young
Engels found his compensations in The Albert Club (after Prince Albert), which
was a Gentleman’s club on Lawson Street (now long gone) for the great & good, mostly middle
class Germans. The site was recently excavated during construction of the University
of Manchester
The red area is the site of The Albert Club
Irish Immigration
From The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845)
We have already referred several times in passing to the
Irish who have immigrated into England ;
and we shall now have to investigate more closely the causes and results of
this immigration. The rapid extension of English industry could not have taken
place if England
had not possessed in the numerous and impoverished population of Ireland
a reserve at command. The Irish had nothing to lose at home, and much to gain
in England; and from the time when it became known in Ireland that the east
side of St. George's Channel offered steady work and good pay for strong arms,
every year has brought armies of the Irish hither. It has been calculated that
more than a million have already immigrated, and not far from fifty thousand
still come every year, nearly all of whom enter the industrial districts,
especially the great cities, and there form the lowest class of the population.
Thus there are in London , 120,000;
in Manchester , 40,000; in Liverpool ,
34,000; Bristol , 24,000; Glasgow ,
40,000; Edinburgh , 29,000, poor
Irish people. These people having grown up almost. without civilisation,
accustomed from youth to every sort of privation, rough, intemperate, and
improvident, bring all their brutal habits with them among a class of the
English population which has, in truth, little inducement to cultivate
education and morality. Let us hear Thomas Carlyle upon this subject:
"The wild Milesian features, looking false ingenuity, restlessness, unreason, misery,
and mockery, salute you on all highways and byways. The English coachman, as he
whirls past, lashes the Milesian with his whip, curses him with his tongue; the
Milesian is holding out his hat to beg. He is the sorest evil this country has
to strive with. In his rags and laughing savagery, he is there to undertake all
work that can be done by mere strength of hand and back -- for wages that will
purchase him potatoes. He needs only salt for condiment, he lodges to his mind
in any pig-hutch or dog-hutch, roosts in outhouses, and wears a suit of
tatters, the getting on and off of which is said to be a difficult operation, transacted
only in festivals and the high tides of the calendar. The Saxon-man, if he
cannot work on these terms, finds no work. The uncivilised Irishman, not by his
strength, but by the opposite of strength, drives the Saxon native out, takes
possession in his room. There abides he, in his squalor and unreason, in his
falsity and drunken violence, as the ready-made nucleus of degradation and
disorder. Whoever struggles, swimming with difficulty, may now find an example
how the human being can exist not swimming, but sunk.... That the condition of
the lower multitude of English labourers approximates more and more to that of
the Irish, competing with them in all the markets: that whatsoever labour, to
which mere strength with little skill will suffice, is to be done, will be done
not at the English price, but at an approximation to the Irish price; at a
price superior as yet to the Irish, that is, superior to scarcity of potatoes
for thirty weeks yearly; superior, yet hourly, with the arrival of every new steamboat,
sinking nearer to an equality with that."
If we except his exaggerated and one-sided condemnation of
the Irish national character, Carlyle is perfectly right. These Irishmen who
migrate for fourpence to England ,
on the deck of a steamship on which they are often packed like cattle,
insinuate themselves everywhere. The worst dwellings are good enough for them;
their clothing causes them little trouble, so long as it holds together by a
single thread; shoes they know not; their food consists of potatoes and
potatoes only; whatever they earn beyond these needs they spend upon drink.
What does such a race want with high wages? 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 upon
meeting chiefly those Celtic faces which one recognises at the first glance as
different from the Saxon physiognomy of the native, and the singing, aspirate
brogue which the true Irishman never loses. I have occasionally heard the
Irish-Celtic language spoken in the most thickly populated parts of Manchester .
The majority of the families who live in cellars are almost everywhere of Irish
origin. 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. Filth and drunkenness, too, they have brought with them. The lack of
cleanliness, which is not so injurious in the country, where population is
scattered, and which is the Irishman's second nature, becomes terrifying and
gravely dangerous through its concentration here in the great cities. The
Milesian deposits all garbage and filth before his house door here, as he was
accustomed to do at home, and so accumulates the pools and dirt-heaps which
disfigure the working- people's quarters and poison the air. He builds a
pig-sty against the house wall as he did at home, and if he is prevented from
doing this, he lets the pig sleep in the room with himself. This new and
unnatural method of cattle-raising in cities is wholly of Irish origin. The
Irishman loves his pig as the Arab his horse, with the difference that he sells
it when it is fat enough to kill. Otherwise, he eats and sleeps with it, his
children play with it, ride upon it, roll in the dirt with it, as any one may
see a thousand times repeated in all the great towns of England .
The filth and comfortlessness that prevail in the houses themselves it is
impossible to describe.
The Irishman is unaccustomed to the presence of furniture; a heap of straw, a few rags, utterly beyond use as clothing, suffice for his nightly couch. A piece of wood, a broken chair, an old chest for a table, more he needs not; a tea-kettle, a few pots and dishes, equip his kitchen, which is also his sleeping and living room. When he is in want of fuel, everything combustible within his reach, chairs, door-posts, mouldings, flooring, finds its way up the chimney. Moreover, why should he need much room? At home in his mud-cabin there was only one room for all domestic purposes; more than one room his family does not need inEngland .
So the custom of crowding many persons into a single room, now so universal,
has been chiefly implanted by the Irish immigration. And since the poor devil
must have one enjoyment, and society has shut him out of all others, he betakes
himself to the drinking of spirits. Drink is the only thing which makes the
Irishman's life worth having, drink and his cheery care-free temperament; so he
revels in drink to the point of the most bestial drunkenness.
The southern facile character of the Irishman, his crudity, which places him but little above the savage, his contempt for all humane enjoyments, in which his very crudeness makes him incapable of sharing, his filth and poverty, all favour drunkenness. The temptation is great, he cannot resist it, and so when he has money he gets rid of it down his throat. What else should he do? How can society blame him when it places him in a position in which he almost of necessity becomes a drunkard; when it leaves him to himself, to his savagery? With such a competitor the English working-man has to struggle, with a competitor upon the lowest plane possible in a civilised country, who for this very reason requires less wages than any other. Nothing else is therefore possible than that, as Carlyle says, the wages of English workingman should be forced down further and further in every branch in which the Irish compete with him. And these branches are many. All such as demand little or no skill are open to the Irish. For work which requires long training or regular, pertinacious application, the dissolute, unsteady, drunken Irishman is on too low a plane. To become a mechanic, a mill-hand, he would have to adopt the English civilisation, the English customs, become, in the main, an Englishman. But for all simple, less exact work, wherever it is a question more of strength than skill, the Irishman is as good as the Englishman. Such occupations are therefore especially overcrowded with Irishmen: hand-weavers, bricklayers, porters, jobbers, and such workers, count hordes of Irishmen among their number, and the pressure of this race has done much to depress wages and lower the working-class. And even if the Irish, who have forced their way into other occupations, should become more civilised, enough of the old habits would cling to them to have a strong, degrading influence upon their English companions in toil, especially in view of the general effect of being surrounded by the Irish. For when, in almost every great city, a fifth or a quarter of the workers are Irish, or children of Irish parents, who have grown up among Irish filth, no one can wonder if the life, habits, intelligence, moral status -- in short, the whole character of the working-class assimilates a great part of the Irish characteristics. On the contrary, it is easy to understand how the degrading position of the English workers, engendered by our modern history, and its immediate consequences, has been still more degraded by the presence of Irish competition.
The Irishman is unaccustomed to the presence of furniture; a heap of straw, a few rags, utterly beyond use as clothing, suffice for his nightly couch. A piece of wood, a broken chair, an old chest for a table, more he needs not; a tea-kettle, a few pots and dishes, equip his kitchen, which is also his sleeping and living room. When he is in want of fuel, everything combustible within his reach, chairs, door-posts, mouldings, flooring, finds its way up the chimney. Moreover, why should he need much room? At home in his mud-cabin there was only one room for all domestic purposes; more than one room his family does not need in
The southern facile character of the Irishman, his crudity, which places him but little above the savage, his contempt for all humane enjoyments, in which his very crudeness makes him incapable of sharing, his filth and poverty, all favour drunkenness. The temptation is great, he cannot resist it, and so when he has money he gets rid of it down his throat. What else should he do? How can society blame him when it places him in a position in which he almost of necessity becomes a drunkard; when it leaves him to himself, to his savagery? With such a competitor the English working-man has to struggle, with a competitor upon the lowest plane possible in a civilised country, who for this very reason requires less wages than any other. Nothing else is therefore possible than that, as Carlyle says, the wages of English workingman should be forced down further and further in every branch in which the Irish compete with him. And these branches are many. All such as demand little or no skill are open to the Irish. For work which requires long training or regular, pertinacious application, the dissolute, unsteady, drunken Irishman is on too low a plane. To become a mechanic, a mill-hand, he would have to adopt the English civilisation, the English customs, become, in the main, an Englishman. But for all simple, less exact work, wherever it is a question more of strength than skill, the Irishman is as good as the Englishman. Such occupations are therefore especially overcrowded with Irishmen: hand-weavers, bricklayers, porters, jobbers, and such workers, count hordes of Irishmen among their number, and the pressure of this race has done much to depress wages and lower the working-class. And even if the Irish, who have forced their way into other occupations, should become more civilised, enough of the old habits would cling to them to have a strong, degrading influence upon their English companions in toil, especially in view of the general effect of being surrounded by the Irish. For when, in almost every great city, a fifth or a quarter of the workers are Irish, or children of Irish parents, who have grown up among Irish filth, no one can wonder if the life, habits, intelligence, moral status -- in short, the whole character of the working-class assimilates a great part of the Irish characteristics. On the contrary, it is easy to understand how the degrading position of the English workers, engendered by our modern history, and its immediate consequences, has been still more degraded by the presence of Irish competition.
North Utsire
