Sunday 10 March 2013

Obiter Dicta



Sunday, March 8th, 2013.

I had occasion to take a young man to task in the pub t’other evening. He was ranting about Poles coming over here and taking all our jobs and houses. I reminded him that nobody had badmouthed the Polish immigrants in the 50s after they’d joined forces with us to defeat Nazism. Anyway, I said (his surname was Irish), a generation or two before that, it was US that the bigots were complaining about – the Irish, and their descendants. So, with Paddy’s day near, I thought I’d dig out this piece I once wrote on the subject for The Scotsman. It was never published. (Xenophobic sods!)


“It actually took a long time to dawn on me that the vast majority of my ancestors were Irish. I wasn’t brought up that way. Nobody sent my brothers and me to Irish dancing classes. My folks never threw parties where some drunken glaik sang Orra Pell (the alternative title to The Rose of Tralee) - “Orra pell mune was rye-zeeng …”  As a child, I only knew one Irish person and that was my aunt. My mother’s brother had married a girl from the County Sligo, a strikingly beautiful young woman whose looks and gentle brogue lent her a glamour, to my childish eyes, as exotic as that of Fletcher Christian’s Tahitian bride, Maimiti.
            I became interested in Ireland not through music, politics, religion or football, but through its literature. Yeats and O’Casey made the initial breakthrough (clever lads!); then subsequently Shaw, Wilde, Behan, Beckett and, primarily, Joyce confirmed my enthusiasm. I wanted to visit Dublin because of  Ulysses and Juno & the Paycock; I wanted to see Sligo because of Yeats’s later poems. I wanted to sit and have ‘the craic’ in Irish pubs because the peerless Flann O’Brien used to do the same. Once I got there, I found that, as in Scotland, the places and the people are reason enough to be there, on their own.
            Before secondary school, Ireland was just a name for me on a map, like any other. Even when I got to the big school, my Irish ancestry hardly impinged upon me. This despite the fact that the majority of my school mates seemed to have been supplied by Central Casting. If they weren’t called Cogan, Logan, Bogan, Hogan or Rogan, then they were called O’Mara, O’Hara, O’Dowda or O’Shea. The girls were all called Mary or Anne-Marie. There was a sprinkling of Italian and Polish names, too, but the preponderance of Irish surnames was taken for granted. I must have been slow, right enough, because the fact that I was called O’Donnell didn’t once suggest Irish descent to me.
            My first inkling came during one holiday job in the Public Park. Up till then, I had never inkled at all. I had an orange polo-neck jersey of which I was inordinately fond. I had craiked at my mother to buy me it for ages and, once she did, it was hardly off my back. I had to be scrutinised carefully every bed-time, to make sure I wasn’t wearing it under my pyjamas. Anyway, I was wearing it at work, the day the boss came into the bothy. He got an eyeful of it – well, truth to tell, it was hard to miss. It wasn’t just orange; it was ORANGE! It was a tangerine dream, an apricot apparition; it was the jersey ambassador from Seville.
            The gaffer snorted and said snidely to the others, “Well, that’ll dae me. Eh? An Irishman in an orange jersey.” I laughed with the others. “I’m no Irish,” I said. “Aw, son,” he replied, “you’ve a lot to learn.”
            I know now what he meant, of course. With a name like O’Donnell, in his mind I had to be a Catholic. Irish and Catholic are still synonymous, to this day, in the narrow minds of some. But it’s been going on a while. My great-aunt in Shotts overheard two women on the street, watching a Polish family walk into Mass. “Ah never kent the Poles were Irish,” said one.
            When did the Irish come here, and why did it cause such a stushie?

“Scotch-Irish” is a term widely current in countries with a significant history of immigration, most notably those of North America. It refers to people descended from the Scots planted in Ulster by King James VI and I, people of predominantly Presbyterian stock. My ancestry is the exact opposite. I come from the Irish Scots, descendants of overwhelmingly Catholic Irish immigrants to Scotland in the 19th and early 20th centuries. These people migrated from the counties of Ulster in search of work. The majority came from Donegal, and most of these from the area around Glenties. So did my branch of the O’Donnells.
            Irish migration to Scotland had been around for centuries before the start of the nineteenth, mainly agricultural workers in search of seasonal employment. But when the work was finished, when the tatties were howked and the neeps shawed, the Irishmen returned to their native land. A significant change for both countries occurred with the Industrial Revolution that took place in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. The textiles industry, the iron and coal industries were transformed. Wages in Scotland rose to as much as five times what a healthy fit young man could earn in Ireland. The crossing between the two countries was short and comparatively cheap. The temptation and the opportunities were obvious.
            Irish migrant labourers arrived first on the west coast and moved east, stage by stage, as jobs proliferated. From Ayrshire and Dunbartonshire, they spread eastwards to Renfrewshire and Lanarkshire and, eventually, came to West Lothian – my part of the world.
            The first reference to Irish labour in West Lothian mentions them in  the years 1818-1821, working on the Union canal, which runs between Edinburgh and Falkirk. This canal flows across the entire length of the county and, when it was built, was considered one of  the engineering marvels of the age. It followed a course of 31 miles, all on the same level, obviating any necessity for locks, and with a constant depth of five and a half feet and a constant breadth of 35 feet. Small wonder it was nicknamed “the mathematical river”. But the Irishmen who navvied on it have left no trace of themselves. When the job was finished, they moved on in search of more work. They did not mix or inter-marry with the locals.
            The next time we come across the Irish in our local history is in the 1830’s, working on the network of railways set up then. Like their compatriots of a decade earlier, they did not mix. But there is documented evidence that they fought with co-workers from the Highlands, another set of men driven by poverty from their native peat to the Central Lowlands in search of work. The “wild Irish” lived in a settlement of huts near Winchburgh and were noted for their drinking and rambunctiousness. On one occasion, they fought a pitched battle with the Highlanders, in numbers of over a thousand, outside the village. If nothing else, it demonstrates graphically that they were not being absorbed into the local population.
            In the 1840’s, the potato blight devastated Ireland and emigration from that country reached massive proportions. The increase can be shown dramatically in the differing census returns of 1841 and 1851 for Blackburn in West Lothian, my home village. In 1841, 18 out of 443, or 4% of the village’s population, were Irish. They worked in the local cotton mill or as general labourers. Ten years later, in 1851, after the starvation years in Ireland, 137 out of 684, or 20% of the population, were Irish. Even this figure may be slightly misleading for these people had begun to marry locals and, if we count the Scottish born children of Irish immigrants, the figure is closer to 25% of the population being 1st or 2nd generation Irish. Work still centred around the mill and general labouring, for coal mining  was still a small scale industry at this time. Indeed, in 1851, there were only 6 coal miners among the population.
            The whole process of coming over from Ireland and finding somewhere to live and somewhere to work was made easier by the system of “chain immigration”. The first Irish to come over invited relatives and friends to follow them, gave them accommodation and found them employment. These new arrivals, in their turn, did likewise. In Blackburn in the 1851 census, a third of the Irish enumerated were lodgers, almost all of them with fellow Irishmen.
The percentage of Irish in the census of 1861 remained constant. Mining was becoming the most important industry in the area and it provided some security and constancy since the mining companies provided housing to encourage a stable work force. More and more Irish stayed and settled in the area. They began to intermarry and integrate with the local community. It would be a falsehood to state that there was no trouble between the local, indigenous population and those of Irish origin, but there was not much. The main source of resentment in those days was the reputation of the Irishmen for taking jobs at less than the going rate – which would still have been far more than they could have dreamed of in Ireland. This reputation was not wholly justified. But, in any case, in West Lothian, for most of the 19th century, work was plentiful and the two groups were seldom in competition for jobs.
            Ill-feeling on purely sectarian or national grounds did, occasionally, surface. There was, for instance, a massive riot in Bathgate in 1857 between Scots and Irish. But it must be remembered that almost a third of the immigrant Irish were of the Protestant persuasion, so that it was hardly, if ever, a straightforward animosity between Scots Protestants and Irish Catholics.
            The last great invasion of Irish immigrants into West Lothian came in the 1860’s and 1870’s, when the county was, for a brief period, the centre of the world’s oil industry. Paraffin Young had patented his method of extracting oil from bituminous coal in 1850, and moved on to shales shortly thereafter. Once his patent expired, other companies moved in and townships sprang up around places like Addiewell and Broxburn. There was a huge influx of Irish labourers into these communities and many of these men stayed and  married local girls. Together with previous immigrants who had done the same, these people were largely responsible for the great number of Catholic families in the county. The electoral registers of modern Bathgate, Blackburn, Broxburn, Whitburn and Armadale still contain great numbers of Irish surnames.
            Resentment against the interloping Irish started early in the nineteenth century. There are records of several full-scale riots in the towns of West Lothian. There were the violent scuffles near Winchburgh in the 1830’s. In the Bathgate riot of 1857, a pitched battle was fought between Irishmen and locals in the town’s Hopetoun Street, Engine Street (now George Street) and along the Whitburn Road. Construction work was going on at that time in Hopetoun Street and the building site provided many missiles for the fighting. The Falkirk Herald for the time describes the scene as  “assuming an alarming aspect.” The cause of the riot is said to have been the Scots’ desire for revenge on the Irish, who had assaulted a local youth.
            The following year, in 1858, Armadale was the location for another potentially ugly street disturbance between Irish and Scots. For some years, Irish labourers had travelled through Armadale on their way to work on farms in the east. The locals, mistrustful of the Irish, took it upon themselves to pelt them with stones and assault them in general, as they passed through. Consequently, the Irish used to muster in Bathgate before they set off on the return to Armadale, in order to have a sufficient number to deter attack. In 1858, however, someone overheard the Irish in Bathgate boasting of what they would do to anyone who set about them in Armadale, and sped off to that town to warn the inhabitants. A huge number of Armadale men, armed with guns, hammers, axes and other weapons, assembled at the town’s eastern end. The Irish approached, savagely-bladed hooks at the ready. An impasse followed, until one Armadale man told the Irish they could pass through in peace, but the first to strike a blow would “fall a dead man." In silence, the Irish walked through the town. An ugly situation had been averted. But the prejudice against the Irish was obvious.
            Precisely why the native population disliked the Irish is not hard to fathom. The reasons were twofold: economic and religious. Irish labourers acquired a reputation for being strike-breakers and for taking positions at wages below the agreed rate, both of which inflamed anti-Irish sentiment amongst the local work-force. That they were used by some unscrupulous managers in strike-breaking is beyond question. That they accepted lower wages than Scots workers is also true. In their defence, it must be stated that the comparatively low wages they earned in Scotland were considerably higher than they could have earned back home. And the charges were rather unfairly applied to all Irish workers, deserved or no.
            It was the bad luck of the Irish to be working in Scotland in general and West Lothian in particular, at the same time as many of the worst social problems associated with industrialisation first came to prominence. People had to toil long hours for little money, in dangerous and back-breaking work; injuries and fatalities were more common; housing conditions and other amentities were poor, and there was a significant increase in drunkenness and  associated crimes. The prevalence of these social horrors, at the same time as the appearance of increased numbers of Irish immigrants, caused many to make the mistake of seeing a causal relationship between the two. The “Paddies” were made the scapegoats for all the ills of the local working community. They were roundly detested by their fellow workers and treated with the utmost contempt by management.
            The immigrant community reacted by becoming an enclave in the larger Scottish society, turning in upon themselves and preserving as much as they could of their native culture and customs. In this, they were led and encouraged by Catholic clergy, who were anxious to resist pressures from outside which might weaken the religious life of their flocks. Many feared that young Irish, working alongside Scottish Protestants, would have their faith weakened, through intimidation or ridicule. Increasing familiarity brought the dangers of mixed marriage and sending children to state schools, where their native religion would not be cherished and taught. In times of hardship, the fear was that Protestant soup-kitchens, especially in Glasgow, might weaken the faith of Catholic Irish, desperate to avoid starvation for themselves and their children. In my childhood, it was still common to hear, of a Protestant with an Irish surname like Brady or Mooney, “Aye, his grandfaither took the soup.”
            The founding of Celtic Football Club in Glasgow by the Marist Brother Walfrid in 1888 was done in an attempt to give Irish Catholic immigrants in the locality a source of identity and pride. The name was chosen to represent the Irish and Scottish roots of the players. Similar sporting associations sprang up throughout the Central Belt, through Lanarkshire and the Lothians, to the east coast. Music, in particular choral ensembles, fulfilled a similar role. Encouraged by the success of such ventures, and the pride they generated, the Irish began to settle down and seek to become part of the wider community. The emergence of the Labour Party, again initially in the west but very soon throughout industrial Scotland, was another factor in the gradual integration of the immigrant community. Labour’s support for the 1918 Education Act, which enabled Catholic schools to become part of the state system, whilst still allowing the church influence over appointments and religious education, won Catholic and Irish voters.
            The process was inevitably accelerated by social and financial improvement. At first within the immigrant enclave, certain individuals began to set up businesses – from itinerant vendors with carts to proprietors of public houses, lodging houses and shops. Their financial rewards allowed them to give their children success through education, a common method of self-improvement and social acceptance in any immigrant community. As the next generation went on to university they, almost by definition, moved out of the immigrant areas and into the community at large.
            Hostility to the Irish and their religion had been a feature of the Scottish psyche for a long time. In 1857, the anti-catholic “Witness” could write:

We deeply lament and condemn the introduction into counties like East Lothian of a set of low Popish Irish, that bring with them their debasing habits, their turbulence, their blind superstition, and deteriorate our native population wherever they settle.

The Orange Order, begun in Ireland in 1795, came to Scotland through soldiers posted to Ireland during the 1798 rebellion. The Order developed slowly during the first half of the 19th century, although there was a significant Orange/Green riot in Girvan in 1831. Increasing industrialisation and the proportionately increased numbers of Irish that came with it fanned the flames of Orangeism in Scotland and in the 1870’s District Lodge #26 was established in West Lothian at Armadale and Whitburn, soon to be followed by Lodge #48 at Broxburn. These towns were at the heart of  West Lothian mining – coal and shale.
            Religious antagonism came from the fact that many Scots looked on Catholicism as an unscriptural and superstitious religion which placed too much emphasis on church practice and dogma, rather than on the Bible, which they saw as the word of God. There were, moreover – and still are, even today – those who see Catholicism as an organised conspiracy against the institutions of the crown and the church.
            Conversely, Catholics always felt that there were intrigues and machinations against them. (The feeling is still there today, amongst some Celtic supporters who feel that there is a Masonic conspiracy against their team). It was not only the very public demonstrations of fealty to state and church by the Orange Order, sometimes descending into mutually violent antagonism, which encouraged these anxieties. There were hostile attitudes towards Catholics in some skilled unions and trades councils in the mid-Victorian era, where entry to certain trades could be denied to RC’s by subtle methods such as making membership of the Freemasons a pre-requisite, and where suspicion and anti-Catholic prejudice in jobs like mining were embodied in membership of Orange Lodges. Even in my childhood, some people never shopped in a certain drapery, because they wouldn’t employ Catholics.
            How much better has it got? Was the composer James Macmillan right in 1999, to say that there is still latent anti-Catholicism in Scotland? It’s difficult to quantify – what’s latent is hardly obvious. There are still bigots and peddlers of hatred around, certainly, and not only on one side. But now, in an era when fewer people are attending church or chapel, when Scotland has a fresh and vigorous sense of its identity as a nation, after years of Little England Toryism making all Scots, of whatever persuasion or none, feel united in the face of contempt, maybe most of us genuinely can say, “A man’s a man for a’ that.”
            Let us pray that come it may!





Monday 21 January 2013

Obiter Dicta

Hallo there and Bonne AnnĂ©e to you all. I haven’t blogged for some time – because I’ve been busy on several writing projects, including a novel, a TV drama and a book on pub drinking. Here is a section from the latter, dsecribing my first experience of perhaps the best pub I ever drank in.


The Crown Inn, in Blackburn, universally known as ‘The Croon’, opened in the late 1860s. The village legend was that Burke and Hare, the notorious resurrectionists of old Edinburgh town, had drunk there during their travels out of the city to find corpses – or, more plausibly, to make corpses -  for the anatomist Dr. Robert Knox. It was a wonderful idea, but hadn’t a grain of truth in it. For one thing, Burke and Hare were never recorded as plying their trade outside the capital. For another, and more importantly, the infamous murders took place in 1828 and Burke was hanged in January 1829 – more than thirty years before the Croon was built. Nice story but no true. (Mind you, I drank in the pub for thirty years, and I could name a bodysnatcher or two who hung about it in those times.)

According to Sybil Cavanagh’s history of the village, the Croon was always the haunt of the local ‘characters’. It was quintessentially a man’s pub - and a miners’ pub. And I loved it instantly. My first visit was little more than a fleeting appearance, though.

It came about because the senior pupils in my last year of teaching in the local high school asked me one day, as we were packing up at home time, what pub I went to. I told them Boyle’s in Bathgate. It was then one girl asked me, ‘Why don’t you go to my Dad’s pub, sir?” Her father part owned the Croon, with his brother-in-law.

So I did. One Sunday evening. Feeling just a touch vulnerable, I pushed open the doors and went into the bar. And back in time.

There were two doors immediately after the small vestibule, one to the right and one to the left of a jug bar. This was not used as such by then, but served as a kind of store-room. The door to the right opened on to a section of the bar that was stone-floored and old fashioned in furnishings, even to the extent of there being a bench seat from an old double-decker bus screwed to the floor behind a table. On the opposite side of the circular bar, through the left hand door, the seating and tables were sparser, and the floor was of varnished wooden boards. There was a back room, where the pool table was to be found, and this room also provided a throughway to the gents’. A more primitive convenience can not be imagined. The bar was circular, as stated, embracing in its loop the two stone pillars that supported the ceiling. The till was an old-fashioned cash register. It was an old man’s pub. Very few young people ever went into it. And therein lay its appeal to me.

The previous proprietor, a certain Tam Wilkinson, was a man who enjoyed the reputation of being a curmudgeon and wit – there are  no shortage of them in Blackburn. As an example of Tam’s grumpy sense of humour, there was an occasion when a stranger emerged from the toilet. Passing trade was rare in Blackburn, so you might have thought Tam would have been keen to encourage it. Not necessarily so. This stranger spoke to Tam, as he took his place at the bar again.

“That’s a hell of a bright light you have in the toilet, there.”
“What’s your problem wi’ that?” snarled Tam. “What are ye doin’ anyway? Shitin’ or developin’ photies?”
           
Another time, a hot summer’sday, an Indian came in. I don’t mean Tonto or Cochise, I mean an Indian from India, with a turban on his head. (Well, he’d hardly have it anywhere else, I suppose.) And a case of brushes. Although that was not on his head.

“Aye?” said Tam.
“May I have a pint of water, please?”
“You think this is the Ganges? I’m runnin’ a business here, pal. I’ll give you a glass of water. But after that, buy somethin’.”

The man was so grateful for the glass of water that Tam must have felt a twinge of guilt at his rudeness. So he continued the conversation.

"You from India, pal?”
“Yes, my friend. From the Punjab.”
“Aye? They tell me somebody in India dies every eight minutes.”
“Sadly, true, my friend.”
“Aye? That’s impressive. No many folk can do that.”

I’m afraid that casual racism, like casual sectarianism, was not uncommon in those days. It still exists, of course, in further flung places than Blackburn, and in many places reputed to be more sophisticated too. But I am pleased to be able to say the incidence of unpleasantness has decreased markedly.

Most of the time Tam had the pub, they served light beer and whisky - nothing else. If your poison was lager, or heavy, or rum or, indeed, anything except light and whisky, then you’d had it. But not in The Croon, because they didn’t have it. Their light beer was reputedly excellent, the pub was noted for it, but that was your lot. That and whisky. And Capstan fags. Gradually, Tam added a heavy beer tap and a lager, then a Guinness. But light was the old bar’s stock-in-trade and most of the old boys who hung about it used to drink it. It was reasonably cheap and popular for use as a ‘chaser’ with whisky. It was comparatively low in alcohol content – abv (alcohol by volume) of 3% so that it was often said that you’d piss your trousers before you got pissed. The locals used to call it ‘leek-feed’, implying that its only value was as a source of minerals for plants. There are still guys drinking it in the village.

There was no Ladies’ toilet. Not many women frequented the Croon – and fewer ladies. In those days, women could acquire a reputation if they went into a public house. (Only a scarlet woman, the wisdom went in my Bathgate childhood, would enter one. Unless it was a man, of course.) On the very few occasions when a woman did go in, if she needed to spend a penny, the ritual was unvarying. She would inform Tam, who would shout into the Gents.

“Anybody in there? Eh?”

If  he got no answer would say: “Right, hen, in you go.” And then he would roar to the bar at large: “Keep oot the noo, boys; lassie here’s havin’ a pish.” And he would stand sentinel until the operation was complete.

On  my first night, there were maybe a dozen men in the place, in pairs and groups of three. My pupil’s father was tending bar and recognised me instantly. He, too, was a Bathgate man and knew my father very well – forbye the fact that he knew I taught his daughter. So my first pint in the Croon was free. I stood at the bar between a pair of older men on my left, and a group of three or four younger ones, about my age, to my right. As I sipped my drink, I listened to the conversations. The younger men were having a go at one of their company for not buying his round.

“It’s no my turn,” the accused protested.
“Would you listen to Shy-the Round here?” said one of his party. “Miserable bastart. Get the drink in.”
“It’s no a question a bein’ miserable,” said the first. “Davie’s afore me. I follow Davie.”
“No, Ah folly you,” said Davie emphatically.
“No, you’re afore me. Ye’re giein’me a red neck for nothin’,” said the first.
“Couldnae gie you a red neck wi’ a blaw-lamp,” said Davie. “No wi’ a can of paint and a brush. C’mon, get the drink up. Or do we have to turn ye upside doon and shake the money oot yer pockets?”

Now the older pair of men, drinking in silent companionship up to this point, took up the script.  “Was that you?” asked the grey-haired one suddenly and sharply, turning to his mate and wrinkling his nose in disgust.

“Was what me?” said the bald one.
“Farted,” replied the grey-haired one.
“You cannae smell that.”
 “Smell it? You could sew a button on it,” replied his pal. “You’re fuckin’ rotten. If you’re going to do that, we’re going to have to stick the whistle off a kettle up yer arse.”
“That won’t stop it.”
“Naw, but it’ll give us enough warnin’ to git out the vicinity.”
           
I shook with silent laughter. And that was it. That was enough. I didn’t stay longer than an hour that night. But I liked the pub. I determined to go back more often. It was a momentous night, in some ways.

I got to know John Pennycook, a retired miner who worked behind the bar several days a week, Jock the bucket-man, and a man called Rab Meek (‘worked wi’ the gas’, as Blackburn folk remember him now). All three were ages with my mother, who was born and raised in Redmill miners’ cottages, two miles from the Cross. They remembered her from the days of their youth.

 “A great dancer, yer ma,” Penny said.
“She was, I believe, John, aye.”
“Aye, a great dancer.”
“I mind her at the Whitburn dancin’,” said Jock. “She had a complexion like peaches an’ cream. Peaches an’ fuckin’ cream!”
Rab now said, “I went oot wi’ yer mammy a couple a times durin’ the war. Mind ye, I think she only went oot wi’ me because I had the car. There wasnae many cars aboot in they days.”
“No, there wouldn’t be, Rab.”
“Used to pick her up at the hoose an’ take her to the jiggin’. Then run her hame again. Saved her waitin’ on the service bus. Oh, she was a bonny lassie, yer mammy. You know somethin’, son,” he said. “If yer mammy hadnae been so virtuous, I coulda been yer faither!”

“Well…”
“Ye might no a been as clever. But at least, ye’d a had a full heid a hair!”