Life history and the Irish migrant experience in post-war England by Barry Hazley

Author:Barry Hazley [Hazley, Barry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Emigration & Immigration, History, Europe, Great Britain, 20th Century, General, Social History, Modern
ISBN: 9781526128027
Google: gXACEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2020-02-11T00:58:03+00:00

The luck of the game

Denis’s investment in the trope of ‘Irish muscle’ thus enables him to view his past in a positive light, facilitating the composure of the self in the present. A hitherto unaddressed effect of this investment, however, is that the performance of work itself tends to be idealised within his narrative, to the exclusion of issues of remuneration, wealth and mobility. Such an exclusion is notable given the popular view of the period as one of growing ‘affluence’. Although the British economy’s rate of growth was sluggish relative to that of other European countries in the second half of the twentieth century, the post-war period witnessed rising incomes and the development of new patterns of consumption, inducing contemporary social scientists to proclaim the arrival of an epochal ‘affluent society’ defined in terms of enhanced purchase power, widespread availability of diverse consumer products and rising social mobility and aspirations.57 As noted, Irish construction workers stood to benefit economically from these processes, even if their ‘working lives were primarily orientated towards facilitating homebuilding for the English population’.58 If increases in home-ownership were most concentrated among the English middle and upper-working classes, it was nevertheless the very demand for housing, coupled with the privatisation and deregulation of the construction industry in the 1950s, which enabled relatively high rates of pay and plentiful overtime for ‘unskilled’ labourers. As with other manual workers in England, such wages helped transform Irish construction workers into consumers in this period, an observation made time and again by numerous contemporaries.

One such was Donall MacAmhlaigh. Around midday one Saturday in April 1957 he called in to the Admiral Rodney, a pub in Northampton, only to find a group of young Irish piece-workers talking incessantly about ‘work and money’:

The Irish at home, so far as I know, haven’t got this ugly habit – always talking about work and money – but they get as materialistic as the rest when they have been here a while. I’ve often been with workmen in a pub in Ireland and we always had plenty to talk about besides the daily job. They had all the best stories and traditional lore at the tips of their tongues – as you might expect of the Irish – but this crowd are interested in nothing beyond jobs and horses. What harm but most of them are from the West of Ireland!59

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