A 1950s Irish Childhood

A 1950s Irish Childhood PDF Author: Ruth Illingworth
Publisher: The History Press
ISBN: 0750986735
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 158

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Book Description
1950s Ireland was the age of De Valera and John Charles McQuaid. It was the age before television, Vatican II, and home central heating. A time when motor cars and public telephones had wind-up handles, when boys wore short trousers and girls wore ribbons, when nuns wore white bonnets and priests wore black hats in church. To the young people of today, the 1950s seem like another age. But for those who played, learned and worked at this time, this era feels like just yesterday. This delightful collection of memories will appeal to all who grew up in 1950s Ireland and will jog memories about all aspects of life as it was.

A 1950s Irish Childhood

A 1950s Irish Childhood PDF Author: Ruth Illingworth
Publisher: The History Press
ISBN: 0750986735
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 158

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Book Description
1950s Ireland was the age of De Valera and John Charles McQuaid. It was the age before television, Vatican II, and home central heating. A time when motor cars and public telephones had wind-up handles, when boys wore short trousers and girls wore ribbons, when nuns wore white bonnets and priests wore black hats in church. To the young people of today, the 1950s seem like another age. But for those who played, learned and worked at this time, this era feels like just yesterday. This delightful collection of memories will appeal to all who grew up in 1950s Ireland and will jog memories about all aspects of life as it was.

The Speckled People

The Speckled People PDF Author: Hugo Hamilton
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1408171201
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 94

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Book Description
Adapted for the stage from the best-selling memoir, The Speckled People tells a profoundly moving story of a young boy trapped in a language war. Set in 1950s Ireland, this is a gripping, poignant, and at times very funny family drama of homesickness, control and identity. As a young boy, Hugo Hamilton struggles with what it means to be speckled, "half and half... Irish on top and German below." An idealistic Irish father enforces his cultural crusade by forbidding his son to speak English while his German mother tries to rescue him with her warm-hearted humour and uplifting industry. The boy must free himself from his father and from bullies on the street who persecute him with taunts of Nazism. Above all he must free himself from history and from the terrible secrets of his mother and father before he can find a place where he belongs. Surrounded by fear, guilt, and frequently comic cultural entanglements, Hugo tries to understand the differences between Irish history and German history and to turn the strange logic of what he is told into truth. It is a journey that ends in liberation but not before the long-buried secrets at the back of the parents' wardrobe have been laid bare.

A 1950s Irish Childhood

A 1950s Irish Childhood PDF Author: Padraig Connolly
Publisher: History Press (SC)
ISBN: 9781845887650
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
A 1950s Irish Childhood

Youth and Popular Culture in 1950s Ireland

Youth and Popular Culture in 1950s Ireland PDF Author: Eleanor O’Leary
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350015903
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Focusing on a decade in Irish history which has been largely overlooked, Youth and Popular Culture in 1950s Ireland provides the most complete account of the 1950s in Ireland, through the eyes of the young people who contributed, slowly but steadily, to the social and cultural transformation of Irish society. Eleanor O'Leary presents a picture of a generation with an international outlook, who played basketball, read comic books and romance magazines, listened to rock'n'roll music and skiffle, made their own clothes to mimic international styles and even danced in the street when the major stars and bands of the day rocked into town. She argues that this engagement with imported popular culture was a contributing factor to emigration and the growing dissatisfaction with standards of living and conservative social structures in Ireland. As well as outlining teenagers' resistance to outmoded forms of employment and unfair work practices, she maps their vulnerability as a group who existed in a limbo between childhood and adulthood. Issues of unemployment, emigration and education are examined alongside popular entertainments and social spaces in order to provide a full account of growing up in the decade which preceded the social upheaval of the 1960s. Examining the 1950s through the unique prism of youth culture and reconnecting the decade to the process of social and cultural transition in the second half of the 20th century, this book is a valuable contribution to the literature on 20th-century Irish history.

High Tea at a Low Table

High Tea at a Low Table PDF Author: Angela Patten
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781949066012
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 130

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Book Description
Irish born and Vermont settled poet Angela Patten turns her lyrical skills to this story-telling memoir of growing up in horse-and-cart Dublin, striving to find her own voice amid the insistent clamor of family and clergy. She was a child in the 50s when Irish milmen still rode bicycles, ladled loose mil from a tilley-can, and telling stories was both entertainment and sustenance. She broke away from home and the authoritarian rule of the Catholic Church as she came of age in the 60s and an unruly future on American soil beckoned.

Another Country – Growing Up In '50s Ireland

Another Country – Growing Up In '50s Ireland PDF Author: Gene Kerrigan
Publisher: Gill & Macmillan Ltd
ISBN: 0717166562
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
From First Communions to CIÉ Mystery Tours – the heartwarming story of award-winning journalist Gene Kerrigan's childhood in Dublin in the '50s In his highly addictive style, Gene Kerrigan effortlessly reconstructs the Ireland of the 1950s and early '60s in which he grew up. An adult world of absolute moral certainties, casual cruelties and mass emigration; for children an age of innocence, but an innocence hemmed in by fear and guilt. In this brilliant and humorous memoir, Kerrigan tells of a world that now seems as distant as another country. Into the details of school, street and family life, of Christmas, First Communion, school violence, CIE Mystery Tours and the arrival of television are woven the political background of the day and recollections of the impact of major figures: Michael O Hehir, Seán Lemass, Eamon 'Dev' De Valera, JFK, not to mention Hector Grey, Shane, Davy Crockett and Audie Murphy. It's a compelling, touching and often very funny account of a happy childhood in a country that was itself far from happy.

A 1950s Childhood

A 1950s Childhood PDF Author: Paul Feeney
Publisher: The History Press
ISBN: 075246227X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Do you remember PathÉ News? Taking the train to the seaside? The purple stains of iodine on the knees of boys in short trousers? Knitted bathing costumes? Then the chances are you were born in or around 1950. To the young people of today, the 1950s seem like another age. But for those born around then, this era of childhood feels like yesterday. This delightful collection of photographic memories will appeal to all who grew up in this post-war decade; they include pictures of children enjoying life out on the streets and bombsites, at home and at school, on holiday and at events. These wonderful period pictures and descriptive captions will bring back this decade of childhood, and jog memories about all aspects of life as it was in post-war Britain.

Growing Up in Dublin

Growing Up in Dublin PDF Author: John E. Mullee
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780990362401
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
The author reflects on his childhood and adolescence in Dublin, glimpsing occasionally into his many places of exile. Told in twenty-six stand-alone stories, illustrated with photos and cartoons. As World War II ends, his mother dies, leaving his dad with four young children. Postwar years are tough on Dubliners: socks are darned repeatedly; clothes are worn until they rip. Bowl haircuts like The Three Stooges are in style. But every Christmas there are toys. He and his pals walk out over the sand flats in Dublin Bay, taste the raw smell of the sea, and feel gritty sand stuffed between their toes. He has happy summers on a farm in County Mayo: raking hay, footing turf, chatting with colorful characters, but gets into trouble with his catapult. Goes hunting rabbits at dawn, smearing footsteps through the drenching dew. Proustian flashbacks evoke the country kitchen: the smell of turf smoke; praties boiling in a fat-bellied pot; a black kettle "singing peace" on the hob. His farmer uncle teaches lasting lessons in work ethics. School is mixed: indiscipline, indifference, animosity, mediocrity; biffs to the hand with the strap, lashes to the psyche with the tongue, the teacher openly calling one an eejit. Discovers Yeats's "terrible beauty"--in the classrooms where Pearse sat, before he was shot for his part in creating it. A Christian Brother inspires him in time to slip across the stile into the field of higher education. Rock 'n Roll upsets parents, grips teenagers; James Dean rebels, Buddy Holly thrills; their impossibly young deaths bewilder the young. Things change; some find no satisfaction. Pirate radios force staid national programs to embrace pop. The Beatles win all sides over in the tumultuous 1960s. He gets hooked on the suave contours and savage crags in the Wicklow Wilderness. At twenty-two he takes the emigrant boat, returns to Dublin for University, leaves again, pays tribute now to the city that mothered him.

Nothing Quite Like It

Nothing Quite Like It PDF Author: Nicholas Grene
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780956223159
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 173

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Book Description
Tells the story of an unusual childhood. The child of academic parents, the author was transplanted from Illinois to rural Wicklow in the 1950s. This vivid and wryly humorous memoir recalls a vanished world from a unique angle.

Books from the Attic

Books from the Attic PDF Author: Alice Taylor
Publisher: The O'Brien Press Ltd
ISBN: 1788492420
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
Alice Taylor takes a look back at the well-used schoolbooks she used in her youth in the 1940s and 1950s. Flicking through the pages of the books and recalling poetry and prose she learned at school, Alice reminisces about these texts, how she related to them and how they integrated with her life on the farm and in the village. In her warm, wise way, Alice reflects on poems and stories on topics ranging from birds, trees and nature to fairy tales and legends, and ties them in with her own knowledge and memory of traditional country life. Containing the text of the poems that readers will remember from their own school days, and evocatively illustrated with photographs of the school books and Alice's notes on them, as well as nature, flora, fauna and objects associated with schools of old, this is a reminder of childhood days and a treasure trove of memory.