An Irish Navvy – The Diary of an Exile

An Irish Navvy – The Diary of an Exile PDF Author: Donall MacAmhlaigh
Publisher: Gill & Macmillan Ltd
ISBN: 1848899661
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 162

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Book Description
DIrish construction workers in post-war Britain are celebrated in song and story. Donall MacAmhlaigh kept a diary as he worked the sites, danced in the Irish halls, drank in Irish pubs and lived the life of the roving Irish navvy. Work was hard, dirty and dangerous, followed by pints in the Admiral Rodney, the Shamrock, the Cattle Market Tavern and others. Living conditions were basic at best. This vivid picture of an Irish navvy's life in England in the 1950s mirrors that of an entire generation who left Ireland without education or hope. Days without food or work, the hardships of work camps, lonesome partings after trips home, periods of intense isolation and bitter reflection were all part of the experience. • Also available: Hard Road to Klondike.

An Irish Navvy – The Diary of an Exile

An Irish Navvy – The Diary of an Exile PDF Author: Donall MacAmhlaigh
Publisher: Gill & Macmillan Ltd
ISBN: 1848899661
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 162

Get Book Here

Book Description
DIrish construction workers in post-war Britain are celebrated in song and story. Donall MacAmhlaigh kept a diary as he worked the sites, danced in the Irish halls, drank in Irish pubs and lived the life of the roving Irish navvy. Work was hard, dirty and dangerous, followed by pints in the Admiral Rodney, the Shamrock, the Cattle Market Tavern and others. Living conditions were basic at best. This vivid picture of an Irish navvy's life in England in the 1950s mirrors that of an entire generation who left Ireland without education or hope. Days without food or work, the hardships of work camps, lonesome partings after trips home, periods of intense isolation and bitter reflection were all part of the experience. • Also available: Hard Road to Klondike.

The Men who Built Britain

The Men who Built Britain PDF Author: Ultan Cowley
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780956643612
Category : Civil engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description


Exiles

Exiles PDF Author: Dónall Mac Amhlaigh
Publisher: Translations 11
ISBN: 9781912681310
Category : Irish fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This well-crafted novel is one of the few novels in either Irish or English that explores this generation of Irish people, often termed the 'silent' or 'lost generation' when over a half-a-million people emigrated, primarily to Britain to work in the post-war economy there - 'building England up and tearing it down again'.

The Navvy Poet

The Navvy Poet PDF Author: Patrick MacGill
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 418

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Book Description


Children of the Dead End

Children of the Dead End PDF Author: Patrick MacGill
Publisher: Birlinn Ltd
ISBN: 0857907034
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
Based on personal memories of his life in Ireland and Scotland in the early 1900s, this was Patrick MacGill's first novel. It tells the story of Dermod Flynn an independent and feisty youth who earns a meagre living as an itinerant farm hand in Donegal and County Tyrone before coming to Scotland with a potato-picking squad. After living on the road, labouring and navvying, Dermod finds work on the hydro-electric scheme at Kinlochleven –an extraordinarily brutal and unforgiving environment where hundreds died on one of the biggest engineering projects of its time. Against this background, Dermod reads voraciously, begins to discover his talent as a writer and is eventually lured to Fleet Street, where he briefly becomes a journalist. Peopled with extraordinary characters, Children of the Dead End is a gritty and uncompromising expose of the near slavery endured by the poor in Scotland and Ireland at the beginning of the twentieth century.

The Railway Navvies

The Railway Navvies PDF Author: Terry Coleman
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1784082317
Category : Transportation
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
This is the definitive story of the men who built the railways – the unknown Victorian labourers who blasted, tunnelled, drank and brawled their way across nineteenth-century England. Preached at and plundered, sworn at and swindled, this anarchic elite endured perils and disasters, and carved out of the English countryside an industrial-age architecture unparalleled in grandeur and audacity since the building of the cathedrals.

A Star Called Henry

A Star Called Henry PDF Author: Roddy Doyle
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 0307375382
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
An historical novel like none before it, A Star Called Henry has marked a new chapter in Booker Prize-winner Roddy Doyle's writing. A subversive look behind the legends of Irish republicanism, at its centre a passionate and unforgettable love story, this novel is a triumphant work of fiction. Born in the slums of Dublin in 1902, his father a one-legged whorehouse bouncer and settler of scores, Henry Smart has to grow up fast. By the time he can walk he's out robbing, begging, charming, often cold, always hungry, but a prince of the streets. At fourteen, already six foot two, Henry's in the General Post Office on Easter Monday 1916, a soldier in the Irish Citizen Army, fighting for freedom. A year later he's ready to die for Ireland again, a rebel, a Fenian, and, soon, a killer. With his father's wooden leg as his weapon, Henry becomes a republican legend - one of Michael Collins' boys, a cop killer, an assassin on a stolen bike, a lover.

Borstal Boy

Borstal Boy PDF Author: Brendan Behan
Publisher: David R. Godine Publisher
ISBN: 9781567921052
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
This miracle of autobiography and prison literature begins: "Friday, in the evening, the landlady shouted up the stairs: 'Oh God, oh Jesus, oh Sacred Heart, Boy, there's two gentlemen here to see you.' I knew by the screeches of her that the gentlemen were not calling to inquire after my health . . . I grabbed my suitcase, containing Pot. Chlor., Sulph Ac, gelignite, detonators, electrical and ignition, and the rest of my Sinn Fein conjurer's outfit, and carried it to the window . . ." The men were, of course, the police, and seventeen-year-old Behan. He spent three years as a prisoner in England, primarily in Borstal (reform school), and was then expelled to his homeland, a changed but hardly defeated rebel. Once banned in the Irish Republic, Borstal Boy is both a riveting self-portrait and a clear look into the problems, passions, and heartbreak of Ireland.

The Great Push

The Great Push PDF Author: Patrick MacGill
Publisher: Birlinn Publishers
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
Patrick MacGill enlisted with the London Irish Rifles in 1915 and The Great Push is the resultant work, written during the Battle of Loos. This story recounts the fear, resilience, humour, and fatalism of those who fought at the raw edge of one of the most terrifying wars ever to have been waged.

Moy Sand and Gravel

Moy Sand and Gravel PDF Author: Paul Muldoon
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1466879807
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 124

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Book Description
Paul Muldoon's ninth collection of poems, his first since Hay (1998), finds him working a rich vein that extends from the rivery, apple-heavy County Armagh of the 1950s, in which he was brought up, to suburban New Jersey, on the banks of a canal dug by Irish navvies, where he now lives. Grounded, glistening, as gritty as they are graceful, these poems seem capable of taking in almost anything, and anybody, be it a Tuareg glimpsed on the Irish border, Bessie Smith, Marilyn Monroe, Queen Elizabeth I, a hunted hare, William Tell, William Butler Yeats, Sitting Bull, Ted Hughes, an otter, a fox, Mr. and Mrs. Stanley Joscelyne, un unearthed pit pony, a loaf of bread, an outhouse, a killdeer, Oscar Wilde, or a flock of redknots. At the heart of the book is an elegy for a miscarried child, and that elegiac tone predominates, particularly in the elegant remaking of Yeats's "A Prayer for My Daughter" with which the book concludes, where a welter of traffic signs and slogans, along with the spirits of admen, hardware storekeepers, flimflammers, fixers, and other forebears, are borne along by a hurricane-swollen canal, and private grief coincides with some of the gravest matter of our age. Moy Sand and Gravel is the winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.