PART ONE
JOBS FOR WORKING CLASS TEENAGERS IN LONDON IN THE 1960s
There was a great anti-industrial campaign during the 1960s in London but it was mainly among the middle-class sociologists. Many were social workers dealing with one-parent working-class families. Their mantra was: `You don't want to be working in factories or building sites. You are better than that.' The result was a lot of young teenagers ended up doing nothing because they didn't have the educational background for anything else. Even to get a clerical job for the working class boy or girl was very difficult. Bank jobs were out of the question and the only possibility was to get work as a clerk for British Rail which paid wages which barely covered living expenses. If you were desperate enough to wear a suit and tie, or what females considered chic, then this was your chance. London back then had an amazing range of manual jobs from aircraft work to shipbuilding and repair. The building industry was booming. There were whole areas of small factories and an area of food production. There were two iron foundries. Soho, notorious for many things, was dotted with small workshops with opportunities for apprentice gold and silversmiths and jewellery makers. There was pride and a little joy in getting a wage packet on a Thursday. There was the idea of wage slavery being tossed around by the same middle class sociologists and some members of the youthful working-class left. Where were you to go to escape from it when countries like the Soviet Union were putting manual labour as one of the highest priorities of mankind. The glossy magazine Soviet Union was full of workers against an industrial background. I don't think those Western 1960s sociologists would agree. London for a time had its rust-belts with factories and dockland lying derelict into the 1970s & 80s. Most jobs now seem to be non-manual and I haven't heard wage-slavery mentioned recently.
POVERTY IN NORTHERN IRELAND IN THE 1930s
I remember the terrible fear of pneumonia, scarlet fever, diphtheria that could hit children in 1930s Belfast. My family were living in a Protestant street (Kilburn Street, Donegall Road). Young children on either side of our house died from pneumonia, the street was stricken with it, along with diphtheria and scarlet fever. There were no antibiotics then for all these diseases. Kilburn Street had one car in the street, belonging to an RUC man. The rest of the street was in poverty. Children ran around without shoes in winter. A young child dressed only in a cotton dress without shoes regularly knocked on our door for a slice of bread. Butter being too expensive to hand out on bread meant that the bread was dipped in milk with a fine coat of sugar sprinkled over it. People burnt rubbish in their fireplaces instead of coal, down draughts of the smoke produced stank the street. Later when we moved to Carryduff in 1938 children continued to die there from pneumonia, diphtheria and scarlet fever. The school I attended was stricken with these illness and now and then a child-pupil would disappear forever with a whole class of young children in tears. Journalists today don't have a clue and are tramping on the bodies of the misfortunate from the past for their own ends and for the ends of governments that don't properly represent the population.
EFFECTS OF RELIGIOUS DISCRIMINATION ON A SINGLE FAMILY
When you think of it unionism has been a most violent org. when you take in the 50 years of the Catholic population being oppressed by arms and in thought word and deed on a daily basis. (this attitude today hasn't gone away you know). Its everyday operation certainly wrecked my family for one. I was lucky to get an apprenticeship through stealth and subterfuge but my 4 sisters had to go through being openly asked what religion they were. Two of them spent 2 years at Pitman's College to become short-hand typists (my father working every hour of overtime he could get to pay for it) and one of them racked up 100 letters turning her down brazenly on the grounds of religion. The third sister ended up in jobs no one wanted like filling batteries with acid while wearing a rubber apron and wellington boots. She later become a stitcher in a clothing factory where they were worked until some fainted with exhaustion, while others accidentally had needles driven through their fingers, which were pulled out with plyers by a maintenance man . The 4th sister ended up also in a factory sorting rags and old clothing for a paper-making company (Catholic and Protestant welcome with the fleas hopping everywhere).
The two shorthand-typist sister, got together, and became born-again with a Church of God Protestant sect. They were never out of work again. Unfortunately as converts they became worse than the real thing, sending me books like Bandit Country, about South Armagh. It was no use reminding these two about our life in the then hard-line Protestant townland of Carryduff - the poisoning of the well-water, with one of them nearly dying as a nine-month old, nightly attacks with stones on the roof and broken windows, being beaten up on sectarian grounds coming home from school, they now put that down to general hooliganism.
One factory-working sister suddenly couldn't leave the house and was diagnosed with agoraphobia. That lasted for 20 years. She kept her religion under trying sectarian conditions on a housing estate but was helped out of her condition by a Protestant care-group. The fourth sister married a Muslim, and although she denies it now, became Muslim, though to a mild degree in never going to the mosque, and only going when her husband died. When her husband was alive she did present herself as a Muslim to all and general. But since he died she pretends to be a Protestant as some form of protection. You hear of the Catholics who will stand up even if their life is in danger but there are those who have been totally ground down by sectarianism.
Unfortunately my father, a Presbyterian, would never live in a Catholic area and therefore as a family we bore the full brunt of the most violent form of unionism. You are isolated from the population. As children you can't play with them, therefore you don't learn social skills, as teenagers you can't have girlfriends of boyfriends from out of that hostile population, Catholic West Belfast, and other Catholic ghettoes, is alien territory to you for you have only lived among Protestants. In the end you just don't belong anywhere. Your father says: `I have to see somebody up the Shankill. Coming along? Don't worry, you can bluff them.' You're with your mother in Donegall St, and you're passing St Patrick's and she says she's going in to say a prayer and you're looking all round the street before you go in and she says: `Don't worry about the Prods, don't look at them, don't even take them under your notice.' So one day you're bluffing them and the next day you hope they won't find out about you.
Maybe I have said all this somewhere before and in different forms but I am saying it again in order to highlight the great work and hope Martin McGuinness has brought to some members of my family and to so many other families. The Daily Mail with its brutalist approach can't hope to understand, or are willing to understand, any of this.
THE INDIAN MUSLIM BROTHER-IN-LAW
Oddly enough I had a brother-in-law who thought like that though he died before zero hours came in. He was an Indian Muslim who had been an engineering officer in the Indian navy and jumped ship in Belfast because he wanted to make money. He picked Belfast because he felt there was less competition there. He started doing odd cash-in-hand jobs and eventually was able to draw the dole as well as National Assistance though he would have been classed as an illegal immigrant. How he managed this no one knew including my sister who was married to him. He studied in his spare time, getting a degree from the Open University in computer sciences when it was in its infancy during the 1960s and ended up as a contractor installing software in an engineering factory in Derry for the first robots for all things like making cigarette-dispensing machines.
He was one of those Indian Muslims who believed in partition and the partition of Ireland so he got on well with the unionists who controlled Derry at that time. He was never out of a contract. Many of the workers in one of the Derry factories came from the Bogside. He was diplomatic enough to go to funerals in Free Derry Bogside, when war broke out and a factory hand/PIRA member got killed. A couple of Indians were killed by PIRA in Derry after they were accused of giving information. When I heard that on the radio I used to phone his home in Derry in the hope it wasn't him. What I got was an earful of ripe Northern cursing. He sure was a quick learner. He died leaving a fortune. I wasn't mentioned in his will. Maybe I sent him too much of our political literature.
He was in Belfast as part of a crew to take back to India an aircraft carrier sold by Britain to the Indian Navy. It was being overhauled in the Belfast shipyard. It was quite an old carrier. I remember it from when I worked in the shipyard. It was totally covered in red lead inside and out to protect it from rust.
The RUC had been informed of his disappearance. The Indian Navy had to send a replacement engineering officer. He hid out in East Belfast being lucky that a lonely Protestant woman took him into her home out of pity when he knocked on her door asking for a glass of water and some sympathy. He might have married her in the end but no one is sure even to this day, least of all my sister.
PROTESTANTS IN THE COMMUNIST PARTY
There was also a Protestant contribution to NICRA [Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association] through the CPNI. One of the leaders of that was Bobbie Heatley, an economic lecturer at a teacher's training college. He later wrote a pamphlet asking the IRA not to target the Ulster-born security forces like the RUC and the UDR and prison officers on the grounds that they were Protestants. It had a foreword by Clare Short, a British Labour MP. Heatley was also a correspondent for the Connolly Association to various Scandinavian newspapers. His don't kill RUC/UDR/ prison officers because it could be anti-Protestant must have been discussed with Desmond Greaves. He was very well thought of by him and also by Anthony Coughlan, and of course Roy Johnston. (1)
(1) Greaves, Coughlan and Johnson were leading figures in the Communist Party and the CP sponsored, London based Connolly Association. The original Communist Party of Ireland divided into the Communist Party of Northern Ireland and the Southern based Irish Workers Party which reunited as the Communist Party of Ireland again in 1969. The Young Workers League was the youth wing of the CPNI.
Heatley came over to London in the 1960s and was an active member of the Connolly Association. Coughlan and Johnston were also living in London at the time. As well as that Heatley was a mature student at London University, studying economics while working as a carpenter and later as a clerk for British Rail. When he got his degree First Class he went home to Belfast.
I knew Bobbie Heatley when we were both teenagers in the Young Workers' League. He worked hard to take the YWL out of Ulster Protestant orientation and into a more Nationalist mode as far back as 1950. The YWL was a majority Protestant organisation with a Catholic membership you could count on one hand. But the charismatic brain-box Heatley managed to get the YWL to attend Easter Rising commemorations at Milltown. (2) The stationery of the YWL was headed in the Irish language, of which he was student of while attending classes up the Falls Road. There was a lot of hostility from the CPNI leadership. The Protestant trade union leader members didn't like it at all.(they who are so loved by the present CPI). They had managed to isolate Sean Murray from the old more Nationalist CPI of the 1930s. Now he had the support of the new reformed Nationalist-orientated YWL. We were threatened with being beaten up at one meeting of the CPNI by these infuriated trade union leaders. I still wonder why three well-known East Belfast gangsters appeared at one meeting and said nothing but glowered at us. One sent his wife over to tell us to shut up when were demanding that the 1930s history of the CPI be discussed. It being a high political discussion going on we didn't shut up.
(2) Milltown cemetery in West Belfast which includes graves of Irish Republican volunteers.
Things changed when civil rights didn't achieve anything and the bullets started flying. Heatley wrote his pamphlet and became a proper Protestant but still non-sectarian. His father was a former professional soldier who worked in the civil service at Stormont but secretly voted for the Irish Labour Party, and having met him numerous times, I could have taken him for a Catholic. His second wife was a prominent member of the Ulster Unionist Party. She once instructed me about how a Catholic can get a house from the Belfast Corporation. I had gone back from London to Belfast in the 1950s to live in the New Lodge area of Belfast which happened to be a marginal constituency. With a wife and a baby I was living in cramped conditions. She instructed me:
`Where there is a marginal seat and the Unionist candidate needs the Catholic vote then the Catholic vote is attained by the Unionist candidate handing out new Corporation houses to Catholics. So go there to his post office and complain that the Belfast Corporation is not giving you a house because you are a Catholic. He will see you right. But don't mention me because I get his political literature out.'
There was too much corruption in it for me at the time as a shining communist knight in armour, so I didn't partake, probably more as a naïve fool. There was an honestly about this corruption because it was spelt out. This is what you do to survive. Unionist Stormont was so powerful at the time you could as a Protestant in the know, do practically anything, even murder and either get away with it or serve a light sentence, but still get your job and your honour back. If you did expose it you would be told by influential elements of the Unionist Party that was the way things are done here. You're not one of us so on your way.
The Catholics repaid the postmaster voting Unionist. At the next election, having felt they had done their duty, they voted him out.
There is indeed a certain honesty about some corruption because it is a corruption in which both parties gain something.
ZIONISM IN THE CPGB
The 1960s was when Jews in the CPGB, especially the Young Communist League branches in London's Jewish areas were turning branches into Zionist-inspired branches and had to be closed down by the leadership of the CPGB. One well-known Jewish psychiatrist who had to flee South Africa because of his anti-apartheid activities, and now a member of the CPGB, was secretly writing for the Jewish Chronicle under an assumed name. His theme was that the general public were sub-consciously anti-Semite. My Jewish brother-in-law at the time used to get a copy of the Chronicle delivered (he entertained his sister and me but didn't like non-Jews). I was in his house one day and picked up a copy. The psychiatrist was there in a group photo. I confronted the psychiatrist about his writing of these articles because I was being labelled an anti-Semite in his generalisation. He flew into a rage and asked me who I thought I was in reading the Jewish Chronicle (an Irish building worker maybe?). I thought then it was to the Zionist benefit to stir up anti-Semitism, to awaken the sleeping dog. Jews left the party in droves. For many members the only contact they had with Jews was in the party. That led to a lot of happy togetherness. Zionism managed to isolate that section of Jews, and in some cases had them forming their own leftist Jewish organisations. A number of Jews did stay in the party but like Trotsky they wanted to shake off that label but never could. Then at some of their funerals I attended I found them hi-jacked by religious zealots.
WORKING CLASS LIFE INTO THE 1950s
My father started working the Belfast linen mills, as a spool boy, at the age of 12. He was a half-timer - half the week at work, half at school.
Starting time was 6 am to 6pm with a one hour break called the dinner hour. if they lived near the mill, and most did, they went home.
His job was to crawl under the machinery when the bobbins fell off the main frames that were shaking the odd one off. I never heard him complain about it. He was making some money, handed into the house of course, when there was very little money about. Just before Xmas a worker would be sent around to get the foot sizes of the employees. Then at Xmas the mill-owner gave his workers each a pair of leather boots, lace-ups for the men, buttoned-ups for the females. Those boots made him loved for the rest of the year.
My father never complained. He felt lucky that he started at 12 because his own father, doing the same job, started at 9 years old and got no boots and less schooling than he. But he stayed in that mill for the rest of his life and became a winding master, a well-paid supervisor for the period.
At 14 (1914) my father started his 7-year apprenticeship as a woodworker in Workman and Clark shipyard, long hours that included Saturday half day. He felt privileged at getting an apprenticeship.
At 14 I started work at Harland & Wolff shipyard aware of my grandfather and father's work experience and also felt privileged to get an apprenticeship and the 3 Rs at school without interruption. I didn't have to do 6 to 6 but 8 to 5.30, including half day Saturday, which was soon abolished.
What sustained us in our spare time was opera for my grandfather (the working class at the beginning of the 20th Century in Belfast and Dublin had a great liking for it). My father had his music - the violin (not the fiddle). I thought of theatre. These were our favourite thoughts at work if it became monotonous some days.
Life wasn't as bad back then as it is made out today if you had a job. Money was money even if it only amounted to farthings, halfpennies and pennies in your pocket sometimes. In Belfast you lived in a kitchen house (kitchen and pantry, two bedrooms) if unskilled but with a job. If skilled you lived in a parlour house - parlour, kitchen, two bedrooms and a box room. All especially built for industrial Belfast.
Not to have that 6-to-6 job meant abject poverty, rags, bread and dripping, living in an overcrowded kitchen house with relatives in the same situation. Or sometimes living in a Salvation Army hostel.
Looking back from our centrally-heated wifi flats and houses with some on universal credits but still running a car and renting a smart phone can give the wrong impression.
Mostly it's all about our problems having changed.
CATHOLICS IN THE SHIPYARD
Up to 1954 when I was in the shipyard there was a Joiner's Shop of 2,000 joiners and wood-machinists with a sprinkling of Catholics, numbers of them apprentices. How they made it into Harland & Wolff I don't know. I did try to find out but none of them would say. These woodworking apprenticeships were very popular. Catholic joiners let themselves be known as Catholics, maybe based on the idea it was sin to deny your religion. They kept in the shadows and were left alone and could even joke about one another's religion. One joiner from Newry went further than any Catholic would dare in opposing the Unionist monopoly, as a Nationalist. He eventually found a live round of ammunition in his pocket with the message:
`Get out or this will be in you and not on you.'
He packed the job in immediately. Then a Protestant went round the Catholic joiners to tell them what happened, as a warning to stay in line. I knew who could have done this, an ex-soldier in the part-time Territorial Army was putting his jacket on when a live .303 round fell out of his pocket. Everyone pretended not to see it. He was very friendly person and taught me my trade when I was an apprentice. He had a Catholic wife and a young daughter going to a Catholic school. Living in the mostly Protestant Lisburn he had to protect them. But he was still an Ulster Protestant, much like my communist Da but without the bullets. Some can't work that one out but I can.
When communists controlled the Amalgamated Society of Woodworkers the jobs for joiners were dished out from their union office. That how Catholics with Falls Road addresses got into the Yard. If the shipyard management wouldn't accept them then the ASW would call a strike. Ironically, the shipyard being 100% unionised, the Protestant joiners would have to come out on strike on behalf of the Catholic joiners.
Joe Cahill (later of PIRA) worked in the Yard, probably through Billy Sinclair, of the ASW office, getting him in. Danny Morison's father, a painter, worked there for a while. A good friend of mine from Glen Road worked there, definitely through Billy Sinclair.
I was over in Belfast at the beginning of 1970 and was in a pub with a few Protestants who were communists. One of them opened his jacket to show his handgun saying that's what life had become for a shop steward in the shipyard. But the shipyard management were definitely there to sack anyone for sectarian belligerence. The shipyard was dying anyway and was finished in 2003.
I'm not saying there was that great a tolerance in the Belfast shipyard. Catholics had to watch their step. It was they who had to be tolerant. The Joiner's Shop of those 2,000 might have had 10 workbenches decorated with orange Lilies on the 12th of July.
Not all Prods went in for that but that didn't mean Catholics could say what they wanted. The best way round that was for a Catholic to be also a communist. Like myself and a few others you could lambast Unionism and Churchill, though you didn't touch on the plight of your fellow Catholics. Communists to them were also anti-Catholic. But then the Left like the CPNI didn't also broach the plight of the Catholic worker so as not to upset the mainly Protestant workforce who were being led by Protestant communist trade union leaders.
MIXED HOUSING ESTATES
It's never popular to bring up issues of a one-time Unionist effort at social engineering which started in 1950 on the newly-built housing estates. It is never popular for what can only be called Catholic ghettoes, without much knowledge of life outside it for Catholics living in the Diaspora to be told of Unionist social engineering and for the fact that Catholics did work in the Belfast shipyard, in small numbers, that's true, but in a greater quantity when more skilled labour was needed and they couldn't lure enough workers from the Scottish shipyards. During WW2 thousands of skilled Catholics from the then Free State were employed in the shipyard when it was going full belt for the war effort. What is called Northern Ireland still remained dysfunctional by British deliberation and it wasn't going to change.
On attempted social engineering in housing I can give a personal account of moving from Carryduff, moving from a house that had no running water, had only two cramped bedrooms for a family of seven, no bathroom, and a dry lavatory outside, to a the Sunnylands Estate in Carrickfergus in 1950. There we found a modern build of a five-bedroomed house with bathroom, two toilets, living room and still retaining the old parlour system. There was a garden back and front. The tenants were 50/50 Catholic/Protestant, each tenant had a Catholic or a Protestant neighbour.
We then moved across Belfast Lough to an estate in Holywood because of the fumes coming from the huge man-made fibre factory of Courtaulds, which employed a lot of people on the estate, so there were no complaints about the air pollution. Workers also came from England and Wales to be employed there. The offer of a Housing Trust house was the lure.
The Holywood estate was also 50/50 Catholic/Protestant, garden back and front, with a view of the Lough. My parents then decided to move across the Lough again to the Rathcoole Estate. I was living in London by then and had news from my parents that Rathcoole was also a 50/50 Catholic/Protestant setup with the added addition of a Catholic school being built on the estate.
Meanwhile in the Catholic West Belfast new estates were also being built but they were going to be Catholic estates because the area was totally Catholic whereas on the other estates I mentioned the Catholics came from the scattered Diaspora and were able to be socially engineered. There is going to be the odd individual, usually loyalist, who will try and upset things but they didn't get very far on these estates. The 12th of July was always going to be a time to hold your breath but mostly what you heard were the Lambeg drums in the distance and not on these estates. The Catholics, of course, let it all go over their heads. They themselves held no demonstrations or ever met in meetings as Catholic tenants. Tenant associations were equally mixed.
On Rathcoole doors were kept open in summer and pre-school kids would wander in and out of the houses without any problems.
On a visit there my mother pointed out a three year old with a croaky voice as being a `fenian' . It was the young Bobby sands.
The late 1960s changed things with the loyalist pogroms in West Belfast and the Bogside in Derry. As far as I remember most Catholic tenants on these new mixed housing estates were annoyed that their lives might be disrupted by these events, while others were inflamed. And they sure were when the intimidation by newly-formed loyalist organisations, pumped up by the Paisley agitation, destroyed the Unionist experiment at social engineering and led to major pogroms on these new estates. The Sands family, for one, had to flee for their lives. Across the windows of the now empty house was painted: 'Infestation'.
