PART TWO
THE YOUNG WORKERS LEAGUE MEETS THE REPUBLICANS
I remember Dessie O'Hagan being involved in Saor Uladh, most likely on the political side of it. (3) He invited a delegation from the Young Workers' League to visit St Mary's Hall, Lower Falls, where an Irish dance was in progress. We met him though there was a lot of hostility from his comrades who could have been anti-Communist or anti-Protestant for the delegation was mostly Protestant, if not all Protestant, except for myself. O'Hagan persisted in talking to us despite the hostile noises. He gave us all literature to do with Saor Uladh. We weren't sure what it was at the time, but one member of the delegation knew all about it - a Protestant who visited the Falls a lot to take lessons in the Irish language. He advised me to throw away my Saor Uladh literature immediately, because as a fenian, I'd was liable to be arrested if stopped in the street by the RUC. The idea of Protestant privilege was reinforced for me when they kept their Saor Uladh literature as a trophy.
(3) Saor Uladh - Free Ulster - was a shortlived paramilitary splinter group from the IRA. Des O'Hagan, nicknamed 'The Devil', was later to become a founder member of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association and was instrumental in the conversion of 'Official' Sinn Fein to the Workers Party.
O'Hagan reaching out to us meant he must have had some scheme going in inviting us. We could have been the key to his possible contacts with Soviet officials. We were never to know what was going on. A Catholic lad joined the Young Workers' League soon after, claiming he had rejected the IRA and was more interested in international socialism. The Protestant, who was taking the Irish lessons, strongly suspected he was infiltrating the YWL. He was very fond of taking photographs of us all. Cameras weren't a common thing to have back then. RUC special branch were openly photographing us in the street anyway so what did another photographer matter.
The fire brigade union secretary was a member of the CPNI, and so were a number of its members. The Catholic lad complained about having no job because of discrimination. Within weeks he was in training as a fireman, thanks to the fire brigade union secretary. I suppose tokenism could only be managed back then. I don't think the present CPI wants to know about any of the history of the CPNI and its youth branch the Young Workers' League.
The date must have been 1951 when we met Dessie O'Hagan. Saor Uladh seemed to spring from nowhere. The new lad brought up the organisation a number of times in conversation. I did think it at the time it brought hope to the Catholic population but I wasn't willing to be interned (in line with most of the Catholic population, as it turned out) continually as I was still putting more hope into communism as the solution. The communist movement in the North was in Protestant Partitionist hands, with barely a thought for the Catholic population so Saor Uladh wasn't going to catch on among the members of the Young Worker's league. In leaving St Mary's Hall, a couple of the delegation began to ape the Irish dancing they had seen, making monkey movements. Another one said Irish music was monotonous as it repeated itself, went on too long and never came to any conclusion. They didn't seem to worry that I was watching the apers and listening to the jeerers.
I met Dessie O'Hagan by chance in the street after he had come out of a short internment - 4 years was the usual length of time spent in the Crum, (4) because a member of the British monarch was visiting Belfast. That was the usual practice when the monarchy visited was to intern maybe over a 100 Republicans until that particular member of the monarch went back to England. O'Hagan told me he had a bad time in the Crum in having to defend himself against attempted homosexual rape by some of the warders. A friend of mine later came across him in a London pub, drunk and disorientated, and into nicking pint beer glasses.
(4) Crumlin Road gaol.
But in the end he seemed to have re-entered Republican politics back in Belfast. There is disagreement about the political path he took in Republicanism but there is no doubt he spent his life at it and suffered for it all.
WILLIAM CARLETON, (5) TRAMPS AND HOLES IN THE GROUND
(5) Carleton was a nineteenth century writer. Although he converted to Protestantism and wrote for the Protestant evangelical press his Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry were so well written and entertaining that he retained his popularity among an Irish Catholic readership.
Carleton saw some of the hedge school teachers as deranged in the way they treated the pupils. A tramp I knew was also deranged at times with his twenty-word string of curses said in one breath about some girl who let him down while he was in his youth. It certainly wasn't some adoring verse but it was still sounded poetical. You could trigger it accidentally (or maliciously) by asking him if he had a wife, or, how's your wife. It was surprising how many gigantic cursers there were around NI. I was told by a Scotsman they had them in Scotland as well.
Then you had your philosophical tramp, living in the hedgerow, even in my time, wearing half a jacket with his trousers held up with a piece of hay rope tied round his waist. He wasn't a bit bothered by his appearance. He would just gabble on and there was no way he could be out-argued There was also no point in asking him if the last bus had gone for the answer would be:
`The last bus won't be gone in your day and mine.'
Then you have the tradition of the hedge schools of the past with a type of vagabond teacher with a knowledge of Greek and Latin, mentioned by William Carleton.
He also described how the school dugouts were made - mostly underground with just the roof of branches and sods showing as a slight bump in the grass.
Whenever there was a lull in the sectarian blitz against our family in Carryduff, as children, we would renew our links with the Protestant children of the area. A favourite activity was digging dugouts. Years later in reading William Carleton I discovered we had been digging them to the same dimensions as described by him. We dug them in mainly abandoned fields that were overrun with rush and whinbush. When hostilities broke out again, and my sisters and I were crossing the fields we might spot a war party and hide in one of the dugouts until they had gone.
It has been said children carry the cultural traditions throughout the generations.
It's often forgotten that there was a an intellectual life in existence among the curious with elementary education. There were the discussion groups in Belfast, even on a Saturday night in small halls for those who didn't drink or play snooker. Dance halls had such a cheap admission fee in the late 1940s/early 1950s you could have a look in in on maybe three of them and in between, go to a discussion in a small hall where the middle-aged met. Of course we were teenage leftists and fancied ourselves intellectually . We'd have a go at the philosophers or argue the ins and out of Tolstoy's Crime and Punishment (6) with these middle-aged and older gents who had had no schooling after the 12 years old. So we had two years extra years on them, having left at 14, or so we thought. The older generation at a guess were mainly Protestants and were carrying out some urban take-off of discussions at the rural crossroads They were very serious about their discussions being better if you came with an empty stomach. They were quite surprised at we youngsters taking life so seriously.
(6) I'm assuming the error is deliberate, indicating that the teenage leftists didn't know as much as they pretended to.
PHONEY WAR IN NORTHERN IRELAND
What I saw of the British Army in our area of Carryduff, County Down during WW2 was one of a tranquil army. A nearby camp had Brit soldiers playing cricket on a manicured cricket pitch while other soldiers watered the flower beds. You could walk into the camp to chat to them. One bizarre scene was of a German reconnaissance plane streaking across the sky with them looking up casually and then carrying on what they were doing. I was 12 years old and aware of what the Soviets were doing on the Eastern Front. The Brit soldiers were enjoying their NI posting. They came to our school to demonstrate their military hardware of machine-guns and armoured cars and later in the evening they held a similar demo in a field for the adults. They spent most of the time drinking bottles of Guinness and flirting with the girls. I think the local Protestant community felt it was England's war but that England wasn't too keen.
The Protestant community certainly resisted conscription when Westminster brought up the subject. Whitehall felt there would be trouble in conscripting the Catholic population and the idea was dropped. There was already large painted signs on the entrance to the Falls Road (the Catholic West Belfast): `Out of bounds to British Troops.' They were put there by the Unionist government and stayed there until well into the 1950s. Then the US Army arrived in Carryduff, took over the British camp, and ploughed up the flower beds and the cricket pitch with their heavy trucks, put up barbed wire and posted sentries. You knew then somebody meant war. Those German reconnaissance kept coming. This time they wouldn't be photographing flower beds and soldiers playing cricket.
THE JOINERS' SHOP IN HARLAND AND WOLFF
Joiners shop in Harland & Wolff
The Joiner's Shop. H&W. There was one Jew who taught the RUC ju-jitsu in his spare time, one Finn, a group of deaf joiners with deaf apprentices (called Dummies then but with no insulting intent) about five overt Catholics, a few coverts, including myself, one joiner from South of the border who was a communist, and up to a thousand very overt Protestants, 20 of whom were in the B'Specials.
AFFECTIONATE RACISM IN NORTHERN IRELAND
In NI it was normal to be racist, and not knowing what it meant. The N-word was around in the 1950s. Shops sold fabric or cloths, describing the colour as N... Brown. Caricatures of black people were on labels of various food jars.
There were a few black people living around the Belfast docks, who had jumped ships. They were
treated well and people in the street stopped to talk to them. A black GP in East Belfast was very
popular. People thought he was African but he came from Liverpool. He was thought to have
special powers like Ju-Ju magic to heal.
Black entertainers came over from Liverpool dressed as Africans with snakes and magic potions
to take part in Barry Amusements, which was on what was called Blitz Square or Red Square
in the centre of Belfast. As a boy, sent to do the shopping from Carryduff, aged 12, I was entranced by their show in a large hut. Half naked black women brought around snakes for the audience to touch while the black men chanted in a strange language, probably Liverpoolian. After that they sold these magic potions of something coloured in a small bottle. My father was ill so I bought a bottle for a shilling out of the shopping money. I thought I would be whacked when I got home for spending that shilling.
My father drank it and said he felt better. I got a pat on the head.
So on one hand we loved these black people and on the other hand we were unconsciously using racist language.
YOUTH VIOLENCE IN LONDON
One of my mixed-race grandsons, by the time he was 15, had two of his class-mates stabbed to death, by black-on-black attacks. That sure traumatised him. That was 30 years ago. And that didn't happen in some run-down ghetto estate but on an estate with a Grade 2 preservation rating, in a central London middle-class area. His mother reluctantly moved the family to the outer-London suburbs to get away from it. Now it's happening there as well. If I had of been my grandson's age, I would probably have joined the communist party in order to try and make sense of the situation but that wasn't an option for him when the movement was beginning to be riddled with neo-liberalism. Instead, as a teenager, he became a Muslim, in order to achieve peace-of-mind, and practises as it should be practised.
His father died not long ago and I was at his funeral - a huge event which overflowed on to the pavement, from the church, blocking the traffic, with the mourner's cars on double-yellow lines, with traffic wardens and police keeping well away. I had driven there myself and there was a great sense of freedom of being able to park where I wanted. My daughter and myself were the only white faces there. It's a long time since I felt such warmth from a community. It's hard to describe, certainly it was very relaxed in the usually socially-cold environ of a large city. Black youth killings are also a tremendous problem for the black community as well. I know a couple of black women who are afraid to go out at night because of black youth activity in the area.
Scatter-gun stop-and-search methods can provoke hostile feeling in the young. I have experienced it in Belfast as a teenager from the RUC when I decided to take a shortcut through a Catholic area. I have experienced it in London during the 50s when a cop and his dog decided to stop me when hearing my accent. I was bloody furious on both occasions.
I have three mixed-race grandsons and they have been stopped and searched, as teenagers, and they haven't liked it. Years later it didn't happen to them. As teenagers they felt their colour was the reason for being stopped and searched. In later years they realised if was mainly their youth that had caused them to be stopped and searched. Now it doesn't happen to them as adults.
But it's all too complex a problem. Bringing up racial problems only causes more racism I found. It might be best to leave it alone.
The early 1950s in London was a bad stabbing period as well among white youth - some Teddy Boys. It was flick-knife-time. Youth were being hanged by the authorities during this time. Islington was a dangerous area for clashing chapters of the Teddy Boys. Like black youth outsiders weren't affected, it was Teddy-on-Teddy. A 6 feet 7 inches policemen was stabbed to death when he tried to intervene in one case. Tall Teddy Boys went into hiding for they knew one of them - anyone - would hang. But cops were out to get the tallest of them, and they succeeded in tracking down one with a similar height to the dead cop. He was tried and hanged.
I was in the Islington Young Communist League, having left the Hampstead branch when a conscripted member appeared at a meeting in his officer's army uniform, talking of thicks (working-class conscripts). We held meetings at the Nags Head pub area in Holloway during 1954. It was gang-time with others besides the Teds, in competition to slice up rivals. (all white then). Most Teddy Boys and their partner Teddy Girls weren't violent. A non-Ted gang surrounded one of our open-air meetings. We didn't particularly see this as a menace. They were young like us and the police hated us for our politics as they did the gangs. Like good evangelists we hoped to bring them into the YCL. One of the gang began to jeer at a YCL member for her weight. I was more or less just over on the boat and I hadn't grasped the seriousness of the London youth gangs so I intervened to protect her. I was told later I could have been stabbed to death. Later I ran into the same gang in the Seven Sisters Road and surrounded. The gang-leader asked me if I wanted to join them. Stupidity sometime gets you to go places. for I thought it a great honour on being asked to join them. Later I learned three of them had been arrested for kicking another youth to death and hanged. Prisoners at Pentonville described them as screaming and kicking and crying for their mothers as they were dragged to the scaffold. Grim times against a grim backcloth of a smog-laden poverty-stricken islington.
SCHOOLDAYS IN COUNTY DOWN
Clontonacally Primary School, Carryduff
The illnesses at my elementary school in the County Down countryside from 1938 - post WW2, were pneumonia, diphtheria, (called The Dip) and scarlet fever. There was one death from each illness. The school never closed even when a number of pupils were bed-ridden with a severe flu, with one death. The whole idea was the unhealthy, the malnourished suffered these illnesses. That seemed true enough for the school had children from Fairview Gardens (WW1 ex-army huts) and also, from Cedar Valley (also, WW1 ex-army huts). All in the middle of rich farmland. The first death from scarlet fever was the seven-year-old-girl Mari Gold (my father said she must be Jewish, but at that age I didn't understand what that meant). She lived in the deprived Cedar Valley huts. The whole school of 82 pupils went into a depressive silence for a couple of days.
Then there was the eight-year-old Skin O'Neill (from the Protestant O'Neills). He seemed to have permanent anorexia (also, from Cedar Valley). He caught The Dip, followed by pneumonia, but survived. He was quite a stick-like sight with his head permanently shaven against lice. .He wore a spit-through jersey even during the snow-falls. His breath smelt of rancid lard. Lard on stale bread was the diet of many living in the huts. Taunt him and you got a stone fired at your head with a great accuracy. I did once and went on to admire his skill.
The sons of well-off farmers didn't seem to catch anything, plus the daughters of the quarry owners, or the children of the top civil servant at Stormont, nor the professor's daughter.
There was an unbelievable lack of concern about the people from the huts, by everyone in the area, never mind the Unionist government agencies. That was their destiny, their ill-luck. All they got from the better-off children were taunts and jeers.
Somehow it was their fault.
I was ordered to share a desk with one girl, as an eight-year-old. It was the rancid lard breath, the torn black dress, the blue ointment on her hair against lice that had me holding my nose and putting a hand over my mouth.
As a young teenager she became a foul-mouthed potato-picker. She was raped by another one in the fields, egged on by the other potato-pickers, both male and female. But it wasn't called rape then. It just seemed to be a bit of fun. Her rapist laughed as he boasted about it.
Then, aged 21, I got the shock of my life when I read, in 1953 about the trial of John Christie, the London Notting Hill serial killer. My sometime desk-sharer, from the huts, had gone to live in London, and had become a sex worker. She was murdered by Christie.
SMALLPOX, DIPTHERIA AND YELLOW FEVER
Maybe people are just too healthy today. I was one of generation who had a smallpox vaccination in the early 1930s. My parents said people almost started a riot there were so many wanting it.
I remember the rush for the diphtheria vaccinations when children were dying from it, and the plea to get something to combat pneumonia, which was also a child killer, during the 1930s - early 1940s.
Yellow fever was feared, especially around the port of Belfast, when it was being carried in by crew members from Asia. There was special plot of land separated within sight of the Belfast shipyard, by water channels, where crew members were buried. A ship flying the fever-flag coming into the port was isolated and the bodies carried off. They were carried off by volunteers labourers who were paid the equivalent of a week's wages for a two-hour task. As 14- year-olds office boys, we got on to makeshift rafts and toured the waters around H&W. We were warned never to go near Yellow Fever Island, and never to sail the rafts, after two boys were run down by a cargo ship and drowned. We used the rafts and still visited Yellow-Fever Island - mass graves over a couple of centuries with rough headstones in Chinese and Indian languages.
DONEGAL MEN ON THE POST-WAR BUILDING SITES
I worked with some of the Donegal men in the highlands of Scotland when electricity-producing dams were being built in the 1950s. There was a15-year-old boy there pretending to be 18. A job he had was carrying bags of nails and screws up a perpendicular steel ladder 100 feet in height, on the side of the dam, on his shoulder, and it sleeting. At first, I couldn't bear to look. He didn't find it a problem. We had to tell him not to go round saying how young he was, and how he fooled the employer, in case he got the sack.
A Belfast man rhymed to him one day::
`Does you're ma know you're out
Does your da drink stout
Does your granny wheel the mangle round the yard.'
His answer was:
No, I got the boat over on my own.
Two older Donegal men controlled the gambling - done after work. We lived in a former German POW camp of Nissan huts. There was even a German carpenter, an ex-POW, again, living in the same hut.
There were quite a few former weavers of Donegall tweed among them. They still operated as a cottage-industry and were put out of business when cheating began by stretching the threads too tight to save on material, as one of them explained.
There were some Scottish unionists on the site who just loathed the Irish. They also cursed the Lithuanians and Ukrainians on the site as Nazi collaborators during WW2 and hoped the Soviet Union would catch. up with them one day. The Donegal men wanted to kick them off the top of the dam but were persuaded that it wasn't a good idea. It was obvious that the UK (Atlee's Labour was in power) knew who they were and allowed these East Europeans in, to be hidden away in the highlands. They had their own separate huts, which were out-of-bounds to the rest of us (a lot of these collaborators were also hidden away in the coalmine. Coalmining ex-servicemen complained about their Swastika tattoos)
I did notice the tong syndrome among the Donegal men. They seemed to favour hitting heads against walls or if tackling two of their kind - cracking their heads together.
I worked with a Donegal man on a London building site. One day, after work we went to the pub. Two Londoners sitting opposite us started to run down the Irish. They obviously wanted a fight. Before I knew what was happening, Feargus, the Donegal man threw the table over, that was loaded with pints of Red Barrel beer, and cracked their two heads together. He then casually walked out, followed by me, as casually as possible. He called that action Donegall Ju-Jitsu. Normally he was a quiet friendly person.
Up in the highlands the favourite camp's showing of films were Westerns. The favourite was one was called SHANE - the fight against the big landowners, on the prairie, by the small farmer. They cheered and wept their way through that one, and wanted to see it over and over again, as Alan Ladd, (actor) the lone gunman took on the hired killer of the small farmer. I couldn't believe the emotions shown there one night. There was something innocent about these usually tough young builders. It was a unique generation.