Richard Kirkland

Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. 232 pages.

ISBN: 9781350230057

Richard Kirkland sets out to tell the cultural history of Irish London in a period well covered by social historians but less by those interested in culture. The Irish cultural life of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-centuries London seems to have become lost or hidden, because of the seeming divide between those Irish trying to scrape a living in very difficult circumstances and a sort-of Anglo-Irish elite, comfortable, yet critical, of life as an Irish person in the imperial capital. Even as the latter became more culturally aware of their Irishness during the Gaelic Revival, their milieu was so different from the bulk of Irish in London, that never the twain did meet.

Admirably, Kirkland shows that this story is much more complicated. He begins with the infamous “rookeries” where the poorest of the poor Irish immigrants in London lived. Situated in warrens of narrow streets and dead-end lanes close to the modern-day “West End”, the poor housing contained thousands of Irish living in confined quarters with no plumbing. Many considered these rookeries dens of poverty, pestilence, and crime. They attracted numbers of Victorian reformers and were, beginning in the 1850s, eventually cleared. Yet, as poor and deprived as they were, they could still be areas of Irish culture. In the most (in)famous rookery at St. Giles, for example, a distinct Irish culture in residents’ funerary practices developed. St. Giles also produced a St. Patrick’s Day procession where men, women, and children paraded with shamrock on their clothes, and not just near the rookery but elsewhere too. Kirkland quotes a London paper noting that they “‘issued forth from the rookery, St Giles, preceded by a band of music, proceeded up Oxford Street and Regent Street into Piccadilly, and on to Hyde Park-corner’” (45). After a celebration in the park, they “‘returned in the same order to St. Giles’s’” (45). What a sight of Irishness it must have been for the “great and good” of London. This organization and activism, Kirkland highlights, was later reflected in labour disputes, particularly the match-girl strike of 1888 in which Irish women were prominent. Ultimately, even as the rookeries were cleared and their populations moved to other parts of the city, Kirkland concludes that “the desperate necessity for hospitality that life in the St. Giles Rooker demanded continued to resonate in the historical memory of the London Irish, emphasizing the centrality of endurance, resourcefulness and community” (51).

One ugly trope that continued for the non-Irish of London was that of criminality, exacerbated during Irish republican Fenian violence and “dynamite war” from the late 1860s through the 1880s. The sheer callousness of the bombing campaign, led predominantly by Irish Americans, forced most of the Irish in London to turn their backs on Irish separatism. A declining Irish-born population, as many more did not need to leave Ireland in the post-Great Famine period, meant that second-generation Irish, now speaking English first, with an English accent, could take advantage of the opportunities the capital city presented. They did not need Fenian bombers jeopardising their upward mobility. As a result, Kirkland believes, there developed “a blindness” (74) among the Irish in London to the increasing radicalization of politics in Ireland in the leadup to World War I. In the meantime, Irish London could bask in the glow of the increasing success of the Irish Home Rule movement in Westminster, and share in the success of Irish exhibitions, like the one at London Olympia in 1888, which highlighted a distinctive Irishness but one within the United Kingdom and the empire and one progressing in both agriculture and industry.

This new sense of pride in a respectable Irishness, however, could lead people back to Irish realities. Alongside the rookery heritage of the poor Irish, we have the image of the middle-class Irish with their Irish Literary Club or the leadership of revivalists like W. B. Yeats who lived in the city for long periods in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.  The divide between the elite high culture of the salon and the more plebian one outside it could be bridged with the public events of said Literary Society, especially the branch south of the Thames in Southwark. Its lectures attracted the interest not just of the traditional Anglo-Irish who maintained a residence in London, but also the increasing National-school educated coming off farms and from villages and towns in Ireland to work in the burgeoning British civil service. Among them were one Michael Collins and his sister, and one P. S. O’Hegarty from Cork who worked for the Post Office. Second-generation Irish Londoners could also find new ways to express their Irishness. This new blood in London, educated and disillusioned with Irish politics over the Parnellite split of the 1890s, were part of what Roy Foster has called Ireland’s “revolutionary generation”. New revival organizations such as the Gaelic League, initially the purview of Anglo-Irish antiquarians, grew in the city, rising to forty-four branches. The Gaelic Athletic Association developed too. Those groups, heavily infiltrated by the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), brought many of the new and old Irish to radical Irish politics, including the young Michael Collins who was sworn into the IRB in London. One could live in a very Irish milieu in London without having much cultural contact with the majority population.

And yet, though it was reaching its climax, the music hall tradition in London displayed a more popular form of Irishness. One of the queens of the popular stage, Bessie Bellwood, was born Elizabeth Ann Catherine Mahoney, the daughter of Irish immigrants, in South London. Kirkland lists the numerous musical plays featured in the London music halls from the 1890s to 1916 including “‘He’ll Forget Ould Ireland’ (1906)” and “‘Sing an Irish Song’ (1911)” to “‘Arrah! Go On, Now, Miss Emerald Isle’ (1915)” and “‘As Long As You’re Irish, You’ll Do’ (1916)” (140). The advanced nationalists of the Gaelic League and GAA, as well as the Anglo-Irish literary types, looked down their noses at the stage-Irishness of these performances and worried that the Irish in London, new and old, had been corrupted into Anglicization because of them. The performances remained popular, though as did moderate Irish politics. The Irish radicals like Collins returned to Ireland to avoid British conscription and fight for Ireland, but of the 5,000 or so Irish Volunteers who had signed up in London to protect Irish Home Rule, only about sixty remained after Irish Parliamentary Party leader William Redmond asked those same volunteers to join the British army and fight against Germany.

Kirkland concludes, however, with those handful of Irish Londoners who did stay in the Irish Volunteers, some of whom made it to the Easter Rising in 1916. Those who did, and survived, discovered a sense of Irishness unavailable to them in London, even with its Gaelic League branches and GAA clubs. They had proved that they had not been corrupted by England and that their English origin and accent were the only things English about them. The Rising itself and the government executions of its leaders, Kirkland surmises, gave the Irish in London another opportunity to express Irishness beyond the music hall or a pretty exhibition painting. A cultural Irishness linked to a more political and radical Irishness could now “provide comfort at times of psychological and material duress” (201). Thus, Kirkland believes, this heightened Irishness in London in times of Ireland’s political need “was not regarded as uselessly archaic or inimical to the sometimes harsh modernity of London life but rather functioned as an essential element in the constitution of a distinctive if frequently bifurcated shared identity” (201).

Kirkland does a masterful job here of bringing some kind of cohesion to the sense of Irish culture in this period. First, it was vibrant and existed outside the salons. Second, its expression crossed class and natal bounds. Finally, it ebbed and flowed over time connected to events in Ireland even, as he highlights, many Irish in London tried to ignore the realities of Ireland when they did not, at times literally, explode on their doorstep. The bifurcation he mentions was there. I wonder, though, if he downplays it a bit. We do not hear much from those Irish Londoners who went to all those “Oirish” music hall plays rather than lectures at the Irish Literary Society meetings or Gaelic League language classes. The cultural luminaries such as Yeats and Dora Sigerson, or the radicals like Collins and O’Hegarty, are more prominent here. Of course, the crowds of Irish Londoner music hall attendees and the thousands who ignored the likes of Collins and O’Hegarty, instead joining the London Irish Rifles battalions of the British Army to go and fight in France, do not feature much culturally. One wonders, for example, how the remaining members of the London Irish Rifles, who were transferred to other Irish regiments in the British Army at their reorganization after suffering massive casualties, felt about their bifurcated identity as Irish Londoners? Nonetheless, Kirland has highlighted that culture among the Irish diaspora in Britain is as important in understanding their lives as immigrants, or the children of immigrants, as their economic, social and political status. I recommend highly this book for anyone interested in the history of Irish Britain but also in the culture of diasporas.