McAlpines Men

Most helpful customer reviews on Amazon. Not a bad book, interesting if you lived through these times as I did. Probably not as interesting if you had no personal involvement. Great book about the itinerant life of the Irish Navvy in the UK. A good mixture of history, anecdotes and personal experiences. A well brought together book that merges testimonials and some reflection from the author and the contributors.

It rouses sadness and pride in the protagonists endevour in what were difficult times for all. For me it was a bittersweet nostalgia piece that allowed me an insight into the lives of relatives no longer with us.

No customer reviews

Just read the Kindle edition of this book. Although the book is very intresting, part way through, I started to read the exact same text again!

If this is a publishing fault, or not, It kept happening on quite a few occasions. Kind of killed it for me. This book reminded me of a couple of books I read, about a couple of well known people in Birmingham. Work the swath turner, the float and thresher.

Navigation menu

The things he couldn't do explains why the Irish all huddled for comfort in Camden Town, Kilburn or Willesden. Ask a woman to go for a walk. Drive a motor car. Wear a collar in comfort. Speak with men wearing collars That was the traditional Irish exile, forced from a barren farm to earn a living on building sites. There is an extra-ordinary lack of film record of this, one of the most persistent and highly-charged of population movements: A rare example is Philip Donnellan's minute The Irishmen.

Shot in by the excellent cameraman Michael Williams on the building sites and in London Irish pubs and homes, it was made just at the point where the Irish were shifting upwards socially.

The Irishmen discloses the physical horror, to them, of urban England: It underlines their baggage of religious belief and intolerance, of primitive patriotism and even muddled pride in their manual achievements over here. But mostly it shows the Irishman as a wounded beast, part nomad, part squatter.

One worker describes his first impression: Even though the day was coming out, it was as if it didn't want to, as though Manchester wasn't entitled to daylight. They had come from luminous, rural Ireland with its eternally cleansing winds. Where were all the cows? Nothing in sight, all I could see was buildings and tracks.

Where were they all leading to? In the 50s and 60s, the Irish were building England, as one man on the building sites put it belligerently in the film: They were all Irishmen. Who built the road at the Nag's Head? A man from Dingle. That was the man who put it through with Irish labour. If you pride your life, don't join, by Christ, with McAlpine's Fusiliers.

In the 50s, the English confronted them with the first of a series of prejudices. In Donnellan's film, a man angrily rebuts this: I've got a brother with a leg and an arm missing that fought for this country. My father fought from to , two uncles killed at Dunkirk and my brother is at home now with a guineas-a-week British army pension. By the 70s, it was their perceived sympathy with the IRA bombing campaigns. They kept their heads down after the Aldershot bombing - when some stores refused to stock Kerrygold butter though Guinness was never withdrawn.

The Birmingham bombing brought a deep insecurity to the settled community.