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THE LUCK OF THE IRISH

Published by Martin on March 4, 2021
Detail from a photograph of Tom and Agnes Minogue (my grandparents) with their family

The memoir opens with an account of my paternal Irish grandfather, Thomas (Tom) Minogue, who came to England in the late 1890s to seek his fortune, the countryside of Ireland holding out scant promise in that respect. Good fortune did indeed strike him in the shape of Agnes, sweet-faced daughter of Michael and Mary Harrison, who ran a boarding house for Irish workers in Poppleton, in the city of York. Mary Harrison, my great-grandmother. A formidable matriarch, she was celebrated in local newspapers at her death as Pocklington’s first centenarian and described as the ‘Mother of Thousands’.

I was reminded of this background by a report in today’s Guardian, 4th March 2021. It records that Pontin’s holiday camp operators had been caught blacklisting people with Irish surnames, saying ‘we do not want these people on our parks’. They also sought to exclude Gypsies and Travellers. All this was reported as a widespread practice for many years. The Executive Director of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) judged that this practice amounted to unlawful racial discrimination. A leading charity commented that it was ‘hard not to draw comparisons with the signs displayed in hotels and boarding houses fifty years ago, explicitly barring Irish and black people’. More than 100 years ago, my great-grandmother’s boarding house gave a haven to young men who elsewhere had been repulsed by signs reading ‘No Dogs and No Irish’. It’s striking that this kind of discrimination was still alive and well in the 1970s, and continues, if clandestinely, to this day.

Tom and Agnes married on 13th January 1902. My father Martin (yes, same name as me, another story told in Chapter Three of ‘Shifting Classes’), came somewhere in the middle of Tom and Agnes’s 11 children. Though a British citizen, he was 100% Irish by blood line, so in my book that makes me half Irish, a calculation further complicated by my mother’s Celtic inheritance through a Scottish maternal line. I regard myself as something of a mixture, part British, part Irish, part Scottish, and not 100% of anything. This came in useful in a later part of my working life, when I frequently travelled to and worked in countries where the British, or more specifically the ‘English’, were not universally admired. I would shamelessly claim to be Irish in these circumstances, even ready if need be to sing one of my Dad’s old Irish favourites. Danny Boy always went down a treat, and my work always went well the day after.

WORLD BOOK DAY

As today is World Book Day it seems appropriate to say what I’m reading just now. This is Shuggie Bain, amazingly a debut novel by Douglas Stuart, and winner of the 2020 Booker Prize (most deservedly so, something you cannot always say about these awards). Set in post-Thatcher Glasgow, it’s a compelling account of the brutal consequences of poverty and addiction (to alcohol rather than drugs), told in episodes which make you wince. At the centre is a mother, Agnes Bain, who cannot cope with the bad hands that life has dealt her in a persistently macho male-dominated society. She longs to find love, and seeks this desperately through her three children, but all in the end desert her, struggling to cope with their own lives and problems. There is plenty of warmth, and that tough brand of humour you find in downtrodden places, but the sense of horror and tragedy is always just below the skin. Above all, it rings utterly true, a revelation of the desperate lives many people lead in our deeply damaged society, and the absence from these lives of any real hope. A must-read.                                  

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MEMOIR WRITING: a labour of love and frustration

Published by Martin on March 3, 2021
Photo of Nick and Ben, my two fine sons
Nick and Ben, my two sons, to whom my memoir is dedicated

Why it’s a labour of love almost goes without saying. It must be in part a hymn to the past, and if it’s a family memoir (as Shifting Classes is) it is rooted in many personal histories. You will be writing about the closest members of your family, and your closest friends. The very act of writing up these personal stories leads you to relive all kinds of past intimacies. Many will be loving and happy events, milestones in a life such as births, weddings, celebrations of educational or sporting or occupational success. Some of the intimacies will be complex and difficult: angry squabbles, misunderstandings, clouds without silver linings. As an author, you give yourself the power to interpret all these differing relationships, to draw your own portraits of people. These interpretations may be challenged outside the pages of the book, but not within them. The power this gives the memoirist is not to be used lightly. On the other hand, you will always be held accountable by your readers. Those in the inner circles of your story will, as readers, be able to fight back: to criticise, correct, disagree. As I remark in the Preface, honouring my mother’s favourite phrase, ‘the living truth’ has many versions, and I would never wish to claim superiority for my own version, as set out in this memoir (I will discuss another time the interesting issue of whether there is a blurred line between fact and fiction, either in memoir, biography, or creative forms of literature.)

Where does the frustration come in? Well, not with the writing itself: in my experience, once you are started the writing takes over, and you can’t stop. Of course, there are irritations along the way, often to do with the technology (hard-won text lost through computer glitches, confusion over which of several versions is the latest corrected one). But the major frustration comes at the point where you have a version you are sufficiently pleased with to consider that it might be publishable. Here you enter a battle zone littered with the corpses of would-be authors, shot down by hatchet-faced publishers or simply left for dead by literary agents who don’t even tell you why. It’s not the rejection letters that hurt, at least someone has had a considering look; no, what gets to you is the Silence, the Not Knowing, until after a few weeks you have to accept that any considering look given to your work was probably one of contempt.

But you can still be saved from all this frustration, as I have been, by the Magic Hat of Self-Publishing, from which a wide variety of rabbits may now spring: and rabbits may in fact be found in Chapter Six: Country Life: Happiness and Miseries.

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MEMOIR: a commentaryMartin in the garden, summer 2020

MEMOIR: a commentary

Published by Martin on March 1, 2021

Hello, I’m Martin Minogue, and though I have a considerable number of publications to my name in the form of academic books and articles, this is my first ever blog post at the ripe old age of 83. I’m doing this to comment on and expand the family memoir that I have now published (for details click here). This memoir covers only the first three decades of my life, from 1937 to 1965. But at its centre is a working class family whose roots reach well back into the nineteenth century, which lived lives of hardship and poverty, yet saw their three children succeed and prosper in ways denied to their own generation. It’s both a grim story and a heart-warming one, and a slice of social history that deserves to be recorded. My parents were unsung heroes, like so many of the ordinary working people of this country. A historian myself, I’m all too well aware that the voices and experiences of these ordinary families are rarely heard. My motive in writing the memoir was that my family’s story, specifically my parents’ stories, should be told, their heroic qualities recognised. Their own voices are heard in this account too, for I rely in part on a very detailed handwritten account my father left of his life as a farm labourer, itself a rarity, and the less organised but more creative reminiscences of my mother, including her poems.

A second motive was to tell this story to the family generation that succeeds me and my two sisters, (Maureen and Sally). Because of our (and their) educational and career successes, our children (and their children) are firmly and inescapably middle class. They know that their origins are in part in the working classes, but have had no experience themselves of what this meant, of what struggles this hard and impoverished background consisted. How could they, enjoying as they did comfortable homes and jobs and incomes well beyond the reach of their grandparents, and earlier generations of their family? So a big motivation for me was to let my own children (Nick and Ben, to whom the book is dedicated), my nephews and nieces, my grandchildren, my great nieces and nephews, know what their own social roots were, to understand where they come from.

A final motivation for me was to set this personal and family story in a wider context, both historical and contemporary. This story runs over almost two centuries in these terms and examines deep changes in rural social life and labour over that time. My parents and their forebears combined several significant strands in British social, economic and political history, my mother’s family drawn from the mining communities in Geordieland, my father’s family bringing together histories both of Irish immigrant labour and English agricultural labour. Part of their family history was rooted in a Catholic aristocratic estate in Yorkshire, on which my Irish grandfather worked for 28 years as a gardener and farm labourer, and my mother as a domestic servant for almost six years.  My own career would lead to interaction with leading members of the aristocracy in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in the 1960s. Prior to that, Cambridge University provided a context of quite sharp social differences. I am at pains to show in this memoir how significant social class relations continued to be in British life in the first half of the twentieth century.

But I also go on to argue, in a final chapter, that class structures and inequalities have continued to be crucial in dictating life opportunities right up to the present day. While the clear social changes in the post 1945 period have made class relations and identities more fluid, this still leaves us with  a twenty-first century Britain in which at least a third of its people live in conditions of poverty relative to the other two thirds, so that as I write, we can see some purchase in the words of the traditional old song:    

              It’s the same the whole world over,

              It’s the poor what gets the blame,

              It’s the rich what gets the pleasure

              Isn’t it a blooming shame?

I think it is a blooming shame, and recent social statistics appear to justify another old chestnut:

              The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

But I don’t want my potential readers to think that this is going to be just another miserabilist, doom and gloom-laden analysis of our modern times. In my childhood and teenage years I lived in five different villages and went to five different schools. These years were full of hardship and poverty for my parents, and often enough for me and my sisters. But they were full of warmth and laughter too, as some of the comic anecdotes I tell about Yorkshire village life will demonstrate. (This version of village life has now disappeared, so if you want to know what it used to be like, I describe it in the  earlier chapters of the memoir.) We lived another commonplace label, ‘poor but happy’, though this is one my mother would have scornfully rejected during many of the grim years, when there was nothing funny about some of their living conditions. In this blog, I’ll attempt to describe both sides of the coin.

www.martinminogue.co.uk

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