Irish London

A Cultural History 1850-1916

Richard Kirkland

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350133204
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern British History
• Index: History

Winner of the 2022 British Association of Irish Studies (BAIS) Book Prize In the years following the Irish Famine (1845–52), London became one of the cities of Ireland. The number of Irish in London swelled to over 100, 000 and from this mass migration emerged a distinctive and vibrant culture based on a shared sense of history, identity and experience. In this book, Richard Kirkland brings together elements in Irish London's culture and history that had previously only been understood separately or indeed largely overlooked (as in the case of women's' contributions to London Irish politics and culture). In particular, Kirkland makes resonant cultural connections between Irish and cockney performers in the music halls, Irish trade fairs, temperance marches, the Fenian dynamite war of the 1880s, St Patrick's Day events, and the later cultural agitation of revivalists such as W.B. Yeats and Katharine Tynan. Irish London: A Cultural History 1850–1916 is both a significant contribution to our understanding of Irish emigrant communities in London at this time and an insightful case study for the comparative fields of cultural history and urban migration studies.

1

‘Nature intended Paddy for a rural existence’: The St Giles Rookery and its afterlives

The Editur of the Times Paper

Sur, – May we beg and beseech your proteckshion and power. We are Sur, as it may be, livin in a Wilderniss, so far as the rest of London knows anything of us, or as the rich and great people care about. We live in muck and filth. We aint got no priviz, no dust bins, no drains, no water-splies, and no drain or suer in the hole place. The Suer Company, in Greek St., Soho Square, all great, rich and powerfool men, take no notice watsomedever of our cumplaints. The Stenche of a Gully-hole is disgustin. We all of us suffur, and numbers are ill, and if the Colera comes Lord help us.

Some gentlemans comed yesterday, and we thought they was comishioners from the Suer Company, but they was complaining of the noosance and stenche our lanes and corts was to them in New Oxforde Street. They was much surprized to see the seller in No. 12, Carrier St., in our lane, where a child was dyin from fever, and would not beleave that Sixty persons sleep in it every night. This here seller you couldent swing a cat in, and the rent is five shillings a week; but theare are greate many sich deare sellars. Sur, we hope you will let us have our cumplaints put into your hinfluenshall paper, and make these landlords of our houses and these comishioners (the friends we spose of the landlords) make our houses decent for Christions to live in. Preaye Sir com and see us, for we are living like piggs, and it aint faire we shoulde be so ill treted.

We are your respeckfull servents in Church Lane, Carrier St., and the other corts. Teusday, Juley 3, 1849.

John Scott, Emen Scott, Joseph Crosbie, Hanna Crosbie [and fifty others].¹

Located at the southern edge of St Giles in the Fields at the northwest end of Drury Lane, the St Giles ‘Rookery’ was the first and most notorious Irish district in nineteenth-century London. About eight acres in extent, the Rookery was a perpetually decaying slum seemingly always on the verge of social and economic collapse; Lynn Hollen Lees in her influential history of the Irish in Victorian London, Exiles of Erin, described it simply as ‘one of the foulest places in London’.² At the heart of this sprawling settlement was a tangled mass of alleys and walkways, which became known during the eighteenth century as the ‘Irish Rookery’, the ‘Holy Land’ or ‘Little Dublin’. Here the residents were almost entirely of Irish extraction and the district often served as the first accommodation for those newly arrived in the city. This was in part because, as Roger Swift notes, ‘it had a reputation in Ireland for being generous in poor relief’, although – in Swift’s account, at least – this generosity had the side effect of attracting ‘the least desirable Irish who quickly became demoralized and absorbed into a rookery of thieves and beggars’.³ Even by the standards of the time, living conditions at St Giles were appalling. A survey of 7 Church Lane, a typical property in the Rookery, from 1849 reported that:

the privy had been taken away and the cesspool covered with boards and earth. The soil underneath oozed up through the boards, saturating the earth with foetid matter. In one of the back rooms several Irish families lived. […] The room opposite was occupied by only three families in the day, but as many as could be got into it at night.⁴

It was out of sheer desperation, then, that in the same year fifty-four inhabitants of St Giles wrote a letter of complaint to the Times, which it published under the headline ‘A Sanitary Remonstrance’. At this point, the already terrible conditions had been worsened by overcrowding as a result of the Famine in Ireland and the piecemeal demolition of other parts of the Rookery. It is mildly surprising that the Times published the letter at all, although its condescension in leaving unaltered its many spelling errors – an editorial practice it did not follow for its other correspondents – is more predictable and was possibly intended to evoke a mode of Dickensian pathos. Despite this, there is reason to be grateful for the decision, as ‘A Sanitary Remonstrance’ constitutes one of the few examples we have of testimony by, as opposed to about, actual Rookery inhabitants. Certainly its depiction of their suffering and the force of their appeal for relief remain vivid. As Thomas Beames noted in 1852, ‘Rookeries are bad, but what are they to Irish Rookeries?’⁵

As with several other sites of urban deprivation in London, the Rookery was established on the site of an old leper colony and was organized around a series of interlinked galleried courts that were essentially medieval in origin. It was this confusion of alleys that suggested to the curious observer the image of the labyrinth, dark and impenetrable. Charles Knight’s extensive report of 1842 describes the Rookery as ‘one great maze of narrow crooked paths crossing and intersecting in labyrinthine convolutions’.⁶ Similarly, John Timbs’s retrospective account from 1855 recalled that the district was:

one dense mass of houses, through which curved narrow tortuous lanes, from which again diverged close courts – one great mass, as if the houses had originally been one block of stone, eaten by slugs into numberless small chambers and connecting passages. The lanes were thronged with loiterers; and stagnant gutters, and piles of garbage and filth infested the air. In the windows, wisps of straw, old hats, and lumps of bed-tick or brown paper, alternated with shivered pains of broken glass; the walls were the colour of bleached soot, and doors fell from their hinges and worm-eaten posts.⁷

As Timbs’s horrified description indicates, the Rookery was a disorientating place that for many years defied the attempts of London’s developers to impose order and rationality on its seeming chaos. To enter its environs was to wilfully surrender one’s status under the law and to place oneself in the jurisdiction of quite different social economies. To express this differently, what happened in the Rookery had a regulation of its own; there were frequent stories of people unwittingly straying into the maze of alley ways and never emerging. It was, as the Morning Chronicle put it as early as 1834, a ‘place known as a receptacle for persons of the lowest description’, a base for predatory ‘barefooted gangs’ of young Irish men who ‘in the most discordant strains bawl out sea songs to the annoyance of peaceable inhabitants’.⁸ It was also what passed for home for hundreds of the city’s beggars. Friedrich Engels would be still more vivid, reporting with horror that:

here live the poorest of the poor, the worst paid workers with thieves and the victims of prostitution indiscriminately huddled together, the majority Irish, or of Irish extraction, and those who have not yet sunk in the whirlpool of moral ruin which surrounds them, sinking daily deeper, losing daily more and more of their power to resist the demoralizing influence of want, filth, and evil surroundings.⁹

The worst of the Rookery was yet to come, however. Following the Famine of the mid-1840s, a new wave of Irish migrants swelled the already overcrowded settlement to the point where it reached near breaking point. This created conditions of almost unimaginable squalor culminating in a serious cholera outbreak in 1848. As this indicates, the Rookery’s final years, before its prolonged demolition from the early 1850s onwards, were also its most traumatic and it became a resonant symbol for urban poverty at its most extreme. As Edward Walford’s Old and New London of 1897 noted: ‘The parish of St Giles, with its nests of close and narrow alleys and courts inhabited by the lowest class of Irish costermongers, has passed into a by-word as the synonym of filth and squalor.’¹⁰ As this chapter will discuss, there were other activities going on in the Rookery that challenge this vision of the Rookery as little more than a breaking yard for the human spirit. Nonetheless, there was nothing unusual in the sad fate of George Masters, an elderly beggar, who was reported to have starved to death in the Rookery in 1837.¹¹

As such accounts constitute the predominant way in which the life of the Rookery has been understood, the need to speak with greater historical acuity about Walford’s ‘lowest class of Irish costermongers’ remains vivid. Certainly such lives deserve better than to be remembered only through the often abusive clichés of the evangelists and philanthropists who frequently attempted to penetrate the Rookery’s mysteries and who recorded their activity with zealous detail. More broadly, a reorientation of the history of Irish experience in London that locates the St Giles Rookery as a point of beginning and that speaks meaningfully about those that lived there is important, not because the Rookery was home to a particularly large number of Irish people (its population was significant but not as a proportion of the overall Irish population in the city, which by 1851 was something like 109,000 or 5 per cent of the city as a whole) but rather because of the way in which the intensity of Rookery life, its proximity to sites of economic and high cultural value, its fostering of the Irish language, and the lessons it can teach us about the experience of Irish emigration under capitalism enable new stories to be told and familiar accounts of the experience of the Irish diaspora to be recast.¹² For many, the Rookery symbolized social desperation, the ruin of the Famine, cultural amnesia and economic deprivation. Yet it also spoke of self-reliance and an acknowledgement of the social contract implicit to the idea of hospitality; as David Green has observed of Rookery life, those newly arrived could expect to benefit by gaining the means for basic survival but ‘the participants in exchange had to be accountable and subject to communal sanctions’.¹³ As such, it was recognized that it was only through social combination that ultimately any form of long-term individual existence could be countenanced.

Understood in these terms, the Rookery was an ethnic ghetto where the impossibility of assimilation was imposed both from above – by the urban economies of a city that placed the migrant Irish somewhere near the bottom (if not quite the actual bottom) of subaltern Victorian London – and from below, in that the Rookery itself exercised communal sanctions and protected its borders. It resisted the rule of law both figuratively and literally, organizing itself against the police raids that increased in frequency during the 1840s.¹⁴ Ultimately, the will of the Rookery was only to be broken by its demolition. Traces of it remained, however, in the memory and experience of those who were dispersed from its narrow alleys and scattered across the rest of the city. With this, the Rookery became a state of mind and a powerful metaphor for Irish social and cultural survival in London through the following decades of the nineteenth century and later. Alongside this figuration as a marker of Ireland, the Rookery also played an important role in the story of London itself – usually serving as a symbol of the residual, the decaying and the uselessly medieval. The district was notorious for obstructing new commercial developments, which, in Engels’s phrase, first ‘penetrated’ the Rookery in 1844.¹⁵ Such accounts present the Rookery’s habitual condition as permanently decaying, always anachronistic and perpetually on the verge of being swept away by the twin forces of rising land prices in the fashionable west end of the city and the insistent calls of social reformers. Yet despite this teetering existence, its demise was seemingly always deferred. The Rookery clung on, in ever-diminishing forms, for the next three decades until its final, longed-for, eradication.

This endurance indicates why the Rookery played a significant role in enabling Lond...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: ‘That great and terrible city’
• 1 ‘Nature intended Paddy for a rural existence’: The St Giles Rookery and its afterlives
• 2 ‘A secret, melodramatic sort of conspiracy’: Fenian violence and the dynamite war
• 3 Hibernia exhibited: Irish London on display
• 4 ‘Those tumultuous days’: London’s Irish cultural revival
• 5 ‘Ria’s on the job’: Irish popular performance in London
• 6 ‘An Irish colony in the midst of the strangers’: The road to 1916
• Epilogue: The slow martyrdom of Dora Sigerson
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint