Patrick MacGill, Children of the Dead End: The Autobiography of a Navvy

Abstract

If unskilled Irish migratory workers in twentieth-century Britain may be said to have anything so lofty as a literary laureate, then Patrick MacGill (1890–1963) has first claim to the title. Born to a desperately poor Donegal family, MacGill was hired out as a farm labourer while still a child and by the age of 15 was ‘tatie-hoking’ (digging potatoes) in Scotland. He subsequently worked as a navvy, railway platelayer and labourer on the construction of an aluminium smelter at Kinlochleven reservoir, until the favourable reception of his first volume of verse, Gleanings from a Navvy’s Scrapbook (1910), led to a job with the London Daily Express. MacGill’s journalistic career proved short-lived, however, and by the time Children of the Dead End appeared in March 1914 he was working as a librarian in Windsor Castle, under the supportive tutelage of Canon John Dalton. The book became an instant bestseller, though its critical and commercial success in England contrasted starkly with its hostile reception in culturally conservative Irish quarters, including MacGill’s home town of Glenties.¹ Within months, he was serving with the London Irish Rifles in France, an experience he immediately drew upon in verse and fiction, notably in his war trilogy The Amateur Army (1915), The Red Horizon (1916) and The Great Push (1916). Although he continued to write prolifically, MacGill’s popularity waned significantly in the post-war years. By the 1930s he had developed multiple sclerosis and was living in Florida with his wife and fellow author, Margaret Gibbons. His death in November 1963, within hours of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, went unnoticed. Since 1981 Glenties has hosted an annual summer school named in his honour.

(London: Herbert Jenkins, 1914). x, 305pp.; pp. 213–16.