History

Sean Connolly (2022) On Every Tide: The Making and Remaking of the Irish World.

My mother’s maiden name was Connolly. As a child, she was sent ‘home’ to Ireland, during the Second World War, with her sister (my Auntie Phyllis) to safeguard them from German bombs and to make their Roman Catholic faith bombproof. She didn’t talk about it, certainly not to me, but there were whispers of predatory paedophilic attempts. And as outcast Irish, they were treated like cow shit. My Auntie Phyllis and my mum had a lifelong-bond based on shared hardship. They were Irish immigrants of a different kind, but they faced the same kind of prejudices and poverty.

My dad was born in Northern Ireland. But he came here as a child. His dad was here and his mum died early. He went to Our Holy Redeemer’s School (still going strong) in Whitecrook. He had a Scottish accent. Not Irish, like my Uncle Charlie and my godmother, Auntie Josie. Or like Pat McDaid’s dad, or Sporter Sweeney or Boxer Toi’s dad. We’re second or third generation and experience the cultural fade of fitting in and marrying into the existing population. Most of us remain mad Glasgow Celtic fans.

In the United States, it is evident that there is little or no difference between the second and third generation Irish who voted Republican and for Trump, the moron’s moron. A generation ago, when John Kennedy won by a very slim majority (and a bit of electoral cheating) Catholics were demonised and if it wasn’t for the electoral blocks delivered wholesale by Capos of the Irish-Catholic, Democratic, immigrant machine, he would have lost.

The Ireland my Uncle Charlie and Auntie Josie left a lifetime ago was rural. What little industry there was in the North, in Belfast, weaving and shipbuilding. The population halved after the Irish Famine (there was also a Scottish Famine mostly in the Highland and Islands) but it was in Ireland were subsistence farming meant the humble potato was breakfast, lunch and dinner for millions that famine took around a million lives directly and indirectly.

Ironically, the root cause may have been a cargo of seed potatoes from across the Atlantic in 1845. The population of Ireland had doubled from 4.4million in 1791 to above 8 million in 1841. Almost 90% of the population depended on the potato. The more prosperous tenant farmer who could afford a cow had assets to sell. Most did not. All they could offer was cheap labour.

An estimated 109 000 sailed for North America in 1846, almost double the total of the beginning of the Famine. What we now know as Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Argentina were less popular destinations. For those with little or no money, the short hop across the Irish Sea meant that tens of thousands a week ended up in the ports of Liverpool and Glasgow.

In their poverty and need, we were caricatured as sub-human and disease stricken. There was some truth in the latter. Ships bringing export goods from America and the British colonies filled their holds with human ballast, which they could charge a fee, and make the return journeys profitable.

For babies, one-in-seven did not survive the journey. Those packed below deck had a nominal space of 6 feet by 3 feet for married couples. Toilets were rudimentary. Women, in particular, crouched down and shat and urinated wherever they could. Water and food were rationed. Typhoid and dysentery were not. Coffin ships delivered their cargoes to cities that started asking for bonds to offset the cost of treating the ill, but which pushed up prices and more ships towards Canadian ports. But more than 90% made it ashore and became citizens. Women, in particular, became a prized asset.

When my Uncle Charlie left Ireland the population was still haemorrhaging the young and fit, but the destination pre-and-post War—with the Hungry Thirties as an interlude—was to British cities. Cities that were crying out for cheap labour the Irish specialised in. Labour that dug canals with pick and shovels, connected railways across continents, created reservoirs and build road after road and house by house helped make Britain and its former colonies Irish enough to have St Patrick’s Day parades and indulge the bonhomie of a green and pleasant land usurped by British rule. Step forward President Joe Biden, following in the footsteps of JFK, Jimmy Carter, and even Ronnie Reagan whose aspirations were more Protestant blue blood.

Ireland, that Irish tiger that has become a parking space for big corporations—with promises of low taxation—inside the EEC has seen its population double from when my Uncle Charlie left Ireland to around five million. It has more Polish immigrants than Britain. And to my great shame has also played the race card. Demonising immigrants while most of its wealth, like in Britain, goes to the rich and Irish 1%. The most oppressed people ever banner, once worn with pride, is now a rallying cry to deport and demonise those at the bottom. Cultural fade. Not for me. I’m not buying into that propaganda. We’ve a different kind of famine in housing and public services and it’s the rich that we need to pay their way. Not the poor, oppressed masses that America once claimed to represent as a sanctuary and offer a welcome. I’m not ashamed to be part Irish. I’m ashamed of such policies finding fertile soil in whatever side of the Atlantic you happened to be standing on. Sean Connolly offers a comprehensive account of what it means to be Irish, but that doesn’t mean the story is ended. It’s still being written by us now and I don’t like what I’m seeing or hearing.

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Rachel Eliza Griffiths (2023) Promise

I promised myself I’d read Promise. I’ve always a stack of books waiting to be read. This fell to the bottom of the pile and I had to keep starting it again and again and again. I got the set-up. Two black families on the edge of the sea, Salt Lake and a dirt-poor white family, living beside them in a kind of Eden.

Jim Crow laws are being challenged and then (as now) there’s a backlash. Cinthy Kindred is two years younger than her sister, Ezra, and her story, is in a large part, their story, but there are other narrators such as Ruby Scaggs, who goes to the same school as them and is the same age as Ezra. Her white skin and parental neglect doesn’t offend them. They have been drilled not to feel sorry for her. Not to feel nothing for white folk, but to keep their heads down and work hard.

‘THE DAY BEFORE OUR FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL, ALWAYS SIGNALLED THE END of the time Ezra and I loved most. Not time the clocks that ticked and rang their alarms every morning, we knew that time didn’t really begin to end. What we meant by the time was happiness, a careless joy that sprawled its warm, sun-stained arms through our days and dreams for eight glorious weeks until our teachers arrived back in our lives, and our parents remembered their rules about shoes, bathing, vocabulary quizzes, and home training.’

Their father took a job in Hobart as a schoolteacher. Many of the villagers objected to black man teaching white children, especially a man with one arm. To being qualified and educated. The coon had it coming to him was as natural as breathing to the Scagg’s family. A landmark case in the Supreme Court is Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, which declared state laws establishing separate public schools for Black and white students unconstitutional, only applied to Southern States. The people of Salt Point created their own rules and ways of doing things.

Nina Simone’s Mississippi Goddam outrage is still to come. Billy Holliday’s Bitter Fruit, which becomes the Strange Fruit of white supremacists sure of their moral right to hang black men from poplar trees, rotting in the sun, and becoming food for crows after being burned becomes part of the storyline. Ruby’s dad, Johan Ruben Scaggs III, an orphan, become part of the exclusive white men’s club when he witnesses such an event, before an uncle buys him a celebratory ice-cream cone—a rare treat.

The Civil Rights movement is on the move. Deputy Charlie is the law in Hobart. He takes his lead from his Uncle, who owns the land and the people on his land. Black men should know their place. But Ezra, Ruby and Cinthy are reaching menstruation. They’re becoming that age when men notice them. Even if they stand still their world is changing.

The Kindreds hail from a place called Damascus. They carry the weight of knowing, like Nina Simone’s song, their family and twelve children were burned and murdered by white racists. Welcome to the moron’s moron’s vision of a new America.

The Junkett family also own their home in Salt Point. They don’t carry as much familial baggage. Caesar and Irene teach their four children to be proud of who they are not what other folk think they are. They came from Virginia, seeking a new life, a better life.  Caesar’s job as a school janitor fits the stereotype of what villagers expect a black man to do. But his dignity and their self-sufficiency mark them out as being different. Offensive to Miss Dinah Alley, the niece of Mr Benedict Hobart, whose word is law.

Miss Burden, the old schoolteacher’s body, had washed up on the shore. Cinthy was two-years ahead of her class. One of Miss Burden’s favourites. Ruby Scaggs hoped to become a pilot and fly in the sky. She becomes Miss Dinah Alley’s pet. In Miss Dinah Alley’s world, black girls don’t graduate and aren’t worthy of attention or education. Not that she’s educated. But she knows how the world works and her purpose is to teach black girls how it should work. Security can become insecurity with the tipping of a coffee cup and the smashing of a glass. Read on.   

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Erik Larson (2015) Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania

Before I read this book, I thought like Erik Larson there was a direct line between the sinking of the Lusitania and the United States joining the war on the side of the Allies, much the same as happened at Pearl Harbour. But the Lusitania was sunk by German U-20 7th May 1915. But the United States maintained a policy of neutrality despite German U-Boats sinking tens of thousands of tons of shipping and killing American citizens until the interception of the Zimmermann Telegram (a proposal from Germany to Mexico to join the war against the U.S.). Only then did the United States declare war on Germany, April 1917, joining the Allies. Did the sinking of the Lusitania make much difference (apart from those obviously on the ship)?  

When air meets water a ship is sinking. The Lusitania, four funnels twenty-four foot in diameter, filled with water which turned to steam which made a shrieking and whistling noise. They sucked in first-class passengers and spat them out again covered in soot from the coal-fired boilers. Two of them survived the sinking of the Cunard Liner. The liner sank in around twenty minutes after being hit by a single torpedo fired by U-20, fourteen sea miles from the Old Head of Kinsale, Ireland. Thirty-three infants died. Most children drowned or died of hypothermia, as did three German stowaways locked in the brig and baggage handlers unable to get on deck. Of the almost 2000 passengers and crew 1959 died. 600 bodies remained missing, unaccounted for. 123 American passengers were reported dead. Britain, France and Russia was at war with Germany and Austria-Hungary (Italy switched Alliances 2015). But it was not yet a world war.   

The sinking of the Lusitania was a triumph for U-20 Kptl. Walther Schweiger and his crew. U-boats were like underwater eggs, regarded by most nations, including Germany, as having little value. Dreadnoughts and bigger and bigger ships that went gun to gun, much like Nelson’s greatest triumph at Trafalgar (1805) when he routed the French and Spanish fleets were becoming the future that had passed. The first five German submarines, prototype U-Boats, sunk, which didn’t look like a new paradigm but money wasted. Yet, in both the first and second world wars, this guerrilla warfare underwater sunk almost a quarter of British shipping and, as an island nation, won the war for Germany, with Britain suing for peace.

‘In maritime vernacular, this trail of fading disturbance, whether from ship or torpedo, was called a “dead wake”’.

Larson outlines this scenario. Admiral Henning von Holtzendorf, 1st February 1917, got the backing of Kaiser Wilhelm II. Stalemate on the Western front. A last roll of the dice, much like the Schlieffen Plan, but underwater with 100 more efficient U-boats. The strategy allowed for the sinking of American shipping. The premise was that by the time America became mobilised, Britain would have already sued for peace.

Just as there were warnings about card sharks in the lounges of Cunard liners like the Lusitania, Room 40 inside the Admiralty buildings in London, were the Bletchley Park of espionage during the Great War, and knew in advance what cards were to be played on the seas and by whom. They delayed one of the great warships, Orion, for example, because they knew there were U-boats lurking.

They also knew in advance the rough position of U-20 in and around the Irish Sea. It had already announced its presence by sinking a small merchant ship. The Lusitania was within range, and it was carrying passengers and munitions. The Germans had already announced such ships were legitimate targets. In ordinary circumstance U-20 would have little chance of sinking a ship like the Lusitania. Even with reduced boiler capacity, the Lusitania was almost twice as fast as U-Boats and it was going away from U-20. One in three and sometimes one in two torpedoes were duds. Even the latest torpedoes fully armed and hitting their target failed to sink much smaller ships.

Capt. William Thomas Turner left the bridge the night before the sinking to reassure passengers in the first-class lounge that they were almost home. The ship wouldn’t sink. He’d left school at nine and become a cabin boy, when ships were sailing ships (wind powered).  He’d been called upon as an expert witness on the sinking of the Titanic. His verdict was it was madness to maintain such reckless speed when there was ice in the water. Slow and careful was his strategy garnered from long years at sea. When there was a need for speed her was ready. Four of the five boilers were fired up and ready. Sometimes the cards just come out all wrong. That’s a rule of the sea.

The Admiralty and Winston Churchill scapegoated Turner. They tried to set up kangaroo courts and get him sacked by Cunard. Whether the Lusitania was left without military escorts—like later Q-ships, sitting  ducks—to bring in U-boats and the Americans into the war is a moot point. Larson dips into history and brings out what was at stake and who was involved. Make your own mind up. Read on.   

Notes:

    Winston Churchill played a significant role in the planning and execution of the Gallipoli Campaign during World War I. As the First Lord of the Admiralty at the time, Churchill conceived the idea of using naval forces to force a passage through the Dardanelles Strait, with the ultimate goal of capturing Constantinople (Istanbul) and establishing a sea route to Russia.

Planning and Decision-Making:

Conception of the Campaign: Churchill was a strong proponent of finding alternative strategies to break the stalemate on the Western Front. He advocated for a naval operation in the Dardanelles to open up a supply route to Russia and potentially knock the Ottoman Empire out of the war.

Naval Assault: The initial plan involved a primarily naval assault on the Ottoman positions along the Dardanelles. However, the naval attempt faced difficulties, including mines and strong Ottoman defences on higher ground, which took out ships without losses of its own.

Land Invasion: Due to the failure of the naval campaign, the decision was made to launch a ground invasion of the Gallipoli Peninsula. This decision shifted the focus from a naval operation to a large-scale amphibious assault.

Churchill downplayed his part in these naval and military disasters, which cost tens of thousands of lives with Turkish forces dug in. Yet he continued to insist that Captain Turner was to blame for the sinking of the Lusitania. And two torpedoes had sunk the ship. As First Lord of the Admiralty, who took a keen interest in the latest intelligence from Room 20, he knew it had been a single torpedo. Captain Turner emerges with his reputation intact. Churchill does not.  

Jill Bialosky (2015 [2012]) History Of A Suicide my sister’s unfinished life.

history of a suicide

This book left me cold. I read an extract of the story of these sisters in The Observer a while back, one living and the other dead. I was intrigued.  I know what I’m supposed to feel. What I’m supposed to say. But it feels a bit like someone leaning over the garden fence and saying yada, yada, yada and I’m saying yeh, yeh, yeh. That’s true. You’re right. I wish I’d thought of that.

In the first act of J.B.Priestley’s An Inspector Calls stasis is undermined in this interchange:

GERALD [laughs]: You seem to be a nice well-behaved family –

BIRLING: We think we are –

In sum, we have the Anna Karenina principle. All happy families are alike. All unhappy families are unhappy in their own way. In ‘Opening Words’, each chapter is Bialosky’s book are bite sized, she draws her family in Cleveland in 1970 for the reader. Kim, who commits suicide is the youngest. Laura, Cindy and the author Jill are more than a decade older than their sister. Their father, a Jewish immigrant died when they were infants and their mother re-married an Irish Catholic. Kim father didn’t last. He’s the villain of the piece who left them in relative poverty, and also left their mother for another woman. Kim was lost baggage, left behind, but with her mother and three surrogate mothers in her elder sisters. She lacked a father figure to nurture her. It belittled her. Set her back in  ways that didn’t affect her sisters. I’m not sure why.  That’s one of the arguments the book makes. Jill finds confirmation in Dr Sheidman prognosis, an amateur Herman Melville fan and eminent sucidiologist who quotes Moby Dick to her:

There is no unretracing progress in this life…we do not advance through fixed gradations. But once gone through, we trace the round again; and are infants, boys, and men, and Ifs eternally.

As the Inspector says:

what happened to her then may have determined what happened to her afterwards, and what happened to her afterwards may have driven her to suicide. A chain of events.

I don’t have a problem with eternal ifs. Temporality, is always dateable. Jonathan Lear, in Radical Hope, quotes Heidegger – a time when. A time when Kim made her last phone call to her sister Jill. A time when Jill lost her baby in the first trimester. A time when Jill lost her second baby, snatched away from life. A time when Kim, with her mum sleeping upstairs,  shuts the garage door and starts the car engine. A time when the boy that’s being paid twenty dollars to cut the grass hears the car engine idling and opens the garage door to carbon monoxide. A time when two police officers stand at the foot of her mother’s bed and tell her there’s no hope. Her youngest daughter is dead.

I don’t have a problem with no hope and its causal link to suicide or even references to Sylvia Plath, Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf, William Styron and Darkness Visible. It seems rather obvious. Those without hope seek a way out. Life gets in the way. But what I found myself doing was saying no.

Jill, for example, says, ‘I should have told her that I once loved a boy, too.’ She has an annoying habit of making statements like that and interjecting drama with the added clause, ‘too’. That would have saved her Inspector?

In ‘Last Dance’ as author she constructs a narrative. ‘In my mind’s eye…Kim…Dabbed her eyes with musk. Wore her favourite jeans and a sexy black top, convinced she would see Alan’.

Alan was Kim’s on-off boyfriend. He also killed himself. It’s part of the narrative, his death and her death. Romeo and Juliet. But I don’t buy it. It’s too pat. Life’s too messy.

‘But he wasn’t there. Not him. Not anyone. Longing consumed her.’ I find that very Mills and Boons.

‘Maybe someone leaned over the bar to talk to her.’ Maybe they didn’t, I interject.

‘Hey, you look cute. Wanna do a line in the bathroom?’

If an Inspector called how many suspects would he find with such bland conjecture? For every ‘maybe’ or ‘possibly’ I overwrite with maybe not. When history become a made-up story then is it history? Or something else? I’m unconvinced. Life is for the living. Perhaps that is the lesson of the Jewish Shiva mourning period. Perhaps that is the lesson of religion. I’m not sure. I’m never sure. Not in the grief-stricken way that Jill Bialosky is. I’m not sure. Not sure.

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