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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
6 0 July 2017
“T
HEY ARE from everywhere - from Asia,
Africa, Europe”. Thus a North Ken resi-
dent in reaction to the horrific fire in
its poorest quarter. And - in deference to his
interviewer: “The Irish Diaspora is here…”.
In my day, all of fifty years ago, there was no
talk of ‘The Irish Diaspora’, that grand term. We
were emigrants from our home country, eco-
nomic exports of a failed state, now scarpering
along the shortest run to jobs, in Blighty.
Strangers in a strange land of Lyons Corner
houses, skirting sad touchstones - The Sunday
Press, whose masthead said in Gaelic De cum
Glóire Dé agus Onóra na hÉireann, stacked piles
of De Valera piety outside churches in Kilburn,
Camden, Luton: For the Glory of God and the
Honour of Ireland.
About 50,000 per year exported ‘on the hoof’
of mail boats. That was the same number of
cattle as humans in those years of what historian
like to call Mass Emigration.
‘De cum Glóire Dé’, by Jayzus. Recruited in
Dublin by London Transport, I worked the No 7
Routemaster from Acton to London Bridge and
back - a swathe of lateral route that sliced the
metropolis from West to East. Following a few
weeks training and a courtesy tour in which we
were shown bomb sites still being excavated (it
was 1961), I signed on at Middle Row garage in
North Ken, said hello to a driver, Archie Collins,
rotated my ‘clippie’ machine to zero, checked it
was an empty bus, as the occasional drunk was
found asleep inside. Readied for the off.
Two bells for Archie to pull out of cavernous
Middle Row garage, then down through Lad-
broke Grove, along Bishops Bridge Road, by the
side of Paddington Statio., left into Praed St, a
right turn into Edgware Rd, left at Marble Arch,
through Oxford Street, down into the city and
majestic St Pauls’...then via the curve of the
Thames to East End. I couldn’t say I loved it but
I certainly came to know it, to under
-
stand it. Love came later, viewing
those images which take us back…
Most passengers going West-East
were commuting to offices off Edge
-
ware Road or worked in the shops
along Oxford Street, C and A at
Marble Arch, then successively
Selfridges, D H Evans, largely patron-
ised by middle class shoppers as M
and S had yet to make a large store
impact up past John Lewis with some
maybe even to Liberty.
Nearing Tottenham Court Rd, the
shops fronts became tackier, as it was
effectively the corner of Soho.
On the return journey we often
picked up little Laskars, families of
sea militiaman from east of the Cape
of Good Hope, who were lithe and
physically compact from work on
ships, dusky in colour with exotic
skin and perfumes of - far away...At
nineteen I had known only the earthi-
ness of Irish and English, but all races came to
London. Making a life at the heart of that city at
that age was as good as a continuing world
cruise.
London Transport had put us, about a dozen
Irish, in Paddington ‘digs’, a terraced street of
two-up, two downs. The crabby landlady made
us evening tea, complaining about the war short-
ages. Being Irish our ignorance had been
ring-fenced by De Valera, keen to make us Gaelic,
Irish, even keep us Catholic. It all made us Oirish
in the eyes of the natives: appearing to them as
sad, lost and untrustworthy from our lack of sup-
port of our neighbour during what we had called
‘the Emergency’,
The landlady remembered that war, and
reminded us. On her twice weekly excursions to
bingo, she locked the black bakelite hall phone
in a suitcase, against us. When it insistently
rang, one of the lads would shake the case to
dislodge it. She warned us about what priests
had called ‘nocturnal emissions’ which she ren-
dered as: “ Now boys, no finkin’ of vem blondes
in yeh bed - I’ve enuff wiv changin’ yer sheets
every week, wivout ‘avin to bleach yah stains…”.
In time we learnt to scour the notice boards in
newsagents.
And yes, I do remember “No Irish, no blacks”
though I cannot swear to “No dogs”. I got a
‘shared room’ with an Irish countryman who was
quietly hospitable until I came in with too much
alcohol. He was a long-term tenant, wore a pio
-
neer pin on a serge lapel and his house proud
IRISH landlady exclaimed more in sorrow than
Immigrants in Grenfell Tower were
forsaken, but the Irish have usually made
it through
by Kevin O’Connor
Failed by England
Author with badge - No 7 route,
Acton to Londonbridge, 1961
The inferno tower emblazons
another era of civic failure into
tiring hearts leaving new homeless
victims with holes in their souls and
gaps in their families, in an England
that has failed them
CULTURE
July 2017 6 1
anger that a new lad like me peeing in the bed
because I could not hold my drink would have to
“look elsewhere”. I was gone.
North Kensington itself was an instant educa
-
tion, where a Corkman Pat, yes Pat, also on the
buses and I managed to rent a ground-floor flat
in Ladbroke Crescent, in a corner house by Ril
-
lington Place where - as I later learned
- necrophiliac murderer Reg Christie serially
strangled women, had sex with their expiring
bodies and boarded them, standing up, between
stud-walls which he wallpapered to conceal their
load.
I was as ignorant of that as I was of the home
reality of Britain’s war until I read, many moons
later, Ludovic Kennedy’s 10 Rillington Place,
which set out forensic details of how a malign
Christie blamed another lodger Evans. You
wouldn’t do that to your fellow lodger. In the
great tradition of British Justice Evans was tried,
found guilty and hanged.
That reality was unknown then, but somehow
the evil was sensed. I recall a conversation with
a woman owner of a small tea place where she
managed to keep an urn and cups turning over
with horse-piss tea. “Ahh that Reggie Christie”
she said, “Often in ‘ere, chattin’ up the gels…”.
Then as now North Ken contained a certain
volatility. A few years before, race riots had
blighted the area. Teddy Boys, those exotic dis-
plays of British ‘working class’ resentment,
menaced the area, hunting down Caribbean
male immigrants, who had been recruited for the
buses and tubes. There were bad incidents down
the road in Shepherd’s Bush. Contrary to some
impressions, the records show The Met tackled
the trouble-makers, though they were notable
by their absence one night I returned to Ladbroke
Crescent, with new found teacher friends drop-
ping me by car.
Suddenly finding ourselves surrounded by
white thugs, I managed to get a window closed
even as a fist slammed into it. Frightened into
driving away, we were powerless to prevent
what, looking back, I could see happening - a
steel girder on the flat back of a lorry was repeat-
edly ramming into the ground floor window of a
house occupied by screaming black families. As
the front of the house shattered, cheers from the
crowd celebrated the absence of police, the
absence of British fair play.
We did not hang about and I have no memory
of what transpired in later days, though the
records show that a Labour government during
the early 1960s began the process of tackling
racism with laws. Prime Minister James Calla-
ghan said, “cannot change people’s attitudes
but we can penalise them for acting on them…”.
And so in recent weeks it became obvious that
the ‘relentless tide’ of immigration cannot be
stopped even by Brexiteers - an effort so zealous
it is injuring a fragile British economy.
And we saw the human side of this immigra
-
tion. Most of Grenfell Tower, that monument to
inequality, totem of displacement from Asia,
Africa, the Middle East or some other forgotten
colony of the Empire, speaking a patois that is
the effective modern syntax of Britain, a linguis-
tic amalgam whose roots are in British, French,
Spanish, Dutch and German conquests of native
peoples. I’m told unemployment for 16-24 year
olds in Britain is 25% for blacks and 28% for
Bangladeshi and Pakistanis, more than twice the
rate for whites (12%). It strikes me now how
much worse is their predicament than that of the
Irish now in Britain. Current migrants are better
educated and the ‘security heat’ has been trans-
ferred to those of Muslim faith, courtesy of Isis,
Jihadists and the Western coalition which
invaded Iraq. As that stark shell of an inferno
tower emblazons another era of civic failure into
tiring hearts new homeless victims have holes
in their souls and gaps in their families, in an
England that has failed them, just as their fore-
runners were failed during the Notting Hill riots
more than half a century ago.
Kevin O’Connor lived in Ladbroke Terrace when
on the buses.He worked on the books pages of
the Guardian and for the Irish Post from the late
1960s and returned to work for RTE in Ireland
from 1974 where he was Mid-Western Corre
-
spondent 1979-80.
It strikes me now how much
worse is their predicament than
that of the Irish now in Britain.
Current migrants are better
educated and the ‘security
heat’ has been transferred to
those of Muslim faith
Grenfell Tower
