LONDON LIVES: Recent immigrants are different from the ‘deliberately forgotten’ Irish

Seamus Enright

Longford-native and London-Irish painter Bernard Canavan tells the 1950s mournful anecdote which describes an emigrant returning home to Ireland on holiday. The man, he says, hires a car and drives home. Canavan says it’s to Cavan he’s bound, but adds that in those times, the story could just as easily be adapted to include any of the other 31 counties.
The man arrives in his home town where the pub is brimming with locals. He buys a drink for everyone but after that he spends the next two weeks in isolation. Penniless he borrows money from his aunt for the journey back across the Irish Sea. The painting that depicts the tale is called ‘When Is He Going Back?’, Canavan says, as if “back” was the place the anonymous man really belonged to.
Growing up in Longford in the 1950s, illness prevented school attendance, but Canavan read and drew pictures at home before emigrating to England in his mid-teens. His family had a shop in the town but, eventually, as their customers left, he and his family followed them.
In England Canavan worked a number of jobs before earning a living drawing for the London Underground publications of the 1960s. Later he read politics, philosophy and economics as a mature student and today teaches Irish, British and European history at a number of London colleges, not to mention exhibiting his art at venues across Ireland, Britain, the US and Spain.
Canavan’s latest exhibition, ‘The Forgotten Irish’, has, as part of a Gathering initiative been on show at the Old Schoolhouse in Edgworthstown in recent weeks.
With influence from the great humanist traditions, Canavan’s work is figurative. It is a social commentary bringing into sharp perspective the difficulties faced by the thousands of Irish who left their native shores in search of a better life, as well as the unseen hardships in coming to terms with those very decisions.
Canavan says that 800,000 people left in the two decades spanning 1945 to 1965.
“That would probably have been a quarter of the population and maybe the youngest quarter of that. That’s four out of five who were born in the 1930s left through these years. One in every 10 English people has an Irish grandparent. The evidence of Irish emigration to England is overwhelming”, he told the Celt.

Slightly treasonable
Now living in Willesden Green, another Irish hub of the English capital, Canavan began painting his brief as a way to “recognise” and “memorialise” the sacrifices of those very people.
“Particularly noticeable during the boom years of the Celtic Tiger, of all the hundreds and thousands of people who left, was that nobody paid them any attention or compliment. But it was them who actually kept part of the Irish economy going in the ‘60s and ‘70s.
“You had people boasting about how well they’d done. Yes they’d done very well, but they had done well because of others before them, others who had left home, and others who were now being forgotten.”
A “forgotten” Irish person - the subject of his work - is described by Canavan as being among the poorest elements of society at the time.
“In the world of de Valera and the subsequent men who made Ireland, they were the ones who didn’t stay at home or didn’t maybe fit into the Catholic world that was growing up around them. They were deliberately forgotten I think. We wanted to become a Gaelic Catholic nation and that’s what we became. Anyone who left was in a sense slightly treasonable.”
Canavan believes the sense of über-nationalism from the top down leant itself to failing the principle of politics as acting for the betterment of society.
“It’s for the people, not just the heroic grandeur of some nationalist idea, or even some Catholic idea. Of the hundreds and thousands who came over most of them have gradually faded into the fabric of England. But they have done a great deal for Ireland and I want that acknowledged.
“These are people who cannot forget that they’re Irish. Everytime they speak, they speak an accent that reminds themselves where they came from. Unless they stand on their head they’re certainly going to express the world they came from.”

Weeping
He criticises the blatant ignorance of what the country was facing at the time, noting that author Tim Pat Coogan in his 1966 book ‘Ireland Since the Rising’ failed to even recognise the issue of emigration in the tome’s index.
“To think 50,000 people were leaving each year and here was a man writing supposedly the authoritative study of post-independent Ireland and where were all these people?
“Mr de Valera came over here to Birmingham and said that wages were as high in Ireland as they were in Birmingham. Well, what can you say? What is the answer to that? Why were there boat loads of people coming over? You’d see them weeping, distraught. Why was that happening if the Irish government was providing a world where people could flourish? That’s an old question. It’s the old, old question. Aristotle asked it, ‘what is the government for?’ It is to allow people to flourish, and we didn’t flourish then, did we?”
When the Celt speaks with Canavan he’s sitting in a London landmark within an Irish landmark, The Crown in Cricklewood, or County Cricklewood as it became known due to the emigrant influx which settled there. But it too has begun to change, as have the times with it. Canavan feels his future work might begin to depict the growing disparities emerging between the emigrant community of old compared to those arriving now.
“The people who left in my generation, my father was 52 when he left and I was coming up on my sixteenth birthday, we belonged to a different world. We weren’t educated to emigrate, we spent our time learning three catechisms - I learned three catechisms,” he says, almost still in disbelief.

Lumps of muscle
Canavan remembers walking into a bar on Mornington Crescent and seeing two or three tables dominated by young men from the Gaeltacht.
“There was an Ireland, in a way, outside of Ireland. But it’s not what we now call the diaspora. I didn’t come to find any diaspora. I came to England with all that implied for 1950s nationalism and to work for somebody else. But it was to work in and for a country that I was told was our oppressor. Many people I feel have never really got over that. They remain lost. They came over here and hadn’t been told how to live in England. England was an industrial country, very different from Ireland and they hadn’t been told how to live in a big anonymous, atomised industrial society.”
The Irish arriving now though, Canavan says, have the skills to adapt. Education has meant that young Irish men and women travel to work in England already with a sense of belonging. “They come over to work in banks and architects’ offices and all the other things in modern society. They know what to expect and they’re welcome.
“In our time the Irish were not welcomed. The men were lumps of muscle who worked at digging holes in the ground, rebuilding England after the demolition in the war and the bombings, laying roads and an infrastructure for modern society. The women were carers, as they would have been at home in a sense. They looked after National Health Service and they provided the benefits that England really needed.”
Canavan calls it laudable the country’s efforts to try to re-establish a connection with those who have left its shores. Having been invited to the country’s Gathering events himself, he is slow to criticise but not afraid of being critical.
“If what the country is hoping is that in the long run this will provide mass money for Ireland I’m not sure that’s going to happen. But beyond that is where I see the value of what is happening.
“I remember the Minister for Tourism came over and told us all that we’ve been forgotten for an awful long time but he’d like us to be remembered again and be remembered in Ireland. The Gathering seems to have galvanised people in towns and villages to think once more about outsiders and the people who left. That in itself can’t be a bad thing. I welcome that.
“Gabriel Byrne put it into rather stark terms and of course there is an element of truth to that but it’s not what I want to dwell on. How I see it is that it has gotten people to use this to tidy up the towns, to get local events going. That is very healthy and good. This is, after all these years, and even after all we’ve been through in recent years, people beginning to flourish once again”.