In February 1966, the Lord Mayor of Birmingham convened a meeting with local political, business and religious leaders to address issues facing immigrants in England's second city. Toward the end of the meeting, the Town Clerk asked whether the Irish should be included in efforts to help immigrants adjust to life in England. Those attending, however, ‘generally agreed that the White Paper be confined to Commonwealth Immigrants’, concluding ‘the Irish could not be included in present discussions’.Footnote 1 Two months later, the Lord Mayor did request the presence of ‘somebody with an Irish connection’ on the committee, acknowledging the Irish faced similar problems to other immigrants.Footnote 2 But nothing came of the request.
This somewhat run-of-the-mill meeting symbolises succinctly the uncertain position of Irish immigrants in Britain in the decades following the Second World War. As the Town Clerk's proposition suggests, Irish people were conceived of as foreigners in the 1950s and 1960s, and presumably deserved the same consideration as other immigrants. They had, after all, moved due to a similar colonial relationship. As we shall see, they also resided in the same parts of the major cities, lived in similar conditions, laboured in similar jobs and met comparably derisory attitudes in their new country.
But the Irish were not quite immigrant enough. Their unique historical position meant they could not grab the attention either of British policymakers then or indeed of most British historians since. Inhabiting a unique position as white ‘Others’, perplexingly placed between immigrants of colour and the host population, they were different, but somehow not deserving. As it turned out, policy intervention would not be directed toward the Irish for decades after this meeting. From the 1960s onwards, while assistance was (rightly) granted to Commonwealth immigrants to confront prejudice and disadvantage derived from historical circumstances, the Irish were ostensibly considered white people moving to a white country.
Accordingly, in the discussion that follows, I situate the Irish in post-war Birmingham and London within the comparative and historical context of Commonwealth immigration and the large immigrant communities of colour in post-war Britain.Footnote 3 By including the largest group of immigrants, I aim to add a layer to our understanding of post-war migration. Though British historians, like British policymakers, have disregarded them, the Irish, like people of colour, were transplanted to a different country and culture, placed on the bottom of the same socio-historical ladder and subject to a similar degree of social exclusion.
* * *
It is of course perfectly understandable that the historiography of post-war migration has focused keenly on the experiences of Commonwealth immigrants, and accordingly a large body of work has demonstrated the substantial prejudice encountered by immigrants of colour in England.Footnote 4 This chiefly state-centred debate revolves around whether or not the political elite purposely racialised immigration. The central event in this literature is the Commonwealth Immigration Act of 1962, legislation which substantially limited immigration for those of colour, while allowing the Irish freedom to move back and forth. Kathleen Paul has argued that government officials purposely prepared the general populace for immigration controls. This Act she shows was designed to keep those of colour out of the country, and illiberal elites were responsible for increasing racism, not the broader population. Other scholars emphasise the continuation of an English tradition of official tolerance founded upon a long-standing liberal commitment to universal rights. The foremost proponent of this school, Randall Hansen, argues that an ungenerous attitude was more indicative of the broader population, not policymakers.Footnote 5
Both of these perspectives concentrate on Commonwealth immigrants and the political sphere, questioning racism in post-war Britain from a top-down angle of view through analysis of official documents. Though these works rightly show the Irish were excluded from immigration controls, they do not recognise the Irish were also excluded from full participation in society through the post-colonial conditions and attitudes they met.
In a recent comprehensive overview of post-war British immigration Panikos Panayi noted that the presence of Irish people to Britain in the second half of the twentieth century has been largely ignored by historians.Footnote 6 British historians, when they consider them, continue to assume the relative inconspicuousness of the Irish indicates easy assimilation. In his highly acclaimed study of post-war Britain, Richard Weight argues that the presence of Commonwealth immigrants somehow directed animus away from the Irish.Footnote 7 And in a recent study, Paul Addison asserts Irish people adapted easily in England. Addison notes the difficult conditions, unfair rents and cultural resistance immigrants of colour confronted in their search for housing. To support this, he points to the notorious signs placed in windows to deter prospective renters, signs that as he notes often declared, ‘Room for rent. No Irish. No Coloureds No dogs’. In an otherwise all-encompassing study, Addison illustrates how easily the Irish can be ignored.Footnote 8 Kathleen Paul, who includes the Irish, considers the Irish as members of a ‘British family’, whose exclusion from controls demonstrates overt racism toward immigrants of colour.Footnote 9 But there was enough exclusion to go around, as we shall see.
In recent years, scholars of Irish origins have conversely made great strides in exploring the post-war Irish experience, particularly that of women. A large body of work by scholars in Sociology and Ethnic Studies has illustrated the post-colonial conditions and their ongoing effects. Mary Hickman has revealed the marginalised position of the Irish as a separate ethnic group. Using social surveys and interviews with older migrants, she has argued the Irish were invisible ethnically and did not settle comfortably as white people. Hickman and others have pointed out that the Irish in England habitually endured discriminating stereotypes ranging from ‘Friendly and entertaining to stupid, drunk, cunning, lazy, sectarian and violent’.Footnote 10 Other Irish scholars such as Louise Ryan have highlighted the diversity of the white Irish experience from the 1930s onwards, showing that different types of stereotypes existed far beyond black and white. Ryan interviewed twenty-six nurses to highlight the variation in experience and the multiple modes of being an Irishwoman in Britain.Footnote 11 Bronwen Walter also highlights the difficult dialectic of assimilation and racialisation endured by white Irish people, demonstrating that the Irish have been excluded from full membership in English society in unacknowledged ways.Footnote 12 And Breda Gray has worked to understand Irish Diasporas in Britain and beyond, demonstrating the complex web of experiences both enjoyed and endured by Irishwomen as migrants, indicating the fluidity of the migrant's identity far beyond one fixed notion of Irishness.Footnote 13 All of these scholars demonstrate the subtle complexity of being Irish in England goes beyond simple assimilation.
None of these scholars are historians, however, and all are Irish or of Irish descent. Wendy Webster is a rare British historian who includes the Irish in her analyses, pointing out aptly that ‘the four-word sign “no coloureds, no Irish” demonstrates the complexities of post-war migration and the multiple racisms involved’.Footnote 14 Recently, in 2007, the Irish historian Enda Delaney offered the first major historical study of the Irish in Britain in forty years. Delaney showed that the Irish were never fully part of either England or Ireland, forced to consider themselves alien. For Delaney, the Irish were stuck in a bewildering position as ‘Halfway house exiles’, part ‘“normal”, part “other”’.Footnote 15 The most thorough account of the post-war Irish experience, Delaney's work, however, excludes any comparison with immigrants of colour.
As Ryan and Webster have argued, the Irish highlight a range of imperial legacies that go beyond just ‘racism’.Footnote 16 There existed, as Stephen Fielding notes, a well-established ‘ingrained hostility to Catholics and the Irish, which was deeply embedded in English society’, derived from the colonial past.Footnote 17 Kevin Kenny notes in his study of the Irish in the British Empire, ‘The connection between Irish emigration and colonialism has not yet been explored in any sustained fashion.’Footnote 18 By merging Irish with Commonwealth immigration, my aim is not to suggest Commonwealth and Irish immigrants met exactly the same circumstances. Rather it is to disrupt the racial binary that characterises most studies of post-war migration, to show that the Irish relationship was shaped by similar derisory attitudes and a parallel historical legacy of unequal colonial relations. If the short-term experience of Irish immigration differed in degree to that of Commonwealth immigration, the long-term historical causes were almost identical. I broaden the scope to show certain segments of the population were prejudiced toward a wider group of immigrants, including the Irish – at home, at work and in the wider cultural milieu, with consequences for Irish life in Britain.
* * *
Attempting to evaluate attitudes is an inexact science, and to be fair to the self-conceived ‘tolerant English’, the 1950s and 1960s were a difficult time to absorb three very diverse strands of migrants. Faced with post-war rebuilding, prolonged austerity and the trauma of war, English people were ill prepared for the culture shock that came along with immigrants from the crumbling empire. Indeed the 1948 British Nationality Act arguably demonstrated just how tolerant Britain was. This legislation after all provided the legal means for imperial subjects to enter Britain, regardless of skin colour, origin, or in the Irish case, a history of uninhibited agitation and even wartime neutrality.
I am more interested in overt intolerance than tacit acceptance, however, since this impacted the immigrant experience more acutely. Immediately following a war won with much colonial assistance, mentalities formed over centuries in an imperial milieu did not disappear quite as swiftly as imperial power.Footnote 19 Like the West Indies, India and Pakistan, Ireland suffered from a huge surplus of labour in the post-war period, and the imperial economic relationship shaped attitudes toward immigrants. The decline of the centuries-old British Empire and the persistence of attitudes derived from an imperial past were central to the historical context of post-war immigration. Paul Gilroy wryly notes the fundamental fact that ‘the immigrant is now here because Britain was out there’.Footnote 20 This simple geographical and historical relationship meant immigrants faced daunting attitudes and conditions.
After the war, migrants from the rural peripheries of empire had little choice but to take the opportunity to move to its urban heart, entering a strange environment of factories, cold houses and grey streets in the big cities. Much concern was generated in response to the increasing numbers of newcomers who began arriving in the 1950s from Ireland, South Asia and the Caribbean. In the period itself, numbers were bandied about without much foundation, as data was rarely reliable. Only at the end of the 1960s were statistics harnessed to show roughly how many immigrants were actually in the country, and there were more Irish than South Asians and West Indians combined. If the three groups moved in similar circumstances, they did not move in similar numbers:
In 1971, there were around 237,000 migrants from South Asia and 488,000 from the Caribbean.Footnote 22 By then, there were close to a million Irish people living in England. Present in huge numbers, the Irish were overlooked by policymakers, though humbler folks living and working alongside them were acutely aware of their presence, as we shall see in the next two sections.
Dickensian ‘digs’
Like Commonwealth immigrants, Irish tenants endured endemic housing abuse in the 1950s and 1960s. And like immigrants of colour, the typical Irish migrant found lodging in the first place available after arrival, often living crowded together in the poorer parts of Birmingham and London. For all immigrants, renting was the chief option available. In 1967, while 91% of Jamaicans, 84% of Indians and 82% of Pakistanis rented, 92% of Irish paid rent, owning their homes the least of all four groups.Footnote 23 Though many English rented too, immigrants notably endured difference along with dearth. Placed on the bottom of the socio-economic ladder due to their status, newcomers of Commonwealth or Irish origin were affected disproportionately by inadequate housing provisions.Footnote 24 Catholic Church workers persistently cited housing as the gravest problem facing Irish immigrants, and were exasperated at an inability to assist so many distressed persons. Advocates of the Irish complained through the 1950s that they could do little to empower tenants against landlords in Birmingham.Footnote 25 In 1961, the Catholic Church in Birmingham initiated a scheme to help Irish couples find homes, as one priest set out purposefully to ‘destroy the fixed notion the Irish have that (shoddy) digs are good enough’.Footnote 26
Social studies from the 1950s reveal both the awful environment many Irish lived in and the persistence of colonial attitudes. Citing the prevalence of the ‘ignorant and shiftless Irish’ in a London study, the noted Spinley Report described one Irish home where ‘The beds have the usual bedding and stained mattresses, probably smelling of stale urine. Apart from the beds, there is a table, some wooden chairs, a cupboard. The most noticeable characteristic of the house is the strong and unpleasant smell.’Footnote 27 The church justly decried circumstances where an Irish ‘family of four (paid) excessively high rents, while having to sleep, eat and cook in the same room’.Footnote 28 Around the same time, those sponsoring the construction of an Irish Centre in Birmingham found ‘lads sleeping six to a room with twenty-seven total in one house; fellows sleeping in public lavatories; girls being given only one sheet for warmth having to sleep in their clothes’.Footnote 29
Indeed Irish migrants lived much more like those of colour than the English. The principal metric used to measure housing conditions and scarcity in the 1950s and 1960s was persons-per-room. In a comparison of housing density in London from 1961 to 1966, the overall ‘Level of Housing Amenity’, as it was called, was as follows, with ‘1’ constituting the highest score. Conspicuously, the Irish score resembles those of immigrants far more than it does their white counterparts:
Studies of race relations focused on people of colour reveal the Irish also lived in the same parts of town as other immigrants.Footnote 31 While white English people moved away from areas with increasing numbers of ‘coloureds’ in Birmingham or London, the Irish remained.Footnote 32 Indian researchers found that though English tenants refused to rent accommodation owned by Asian landlords, the Irish were less bothered by the notion, living wherever they could in the circumstances. As Desai noted in 1963, ‘Only Irish, West Indians and Pakistanis willingly accept accommodation in Indian houses.’Footnote 33 In 1961 census data for the notoriously immigrant-heavy and run-down Tower Hamlets area in London, 8,916 were of Irish origin, 3,084 South Asian, and 3,126 from the Caribbean.34
As scholars such as Bronwen Walter have shown, a simple dichotomous attitude toward black and white immigrants fails to explain post-war migratory experiences; being Catholic differentiated Irish immigrants in Britain.Footnote 34 And indeed through the 1950s and 1960s, the Catholic Church found persistent examples in Birmingham of tenant desperation among Irish immigrants, usually stemming from fractured relations with landlords, with such ‘typical cases’ including young couples with children forced out into the streets.Footnote 35 The black-white binary of post-war migration is further complicated by the fact that landlord prejudice worked in all directions. Often the choice was between bad housing and no housing. The migrant Mary Gilligan recalls having to return home to Ireland due to frustration searching for accommodation in London.Footnote 36 The notorious signs stating ‘No blacks, no dogs, no Irish’ are cited in memoirs of many Irish people like those of Commonwealth immigrants, with boards proclaiming ‘No Irish Need Apply’.Footnote 37 One Irishman recalls the immediacy with which immigrants were made unwelcome: ‘I went straight to London, tried to get digs, but on the notice board, was the usual, “No blacks or Irish need apply”’.Footnote 38
Property owners’ propensity to discriminate worked for and against all immigrant groups. In 1956, one Irish newspaper declared that in Birmingham ‘hundreds of young Irish newly-weds desperate for a home (were) being exploited by get-rich-quick landlords, many of them coloured’.Footnote 39 A few years later, newspapers in the Midlands suggested vice squads should root out rapacious landlords of colour. Highlighting the greater tendency of West Indians and South Asians to buy homes compared to the Irish, one Midlands MP in 1963 suggested a fund to help whites buy homes.Footnote 40 Lord Elton, the noted parliamentary beacon of anti-immigrant bias, claimed in 1965 that Pakistani and Indian landlords were guilty of 98% of landlord abuse toward tenants.Footnote 41 The noted social researchers Rex and Moore, considerably more sympathetic to immigrants, found too that Asian landlords were generally insensitive to tenants’ rights.Footnote 42 Of course, Irish migrants mistreated each other too, as Catherine Dunne's interviews demonstrate. Her interviewees recall that ‘Mayo people always stuck together, and Dubliners preferred to avoid “culchies”.’Footnote 43 Irish landlords had few scruples about profiting from their compatriots. In 1951 one Dubliner complained to journalists that his landlady from Wexford ignored his complaints, noting ‘None of the beds had pillows or sheets and the food was bad.’Footnote 44
Throughout the 1960s Irish people lived like their fellow migrants. Census statistics from 1966 showed Irish home-life mirrored that of other immigrants, skin colour notwithstanding.Footnote 46
Immigrants from all origins met isolation and hardship amid such conditions. The author John O’Donoghue captured succinctly the circumstances Irish immigrants faced that post-war histories fail to capture: ‘The personal upheaval, the inadequate preparation given by one cultural background for life in another, the heartaches, fears and uncertainties which all immigrants experience “in a strange land”’.Footnote 45 The sociologist John Jackson similarly grasped the common immigrant condition, pointing to the loneliness of living in unkempt ‘digs’.Footnote 46 An Irishman interviewed in 1965 told a filmmaker that to counter loneliness he comforted himself by staring at the moon, as it was the same moon he had seen in Ireland.Footnote 47
As the 1970s approached, animosity to Commonwealth immigrants sharpened, which perhaps explains scholarly attention to people of colour. The immigration discourse took a particularly nasty turn after Enoch Powell's infamous 1968 speech in Birmingham. Focused on the imaginary old white lady ‘who could not walk her street or feel safe in her house for fear of wide grinning pica-ninnies’, Powell reaffirmed the direct connection between housing and prejudice. Due to the presence of immigrants, English people could not feel ‘safe in their own homes’.Footnote 48 Though Powell is famous for openly expressing nativist hostility to blacks and Asians, he was at least consistent in his bigotry, proclaiming he wanted the Irish out too.Footnote 49 Nor was he alone. Aside from the unspoken opinions of many in England, even the Liberal Party had a wing that wanted the Irish ousted too, insisting if others be restricted, so should the Irish.Footnote 50 The Irish were not part of a putative British family, even ambiguously so, as Kathleen Paul suggests. One person who wrote to the Observer felt compelled to ask in 1970 why the Southern Irish were not restricted too, given they entered the country ‘at a rate of 50,000 per annum each year?’Footnote 51
Otherwise, little changed. In 1971, the average number of people per home in England was 2.89 for English people, while for the Irish it was 4.14 per house, and for those of colour 4.73.Footnote 52 Irish immigrants moved in similar post-colonial circumstances as immigrants of colour, to housing in the same parts of the same cities, they met the same kinds of attitudes, and they succumbed to the same landlord-tenant power dynamic in search of dilapidated housing. When they awoke each morning to go to work, they performed the same types of jobs, in the same conditions, with the same limited options derived from historical-imperial circumstances. Noel Kelly, an Irish worker who moved in the early 1950s, illustrates the close connection between work and lodgings for the typical labourer from Ireland:
There used to be a camp on the site which saved you from going into bad digs, usually the grub was good. Once on the camp (there was) no rations. Meat, eggs, stuff like that might be short, but you’d have porridge, bread, plenty of potatoes, vegetables, etc, it kept you going.Footnote 53
‘Hard the work and long the day’
For all three major migrant groups, moving to Britain in the 1950s and 1960s meant living anywhere they could and working where they had to. Migrants moved due to the colonial relationship that prompted emigration in the first place. Scholars agree that both immigrants moved for work because of imperial economics.Footnote 54 Caribbeans, Asians and Irish were forced to leave homelands saddled with poverty, riots, famine and division.Footnote 55 In such circumstances, official records predictably reveal an enduring mindset of contempt toward immigrants of any colour, even while their labour was so desperately needed. The title of the first official attempt to grapple with immigration, ‘The Working Party on the Employment in the United Kingdom of Surplus Colonial Labour’, revealed that colonial labour existed in surplus due to a lack of work in colonial peripheries. The sudden move from colonised to industrial nation sustained hard-to-erode imperial stereotypes for Commonwealth immigrants. Labour MP Lena Jeger, like other officials, received letters in the 1950s ostracising ‘lazy darkies who go straight on the dole’.Footnote 56 Union leaders made frequent note of prejudice toward immigrants of colour. As one Trade Union reported sympathetically in 1959, ‘Everything the coloured worker does is viewed with condescension due to their arrival unskilled, and a confidence of white superiority.’Footnote 57
Similarly, Ireland's inferior economic position contributed to persistent affronts toward the Irish population. Like their counterparts, Irish workers endured low-paid jobs, long hours, and frequent derision. After the war, one of the country's largest employers, the National Coal Board, objected to the practice of bringing Irishmen into the mines. Irish labour was considered inherently unreliable; supervisors found Irishmen ‘unsatisfactory, a bad influence in the pit and in the hostel’.Footnote 58 One government official articulated the fractious relationship and persistence of colonial attitudes in 1951, grumbling, ‘The less said about Irishmen, the better.’Footnote 59 And a Labour Department minister thought Ireland's persistently fraught labour conditions and poverty were due to the essential nature of the Irish rather than the colonial context or imbalanced trade relations: ‘It was their characteristic predisposition to cause trouble,’ he surmised.Footnote 60 They were at best a necessary nuisance.
Part of the problem was that so many Irish people, like other groups, came from farms and field where they had worked at a different pace. Unused to an industrial work environment, Andy Higgins recalls work in England as a ‘very strange experience, I’d never worked around machines, had no training. (I) did not know how to behave on jobs of such magnitude’. The noise and the attention to detail required for industrial work would have been shocking enough if good training was supplied, but in the rushed environment of post-war Britain, immigrants had to grapple with the situation without much assistance.Footnote 61 As Irishman Pat McCann put it, from his perspective London was ‘A vast metropolis, I’d never worked before, only in farming, didn't know which way to turn, completely lost, didn't know even how to go about getting work.’Footnote 62 Used to rural economies and typically unskilled, those from all three origins met inherently distressing – yet decidedly similar – work conditions in the empire's economic heartlands of Birmingham and London.
Though some Irishmen worked in agriculture, most worked on construction sites or other alien environments such as coalmines and metal foundries. Charles MacNamara recollects the mind-numbing drudgery of the hectic factory environment: work was ‘clean but noisy, people went deaf. [The] production system destroyed people's minds’.Footnote 63 Thomas Bourke, who moved in 1950 from the West of Ireland, found himself facing a blast furnace within days of arrival. He concedes he ‘just couldn't take the heat’, and accordingly moved on to a new job.Footnote 64 Though Louise Ryan has studied the many Irish women who worked in nursing and domestic service, factory work was common for women too.Footnote 65 Church records from the 1950s express dismay that so many girls worked in ‘harsh factories’. One priest complained that ‘only last week, due to inadequate training, one lost her finger.’Footnote 66
Irrespective of attitudes or conditions, the vast majority of Irish moved to work, and worked hard. A 1961 Board of Trade survey found that within one week after arrival, 63% of Irish found work, and within a month over 90% did so.Footnote 67 A ministerial committee researching Irish people in England, titled ‘The Irish problem’, found that in 1962 and 1963, very few Irish immigrants were unemployed.Footnote 68 Individual memoirs illustrate that the fear of hunger required walking around asking for work. Noel Kennedy recalls, ‘I got off the train Sunday night, didn't know where I was, walked up and down all day. Got a job Tuesday morning.’Footnote 69 Another Irishman tells how he immediately made his way to London, explaining he ‘found somebody in Camden Market who took an interest in me, gave me a couple of bob and gear to sell, and that is how I started off surviving economically’.Footnote 70 Yet as with other groups, the focus was often on the irresponsible few, rather than the vast majority of Irish. In 1967 The Times reported a London magistrate scolding a jobless Irishman: ‘It is scandalous that people like you should live on social security. There are hundreds of young Irishmen coming over here and doing it.’Footnote 71
Anxiety over self-expression compounded derision and tension. West Indians faced issues due to their dialect, and South Asians had to surmount a challenging language barrier. However, Irish people also encountered otherness through their accents too. As Irish scholars have shown, a subtle and at times not-so-subtle aura of undisguisable difference prevailed, exposed by the correction of their usage of the English language. Breda Gray showed female Irish workers recall the constant correction of their use of the English language.Footnote 72 And as Ryan and Webster demonstrated, some Irish who migrated struggled to communicate with Londoners upon arrival. One interviewee complained, ‘they didn't understand us. It was really, really hard.’Footnote 73 Others were silenced in the workplace. One woman recalls, ‘I got into trouble straight away because it was not fashionable to have an Irish accent and work in an office. I was told not to answer the phone.’Footnote 74 Donall Mac Amhlaigh has shown how male Irish labourers struggled to understand English workers building the roads.Footnote 75 Innocent communication problems reinforced the well-worn trope of the feckless paddy. One home-helper recalls that ‘After being told to fetch some shopping, I picked up bananas instead of swedes, not knowing what swedes were.’ The inevitable outcome she notes was ‘being told you’re thick’.Footnote 76
At best, the Irish found steady work in nervous circumstances. At worst, they met death. Asked about the frequency of injuries and deaths at work, one Irish labourer replied: ‘Ah Jaysus, yeah, there was a big fella walking off a high-cast bearing on a Sunday morning, we were only after starting, a fine man, 6’ 4” or 5”, hit the ground like a tonne of bricks, never moved, splattered all over the concrete.’Footnote 77 Though this was thankfully rare, more prevalent was the simple solitude and sadness associated with leaving home. As one Irishwoman frankly put it, ‘I didn't want to leave, who does?’Footnote 78 Another who moved in the 1950s told church aides yieldingly, ‘I decided I would go as the thousands of others go, with just a few pounds, accepting their ways of living (and the) working conditions.’Footnote 79 Migrants point to the lack of alternatives: ‘With no work (in Ireland), we were just expecting something better than we had at home’, which is, after all, about just about what they received.Footnote 80 Perhaps the Irish workers’ poem, ‘The Exile Song’, best captures the combination of nostalgia for home and the harsh reality of living as immigrant labour, forced to move due to a colonial past:
Hard the work and long the day,
Though I’m many a mile away.
Kiss the children for me, Mary,
Do not let them grieve,
Tell them how I’m working for them,
Why our home I had to leave.Footnote 81
The common colonial legacy and ethnic otherness
Pointing to the melancholy nature of the post-war immigrant experience might be regarded as syrupy, and be reasoned away as an inevitable part of life in the 1950s and 1960s. Conditions for lower-class English workers were hard too, and there was a great deal of acceptance toward all groups. Compared to other European nations, Britain's overall record regarding prejudice is hardly disgraceful. Yet by exploring immigrant life at home and at work, away from the halls of power, the parallel historical-imperial circumstances facing immigrants of all colours is unearthed.
So too is the continuity in colonial condescension. It is no surprise those in power had few reservations adopting scornful attitudes that toward South Asians. One official candidly declared in 1951: ‘I can't believe it was the intention of the 1948 Act that we. . . should become the dustbin for the refuse of these two countries (India and Pakistan).’Footnote 82 Hugh Dalton's 1950 diaries showed no shame in labelling the non-white colonies as ‘pullulating poverty-stricken, diseased nigger communities’.Footnote 83 But the civil servant Sir John Maffey wrote to Clement Attlee in 1948 he considered the Irish a ‘vendetta-minded people’.Footnote 84 The doctor who spoke to Mass Observation researchers in 1939 may not have represented the majority of doctors, but nor was he alone: ‘I have always thought the Irish wanting in a sense of reality . . . and have considered them paranoiac. I have good friends that are Irish. These latter are, however, Protestant, which in my opinion, means greater intelligence.’Footnote 85 Such attitudes prevailed well into the post-war era.
Present in such great numbers, the Irish, however, inhabited a perplexing position that merged questions of religion and class, serving, in Breda Gray's term, as ‘unnoticed labour’.Footnote 86 Though their contribution to the economy was not noticed, their status as inferiors surely was. Like immigrants of colour, Irish people were mindful of the structural bind that placed them in England. As one Irishwoman put it, ‘We always knew we were different. We openly discussed it. We were aware we were thought to be inferior people, useful, likable in many ways . . . on the whole intellectually inferior; we were stupid, stupid people.’Footnote 87 Similarly, the Irishman Joe Davis recalls, ‘My own experience is yes, the Irish were abused in ways. Things happened to me – a fella spat over the counter at me and all this carry-on.’ He goes on to note, ‘But these things happen. You forget them.’Footnote 88 In 1961, one immigrant protested the assumption that Irish people chose to migrate, noting ‘They talk as if Irish people regarded emigration to Britain as the next thing to attaining heaven.’Footnote 89
Perhaps due to decades, indeed centuries, of condescension from their island neighbours, Irish immigrants found disparaging slurs ordinary? Those of Irish origin were of course conscious of a generalised resentment. As one put it, ‘I discovered the very name Irish had almost a criminal air about it, a backwards species viewed with suspicion. Things like, “So you’re one of the little people” and [being] the butt of Irish jokes.’Footnote 90 One Irishwoman stated rather reticently when interviewed, ‘we were discriminated against in those days’.Footnote 91 Yet, when colleagues persisted with jokes, the Irish tendency was to ignore it; one car worker noted casually in his memoirs, ‘Good atmosphere, though some Irish jokes.’Footnote 92 The broader culture replicated this characterisation. In a popular 1970s television series, The Comedians, anti-Irish jokes were second only to anti-Pakistani quips.Footnote 93 Indeed it was partly in response to such jokes that an Irish response eventually emerged in the 1980s to counter long-standing perceptions.Footnote 94
Though surely small comfort, the difference in skin colour meant Commonwealth immigrants at least knew they were dissimilar. Bereft of a voice to broadcast their circumstances, the Irish were not conceived of as an ethnic minority and missed out on the attendant state services or gradual modification of attitudes that came with that status. As Hickman and Walter have illustrated, continued persecution of Irish people lasted well into recent years.Footnote 95 Though Irish people inhabited an ambivalent racialised position, they were subject to the same iron rule, as Walter notes, that ‘power relations underpin emigration’.Footnote 96 By the 1980s Irish marginalisation would slowly gain attention, though in 1993 representatives from the London Irish Women's Centre could still claim plaintively: ‘When immigrants of colour run into discrimination, they are able to appeal as “ethnic minorities” with some authority and confidence. Their place in the social infrastructure of employment, housing and health is measured in a way that ours is not.’Footnote 97
In stark contrast, the influence of the colonial legacy on Commonwealth immigrants was public knowledge and invited an immediate riposte from immigrants of colour. Organisations such as the National Committee for Commonwealth Immigrants, the Indian Workers Association, the British Caribbean Association, the National Federation of Pakistani Associations or the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination, among others, offered a rallying point for immigrants of colour by the 1960s, and at the very least forced English people to assess their attitudes toward immigrants. All of these groups pointed to the ongoing impact of imperialism, ensuring both ordinary people and illustrious officials knew immigrants of colour merited assistance.
Like Commonwealth immigrants, the Irish lived and worked in grim post-imperial circumstances. And like Commonwealth immigrants, they met hostile attitudes derived from a long-standing colonial relationship. Caught in the middle of an ambiguous paradigm of post-war prejudice, they were ‘immigrant enough’ to invite disregard and contempt as second-class citizens, but not enough to warrant consideration as foreigners. Easily identified imperial racism toward Commonwealth immigrants inspired active organisation and agency, resulting in improved treatment and a greater voice in ensuing decades. Yet a more ambiguous but equally pernicious historical condescension toward the white Irish induced minimal state attention and a negligible role in the cultural conversation.
Indeed, the effects of Irish inconspicuousness only began to receive scholarly or popular attention in the 1980s. As Liz Curtis has shown, there were consequences of Irish people's ambivalent status.Footnote 98 In 1981, the Irish in Britain Representation Group’ stated its founding purpose was to counter the lack of ‘effective representation of our interests in social, cultural or political matters’.Footnote 99 A lament-like preface to the 1987 book The London Irish noted, ‘The Irish in terms of the race debate can be seen as a forgotten community.’Footnote 100 In 1988, researchers found that the Irish suffered more mental illness than any other immigrant community. The mental health group MIND contended that invisibility as an ethnic group had hindered recognition of social problems and consequent possibilities for treatment.Footnote 101 In 1991, The Sunday Mercury in Birmingham went so far as to claim the Irish were the only immigrants who fared worse in Britain than in their own country.Footnote 102 Accordingly, the Irish were not perceived of as an ethnic group until the 1990s, with a severe bearing on the population who moved after the war. Though state energies were focused on Commonwealth immigrants to confront the colonial legacy, it never occurred to anyone to do the same for the Irish; they were ostensibly just white people moving to a white country, left to their own devices.Footnote 103
Conclusion: Different degrees of derision
My intent here is not to suggest an identical immigrant experience in the post-war decades. There were of course differences, among and within groups and the Irish were no different in the variety of their experience, as scholars have shown.Footnote 104 Undoubtedly, it was harder to walk the streets if one's appearance indicated origins in South Asia or the Caribbean rather than Cork, Galway or Dublin. The Irish position, when placed next to that of Commonwealth immigrants, points to both similarity and difference. By inhabiting a middle zone between ‘immigrant other’ and ‘white citizen’, Irish people could integrate comparatively easier, distancing themselves from undesirable cultural connections with ‘Irishness’.Footnote 105 Though feasible, this was less readily available for those of colour; a Jamaican, an Indian, or a Pakistani was always perceived by English people as just that. Geographical proximity to home also offered greater options for Irish people to move back and forth, and many did.Footnote 106 Having made such a long, arduous journey, Commonwealth immigrants were not likely to return upon a whim, regardless of conditions. But these points do not diminish the marked equivalence of the Irish and Commonwealth immigrant experience. They certainly do not suggest Irish people lived in England free of condescension or discomfort, assimilating as whites in a white country.
Questions concerning which segments of society were most prejudiced in post-war Britain or the racism of particular legislation are important, and scholars have rightly addressed them. Decades of scholarship on the iniquities of ‘coloured prejudice’ have rightly exposed the hardship facing immigrants from the Commonwealth. But we delve deeper into the post-war immigrant experience when we consider the lives of immigrants of all colours, in the places they lived and worked, rather than amid the quaintly worded quagmire of legislation. We begin to discern the varieties of prejudice encountered by people of all shades when we include the Irish as colonised whites.
After the war, almost a million Irish people entered Britain alongside their Commonwealth counterparts. By exploring the actual lives of these migrants we counter the conventional wisdom that the white Irish moved merrily to Britain and integrated accordingly. If the comments of one down-on-his-luck Irishman in London do not perhaps represent ‘the Irish’ in toto, they do depict daily life for so many migrants, regardless of colour: ‘I lived in Birmingham, working regularly in the building. I would drink from Thursday to Sunday. The rest of the week would be sort of hell, but I always seemed to manage in some way.’Footnote 107 Every immigrant community endured contempt and squalor in post-war Britain. But none came in such large numbers as the Irish or made the same overall contribution to post-war reconstruction. Irish people then were trapped in the middle of a polarised immigration discourse with no conceptual room for them, either for policymakers or for historians of Britain since.
And as the 1970s began, attitudes toward the Irish in Britain were about to darken markedly. Irish difference might have been rendered in subtly shaded derision through the 1950s and 1960s, but it would be accentuated clear and starkly once the IRA restarted their campaign to broadcast grievances regarding the British in Ireland. On November 21st, 1974 two horrific bombings set off by somebody in the IRA in popular city centre pubs in Birmingham murdered 21 people and injured 182. The six Irishmen arrested and imprisoned for sixteen years for the bombings were subsequently released, having been forced to make confessions based upon inadequate evidence. Those responsible are still unidentified, providing no closure to the tragedy, or more importantly, to the families of the victims.
In the week following the bombings, the Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, rushed through Parliament the Prevention of Terrorism Act of 1974. This was an act of law specifically aimed at Irish radicals, who Jenkins argued constituted a ‘clear and present danger’.Footnote 108 However, reservations regarding the Irish amid such emergency legislation could easily be broadened to embrace ‘Irish people’ in the mind of the public. Enacted only eight days after the bombings, the legislation contributed to circumstances whereby the majority Irish in Britain could be conflated with the tiny minority willing to perform violent acts to protest against past and present. With ongoing IRA violence worsening conditions, a spirit of anti-Irishness skyrocketed in the years to follow. In such an environment, any Irish person could conceivably be sympathetic to the IRA, or worse, a member of the organisation. Many English had suspected the worth of the Irish as citizens following the war. By the 1970s widespread misgivings toward their very presence on English soil prevailed, a historical irony if ever there was one.
