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Moleskin Joe
Moleskin Joe is one of the most memorable characters to appear in Patrick MacGill’s first two books, Children of the Dead End and The Rat-Pit. This sequel, first published in 1923, recalls the tramps and navvies MacGill encountered during his time on the road in Scotland and the north of England in the early years of the twentieth century. It centres around the adventures of Moleskin Joe, with his philosophy of ‘there’s a good time comin’, although we may never live to see it’, who in this book falls in love with a young Irish woman he meets on his travels. Filled with superb characterisation, humour, poignancy and eloquence, Moleskin Joe is a vivid portrayal of the hardships of the immigrant experience, which McGill not only experienced himself, but also successfully exposed to a huge audience through his writing.
189 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1923
About the author
Patrick MacGill
79 books5 followersPatrick MacGill was an Irish journalist, poet and novelist, known as "The Navvy Poet" because he had worked as a navvy before he began writing.
MacGill was born in Glenties, County Donegal. A statue in his honour is on the bridge where the main street crosses the river in Glenties.
During the First World War, MacGill served with the London Irish Rifles (1/18th Battalion, The London Regiment) and was wounded at the Battle of Loos on 28 October 1915.
MacGill wrote a memoir-type novel called Children of the Dead End.
In early 2008, a docu-drama starring Stephen Rea was made about the life of Patrick MacGill. One of the film's locations was the boathouse of Edinburgh Canal Society at Edinburgh on the Union Canal, and one of its rowing boats.
An annual literary summer school is held in Glenties in mid July each year in his honour.
MacGill was born in Glenties, County Donegal. A statue in his honour is on the bridge where the main street crosses the river in Glenties.
During the First World War, MacGill served with the London Irish Rifles (1/18th Battalion, The London Regiment) and was wounded at the Battle of Loos on 28 October 1915.
MacGill wrote a memoir-type novel called Children of the Dead End.
In early 2008, a docu-drama starring Stephen Rea was made about the life of Patrick MacGill. One of the film's locations was the boathouse of Edinburgh Canal Society at Edinburgh on the Union Canal, and one of its rowing boats.
An annual literary summer school is held in Glenties in mid July each year in his honour.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
November 27, 2023
I read this book many years ago, and read it again now because I’m buying a copy for someone this Christmas. Unfortunately I no longer have the first two in Patrick MacGill’s autobiographical novels, having bestowed all three on my son years ago, with only this one to hand at the moment.
I was impressed by the introduction by Brian D. Osbourne (2000), which I read first, as I knew the story. The introduction is a comprehensive but concise summary of MacGill’s life, born “around March 1890” into poverty in Ireland and growing up as farmhand, seaman, soldier and navvy, and of MacGill the self-taught intellectual who became a Fleet Street journalist, a secretary and librarian at Windsor Castle, and an author. For me, this duality sums up his writings.
“MacGill’s socialist politics were not essentially a matter of book learning or theory but rather a human response to the sufferings of his fellow men.”
Patrick MacGill said himself,
“I lived with Hugo’s characters, I suffered with them and wept for them in their troubles.”
So he had the choice of delving into theory, or of making the day-to-day endurance of working people known to the world beyong the navvy. The introduction details that MacGill was “an auto-didact of quite prodigious proportions” who read extensively, from Zola and Thomas Carlyle, Montaigne, Ruskin and Marx, and even translated poetry from Goethe and La Fontaine – “his knowledge of German and French being mainly derived from dictionaries”. He chose to document his world, the real world, in story form.
To the book itself. Here is MacGill’s introduction, in the novel, to “Moleskin Joe”:
“The buck-navvy is a type of workman in whom are the qualities (or lack of them) of the hobo, sundowner, vagrant and tramp. He is an outcast of society, a children’s bogey, the shunned of civilisation – of which he is the pioneer. It is he who goes out into the deserted ways of the world, who works and dies in combat with Nature, the rude uncultured labourer under whose feet railways, bridges, cities and castles spring into being.
Joe was his name and the soubriquet ‘Moleskin’ was acquired, the why and when of this acquirement being untabulated in the recollection of the possessor.”
The book is not a polemic but a love story, starting from a small incident in which “something strange had crept into his life, something that was almost ridiculous, but uncommonly sweet and radiant”.
The plot reflects MacGill's era in its reliance on coincidences, although these mostly arise from the connected nature of the navvies’ vagabond existence, passing on the news of big water-schemes, through word of mouth. As the plot reaches its conclusion it rests on less believable coincidence, a literary technique perfectly acceptable to MacGill’s readers but which some readers today might consider contrived – I was fine with it. The same goes for characterisation; some might find it stereotyped, but for me this was part of what MacGill was about - telling the human story of the dispossessed, the outcasts of whom he was one.
Here is one of the few passages of general comment, here used to move on the account of Moleskin Joe’s life.
“Five years had passed and the world was swinging on its accustomed way. The war was won, but by whom was still a matter of grave doubt. . . . . The war profiteers were being accepted by society, that society which found grace in the fact that its profiteering started in ancient times unpolluted by eavesdropping journalists. The men who did so much (not in the hazard of the field, of course) to win the great war were dying off, doing time, or holding on to the public favour by the hair of their eyelids; and the men who had really taken part in the war, who had suffered, but had not died, were in a bulky measure starving in a land fit for heroes to inhabit.
In fact, things were going on much the same as ever. The eternal verities of Nature were unchanged, the world still stood on the three things on which it will stand for ever: the thin stream of milk from the breast, the thin blade of corn on the holm, and the thin thread through the hands of the spinner. The emotional upheaval which infected the more civilised races in 1914 was now dulled, and the world had rested for a while to lick its sores and prepare for a second upheaval greater than the first.”
Moleskin Joe himself is a charismatic character and has become legendary for his customary epigram on the navvies’ life:
“There’s a good time coming, though we may never live to see it.”
I’m sorry they all missed a better time, all of them, who built, with their rough hands and the strength of their backs, the reservoirs, the canals, the railways, the bridges and the roads. Like MacGill, I lived with and wept for Les Misérables, but I weep for MacGill too. It was all true. For many, it still is.
I was impressed by the introduction by Brian D. Osbourne (2000), which I read first, as I knew the story. The introduction is a comprehensive but concise summary of MacGill’s life, born “around March 1890” into poverty in Ireland and growing up as farmhand, seaman, soldier and navvy, and of MacGill the self-taught intellectual who became a Fleet Street journalist, a secretary and librarian at Windsor Castle, and an author. For me, this duality sums up his writings.
“MacGill’s socialist politics were not essentially a matter of book learning or theory but rather a human response to the sufferings of his fellow men.”
Patrick MacGill said himself,
“I lived with Hugo’s characters, I suffered with them and wept for them in their troubles.”
So he had the choice of delving into theory, or of making the day-to-day endurance of working people known to the world beyong the navvy. The introduction details that MacGill was “an auto-didact of quite prodigious proportions” who read extensively, from Zola and Thomas Carlyle, Montaigne, Ruskin and Marx, and even translated poetry from Goethe and La Fontaine – “his knowledge of German and French being mainly derived from dictionaries”. He chose to document his world, the real world, in story form.
To the book itself. Here is MacGill’s introduction, in the novel, to “Moleskin Joe”:
“The buck-navvy is a type of workman in whom are the qualities (or lack of them) of the hobo, sundowner, vagrant and tramp. He is an outcast of society, a children’s bogey, the shunned of civilisation – of which he is the pioneer. It is he who goes out into the deserted ways of the world, who works and dies in combat with Nature, the rude uncultured labourer under whose feet railways, bridges, cities and castles spring into being.
Joe was his name and the soubriquet ‘Moleskin’ was acquired, the why and when of this acquirement being untabulated in the recollection of the possessor.”
The book is not a polemic but a love story, starting from a small incident in which “something strange had crept into his life, something that was almost ridiculous, but uncommonly sweet and radiant”.
The plot reflects MacGill's era in its reliance on coincidences, although these mostly arise from the connected nature of the navvies’ vagabond existence, passing on the news of big water-schemes, through word of mouth. As the plot reaches its conclusion it rests on less believable coincidence, a literary technique perfectly acceptable to MacGill’s readers but which some readers today might consider contrived – I was fine with it. The same goes for characterisation; some might find it stereotyped, but for me this was part of what MacGill was about - telling the human story of the dispossessed, the outcasts of whom he was one.
Here is one of the few passages of general comment, here used to move on the account of Moleskin Joe’s life.
“Five years had passed and the world was swinging on its accustomed way. The war was won, but by whom was still a matter of grave doubt. . . . . The war profiteers were being accepted by society, that society which found grace in the fact that its profiteering started in ancient times unpolluted by eavesdropping journalists. The men who did so much (not in the hazard of the field, of course) to win the great war were dying off, doing time, or holding on to the public favour by the hair of their eyelids; and the men who had really taken part in the war, who had suffered, but had not died, were in a bulky measure starving in a land fit for heroes to inhabit.
In fact, things were going on much the same as ever. The eternal verities of Nature were unchanged, the world still stood on the three things on which it will stand for ever: the thin stream of milk from the breast, the thin blade of corn on the holm, and the thin thread through the hands of the spinner. The emotional upheaval which infected the more civilised races in 1914 was now dulled, and the world had rested for a while to lick its sores and prepare for a second upheaval greater than the first.”
Moleskin Joe himself is a charismatic character and has become legendary for his customary epigram on the navvies’ life:
“There’s a good time coming, though we may never live to see it.”
I’m sorry they all missed a better time, all of them, who built, with their rough hands and the strength of their backs, the reservoirs, the canals, the railways, the bridges and the roads. Like MacGill, I lived with and wept for Les Misérables, but I weep for MacGill too. It was all true. For many, it still is.
Read
November 3, 2025Very funny on multiple counts that the author is the guy the annual Summer School in Glenties is named for.
Did Not Finish
March 25, 2026picked this up at a hostel in Ireland, misplaced it before I could finish it.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews