Children of the Dead End

by Patrick MacGill, Brian D. Osborne (Introduction)

Written as fiction, this text is Patrick MacGill's autobiography. Starting with an account of his childhood in Ireland at the end of the 19th century, the story moves to Scotland where, tramp then gang-labourer then navvy, Dermond Flynn (as he sometimes calls himself) discovers himself as a writer.

Genres: Ireland, Scotland, History, Irish Literature, Memoir, Biography Memoir, Classics

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1914

About the author

Patrick 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.

Reviews

[Ian · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book that I had long meant to read. Part of the author's story took place in the village of Kinlochleven about 20 miles from where I live, so the book tends to feature on the shelves of local bookshops in my area. It is one of those "fictionalized autobiographies" that are neither quite one or the other. In his introduction, the author advises that the book is an autobiography and that all the major incidents happened under his direct observation, but asks for "a little license for the novelist's pen".

The story, written in 1914, is nonetheless a remarkable one. Born into desperate poverty in Donegal, the author leaves school at the age of 10, leaves home at 12, and subsequently migrates to Scotland to work as one of the famous "navvies", living and working alongside a cast of wild characters with names like Moleskin Joe, Carroty Dan, and Hellfire Gahey. By his own account the author himself was a physically powerful man whose passions were brawling, drinking, gambling, and incongruously, poetry (more or less in that order).

The book really impresses in its vivid descriptions of the lives of itinerant workers of just a century ago. Ragged and battered figures with scarred faces and missing fingers, they roamed from site to site, sleeping under hedges and stealing food from farms, before working on construction projects where safety standards were zero and where all too often a navvy ended his days in an unmarked grave. On the other hand, the weakest part of the story concerned the author's love interest, set out in a sentimental style that seems to have been a hangover from the Victorian era, and which was a bit too mawkish for my taste. On the whole though, this is an excellent memoir and a fascinating window to the past.

[Linda Robinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Born in Ireland, sent to Scotland by his family to work potatoes, Dermod Flynn labors and fights his way through work seasons, sleeping outdoors or 3 abed in a leaky room, sending his sub home to his demanding mother as more babies come along. The brutal life of a navvy, day laborer is cushioned by the lyrical prose MacGill applies to his, and our, wounds. He finds pride in what's left to him: a hammer or fist blow well-placed, and compassion for his fellows and the girl from home robbed of a future. Moleskin Joe is Flynn's philosopher companion whose fistic opinions pepper the work gang and lighten the load a little. Flynn's body and spirit harden as the work molds the railways, waterworks and the cities of a future Dermod and his cronies will not share.

[SnowFlash · Rating 4 out of 5]

As Harsh as The Land.
Children of the Dead End is a (mostly) autobiographical recounting of a young Irish peasant’s life in the early 1900s. I picked up this book from a local independent bookshop in Fort William, Scotland while having just walked through the Scottish Highlands and the town of Kinlochleven, which is the setting for the book, and the fact that I was there made me appreciate so deeply the harshness that is described in the book.
 
The author’s stories about how he was treated in different jobs, his working conditions, and the way he was treated were truly horrendous and for me it was brought into even crisper light by seeing and walking through the bogs and the moorlands of the Scottish Highlands. 
 
Throughout these stories, however, is a narrative of a loss of innocence and the loss of faith during the most critical years of a boy’s coming of age, and the eventual self-fulfillment of the ‘dead end’ destiny of which he speaks.
 
It’s a sad story, and after almost a century, it may feel a bit cliché, but at the time that this book was written, writings about the struggles of the proletariat or even common struggles were rare or nonexistent. 

Overall, this book was more enjoyable for me to read because I was experiencing the very land it was written about as I was there and that personal connection with the subject made it more interesting and engaging. Without that personal connection and context, I’m not certain I would have enjoyed it nearly as much.

[Andy Weston · Rating 4 out of 5]

In 1914 when this was first published novels about the working classes were largely ignored, if they were referred to, it was usually written from a more educated social standing. This therefore, was radically different, and immediately successful because of it.
Although fiction, it is based heavily on the author’s own experiences,

it must be said that nearly all the incidents of the book have come under the observation of the writer, that such incidents should take place makes the tragedy of the story.

Dermod Flynn (MacGill) leaves Ireland at 12 years old, and is largely alone on the Scottish roads, sleeping rough, often not eating for days, taking work when he can. Such was the life of navvies.
Descriptions are precise and completely believable, details of such incidents as the death of a railway worker, are graphic and gruesome.
Flynn ends up at Kinlochleven, where indeed I am tonight, working to build the hydroelectric scheme; a huge engineering venture which included Blackwater Reservoir, a 6 kilometre aqueduct and an aluminium smelting plant. He works mainly up at the reservoir, 5 rough miles from the town, where life indeed is brutal.
I came across this book in Patrick Baker’s The Unremembered Places: Exploring Scotland's Wild Histories. He hikes up to the reservoir and is haunted by the ruins of the community and its graveyard. The chapter was so inspiring I am heading up there tomorrow to see it for myself.

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

A rare story of a desperately poor Donegal family set at the fag-end of the 19th century. So poor indeed that they have to send out 12 year old Dermod to a hiring fair where he is hired out to a brutish farmer for a period of 6 months. The family rely on Dermod's regular remittances to pay for their rent & food.
Eventually Dermod decides to take the boat over to Scotland to work as part of a potato-picking crew. The story continues with the harsh, hand-to-mouth existence of his travels and the colourful characters he meets on his journey.
There is a skillfully depicted romance and a surprise change in his fortunes which make this true account particularly interesting.
The book has been likened to The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists due to its espousal of socialist values and depiction of the poverty, cruelty & inequality faced by the labouring class.
I shall look out for the sequel.

[Chris Wray · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Life to me had now become dull, expressionless, stupid. Only in drink was there contentment, only in a fight was there excitement. I hated the brown earth, the slushy muck and gritty rock, but in the end hatred died out and I was almost left without passion or longing. My life now had no happiness and no great sadness. My soul was proof against sorrow as it was against joy. Happiness and woe were of no account; life was a spread of brown muck, without any relieving splash of lighter or darker colours. For all that, I had no great desire (desire was almost dead even) to go down to the Lowlands and look for a newer job. So I stayed amidst the brown muck and existed.”

This is an incredible book, a fictionalised autobiography recounting the first twenty-one years or so of Patrick McGill's life. He begins in rural Donegal, close to where I grew up in Tyrone, but the childhood he describes could be from another planet. It may only be 100 years ago, but the degree of abject poverty is shocking (albeit that potatoes and buttermilk are probably healthier than the bread and dripping of the urban poor), and every aspect of life is stifled by a pervasive and highly superstitious brand of Catholicism. Even accounting for MacGill’s anti-religious and left-wing political leanings, it is hard to argue with the fact that the priest and the landlord held everyone in an almost inescapable iron grip.

This is a life that almost anyone would be glad to flee, but MacGill’s journey over the mountains to the hiring fair in Strabane at the age of twelve is merely to exchange one grim drudgery for another. He is contracted as an indentured farm labourer for six months at a time, before later taking the boat to Scotland as a teenager and joining a potato-picking crew. Even as he sends most of his wages back home, there is a sense of inevitability to the loss of money at gambling, the pride and shame that prevent a return to Donegal, and the striking out on the road as a tramp.

This is where the book is at its absolute best, in MacGill's account of his life on the road, and his work as a navvy on the railway and as a day labourer. His life in those years was hard, grinding, unspeakably dangerous, and miserable above all. This is a hand-to-mouth existence in which smoking, drinking, gambling and fighting are the only meagre pleasures on offer. It is also inescapable in a way that isn’t quite the same for George Orwell in Down and Out or The Road to Wigan Pier. The irony, of course, is that MacGill does escape, and it is almost a miracle that he not only survives but begins to develop the literary ability that would characterise the rest of his life. If he had stuck to his account of rural poverty, tramping, and life as a navvy, this book would have easily earned five stars - but I had to dock one for the cliched love story with its mawkishly tragic ending.

Overall, this is a compelling, depressing and often surprisingly funny account of a way of life that (thankfully) no longer exists. I’m very glad that I read it, and it is a remarkable and memorable book that deserves to be much better known than it is.

“One night towards the end of October I had lost all my money at the gambling school, although Moleskin had twice given me a stake to retrieve my fallen fortunes. I left the shack, went out into the darkness, a fire in my head and emptiness in my heart. Around me the stark mountain peaks rose raggedly against the pale horns of the anæmic moon. Outside the whisky store a crowd of men stood, dark looks on their faces, and the wild blood of mischief behind. Inside each shack a dozen or more gamblers sat cross-legged in circles on the ground, playing banker or brag, and the clink of money could be heard as it passed from hand to hand. Above them the naphtha lamps hissed and spluttered and smelt, the dim, sickly light showed the unwashed and unshaven faces beneath, and the eager eyes that sparkled brightly, seeing nothing but the movements of the game. Down in the cuttings men were labouring on the night-shift, gutting out the bowels of the mountain places, and forcing their way through the fastness steadily, slowly and surely. I could hear the dynamite exploding and shattering to pieces the rock in which it was lodged. The panting of weary hammer-men was loud in the darkness, and the rude songs which enlivened the long hours of the night floated up to me from the trough of the hills.”

[Christopher Day · Rating 4 out of 5]

Semi-autobiographical tale of MacGill's journey from rural poverty in Ireland, through working as a navvy in the Scottish Highlands, to becoming a writer.

[ellie✧*:･ﾟ · Rating 4 out of 5]

✭ ✭ ✭ ✭

really enjoyed this! i liked how the epigraphs quoted characters in the book itself & how this kept the references self-contained and you can really tell how significantly the text was moulded by personal and material circumstance!

[Kirsten · Rating 2 out of 5]

Patrick MacGill hatte lange kein Glück im Leben: er wuchs zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts auf einem kleinen Hof in Irland auf. Die Familie war arm, aber fast alles Geld, das verdient wurde, ging entweder an den Landbesitzer oder an die Kirche. Er musste schon früh die Schule verlassen und arbeiten, um die Familie zu unterstützen. Später ging er nach Schottland, um dort sein Glück zu machen. Aber der Weg dorthin war steinig und die größten davon legte er sich selbst in den Weg.

Anfangs klingt Patricks Geschichte wie eine von vielen. Das Leben seiner Familie wurde von Armut, harter Arbeit und dem blinden Gehorsam zur Kirche bestimmt. Die Menschen hatten nichts zu essen, aber der Prieser baute sich ein luxuriöses Badezimmer in sein Haus. Darüber wurde zwar geredet, aber offene Kritik wagte keiner. Als die Kinder zu zahlreich wurden, ging Patrick von der Schule ab, um selbst Geld zu verdienen und bietet sich auf dem Wochenmarkt als Arbeiter an. Wer Glück hatte, kam zu einem guten Herrn, bei dem man anständig behandelt wurde und vor allem genug zu essen bekam. Patrick hatte anfangs nicht dieses Glück. Sein erster Arbeitgeber behandelte ihn nicht besser als die Schweine, auf die er aufpassen musste. Erst später hatte er Glück und bleib auf diesem Hof auch mehrere Jahre.

Aber Patrick war auch rastlos und immer auf der Suche nach einem besseren Leben. Das verspricht ihm ein Freund, der nach Schottland gehen will. Dort braucht man starke Männer für den Bau von Straßen und Eisenbahnen und auch bei der Ernte. Die Überfahrt und die Zeit danach verändern Patricks Leben auf dramatische Weise: er beginnt dort zu spielen und beginnt auch zu trinken. Aber er findet auch eine Frau, in die er sich verliebt und der Traum von einem glücklichen Leben mit ihr hält ihn die langen Jahre aufrecht, in denen er ganz unten ist.

Ich hatte bei der Lektüre zwiespältige Gefühle. Keine Frage, Patricks Geschichte ist schrecklich. Die Gängelei durch Kirche und Gutsherrn und die modernen Sklavenmärkte, auf denen die Notlage der Menschen ausgenutzt wurde, waren bedrückend zu lesen. Auch die erste Zeit in Schottland ist nicht besser. Die Gruppen mit Iren werden hauptsächlich als Erntehelfer eingesetzt, bei denen die Arbeitsbedingungen oft nicht viel besser waren als in Irland. Die Abhängigkeit der Menschen von dem kleinen Einkommen, das sie erhielten, wurde gnadenlos ausgenutzt. Als Patrick später beim Bau arbeitete, verschlimmerte sich seine Lage noch. Zu einem großen Teil war er durch seine Alkohol- und Spielsucht selbst schuld daran, aber bei diesen Schilderungen fehlt mir die Einsicht. Vielmehr habe ich da den Eindruck bekommen, dass er sich als Opfer der Umstände sieht und das hat es mir schwer gemacht, wirklich Mitgefühl mit ihm zu haben, auch als er andere Szenen, wie die beim Bau des Stauwehrs in Kinlochleven beschreibt. Ich habe mich immer gefragt, wie weit er seine Lage selbst verschuldet hat, auch wenn ich das den anderen Arbeitern, die in der gleichen Situation wie er waren, ungerecht fand. Aber auch wenn ich Patricks Beschreibung kritisch gegenüberstehe, ändert sie nichts an der Tatsache, wie sehr sie Notlage der Menschen ausgenutzt wurde.

[Mickey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Patrick MacGill's Children of the Dead End was given to me to read by my brother, who had gotten it from our grandfather. He told me it was a quick read, and surprisingly exciting despite its depressing title. I brought it with me on my move to Germany, and finally began reading it at some point in April. The old blue paperback rode around with me in my brown backpack through Cologne for almost two months, and was mostly read on train rides between Chlodwigplatz and Nußbaumerstraße.
The book's introduction describes something of a miracle that occurred in MacGill's education, or lack thereof. He appeared as a writer with this book more or less out of nowhere, having left school at age ten and roamed the British Isles working wherever he could until writing this book at age twenty-five. To read the book is to learn how he managed to do that, but his transparency and authenticity in narration makes it no less of a wonder. I believe MacGill was some kind of prodigy, born into conditions that have, in most cases, deprived the world of such genius. Artists are everywhere, and we as a society ought to do what we can to allow their gifts to naturally thrive and grow.
Of course, if MacGill had gotten the education and encouragement his talent deserved, who knows if he would ever have written anything? What happened happened, and we're left with a breathtaking account of what one man saw while tramping around early 20th century Scotland.

[Anand · Rating 5 out of 5]

My great grandfather wrote this semi-autobiographical book. Even though it was published more than a hundred years ago, it feels vivid and raw. Highly recommend it for anyone who wants to understand what it’s like to be poor, to have no safety net, and to not know when you next meal (let alone payday) will come.

[Henry · Rating 5 out of 5]

I

[Jack Conway · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the greatest books I read, absolutely devastating.

[Leah · Rating 1 out of 5]

Sympathy has its limits…

Dermod Flynn lives for the first few years of his life with his family in Donegal. His parents make it clear that his main, perhaps sole, purpose in life is to go off to work to send home money to keep his parents and younger siblings from sinking further into poverty than they already are. So at a young age he is packed off “beyond the mountains” to the hiring market, where farmers hire workers on a seasonal basis. After a series of jobs, treated well in some, appallingly in others, Dermod joins a gang of workers bound for Scotland for the potato-picking season, and this begins his life as an itinerant worker, a “navvy”, in Scotland in the early days of the twentieth century.

Dermod is MacGill’s fictional representation of himself. In his foreword, he claims that most of the people he meets and most of the incidents in the book are true although he has used some licence to create a kind of plot to hold the thing together. Mostly the book is remembered (if at all) as a record of a way of life now gone, though some (oddly) praise it for its (non-existent) literary merits. Since I am already fairly well aware of the appalling conditions of itinerant Irish workers at this period and of the poverty and ill-treatment they endured, the lack of aforesaid literary merit meant that it wasn’t worth enduring the intense dislike I developed for Dermod/MacGill for anything I might learn. I therefore abandoned it halfway through, merely flicking to the end to discover if the mawkish love story MacGill used as his plot had a happy or tragic ending. I won’t spoil it for you, in case you ever feel inspired to read the book.

Had Dermod been truly fictional, I might have been able to tolerate him as a character. It was the knowledge that he is in fact MacGill by another name that caused me to find the book intolerable. Despite being at the bottom of the social heap, Dermod has a wonderful ability to look down on others, clearly because by disparaging them he thinks it somehow makes him look superior. I might even have found this psychology interesting or pitiable had it not been for his clear dislike of humanity as a whole, and the female half of humanity in particular. The language he uses to describe women is repellent – perhaps normal for men of that class and era, but it seemed to me indicative of a real hatred for women, especially those who had lost the physical attractiveness of youth. Here he is describing Gourock Ellen and her friend Annie – whores in their younger days but now too old for that job, they eke out a pitiful living crawling across muddy fields on their knees picking up potatoes. And yet Gourock Ellen is kind to beggars, washes Dermod’s clothes for him and generally commits acts of kindness despite having nothing herself. Here’s what lovely Dermod says of her and Annie:

Nearly everyone in the squad looked upon the two women with contempt and disgust, and I must confess that I shared in the general feeling. In my sight they were loathsome and unclean. They were repulsive in appearance, loose in language, and seemingly devoid of any moral restraint or female decency. It was hard to believe that they were young children once, and that there was still unlimited goodness in their natures.

This from a man also with nothing, also filthy from working in the fields, also viewed with contempt and disgust by those who think themselves superior to the poor. Funnily enough, he can find justifications quite easily for his own weaknesses. He gets drunk and gambles his money away because society makes him do it, not because he is “devoid of any moral restraint” and his routine unprovoked violence is apparently not an indication of any lack of “male decency”. Here he is on a night when he has been prowling round a large house, peering through a window at a dinner party in progress:

At the further end of the table a big fat woman in evening dress sat facing me, and she looked irrepressibly merry. Her low-cut frock exposed a great spread of bulging flesh stretching across from shoulder to shoulder. It was a most disgusting sight, and should have been hidden.

He throws a stone through the window, showering broken glass over those inside, and the householder lets the dog loose:

Before I reached the gate a fairly-sized black animal was at my heels, squealing as I had heard dogs in Ireland squeal when pursuing a rabbit. I turned round suddenly, fearing to get bitten in the legs, and the animal, unable to restrain his mad rush, careered past. He tried to turn round, but my boot shot out and the blow took him on the head. This was an action that he did not relish, and he hurried back to the house, whimpering all the way.

It wasn’t long after this point that I decided I’d had enough of the adventures of Mr Misogyny and his dog-kicking boots.

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[Jack Deighton · Rating 4 out of 5]

In some respects this is an odd choice of book for inclusion in the list of 100 best Scottish Books. MacGill was Irish and the book starts off in Ireland with the early life story of Dermod Flynn, offspring of a poor family living off potatoes and buttermilk (with the occasional variation of buttermilk and potatoes.) When Dermod takes exception to his schoolmaster picking on him and hits him back, his schooling is over and he is packed off to be an agricultural hired hand - in effect, a slave for six months – so that he can send money back to his mother and father. But the majority of the book is set in Scotland to where Flynn decamps as a member of a gang of potato-pickers and ends up as a tramp until, via a stint on the railway, he joins the workforce building the aluminium works at Kinlochleven.

In the text MacGill affects to be giving us Flynn’s unvarnished autobiography, denying any artifice, explicitly stating that he has taken incidents from his (Flynn’s) life - though the assumption is that they are from MacGill’s own as his biography is all but identical - and written them down, but there is an organisation to them, a novelistic arrangement that belies such simplicity.

The itinerant life, the characters Flynn meets, are described in detail. The brutal existence of the life of a navvy, the arbitrary dangers it involved, admirably demonstrated. The only interests of the men of the gangs at Kinlochleven - outside working hours - are drinking, gambling and fighting one another. Somehow through all that Flynn learns to read, to jot down poems and incidents which he sends to a newspaper and whose acceptance is briefly parlayed into a job as a journalist in London. But the “civilised” life does not suit him.

However, at the core of the book is Flynn’s connection with Norah Ryan, a girl from his village of Crossmoran in Donegal, who came across to Scotland as part of the potato-picking gang but to whom Flynn neglected to pay attention as he fell into gambling and, consequently, she into a relationship with a farmer’s son which will not end well.

MacGill also brings out the ungratefulness of the general public who do not care about the dangers the navvies endured, the risks they took, but after they are laid off - all but en masse - only see itinerant wasters before them.

Flynn’s bitterness towards the church – both Catholic, in Ireland and Scotland, and Presbyterian in Scotland – is no doubt a reflection of MacGill’s own. “The church soothes those who are robbed and never condemns the robber, who is usually a pillar of Christianity..... To me the industrial system is a great fraud, and the Church which does not condemn it is unfaithful and unjust to the working people..... I have never yet heard of missions for the uplifting of MPs, or for the betterment of stock exchange gamblers; and these people need saving grace a great deal more than the poor untutored working men. But it is the nature of things that piety should preach to poverty on its shortcomings, and forget that even wealth may have sins of its own.” He goes on, “In all justice the lash should be laid on the backs of the employers who pay starvation wages, and the masters who fatten on sweated labour. The slavery of the shop and the mill is responsible for the shame of the street.”

In its unalloyed description of the life of the working man Children of the Dead End is of a piece with many works of Scottish literature, so maybe its place on that 100 Best list is justified after all.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am amazed that this book is not more widely known about, and I sort of came upon it by happy accident. Set at the start of the 20th century it tells the life of a young Irishman sent over as a youth to Scotland to support his family back home. Picking up any job going from potato-picking, to laying railway lines while sleeping in fields, model houses and bunkhouses. It is a hand to mouth existence, made all the more harrowing as it is semi-autobiographical. The young Patrick MacGill character educates himself from any books he comes across and in the libraries of Glasgow in the early 1900s, and begins to supplement his wages writing pieces for London newspapers.

Open about his happy abandonment to the wiles of gambling, fighting and alcohol, it is an eye-opening account of the harsh conditions the navvies endured to build the railways and waterways of Scotland. The grimmest section is set up in a part of Scotland I know well, as he works for a year at Kinlochleven building the dam and waterway that would power the aluminium smelting plant up there. The casual loss of life becomes an everyday occurrence, as the sombre "Navvies' graveyard" that still can be found at the remote Blackwater dam attests to this day.

[kyle macdowall · Rating 5 out of 5]

What an interesting read!

What an interesting read! I downloaded it on a whim after reading the poem preceding the first chapter, which was so similar to Tolkein's 'song' of Tom Bombadil that it had me wondering whether he had plagiarised Patrick MacGill? Not that it matters...

I read the book in one sitting: fascinated by the description of the harsh life of the Irish rural poor and the 'navvies' travelling to the UK (Scotland) for work. To my mind, and this isn't a qualified opinion, I found it more informative and authentic than a Dickens novel, and I'm really pleased to have discovered it.

I'm also rather impressed with Patrick MacGill's poetry, as each chapter begins with an epigraph of his own work. Again, this isn't a qualified opinion as I'm not overly familiar with the genre, but I'm of the impression that, as a poet, he's underrated.

Now I could end this 'mini-review' by talking about Bukowski as I've already mentioned Dickens, but I'll leave you to make your own mind up about that. It certainly captivated me...

[Thekirkiepirate · Rating 3 out of 5]

I originally read this book at school, and was surprised to see that a new edition has come out.

It certainly paints a vivid and harrowing picture of life on the road as an interant labourer in the early 20th century. However, I found the main character - a thinly veiled representation of the author - to be somewhat smug and irritating. I was surprised to read that he only lost one of the many fights that he engaged in, and always seemed to get the better of his fellows. He came across as narcissistic as Alan Partridge, to the extent that I expected each chapter to conclude with 'needless to say, I had the last laugh'

I was at a loss to understand why the author did not simply produce an autobiography.

[Brian Doak Carlin · Rating 3 out of 5]

There’s a worthy tale to be told of the life of a navvy and going on the tramp, unfortunately I don’t feel MacGill’s prose is up to it. Regardless of the truth in the tale the drama is delivered in an unremarkable way and occasionally melodramatic style. Wished it could have been better. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists it ain’t .

[Stephanie Ng · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting enough to read, but some parts were so, so dull and I had to force myself to read it. I would give it 2.5, but I can't so I have to round up to a 3 😂

[Tim · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5, I enjoyed the writing style

[Tanya · Rating 5 out of 5]

The history you don't hear from the Brits!

My ancestors were all Irish on my Dads side, half from very rural Mayo, the other half from who knows where. Just "Ireland" on the UK census. My Grandad was simply not interested in my brother & I when we were children & did all he could to not be in the house when we were visiting. Would this attitude have carried on into our adult life? I don't know as he had a bad stroke when I was 8 & was dead by the time I was 12. His parents were both Connor, both from a tiny part of Mayo. They eventually married in Edinburgh but after having 1 son born out of wedlock. My grandad was the first "official" child & thus seen as head of the family when his parents died. Long prior to that he was regularily sent back to Mayo to work on a farm. Why did his parents come to Scotland, what was their journey? Ive no idea as these stories have not been told. This diary however gives a real look into the life of an Irishman back in my Great Grandparents day. We've all heard of the Irish Navvy & quite possibly for most its the bad things we have heard. This was a really eye opening book. Quite depressing to be honest & made me understand perhaps why my own grandad couldnt be bothered dealing with us kids. The reality of how the Great Britain of the Empire was built really comes to life in this tale. With all the current nonsense in the UK around immigrants, the average Brit really should give this a read to fully understand that without the abuse of immigrants, the UK would not look anything like what it does today, would not have the services infrastructure that it has today either.

[Sorrento · Rating 5 out of 5]

Patrick MacGill wrote his autobiographical novel just before the first world war. He captures the authentic speech and thoughts of an ordinary labouring man Dermod Flynn and his mates. The story follows the struggles of Dermod to survive first in the Irish village of his birth and then in Scotland. He begins as an agricultural labourer doing back breaking poorly paid work such as potato picking (I only tried this once as a student & found it v tough). He then finds a friend Moleskin Joe who gets him into navvying at Kinlochleven in Scotland where they are building a dam for the Aluminium works. The accommodation for the men is very poor and the work hard. The life is tough and a lot of heavy drinking, fighting & gambling goes on.
I came across this book whilst researching my family history & I am very glad I found it. My great grandfather worked as a navvy at Kinlochleven and my grandma lived there as a child. She gave one of her children (my uncle) the middle name Kilock, so I have a special interest in the story. I enjoyed it very much & many of the anecdotes made me in turn laugh and cry. It is one of the few very well written books by people who have first -hand experience of hard manual work at the turn of the century when pay and conditions were terrible. The lengths that poor Dermod goes to find work and to survive are truly incredible.

[Hoyadaisy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Autobiography under cover of fiction. Poor boy sent from Ireland to earn money in Scotland for his family. Works at everything from harvesting potatoes to laying railroad tracks, and tramps along with nothing in between. Along the way, he falls in love with books, and eventually becomes a reporter.

I'm amazed that this book isn't more widely available. (Gutenberg.org should be sharing it shortly.) It's excellent--engaging, well-paced, and filled with important and interesting stories.

[Lesley-Ann Anderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although a story rich in image and description I did find it a tad depressing.
This man led such a sad life with many of his talents going to waste from an early age due to lack of education and social advantages.
How many equally great writers are hidden in today's socially deprived areas we'll never know.

[Margaret Mcneill · Rating 5 out of 5]

A magical, gifted author

This is my Grandfathers book which i have reread this time with different eyes. I am completed taken by his style of writing, his perspective and the fact that he had no education. His words flow like a song put in to sentences. And the poetry is beautifully from the heart. Poor Grandpa lived such a hard life

[Del · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every now & then you read a book which pierces your soul. This is such a book. A heartrending look into a darker time & the cruel, cold, brutal life of a navvy