Northern Industrial Slums: The Working Class and the Great War

[Guest]

1 hour ago, ilkley remembers said:

 

MG, I have followed the thread of your argument with interest and with some considerable degree of agreement. However, I am a little perplexed by the comment quoted above, particularly the mention of sub-groups. What sub-groups do you mean? I have read back through your previous comments and rather than place my own, inevitably imprecise, interpretation on what you said, I wonder if you would be happy to explain in a little more detail what you are alluding to.

 

At risk of stating the obvious, the working classes were clearly present in every community in the UK. The 1911 Census tells us that 78% of the population were urban dwellers and also shows us the population by administrative counties. The largest  by population is Lancashire and the third largest is Yorkshire....other Northern counties are generally clustered towards the most populous end of the bar chart (see post #13 which provides the data). If a very large proportion of the population resided in these counties it follows that a large proportion of the working classes also  resided in these counties. The Cenus also provides mind-boggling detail on housing, family size and population density down to towns with  populations of 5,000. Putting it all together it is clear that the Northern working classes were largely urban working class and a proportion of them were in the very lowest socio-economic group. It is these 'sub groups' (urban working class men in Northern counties) that I am interested in.

 

London - the other large population base is rather more complicated to analyse as its TF structure was in no small part recruited along class lines. I have a separate thread on London. The London thread includes an 1891 map of London showing every street colour-coded by socio-economic group.  It would be interesting to find something similar for the great industrial towns and cities in Lancashire.

 

I perfectly understand there were millions of working class men who lived all over the country. I am not interested in these. The genesis of the interest is that Bean and Parsons (among others) described these Northern men as 'slum-bred' or 'slum-birds' which suggests some preconceptions or assumptions about the  socio-economic groups some units recruited from. In these instances the 42nd East Lancashire Div and the Tyneside Irish. 

 

Separately there is a wealth of literature on poverty in the late Victorian and Edwardian period which sheds light on some of the poorest communities. As one example the expatriate Irish communities living in England  have been well documented. Their living conditions in some areas were simply appalling. There were large concentrations of immigrant Irish in Lancashire, Yorkshire, Co Durham and Northhumberland. If Conscription was indiscriminate we might expect these communities to have provided some recruits.  

 

I hope this answers your question. MG

Edited 2 December , 2017 by Guest

[Guest]

12 minutes ago, Medaler said:

Hi,

" I don't understand this last sentence." I'm not sure that I do now either. What I meant to say was.............

 

At the end of the day, the sweeping statement that the working class of whatever you want to define as "the north" actually "won the war" does  not stand up to any real scrutiny, no more so than the concept that elements of society who were not either northern or working class did not suffer and contribute in equal proportion.

 

I think I have probably become too wrapped up in your opening sweeping statement. Now you are refining things a bit it is helping my understanding.

 

Regards,

Mike

 

The 'won the war' was tongue in cheek -  paraphrasing the ideas promoted in literature on other minority groups whose claim a disproportionate contribution to the War. There is a long queue headed by Niall Ferguson who wrongly believes the Scots were killed at twice the rate of the English.  My error for not making that abundantly clear. 

 

We now seem to be in furious agreement on the 6th Bn Sherwood Foresters. Incidentally my grandfather came from Wirksworth  (Derbyshire Yeomanry) so I know the area very well. 

 

MG

[Guest]

1 hour ago, John_Hartley said:

No. At least not in the case of the Manchester Regiment Pals battalions.

 

When the first four were formed in September 1914, there was very tight recruitment. The early joiners had to bring along a certificate from tneir employer proving they were a "clerk or warehouseman". In essence, these were pretty much exclusively lower middle class "white collar" workers. In January 1915, each battalion recruited a temporary fifth reserve company. By then , they were taking anybody - including my grandfather, a fireman (stoker) at the local gasworks and his brother, also working at the gasworks.

 John. Very interesting that their recruiting criteria had changed within 6 months of the start of the war.  I have seen examples where there were attempts to recruit men of certain occupational classes into separate companies. My belief is that this was always unsustainable. MG

[Medaler]

3 minutes ago, QGE said:

 

..........Niall Ferguson who wrongly believes the Scots were killed at twice the rate of the English. 

 

Not since Culloden, but maybe I shouldn't have mentioned that.

 

Wirksworth - Goodness me. I always think the folk of Wirksworth must be super fit, given the gradient on the main road that runs through the place. I used to cycle up it in my younger days, but that was a long time ago. I am in Brimington, about half way between Chesterfield and Staveley, but was born in Hasland - about half way (ish) between Chesterfield and Clay Cross.

 

One resource that I have found fascinating, which touches on this subject, is a volume written by the Midland Railway Company in November of 1914. Some of the forward is almost couched as an apology that they have had to exercise some form of control over a workforce who were fast vanishing to join the colours. A big mixed bag of their employee's left them, across a wide range of different skills and (I would have thought) pay grades.

 

Regards,

Mike

[Dai Bach y Sowldiwr]

I've never heard the colliers and steelworkers of Glamorgan and Monmouthshire referred to as "Southern Jessies" before.

[Guest]

This is interesting, particularly as it looks at conditions in four towns in 1915

 

Livelihood and poverty; a study in the economic conditions of working-class households in Northampton, Warrington, Stanley and Reading

by Bowley, Arthur Lyon, 1869-; Burnett-Hurst, Alexander Robert

 

It compares Northampton, Warrington, Stanley (Co Durham) and Reading

[Guest]

4 minutes ago, QGE said:

This is interesting, particularly as it looks at conditions in four towns in 1915

 

Livelihood and poverty; a study in the economic conditions of working-class households in Northampton, Warrington, Stanley and Reading

by Bowley, Arthur Lyon, 1869-; Burnett-Hurst, Alexander Robert

 

It compares Northampton, Warrington, Stanley (Co Durham) and Reading

 

     It is  germane- but the data is pre-war- gathered in 1913, so not relevant for wartime conditions. There are similar social surveys for a number of towns-Norwich, Cambridge,  for instance. But the greatest source of stuff is in Blue Books-esp. the Board of Trade "Cost of Living" reports done just before the war.

[Guest]

16 minutes ago, Dai Bach y Sowldiwr said:

I've never heard the colliers and steelworkers of Glamorgan and Monmouthshire referred to as "Southern Jessies" before.

 

I think it was an interlude by one of the Monty Python team

 

 

 

[ianjonesncl]

7 hours ago, QGE said:

 

When the 16th (Irish) Division was facing a manpower crisis, an idea was floated to include the recently raised Tyneside Irish to make up the numbers. Parsons (GOC  16th (Irish) Div) flatly rejected them as 'slum birds' that he did not want and rambled on about hurley playing Oirish as the type he wanted. Most historians of the Irish formations are a bit 'Donnybrook'  in their perceptions. 

 

 

One wonders what Parsons perceptions were.

 

Those recruited from Belfast would be living in similar, if not worse, conditions to those on Tyneside, or any other urban area.

[Steven Broomfield]

49 minutes ago, Dai Bach y Sowldiwr said:

I've never heard the colliers and steelworkers of Glamorgan and Monmouthshire referred to as "Southern Jessies" before.

 

Not a subject which often comes up in conversation round here, I must say.

[ilkley remembers]

4 hours ago, QGE said:

At risk of stating the obvious, the working classes were clearly present in every community in the UK...............

 

MG, first of all, thank you for your detailed and thoughtful response to my question which is much appreciated. 

 

4 hours ago, QGE said:

The genesis of the interest is that Bean and Parsons (among others) described these Northern men as 'slum-bred' or 'slum-birds' which suggests some preconceptions or assumptions about the  socio-economic groups some units recruited from. In these instances the 42nd East Lancashire Div and the Tyneside Irish. 

 

This particular sentence in your response was espcially intriguing given that I am, for better or worse, also a 'slum bred' individual, albeit from County Durham. You mention in your reply, the the wholly negative reaction towards men from the lower echelons of society by people of the standing of Parsons and Bean. Given their particular willingness to degrade soldiers from the industrial cities of the North of England is it, therefore, beyond comprehension to conclude that this contemptuous attitude was  also common parlance among societal elites in Britain. 

 

I would speculate that the events of the 1920s lend credence to the notion that the war taught the ruling classes little about the about the high levels of deprivation and disadvantage experienced by the British working class. The Great War was not started by the working class but they were expected to pay the lions share of the cost and as recompense received  little.

Edited 2 December , 2017 by ilkley remembers

[Medaler]

1 hour ago, ilkley remembers said:

This particular sentence in your response was espcially intriguing given that I am, for better or worse, also a 'slum bred' individual, albeit from County Durham. You mention in your reply, the the wholly negative reaction towards men from the lower echelons of society by people of the standing of Parsons and Bean. Given their particular willingness to degrade soldiers from the industrial cities of the North of England is it, therefore, beyond comprehension to conclude that this contemptuous attitude was  also common parlance among societal elites in Britain. 

 

I would speculate that the events of the 1920s lend credence to the notion that the war taught the ruling classes little about the about the high levels of deprivation and disadvantage experienced by the British working class. The Great War was not started by the working class but they were expected to pay the lions share of the cost and as recompense received  little.

 

It has to be said that ambivalent attitudes towards the lower orders of society were not restricted to a "social elite", but permeated much further down the ladder. In fact, I suspect that those attitudes were actually present at every step on the social ladder, right down to the penultimate rung. I further suspect that they are still with us today, and have very little to do with the price of fighting wars and who ends up paying for them.

 

 

[phil andrade]

10 hours ago, ianjonesncl said:

 

One wonders what Parsons perceptions were.

 

Those recruited from Belfast would be living in similar, if not worse, conditions to those on Tyneside, or any other urban area.

 

Might there have been a sectarian dimension to those  living conditions, and a peculiar disdain emanating from it ?

 

The Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast, for example , was , perhaps, an arena for this.  Did the Protestant workforce retain all the most highly paid work, and wield an influence that kept catholic workers relegated to the most unskilled and lowly paid work ; or, indeed, exclude them from work altogether ?

 

This was surely at its most pronounced in Belfast ; but I suppose it was rife in Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester and Tyneside, too.

 

I venture this as a suggestion, based on supposition on my part, and not backed up by much knowledge , let alone research.

 

Could we explain much of the syndrome being discussed in this thread by the existence of large proportions of catholics in those areas where there were the worst living conditions, and by the perpetuation of a form of societal deprivation and prejudice which went with sectarian apartheid ?

 

Phil

[josquin]

13 hours ago, voltaire60 said:

 

     It is  germane- but the data is pre-war- gathered in 1913, so not relevant for wartime conditions. There are similar social surveys for a number of towns-Norwich, Cambridge,  for instance. But the greatest source of stuff is in Blue Books-esp. the Board of Trade "Cost of Living" reports done just before the war.

 

I differ with your statement that regional socioeconomic surveys antedating the outbreak of the war by a year are not relevant as documentation for the

questions Martin raises.  Surely little would have changed with respect to social class and social mobility in the U.K. between 1913 and the duration of the

war, so the 1913 data should be quite relevant.  Judging from his comments, General Parsons discerned a continuity extant between prewar and wartime

class status that, as others on the Forum have commented, was not an uncommon sentiment at the time and has enjoyed a robust posterity in the subsequent

decades.  Housman's poem about the unsung, forgotten regulars who died saving the Empire for soldiers' pay aptly distills the extent of the reward the PBI from

modest class backgrounds received from a grateful nation--which was, I believe, what Martin is exploring with this thread.

 

Josquin

[Guest]

There are a number of important studies of Poverty in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. The original methods have been challenged by modern academics and there are some interesting attempts to rebase some of the earlier studies. 

 

Charles Booth's seminal study of Life and Labour in London and his Poverty Maps. Close to 30% were allegedly below the poverty line.

 

Seebohm Rowntree's study of Poverty in York in 1899 covered 11,560 and 46,754 individuals and concluded that nearly 28% lived below the poverty line. His results were published in Poverty, A Study of Town Life

 

One more recent study (2011) by Gazeley and Newall  Poverty in Edwardian Britain, using data from 1904 concluded that 23% of people in urban working class areas and 18% of families were below Bowely's poverty line. In labourer's households they found that up to 50% could be below the poverty line.  I have not got access to the full report but the summary page is interesting reading. It also alludes to Army recruiting during the Second Anglo-Boer War and alleges that "only 14,000 of 20,000 recruits were found sufficiently fit to join". The same authors appear to have a slightly different view in this 2007 paper on Poverty in Britain in 1904. This paper highlights how difficult it is to measure poverty and by applying different methodologies to other data, it shows how vastly different results can be generated. Using original data and applying more modern methodologies they conclude Poverty rates of around 15%.

 

Clearly the data is not evenly distributed across communities. 

 

One sub-group which has received considerable attention from academics is the expatriate Irish. The communities were highly concentrated in industrialised areas. In the 1861 Census some 3.00% of England's population was born in Ireland. In that year 24.58% of Liverpool's population had been born in Ireland. Birkenhead (14.38%), Manchester (13.77%), Prescot (10.15%), Warrington (8.89%), Salford (8.73%) Durham (8.18%), Newcastle (6.77%), highlight the breadth of the Irish diaspora. These communities largely integrated in England and their children and grandchildren wereEnglish born. 

In Scotland the Irish diaspora was higher as a % of the population at 6.66% . Glasgow (16.99%), Dundee (15.89%), Edinburgh (4.38%)

 

It is difficult to imagine today the differences that existed in the Edwardian period and what poverty meant in real terms. The studies above seem to suggest somewhere between 15% and 30% of households in Northern towns and cities were living below the Poverty Line in the late Victorian and early Edwardian periods. 

 

Slightly related, and something I stumbled on: The First World War and Working Class Food Consumption

 

MG

 

Edited 3 December , 2017 by Guest

[Guest]

22 hours ago, QGE said:

Post Office- in 1914 the Post Office was the largest department of the Civil Service- thus, many more potential recruits than in our lifetimes. The SDGW and CWGC data seems to indicate Post Office workers from across the country were channelled into the PO Rifles,ostensibly a London unit.

 

      Interesting- I would expect  the same to show for  Civil Service Rifles?

22 hours ago, QGE said:

   The statistic that skews the figure most is emigration-which averaged half a million a year for the century from 1815-1914..massively skewed by Irish emigration from the 1841 Census onward.  It is not the old or the  crippled that migrate (eg-Canada ran its own system like Ellis Island-rejecting the unfit,the drunk,etc)  Thus a reminder again of one of the statistical quirks of the war that the UK ended the war with effectively no loss of  "Lost Generation" manpower-  the  closure of emigration meant more men of military age were retained in the UK than the losses were year on year. It caused long term dislocation and imbalance but in terms of pure numbers, the UK  was untouched. The manpower cost of the war was borne by those Dominions and the US-the places where the migrants would have gone- hence, in part, the inter-war  recessions in Aus., NZ, S.Africa. Very interesting. I would add that one needs to net off natural wastage from the battle fatality numbers as well. Also net inward migration of Irish workers exempt conscription may well have released men in the UK for military service. 

 

     We have had a go at Irish figures elsewhere, with regards to the effects of  diminished Irish recruitment both before the war and during it.  My view is that the British (ie UK) Government's policies with regard to the stock of Irish manpower was a good deal more complex and subtle than simple statements that it did not seek to enforce consription in Ireland for fear of "Troubles"  I have not as yet located any handy figures of how many Irishmen (and women) came over to work in war industries (Have I I mssed it in SMEBE?)  This was a quite subtle system of labour substitution. The keys are the activities of the Port Control Officers and the significant restrictions on emigration .Covered by inter-dominion agreements ( and subsequently from British-American)  I wish I could find the paperwork at Kew for the Irish  exemptions from MSA- Would anyone know if it is there?   The draw of high wages in UK war industries, as well  as a comparative stagnation of job opportunities in Hibernia (Yes, there were war industries as well-which should have reflected in a draw to Irish cities-Irish data is too superficial to work this out easily).  What we seem to have is a suden concentration of Irish industrial labour in certain areas= esp. West Midlands (and near me, the construction of the Dustbin- Dagenham for Ford in the 1920s). I suppose we will have to wait for the number-crunchers to work on the 1921 Census when released.

      

[Guest]

37 minutes ago, josquin said:

 

I differ with your statement that regional socioeconomic surveys antedating the outbreak of the war by a year are not relevant as documentation for the

questions Martin raises.  Surely little would have changed with respect to social class and social mobility in the U.K. between 1913 and the duration of the

war, so the 1913 data should be quite relevant.  Judging from his comments, General Parsons discerned a continuity extant between prewar and wartime

class status that, as others on the Forum have commented, was not an uncommon sentiment at the time and has enjoyed a robust posterity in the subsequent

decades.  Housman's poem about the unsung, forgotten regulars who died saving the Empire for soldiers' pay aptly distills the extent of the reward the PBI from

modest class backgrounds received from a grateful nation--which was, I believe, what Martin is exploring with this thread.

 

Josquin

 

    You misunderstand me-I think we are in what Martin calls "violent agreement". I was merely pointing out that the surveys of 1915 are not reliable for WARTIME conditions as they use 1913 data- collected before the war ever hove into view. That the strong series of social surveys  from the pre-war years is of use is something I agree with. A problem with the wartime years is that the normal series of annual reports of this,that and the other were suspended- but many exist as internal publications or as MS drafts at Kew . There is a fair amount of social surveying going on in the war years but it is tucked away in all sorts  of official publications.

     As regards the effects of the war- well, for the working class-uneven. I think we have to separate out the spread of military casualties and their home areas with how the domestic economy of those areas functioned during those years.  Here, there is a phenomenon I have always called a "Crisis Paradox"-  Some areas and some communities did well out of the war-   a working class family with  a man (surviving) in the armed forces could be the best off they ever were if the wife worked in a war industry. Some areas received a substantial boost to their regional economies-  I suspect the West Midlands was propelled towards it's  car-industry base quite a lot during the war years.

 

      On a small note, the traditional North-South split was always taught to me as being one of geography and geology-   Not Bristol-Wash but the Tees-Exe Line- that separates out highland from lowland Britain and affects industrial location (the coal is north-not on chalk or granite)

     

Edited 3 December , 2017 by Guest

[Steven Broomfield]

25 minutes ago, voltaire60 said:

(the coal is north-not on chalk or granite)

     

 

The Kent coalfields being (as we were taught at school) 'the exception which proves the rule'

[Interested]

Nice interesting debate, and as we hail from the Rochdale area I assume my antecedents would be classed as "slum-birds", perhaps.

My contribution to this is, that I'm currently re-reading "Forgotten Voices of the Great War" produced in conjunction with the IWM sound archive recordings of survivors, and I quote (Hopefully without any breach of copyright) the words describing recruitment in 1916 of Lieutenant Charles Carrington, 1/5th Bn Warwickshire Regiment:

When they came to us they were weedy sallow skinny frightened children - the refuse of our industrial system - and they were in very poor condition because of wartime food shortages.  But after six months of good food, fresh air and physical exercise they changed so much their mothers wouldn't have recognised them....etc.

It doesn't say how long after cessation of hostilities the recordings were made, so any changes in opinion in the intervening period cannot easily be assessed.

If you end up publishing something on the cost/benefit analysis of the contribution from the North, I think a view from "the bottom up" would be more interesting to me than what might appear to be an academic top-down assessment.

Keep up the good work, though.

Philip

 

 

 

[Guest]

10 minutes ago, Steven Broomfield said:

 

The Kent coalfields being (as we were taught at school) 'the exception which proves the rule'

 

     Ooops-Forgot- As I live north of the River, then "Sarf Lunnun" and Kent are something best avoided.

[PhilB]

Is it possible to draw any comparisons between the general conditions of the working classes in the industrial and in the agricultural areas of the country at that time? I'm assuming that the country can be roughly divided into one or the other.

[Guest]

This is a simply fascinating read The Betrayal of the Slums and comes very close to my area of interest. It is post war (1922)  but relates to stats from the immediate prewar period. Pages 54-58 have some harrowing stats on Leeds and Glasgow from the 1911 Census.

 

Leeds: 33,000 hoses build back-to-back in long continuous rows....The sanitary conveniences and the housese themselves are so atrocious that we are informed it is difficult to suggest any satisfactory method of dealing with them short of complete clearance.

 

Glasgow: In this City in the year 1911 there were 32,742 houses consisting of not more than one room. and they accommodated 104,621 people or more than three people per room. At the same time there were 75,536 houses consisting of two rooms which provided homes for 267,341 people. These two classes of hoses together therefore provided dwellings for 470,000 people or a little more than 62 per cent of the total population of the City....a large number of these dwellings beside being overcrowded are utterly insanitary and inadequate. It is not a misuse of words to say that in these dwellings the City of Glasgow is presented with a problem of appalling dimensions. 

 

Chapter V: Life in Slum Houses: Its General Character starting page 59 onward is a rather disturbing read. In Scotland according to the Royal Commission nearly half the population was living in houses of either one or two rooms. etc...

 

Public Health Administration in Glasgow by James Burn Russell (1905) is cited in the above report. It is a disturbing read. 

 

Some of the data is quite astonishing. Page 189 'Life in One room' is worth reading. MG

Edited 3 December , 2017 by Guest

[Guest]

11 minutes ago, Interested said:

Nice interesting debate, and as we hail from the Rochdale area I assume my antecedents would be classed as "slum-birds", perhaps.

My contribution to this is, that I'm currently re-reading "Forgotten Voices of the Great War" produced in conjunction with the IWM sound archive recordings of survivors, and I quote (Hopefully without any breach of copyright) the words describing recruitment in 1916 of Lieutenant Charles Carrington, 1/5th Bn Warwickshire Regiment:

When they came to us they were weedy sallow skinny frightened children - the refuse of our industrial system - and they were in very poor condition because of wartime food shortages.  But after six months of good food, fresh air and physical exercise they changed so much their mothers wouldn't have recognised them....etc.

It doesn't say how long after cessation of hostilities the recordings were made, so any changes in opinion in the intervening period cannot easily be assessed.

If you end up publishing something on the cost/benefit analysis of the contribution from the North, I think a view from "the bottom up" would be more interesting to me than what might appear to be an academic top-down assessment.

Keep up the good work, though.

Philip

 

 

 

 

      The war  works at many levels when considering what happened and why  (Baldrick v Melchett?)- the raw national statistics can often illumine  paradoxes that go against the traditional historiography. What is needed somewhere along the line is an econometric model of the British economy for the war years.  

     Your point about better food is one of the paradoxes of the war- Necessity drove a demand for healthy soldiers - thus, many men physically flourished in the army and were never better fed-either before or after the war

      One part of the historiography concerns the comparative hardships of the civilian populations- especially the urban working classes-who, being concentrated, act more readily as a tinderbox when sparks of discontent flare up.  Here, the comparison with Germany is a direct one. The German urban working class population is traditionally portrayed as cracking under the British blockade- the Potato Winter and the silent killing effects of malnutrition on the old and the young. Of course, it was important in the defeat of Germany- the German army of the latter part of 1918 was down but not wholly defeated-it was the combination of home and frontline matters that caused the Germans to sue for an armistice.

     But the UK did not get off scot free.  The U Boat campaign and the food shortages of 1917-1918 were profound- and were silent killers here as well. There is almost nothing in the mainstream literature about the fatal effects of the war on the home population. Just how many elderly working class poor in the northern cities died?  The data should be there- extrapolating expected deaths from the pre-war Reg Gen stats. and then factoring the effects of the war is not a greatly difficult exercise. Should be out there if I look. And the food riots and black market?   Almost a blank in the history books.  And of course, the mortality from the Spanish Flu was made all the worse by the effects of poorer diet across an extended period of time. Again, flu epidemics and mortality come  back again and again (Still do-just had my jab), so a statistical exercise in calculating what the additional mortality of the 1918-1919 epidemic was-caused by poorer health conditions is out there to be done. It is likely that  the effects of the war as a killer on the urban working classes of the North has been greatly ignored.  At a guess- (A pure guess Martin-put that calculator down), then the working class military casualties of the war were probably in the ball park of 700,000 to 750,000 -  but another guess- it is likely that the extra deaths of old and young are likely to have been c. half that again?

[SiegeGunner]

Re the liability of Irishmen to conscription, I thought it was only Irishmen living in Ireland who were exempt, and that Irishmen living in Great Britain were subject to conscription.  Would that have applied to Irish workers who came over to Great Britain to work during the war, or did they retain their exemption.

 

Come to think of it, another question:  were all men permanently resident in Ireland exempt from conscription, or only those of Irish ancestry? 

Edited 3 December , 2017 by SiegeGunner

[ianjonesncl]

4 hours ago, phil andrade said:

 

Might there have been a sectarian dimension to those  living conditions, and a peculiar disdain emanating from it ?

 

The Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast, for example , was , perhaps, an arena for this.  Did the Protestant workforce retain all the most highly paid work, and wield an influence that kept catholic workers relegated to the most unskilled and lowly paid work ; or, indeed, exclude them from work altogether ?

 

Phil

 

I have just returned from Belfast (visiting the Titanic Experience in part of the old Harland & Wolf shipyards) and took the opportunity to read about the Troubles. I think you are right about the sectarian differences, however, it is only a perspective from one book.

 

I am also intrigued about Parson's background and his statement about the Tyneside Irish.... so a little research....

 

Charles Algernon Parsons founded C A Parsons, a Tyneside engineering company which grew to be one of the major engineering companies in Newcastle. He was of Irish descent and part of the same Parsons family as GOC 16th (Irish) Division, Lt Gen Sir Lawrence Worthington Parsons.

 

One wonders if Parsons statement had a specific Tyneside Irish slant as opposed to a more generalised view of the Industrialised North.

 

Ian

 

 

Edited 3 December , 2017 by ianjonesncl