Glenties County Donegal Ireland Memorial to Patrick Mac Gill known as The Navvy Poet on a bridge over the Owenea river
Patrick MacGill, whose bestselling novels, written in the first decades of the 20th century, are still being read. His first and most famous book, Children of the Dead End, written in January 1914, is a remarkable book by a remarkable man. MacGill was born in 1890 to a desperately impoverished Donegal family. He left school at 10 and was bought as a hired hand at a county market, his pitiful wage going back to his family, which passed most of it on to the landlord and the rest to the grasping priest. In time he escaped from this servitude and joined a party that went to pick potatoes in Scotland. From then on he lived the life of a tramp, punctuated by employment where he could find it, mostly as a navvy. Children of the Dead End is his account of that life. He calls it an autobiographical novel. Perhaps the most powerful episode is the involvement of Dermod Flynn, MacGill's alter ego, in the creation of a hydroelectric scheme and aluminium smelter at Kinlochleven, a village at the end of Glen Coe (not far from Fort William). Life had been tough before, but here the misery and the squalor, the physically shattering work, the nights full of epic drinking, gambling and fighting, are described with a vividness that sweeps away doubt as to whether they really happened. MacGill has sometimes been bracketed with Robert Tressell, who wrote The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, as a specifically socialist writer, but MacGill's agenda is less overtly political than Tressell's; his socialism has little to do with theory or argument but wells spontaneously out of his observations of how capitalism works. And unlike Tressell, to whom writing doesn't always seem to come easily, MacGill is a writer of huge natural talent. Throughout his travels and turmoils he was writing verse. From Kinlochleven he dispatched to the Daily Express (here fictionalised as "Dawn") accounts of his life as tramp and navvy. It printed them and, in the autumn of 1911, called him down to London and gav
Size: 5120px × 3427px
Location: Glenties County Donegal Ulster Ireland
Photo credit: © Richard Wayman / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
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Keywords: arts, author, chemist, culture, eire, eu, glenties, highlands, hotel, irish, literary, literature, macgill, monument, poem, poets, school, summer, traditional
