british isles highways. Birmingham had already made the turn from the Conservatives to Labour in 1945, and although communists like Dick Etheridge dominated the British Leyland Combined Shop Stewards Committee, the best the Communist Party could do in elections was to push the Liberals into third place in a council ward poll in 1965.
In its day, the BSA Gold Star (1938–63) was surely the most beautiful motorcycle in the world. Manufactured by Birmingham Small Arms, the bike was handmade by skilled craftsmen working as subcontractors on the different parts. Vinen rides pillion on Asa Briggs’s famous 1950s thesis that Birmingham with its small workshops offered a more conciliatory – and more typical – model of British industrial relations than big-factory Manchester. A wide range of trades made the city versatile. Birmingham could turn its hand to making any machine, just like Tyneside could turn its hand to building any ship. In the end, however, all those fitters and turners couldn’t compete with Thatcherism and the revolution in precision engineering. British manufacturing had to give way to globalisation. BSA had to stand down to Honda. Rover’s final surrender was particularly squalid. Its Longbridge plant was sold for £10 to Phoenix Venture Holdings, which seems to have made more money than cars out of the deal. Cadbury was bought by Kraft in 2012. Suffice it to say that Bourneville, the model village where Cadbury World is situated, hasn’t been the same since.
If all this sounds like a man’s story, it isn’t. Women worked with men in most sectors. They hammered chains in Cradley Heath and drilled Spitfire wings in Castle Bromwich. Despite their wealth and privilege, the Cadbury sisters virtually invented social work in the more desperate parts of the city.
Vinen’s central argument is that Birmingham’s ordinariness has prevented us from seeing what is extraordinary in its history. Brummies shaped our everyday world. From Dunlop tyres to the Austin Mini, from the archetypal modern pub (M&B) to the archetypal modern cinema (Odeon), Birmingham was good for all of us because it was open and useful. This is a smart line, well worth stealing. Vinen’s book provides a template for how we might level up the way we write about England’s northern and Midland cities.
marc mulholland
From Ballymena to Boston On Every Tide: The Making and Remaking of the Irish World
By Sean Connolly (Little, Brown 496pp £25)
A great export of Ireland in the 19th cen- tury was its people. From the 1830s to the 1950s, about eight million individuals permanently left Ireland, most crossing the wide Atlantic. This was one of the great migrations in history and has produced a mass of memoirs, analysis and reflections. Sean Connolly, an expert in the field, offers here an accessible and impressively lucid overview. His story starts just as the legendary attachment of the Catholic Irish peasant to their land of birth was beginning to wane as conditions at home degraded and opportunities abroad beckoned.
This was a migration of the masses. In the earliest years, passage to America was surprisingly cheap, accessible to all but the poorest peasantry. Ships to Britain brought bulky timber and cotton bales and carried away a much lighter cargo of textile goods. Irish emigrants in steerage were able to travel cheaply because they were, in effect, human ballast for the return journey.
In general, the transatlantic voyage was fairly safe, but when the years of the great hunger, 1845 to 1851, swelled the river of emigration to a flood, there was an awful climax of suffering on the ‘coffin ships’. In 1847, about 10 per cent of passengers died. One apparent novelty was the casual violence meted out by crew to bewildered and demoralised passengers. The receiving station at Grosse Ile in Canada became legendary for its horrifying levels of sickness and death. The misery of the refugees was indescribable, but Connolly succeeds in confronting us with its frightful horror.
The British government saw the famine as a providential opportunity to remake Ireland’s social structure. It bent policy towards forcing the clearance of peasants in favour of cattle and sheep. The effect was drastic. Pre-famine conventions of early marriage and subdivision of farms disappeared. It became normal to marry late and to hand on the farm in one piece, leaving other siblings little choice but to emigrate if they wished to avoid a bleak life ‘assisting’ on their brother’s farm. The ‘American wake’, extravagant displays of grief at gatherings to see off emigrants, became a fixture of Irish rural life, but the truth is that many were more than happy to escape overseas for a new life.
As Connolly explains, emigration was increasingly built into the Irish life cycle. Between the 1840s and the 1880s, 4.5 million people emigrated from Ireland. In terms of ultimate destination, 645 out of every thousand went to the United States, 225 to Great Britain, 79 to Australia and 51 to Canada. After 1850, Ireland was the only European country to send almost as many women as men across the Atlantic. The high level of female emigration explains why the Irish, compared to other emigrant nationalities, were disinclined to return to their country of origin. They could easily find a husband or wife of the same nationality in their new homelands.
This was a proletarian emigration. By 1870, just under three quarters of the Ireland-born in the United States were living in urban and industrial rather than rural and farming environments. The Irish rural poor had been used to spadework rather than developing the full panoply of farming skills that were required for the American open frontier. Irish emigrants congregated in New York, Boston and Chicago. Even skilled white-collar workers usually ended up in unskilled labouring jobs.
Irish-Americans were widely considered to lack the entrepreneurial spirit. But they used their political and organisational skills to unionise and to take over urban political ‘machines’, most notoriously New York’s Tammany Hall. Historians have speculated that Irish peasant migrants brought with them a ‘premodern’ mentality, ill-fitted to capitalist modernity. In fact, as Connolly illustrates in his wide-ranging narrative, Irish Catholics in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Argentina fairly quickly assimilated into the social structures of their new homelands. In America and Great Britain,
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