Horses, Tractors, and Vans/Chapter I

Leaving home
John Keary - Union between Britain and Ireland – Struggle for Catholic emancipation - Thomas Kearey leaves Ireland for St Giles in London – The Irish ghetto - The canals - Railways – Booming economy – Buildings galore - Factory Acts – Dickensian Life – Metal smelter - Tinsmith or Whitesmith – Carter – Worker in metal – Tin-plate.

John Keary was a Gaelic speaking Irishman born in the middle of the eighteenth century. He had five children, the fourth, a boy, he called Thomas, which was a family tradition. Thomas saw the first light of day in 1791… and as with all cultures, he assumed, when old enough, his father’s craft, as a carter and whitesmith - working in and around Dublin. The social conditions for working class people at the turn of the eighteenth century was poor. The city was crowded with many country folk all trying to obtain work. There was not enough housing, and the rents continually increasing. The harvests had been bad for a number of years and the family had a difficult time trying to find enough food for all. Troubled Ireland was in rebellion, and Britain fighting Napoleon Bonaparte, an event that stimulated a period of economic growth especially in shipbuilding, and those things needed to equip an enlarged army. Now was the time to exploit the need for skilled workers for the new industrialized society.

When he marched down the gangplank in Liverpool Docks Thomas was excited by the challenges, which lay ahead. He sought passage to London by coach; relying on his skills as a worker in metal to find work – perhaps start a business - for Dublin’s silversmiths and goldsmiths were recognised as highly skilled craftsmen. These skills, working with precious metals, carried over into working with lead and tin – metals more closely allied to the home – servicing water-tanks, pipes, buckets, cauldrons for washing and cooking pots, and all other metal containers. Not only was he skilful shaping metal but also had knowledge of joinery and the manufacture of carts.

Thomas described himself as a whitesmith, which today maybe better described as a tinsmith, and as a smelter - an extractor of metal from an ore. Back home, the family had originated, in the hills and lowlands on the southeast side of Lough Derg. The ore that had washed down from those hills would have been a combination of any number of metals. The smelter of one ore would be knowledgeable enough to work with any number of base or precious metals.

The skills of a whitesmith was more concerned with cutting, shaping and hammering-out sheet metal, making joints and seams using a mixture of lead and tin to make solder - to give a watertight joint. He may have worked in silver making jewellery. However, when working in London it was highly unlikely that Thomas would have been working with this expensive metal. He would have been devoting all his energies working with lead and tin in a household environment, making and repairing pipes and cooking pans, pots and utensils for a working population. He was quite prepared to seek work of a more mundane kind - to start afresh… hopefully, with better prospects for long-term employment… especially after taking the plunge to leave home. His family, having gone through years of persecution, exploitation, and finally eviction, now had to split up and find their own way, away from the country they loved.

When the Irish immigrant travelled to London, he made for Westminster… it was here that he felt most at home. The Irish populated Soho and the surrounding street and alleyways. There are many written accounts about St Giles-in-the-Fields, in the early 1800s, appearing as a maze of cellars and tenements based on the boundaries of St Giles High Street, Bainbridge Street, and Dyott Street. This was about the time that gas lighting first started to be installed in London, initially in Pall Mall. Within the area about St Giles, New Oxford Street was developed to lay waste to the slums of Church Lane, Maynard Street, Carrier Street, Ivy Lane and Church Street, which was a mass of courts, alley ways and hiding places. These countless tenements were described as ‘Rookeries’ or perhaps as ‘Little Dublin’ or The Holy Land’, whatever, as an area populated by the Irish.

The area of Westminster, Tothill Street, York Street, and Castle Lane was another locality given the deriding term, connecting Oxford Street and Holborn… the area of the abandoned of both sexes. The whole area was sold for redevelopment by private contract in 1844. Even today’s congested streets and heavy traffic does not suitably depict the area of that time: the noise, the horses, shouts, cries of the passing traders, street urchins darting here and there, the sandwich men, the dust, dirt, droppings, puddles and stench, all underfoot. The omnibuses disgorged their passengers, ponderous wagons, lurched and swayed, turned down narrow lanes completely blocking them, forcing all to proceed ahead of them to burst out into the street at the other end. It was described as a howling wilderness.

To Thomas, Georgian London must have seemed intimidating. He was here to escape poverty but was faced with it. His bad of tools, at onetime a mark of industry - here the bag felt like a burglars haul. However, it was no good berating his bad luck he just had to make a go of it. Now that he had adopted an English spelling for his name he could not face the scorn of the rest of the family, by going back...

It was there, shortly after taking lodgings, in 1818, that he met and courted Hester Pepler, eventually marrying her on the 17th October 1819, at St Anne’s Church, Soho fathering two boys and five girls. Hester was born and christened in 1794 in Great Stanmore; a small village on the outskirts of North London, just off the Great North Road, and died, March 1872 in Westminster at the age of 79. She was buried at the same church she was married in sixty years before. Hester’s mother before marriage was named Mary Collins.

In 1816, the building of the Grand Junction branch canal was being dug out on the Paddington Estate. At the same time, houses were being built along its banks to furnish the builders with homes. In 1801, there were only 324 houses in Paddington; this was a time of expansion in keeping with the construction of canals and the development of steam engines. Connaught Place in 1807 was the start to the development of Tyburnia between Edgware Road and the Uxbridge Road. A couple of years later the degradation mounted causing concern,not before time for by then Paddington had 879 inhabited houses to give shelter to over four and a half thousand people. It was not long before Paddington acquired a terrible reputation. The area on the north side of the Paddington and Marylebone Estates was as far as the more reasonable living conditions stretched, for the time being! Beyond that lay: mean streets, alleyways, huts, reservoirs, wharves and warehouses. The building of the Great Western Railway reinforced this division in the 1830s with its terminus and goods station. Land between the railway and canal intersected by Harrow Road deteriorated into slums. A large percentage of those living there were displaced Irishmen.

This whole area began to be redeveloped. The people was gradually pushed out, whole estates raised to the ground and the builders moved in. It became a period of massive building projects that made the way for the prosperous suburbs of Bayswater, Paddington, and Kensington, a place where rich trade’s people, developers, merchants, and professional men followed the gentry into taking over the new houses, giving a further boost to the area with their lavish life styles. Westbourne became the place to be, reaching to the southern most end of Westbourne Green. By 1860, the feverish pitch of building started to end. Thirty years of rapid development... Thomas and Hester’s eldest son, born 1820 in St. Giles, Middlesex, was named Thomas - as was the custom. He was my great-grandfather and trained, after leaving school, as a whitesmith and tinsmith taking over much of the trade from his father. He married Hanna Raybould in 1841, when she was twenty-one - her father Henry was also a whitesmith. The couple were married at St Andrew by the Wardrobe, Holborn. It was a common belief that there there were 1,000 Irish paupers entering London each week, congregating around this area, all seeking work.

The ‘railway age’ started in 1825 when Thomas was five. By the start of the First World War, almost every part of the country was covered. It was very unusual for anyone to work in a factory that employed more than ten people, for this was the average staff content of most stately homes... workshop managers were just not used to controlling more. It seems strange that businesses had this almost mental limit for group practices. The railways broke this barrier stimulated by the rapid decline in agricultural work. The operation of the Corn Laws, which blocked the import of foreign produce, ensured that farmers received a better rate of pay for their harvests. Only about a third of the population lived in large towns or cities but this was soon to change as industrialization took hold. The government restrictions on the employment of women and children although resisted by the working class were passed. The Factory Acts ensured a fixed working week and length of day, even though a fourteen-hour day was not unusual it continued to drop to ten, later in the century. Schooling was for all ages and a matter for individual parents to decide what was best. There was no co-ordination between competing educational establishments. Only about fifty per-cents of adults could sign their names. Thomas’s brother William, 1837–1902, sixth child of Thomas and Hester, was born the same year Queen Victoria came to the throne. He became a much-respected Westminster City Councillor for fourteen years - about the same time the London County Council was established. He was a coal merchant, baker and boot merchant [his wife’s father was a Leather Dealer]. During his two marriages, he had fifteen children - four of the births are recorded in St Anne’s Church, Soho, [St Anne’s Church was the same church Thomas was married in eighteen years before] nine of William’s children had connections with the Borough of Brompton where they were all born. There is a plaque erected in Westminster City Hall in his honour for his, ‘loyal and faithful work to the people of Westminster particularly the poor’.

Back in Ireland the ancient clan lands in and around Kilkeary Parish were recorded as being situated in Upper Ormond, four miles south-west of Nenagh. This parish covered an area of over two and a half thousand acres, containing 662 inhabitants. It lay twenty-seven miles from Limerick, in County Tipperary in the diocese of Killalo. Kilkeary and Ballynaclough formed a benefice linked to ‘the deanery’. The deanery was endowed with sufficient capital to provide the enlarged parish with a private school capable of providing education for 70 local children. The farmed land alone brought in tithes amounting to £120, which went towards the rector’s stipend. The growing strength of the British economy had an effect not only on Irish manufacturing but also in siphoning off capital from Ireland’s farming community.

Thomas’ move away from home was precipitant for when his son was eight years old the people of Kilkeary were locked in famine conditions. Gradually the eldest boys of poor families moved into the cities, thereafter making their way to Dublin and onwards to England and London. It was a desperate situation alleviated only by the new industrial society - its quest for power and the need for swifter transportation, all accomplished by: the construction of better roads, the birth of canal navigation, and the manufacture of bricks and steel. The invention of steam locomotion and the construction of the railway network added to the demand for even more coal. Once this movement was afoot – the gravitation from a rural existence to town and city life continued; this was coupled with the invention of machines to mass produce everyday products. Now there was no stopping the process. Fortunately, there was sufficient labour available…

The 1841, census of London registered nearly two million citizens. Three years later parts of Soho were described as ‘a sort of petty France’. French immigrants predominately owned most shop; there were schools, wine shops and restaurants mostly catering to ‘the French’. The proximity of ‘The Rookeries’, in St Giles and elsewhere, gave ‘foreignness’ to this whole neighbourhood of London. None of this mattered to the new citizens. They were only interested in earning money to pay for food and board. Other niceties could come along later. As agricultural workers were laid off, a rapid change was noticed in the countryside. Only just over twenty per-cent of the population worked on the land the difference was felt by the industrial towns and cities as people began to flood in. Construction – the making of things not just building, took half of Britain’s labour force. Free Trade was now the call in all but agriculture. In 1842, the budget introduced income tax... although declared a temporary measure it was never removed, taking the place of tariffs.

There was scarcely any drainage or sewerage, where the gullies were open a foot or more of offal, garbage, dung and sand overlapped the sides, buckets of human waste was still thrown out of upstairs windows adding to the indescribable mess and stench. The corpses of the poorest were just thrown into open marshland around St Bride’s Church. On Wednesdays, the ground was opened up again to receive more bodies. Low-lying districts often flooded resulting in the Great Stink of 1858. Many Irish immigrants were engaged in the construction of the new sewer system. Labourers were paid in 1859 18s a week, skilled workers double that and engineers, the latest skill to be picked-up and developed - by associated tradesmen.