Authors: Meg Henderson
He would shake his head mournfully at this point, as he did at various points throughout the tale, and Daisy wasn’t very old before she knew in advance where each shake would come.
‘Those who could afford it went to America,’ Michael continued, ‘but the really poor like Bernard had to go wherever work was to be found, to big cities like this damnable
place.’ Another sad shake of the head followed.
Newcastle had been rich in industry in the early 1800s, with chemical works, shipbuilding, engineering, coal mining and, at just that time, the invention of the railways. Most of the new
arrivals became navvies, building railroads and viaducts, camping beside the newly built lines, surviving cheaply, saving what they could to one day afford to bring their wives and families or
their sweethearts over to Newcastle.
‘All they wanted was to be able to earn enough to look after their own, to have normal family lives,’ Michael continued, ‘but the only work they’d give the Irish was the
hardest and worst paid, so they could only afford the dirtiest and cheapest lodgings. Bernard was going to work on the railways, he had family working as navvies who had spoken up for him, and he
would’ve joined them if it hadn’t been for Lord Londonderry.’ Another shake.
In 1844, Lord Londonderry, who owned coal mines in Seaham in nearby County Durham, was in dispute with his workers, so he threw them out of their jobs and tied homes and brought in 150 Irishmen
to do the work instead – for lower wages, of course. Bernard had jumped at the chance. His earnings wouldn’t be as high as those of the miner he was replacing, but they were
considerably better than he could have earned for equally back-breaking work building the railways. If the Geordie miners didn’t want it, he and another 149 did.
‘He landed at Whitehaven and had to walk over miles of moorland to get to Seaham, but he didn’t care. He knew he could earn good money sinking shafts for new mines and that if he
worked hard he could afford to bring the lovely Niamh over from the ould country.’
‘The lovely Niamh.’ That was how Michael always described his grandmother, making Daisy feel that she had a special relationship with the old woman she had no memory of. Daisy had
entered the world as ‘the lovely Niamh’ had been taking her leave of it, but they shared a bond.
What Bernard and the others didn’t know then, and, in their circumstances, probably wouldn’t have cared about if they had, was that the incident would become another weapon against
every Irishman or woman in the Newcastle area for all time. They became known as ‘the Seaham Scabs’, though local myth would transform the numbers from 150 to thousands, and the stigma
of the Irish Blacklegs would encompass anyone with an Irish name for generations to come. Even fifty years later, when work was slack, miners of Irish descent like Daisy’s father were laid
off first from pits where they had worked for three generations longer than the English miners who were kept on.
‘Was it fair that my grandfather and the others took the jobs and homes of other men?’ Michael Sheridan would ask with a shrug when he recounted the old tales. ‘Probably not.
We wouldn’t have liked it much if it had happened to us, now, would we? But when people are starving the first things out of the window are principles. Besides,’ he would say with a
note of bitterness, reaching for the bottle once again, ‘I think we’ve been punished enough by this city for the sins of our grandfathers, don’t you?’
Listening to him, Daisy would nod firmly because that was what her father wanted, but she didn’t really feel as he did. She understood the hurt, but she didn’t
feel
it, nor
the melancholy. That was mainly a male thing, though she sympathised with Michael’s feelings over the treatment of generations of Irish Geordies. Sometimes, in the retelling of the old
stories, she would glance at Kay, trying to gauge her sister’s reaction, but there was no expression there, save the one she always had, beautiful but blank.
‘Their only crime had been to be starved into taking any work they could get and to love Ireland!’ Michael’s voice would rise in a kind of crescendo at this point. ‘And
God knows, the one they lived in didn’t want them.’ And here his voice would crack completely.
And, Daisy knew, it lost few chances to let them know they would never be accepted, no matter how long they were there, which in turn made them keep to themselves, living, working and
socialising only with each other, keeping alive a vision of the green place across the sea that they had left, never to set foot on again.
Daisy understood that, but she didn’t understand why generations who had never seen Ireland seemed to remember it even more strongly and lovingly than those who had. Somehow she
didn’t feel part of their maudlin, defeated attitude that all too often led to the bottle. That, she began to understand as she grew older, was part of the problem. What it did to her was
make her determined that she wouldn’t be there any longer than necessary. It gave her the will to move on from Newcastle and from the way the Irish all too often dealt with the city. She
didn’t know where or when she would achieve this, but she did know that she didn’t belong to either side, and she didn’t want to belong either. There was a world out there where
all these ancient hurts, tiresome resentments and mindless animosities didn’t matter, and that’s where she belonged.
While Michael retold the old stories to his daughter, across the continent an odd-looking little Austrian was working himself into a simmering rage because Germany had lost WW1. Daisy had no way
of knowing it, but it would take the little Austrian’s ambitions to present her with that opportunity to move on when she was eighteen years old.
2
When Bernard Sheridan and the other 149 Seaham Scabs took over the forcibly vacated homes of English miners, his work would make him and his family itinerants, moving from
colliery to colliery, wherever he was needed to open up a new pit. Sinkers dug through the earth to where unworked coal seams were to be found, creating new work for miners and increased profits
for the owners. It was back-breaking and dangerous work, but there would never be a safe job as long as the mining industry existed, and in time he picked up the special skills needed from his
fellow sinkers.
They worked in teams of up to six, digging the soft earth on the surface by hand to open up a hole measuring ten feet by fifteen. As they dug deeper, a reinforcing framework of wood was
constructed to stop the walls of the trench falling inwards and burying them alive. Gradually the wood was replaced with brick and stone, and at the same time wooden shafts would be sunk through
the soft earth to the rock beneath. To get through this layer, hammers, chisels and sometimes explosives were used to clear a path to the coal seam below. The hole would run straight down for a
hundred feet or more, with the men being lowered down to work and hauled back up by steam-powered sinking engines.
It went without saying that accidents were frequent. It was not a safety conscious era, and Lord Londonderry was no different from other mine owners in caring not a toss for his workers, as he
had already proved. If some protested about the conditions, there were always others willing or desperate enough to take their place.
Danger came not just from the explosives they used, but from boulders falling down on the sinkers working below, and it wasn’t unknown for a man to fall into a deepening pit. Other risks
came from the earth itself, at a time when geology wasn’t understood. Encountering a sudden rush of water not only weakened the sides of the dig, but risked drowning men before they could be
hauled back up. Suddenly finding quicksand had the same effect, and, occasionally, they would hit gas, always a danger, even with ventilation shafts installed. The job of the sinker teams was a
skilled one that took time to master, but it suited Bernard in one way, because he had been used to the open land all his life and the thought of being completely underground, huddled in a dark,
wet, three-foot-high seam, hulking coal all day, scared him. In other ways it suited him less, precisely because he was a country boy and he hated the increasing darkness as he descended from
ground level, the lack of space and air. But it was still better than that three-foot seam, and if you looked up you could see the sky above.
As a sinker he would work till the coal seam was reached, sink the shafts to support it, leave the actual coal-digging to others, then move on to the next village where his skills were needed.
It wasn’t uncommon for each child in a sinker’s family to be born in a different village because home was wherever their father happened to be working at the time, with the boys going
down the pits and the girls into service or to work on farms.
As fate would have it, though, Bernard would work in the Newcastle coalfields for only fourteen years, before an unlikely scenario brought his time to an end.
‘I never knew my grandfather,’ Michael would say, ‘but I heard so much about him that to this day I can almost see him. He was a small, stocky man, well-muscled because of the
work, with brown hair and grey eyes; quiet, so they say, and cheerful. He didn’t draw attention to himself and his only ambition was to save enough to take his family back to Ireland one day,
though he wasn’t the only one who was doing that. He missed the open air and the space, and in his mind he thought he could go back home, buy a farm and start his life over again. He had to
work as a sinker, but his heart wasn’t in it, and when he had a few hours off, he walked.
‘My father told me he would go off on one of his walks and just disappear for hours at a time, then come back and get ready for work again in his quiet way.’
Daisy could almost see Bernard through Michael’s eyes, just as Michael saw him through his own father’s, and she wondered if he was ever aware that he was describing Granda Paddy and
himself as he talked about Bernard. She never tired of Michael’s stories; even if she was never sure how true they were, because each time she heard them it was as if she was seeing her past
a bit more clearly, and feeling a sense of herself that much stronger.
‘He liked the sea, I think it was that space thing again. You know how you can stretch your eyes when you look across the sea?’
Daisy nodded.
‘And it reminded him of Ireland, of course, because his home wasn’t far from the sea and he was used to boats. He liked to spend time where fisherfolk were to be found, to walk by
the riverside and down the lanes, Dark Chare, Blue Anchor Chare and Peppercorn Chare. And that’s what he was doing on that October day in 1854,’ Michael said with a sigh, ‘walking
along the Tyne by Guildford, looking at the fishing boats landing their catches and the wherries taking loads to bigger ships lying down river. Then there was the big explosion.’
A fire had started in a worsted factory in Hillsgate, Gateshead, and quickly spread through the cramped riverside buildings to a warehouse containing thousands of tons of sulphur, saltpetre,
turpentine and naphtha. As it exploded, stones and bricks were thrown across the Tyne, starting fires on the other side, and fifty-three of the crowd that had gathered to watch were killed,
including Bernard Sheridan.
‘He’d been using explosives at work every day for years,’ Michael said, ‘and he died at the age of thirty-four in an explosion on his day off. Now isn’t that just
plain unfair? And they talk about the luck of the Irish,’ he would finish bitterly, as though the whole world regularly conspired against them.
Bernard’s wife, Niamh, left a widow at the age of thirty with six children to care for, briefly considered moving back to Ireland, an instinctive reaction to run for home in times of
trouble. Niamh was made of sterner stuff, though, and she used the money Bernard had been saving ‘to go back home’ to rent a house in Byker, a working-class area far from the
coalfields, and became a landlady. She was small, as all malnourished people were in that era, with dark blue eyes, her fine fairish hair in a bun that never quite contained the strands, and she
had a bustling air about her. She was a feisty woman who had opinions and voiced them freely in a way that Bernard never would have. She resented the anti-Irish feeling she and her children faced
every day, and remarks that blamed the Irish for being poor, uneducated and dirty.
Newcastle was a busy port and, like all ports, the constant traffic of foreigners brought diseases like typhus and cholera to the city, particularly when there were many people crammed into
little space. The native Geordies always blamed this, as everything else, on ‘the Irish’. Whenever she met with this kind of bias, Niamh would point out that if the Irish were kept in
low-paid jobs they could only afford the worst housing. So it was from necessity, not choice, that they lived in over-populated tenements with no sewers or drains, and was it any wonder some of
them drank out of despair and became even more maudlin about ‘home’?
Secretly, though, Niamh disapproved of drink. She thought it a great failing of the Irish, particularly the males, and she had no time for the false sentiment it brought out in them, though she
would never have admitted it outside her own four walls. Her own father in Ireland had been a case in point. He drank to escape his circumstances but he drank his wife and children out of any hopes
they had of improving their situation.
Niamh had never forgotten that: it was partly why she had seen moving to Newcastle as a step away from that attitude all those years ago. She soon learned that it didn’t matter where they
lived, though. The Irish saw themselves as defeated victims wherever they were, and turning to the bottle was too often their only response to their problems. It wouldn’t happen to her
children, she decided. She would make sure they understood they had to help themselves; and the way to do that was through learning. ‘Now, her I do remember, her I will never forget,’
Michael said with a smile. ‘My, now, there was a busy woman for you. No time for slackers, no time for complainers, she believed in getting on by helping herself. “Don’t feel
sorry for yourself,” she used to say. “Make something of yourself instead.” And all her children learned to read and write, including my father, her youngest. I don’t know
if you remember your Granda Paddy, Daisy, but he always had a book about him, didn’t matter what it was or how many hands it had gone through before his had touched it. He always had a
book.’