€15.00 including P&P
Read the review by the Irish Oral History Network
Voices of the Men Who Built Britain tells the stories of the Irish in Britain in a collection of audio interviews with the people who lived it, along with a collection of the classic songs of the era by Joe Giltrap.
This was a secret world of ‘Tunnel Tigers’, ‘Heavy Diggers’, and ‘McAlpine’s Fusiliers’; of ‘hen houses’, ‘cock lodgers’, and ‘the landlady’s breakfast’; of ‘pincher kiddies’, ‘long distance men’, and ‘shackling up’; of ‘dead men’, ‘walking pelters’, And ‘Murphy’s volunteers’; of ‘the Shamrock’, ‘the Galtymore’, ‘the Buffalo’ and ‘the Crown’; of exile and isolation and loneliness and despair.
What today’s migrant labourers experience is only an echo of what Irish men endured in Britain decades previously. As one man put it:
“You told it as it was. It brought back anger, sadness, tears. It also brought back memories of pride, joy, and laughter; of men who earned their bread by the sweat of their brow. God rest those who are gone“.