Across the Irish Sea
In 2010, writer and theatre director Pam Schweitzer MBE met with London Metropolitan University (LMU) to discuss records created from her production ‘Across the Irish Sea’. The archive is currently shared, in part, on the Reminiscence Theatre Archive (RTA) website, and held in full at the University of Greenwich.
With such an important history to tell about the Irish experience migrating to London, it was agreed that it should also share a home in The Archive of the Irish in Britain.
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The beginnings of ‘Across the Irish Sea’ saw over thirty Irish elders from across London interviewed during 1989, to help develop a musical show that would tour Irish communities in London, Liverpool, Glasgow and other cities, later travelling to Northern Ireland, Holland and Germany.
These oral histories include the memories of participants like Maire Curran, Martin Fahey and Seamus Kineally who grew up mainly in rural Ireland and who moved to London between the 1930s and 1950s to join family or friends.
You can hear clips on the RTA website, like this excerpt from Martin Fahey, part of Battersea Elderly Group:
“I come from Galway, which is in the west of Ireland. The jobs I did in Ireland, well I had one job all my life, in a shoe shop. I was selling the shoes, mostly, and earned about 4 shillings a week in the beginning, but then it went up, and when I finished I was earning about £3 a week, which wasn’t bad. But then I used to see a lot of people coming from England with big pay cheques, and I thought well, what am I doing here? So I applied to come to England, and when I got to England I was very disappointed, because I was earning more money in Ireland than I was in England. I still had to send money home to Ireland, because I was married in at the time, of course I was losing money then, but I survived I managed to get on…"
Excerpt from Jane Bruder interview:
“I wanted to get away from home because all it was at home was hard work and no money… I was nothing to do with sheep but I had to work on the farm and I was outdoors so I was like a boy and Bob and Bill [her brothers] were away during the war so it meant that Jim who was only a year older than me was head of the house.
I was born in 1900... I wanted to get away from home because there was so much work for me to do and no relief and no money. I mean the boys, we girls worked in the yard and fed the horses and cleaned out the stables when they were out hunting and we were never - we girls were never allowed to hunt. For one reason was we had no - if you get on a horse you must be perfectly… must have a perfect outfit, my mother couldn’t afford an outfit for us… They [the brothers] were dressed to the waist but they were on the best horses.”
Live performances
The play itself recreates, in their own words and with the songs they remember, scenes of childhood in rural Ireland and the process of finding work and home in England. It also reflects the contributors’ feelings as emigrants, their continuing relationship with Ireland and their experience of growing old in London.
The play was written and directed by Pam Schweitzer, and researched by Pam Schweitzer and Maxine O’Reilly.
You will find videos of performances of the production on the RTA website.