The Personals Page 9
Michael’s love of history came primarily from his father, who left Ireland when he was young. ‘He was really interested in buying and selling over the years,’ Michael says. ‘In fact, some of the stuff I’m going to show you here came from him, and was sourced in London when he was working there. He went there in the sixties and he’d be home maybe three or four weeks of the year and I would go over to him on my holidays.’
This situation was often referred to as an Irish divorce, when Irish men went away to work and came back for very short periods of time. Michael says his mother didn’t like London, and couldn’t stand the hustle and the bustle. During all those years she kept things going at home, balancing three kids while working two jobs. His father sent money home every few weeks, and she passed away before he retired, so they never spent 52 weeks of the year together again after he emigrated.
He did come home for her funeral. ‘She’s dead 20 years now,’ Michael says. ‘My father is dead seven years, and when he died, there was a shed load of stuff left.’
Every school holiday Michael had joined his father in London and worked on the building sites. His father did groundwork mainly, messy stuff Michael calls it, such as laying foundations and block paving. He did quite well at one stage, becoming a small sub-contractor and he worked with the large builders McAlpines, but was eventually squeezed out by the bigger players.
When Michael joined his father in London he also worked in construction, and this continued until the first few years he was teaching, before he got married. He describes his father as a typical 1960s Irish man, with drinking being one of his favourite pastimes. ‘He drank and he played hard, but he worked hard then as well, and he worked till the day he retired. Then he came back home to Ireland to the family home.’
Michael’s collecting had started when his father bought him a stamp album one Christmas when he was about 10 years old. From there he collected coins, and still does. When he was in London with his father they had a routine every Sunday which became important to his collecting. ‘We used to go to a car boot sale in Hackney every Sunday morning and then we’d go a little bit down the road to a place called Brick Lane. We would do the markets until lunchtime and then we’d go for a few drinks in Mile End. We always bought something, so I was always collecting bits and pieces and would bring them home in the boot of a car, back on the ferry when it was time to leave.’
And with that, Michael opens the box on the table in front of him and starts taking out some of the items inside. He has several of them for sale online and others he has collected over the years. He shows me original bank receipts and invoices for a bridge built in Wales by McAlpines, dating back to the 1920s. These may not be worth much, he says, but they have special significance for him given his father’s connection to McAlpines.
Sitting alongside these very British and London Irish items was a German soldier’s book in immaculate condition. ‘I was kind of always into military stuff,’ he says. ‘The uniforms and the ceremony look very well. This was an ordinary Wehrmacht soldier’s from the Second World War. In 1944 the resources weren’t there to do photographs, so there’s a description of what he looks like written inside. This is like his passport, all stamped, showing everything from his vaccines to his gear kit. He survived, and we know this because his demobilisation papers are included here too. William Schmidt was his name: born in 1898, he was demobbed in 1946, so he probably spent time in a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany. I picked this up in Berlin a number of years ago when I was leading a school tour. I got it in an antiques shop. It’s a fascinating slice of history and only cost me €50. It’s not for sale though.’
Other items he shows me include deeds from the 1660s written on animal hide, a Victorian fan as well as various small buttons and medals from the First World War that he has for sale on DoneDeal. He also takes out a small hand pistol which he found on a building site in Hackney in the 1980s. ‘It’s a little one shot pistol and it’s almost like a .22 – you put a bullet in and lock it into place,’ he says, demonstrating how it works. ‘The trigger and all is working. It’s late 1800s, and it’s German. I was digging on a work site and found it. I’ve a few Roman coins also that I got on sites. My uncle found a bag of them when he used to operate a digger. The pistol was all muck and dirt; it was something you would hold in your hand and conceal. It would have to be used at close range, with just one bullet. You’d make sure you were on target or else.’
While Michael is happy to offload some of his items, much of his collection he takes out and looks at regularly, unlike other collectors I’ve met. He had hoped his son might want to carry on the tradition of collecting that his father passed on to him. But this looks increasingly unlikely. ‘My son is more interested in the Xbox or PlayStation than this stuff,’ he says. ‘I look at the online ads every single day. I look at my own ads, but also, I’m looking for specific things: Lady Lavery banknotes at the moment and an Iron Cross, 1st Class. You’re always looking for something’
Continuing the collecting and carrying on a tradition his father introduced him to during those school holidays in London is a way of keeping his father present. We reflect on the Irish travelling to London today – putting down roots in areas such as Clapham Common and establishing GAA teams in places like Fulham. While close in physical proximity to the once thriving Irish communities in places such as Kilburn and Cricklewood, the current emigrant’s experience of London couldn’t be more different from the Irish who emigrated in the fifties and sixties. Their building sites are now tech hubs, while cheap Ryanair flights mean they’re unlikely to be home just one week a year. It’s more likely once a month now, leaving little room for the modern-day version of the Irish divorce of the past to continue.
Michael thinks he may leave the items in his collection to a local museum and what he doesn’t want he will continue to sell on DoneDeal. One room in his home that was meant to be an office now houses the collection. He calls it his cubbyhole, and among the items on the wall is a US flag from the Kuwait War, which his brother, who served during the conflict, gave him. ‘When I’m sitting in my room, I sometimes look around the walls. I’m surrounded by hundreds of years of war and I’m transported back to a moment in history,’ he says. ‘That’s the real thrill for me.’
The Weight of History
War of Independence medals for sale. Genuine provenance. DoneDeal, September 2018
It feels like the rain on the Isle of Man constantly has the wind egging it on, like a scrum half pushing his forwards into a ruck, so that when it hits you it does so with added intensity and pressure. It’s an unusual place, where 70,000 or so people share a chunk of land in the Irish Sea just 13 miles from Liverpool. It’s famous for a road race each year in which at least one participant nearly always dies, and for transforming itself from a holiday destination into a tax haven.
In some ways this change was necessary, as cheap continental flights from the 1970s onwards meant that the island could no longer rely on the hordes of UK tourists it had been receiving since the nineteenth century. Today, asset management, gambling and offshore investment companies have replaced the deckchairs and ice cream parlours of previous eras, and post Panama Papers there has been renewed focus on this semi-sovereign state.
As well as being a refuge for the tax shy, the island has also been a refuge of sorts for people who want to escape their past. Gerard Kelly is one of those people. He left his native Omagh for the first time when he was 15, taking the boat to England like tens of thousands of his contemporaries. Now in his early fifties, he tells me he’s been living on the island for over a decade. Gerard had kindly offered to collect me from the small airport at one end of the island, when I arranged to meet him after seeing the medals he had advertised for sale online. On the journey to a coffee shop, in between swapping parenting stories and mortgage woes, he relayed something of a potted history of his upbringing in 1970s and 1980s Northern Ireland.
‘I left Omagh first in 1988,’ he tells me. ‘There was no work there then. I remember the year only because I arrived in London the same month Ireland beat England in football. I remember picking up the papers and seeing the headline “Paddywhacked” and thinking, how can they even write that.’
The irony for Gerard and many of his neighbours in the 1970s and 1980s is that the very country that was making life difficult for them at home in Omagh, as they saw it, was also the one that offered them a way out. ‘Yeah, that was strange for me because I left a garrison town with a British Army base,’ Gerard says. ‘There were a few small bombs but no major violence. You really became aware you were Catholic when you left school and found opportunities limited. You couldn’t have got a job in the council or the water board, or anything like that because it was all Protestants. You’d get a job in the building site no bother, but you couldn’t get decent money jobs. Nobody in my class went to university, for example.’
So Gerard set off for London with no money and little education. His first stop was the Holloway Road and the Cock Tavern. Through people he met there, the next day he was on a building site, working outside Battersea Dogs Home. His existence for the first few years became the clichéd pub-centred one which many Irish fell into abroad.
‘You kept moving job to job. It was well paid but we were working for agencies and had to go to The Archway Tavern to get paid on a Friday,’ he tells me. ‘There was a wee boy in a hatch and they gave you a five-pound meal ticket and a pint while you were waiting for your money to be cashed. It was just a bar full of Paddies, but then everyone stayed there. The agency would take their money and the bar would take their money and there was a queue out the street of Irish people and everyone stayed on and drank. I always said the worst people to work for were my own. They treated you like shit because they knew there was another busload or planeload over in the morning. There was none of this Irish camaraderie. The worst thing about an Irishman is when they get money because they turn into totally different people. You might say that about everyone but it’s something to do with the Irish; we’re not suited to having a lot of money.’
Despite the unsympathetic attitude of his countrymen, Gerard was glad to be away from Northern Ireland and the Troubles. He knows that had he stayed his life would have been very different. It brings to mind a joke told about a fanatic IRA cell somewhere in west Clare and the accusation: ‘Well, ye’re not exactly on the frontline, lads.’
This works in reverse too. It’s easy, particularly post 9/11, to be anti-Republican, or to judge those who got involved in the armed struggle from the safety of the Free State. Gerard is clear – had he stayed in Northern Ireland he too would have got involved. ‘I would have been sucked in. I still have Republican tendencies but I definitely would have been involved some way or another. Thank God I didn’t,’ he says.
‘We were like Catholic ghettos. We never met a Protestant. I didn’t meet a Protestant until I was about 18 years old and had been living away for a few years. Catholics stayed in Catholic areas. And then the Brits would come around your houses and you threw stones and petrol bombs at them. It was bad times. Going back to the days of Lloyd George and Churchill, the Brits always hated us. Some still do. Some still think we’re all going around digging spuds up. I hate that fucking attitude.’
Gerard grew up in a world where people from the Republic of Ireland were called rednecks and Free Staters who had sold out his community. ‘That was the mentality. To be honest, I still think that. A lot of people revere Michael Collins. He was bad to his own people though. He’s not my hero,’ he adds.
We’ve been talking for over half an hour by this stage, and haven’t yet mentioned the medals he has for sale. After finishing our coffee Gerard suggests a trip around Douglas, the capital of the island, and we go for a spin. There’s a real sense of faded grandeur about it. The curved white colonial terraces still look impressive, but behind them are poor-quality housing and the damaged signs of backstreet Indian takeaways come more and more into view.
Gerard spent a few years in London and then in the early 1990s decided to return home. By this stage he had developed a huge interest in music and the rave scene was about to take off. He was ahead of the curve and brought some of that music back with him from London. While people he knew in his area were going around shouting ‘Up the RA’ and painting Republican slogans on the walls, he was listening to The Specials and wearing braces. This didn’t go down well with the local mini Devs.
‘I was getting battered in my own housing estate,’ he says. ‘I remember one Christmas I got a cheap Walkman. I was going up through the housing estate and I got jumped. To go to the shop from my housing estate was like a war in itself. I had to go about two miles out of the way to go to the shop as I would get battered at the local shop because I wasn’t going around shouting “Up the RA” every two minutes – instead I was listening to music.’
With the early rave scene came the drugs, namely ecstasy, and Gerard became as committed to them as he was to the beats. First, he took them himself, and then he later sold ecstasy to feed his own habit. ‘It was escapism for me, from my life and my house at the time,’ he says.
He says what was interesting about the early rave scene in Northern Ireland was that there wasn’t the sectarian hatred inside the clubs that existed outside. Ecstasy eroded all that. ‘Nobody bothered about religion in that scene. Everyone just went raving. You’d go out on a Friday night and you mightn’t come home till Tuesday. Then you had the guys on the other side of town that hated you. The Provos. Or as we used to call them “armchair Provos”. Boys sitting at the bar and shouting “Up the RA”. They wanted to batter us too, so it was a them and us thing again. I always seemed to be fighting against somebody and not wanting to be.’
Initially, ecstasy got Gerard away from everything, but after a while the drugs also began wearing him down. He says he has about a dozen convictions, mostly for doing stupid things when drunk or high; some of them are for assaults on police officers. He wanted to go to America for his fiftieth birthday but couldn’t get a visa, while recently he successfully secured a job as a postman, only to fail the police vetting. That hit him hard as he felt his past was weighing him down, following him around – stalking him almost.
When he first arrived on the Isle of Man he began taking cocaine. He was living in a flat and one Christmas he went to stay in a local hotel, drinking gin and playing a bit of golf. He says he remembers coming home on the Sunday and starting to feel this huge down. ‘I was in the bathroom and I had a breakdown. I thought I can’t be doing this any more. I’d been doing it for 10 years. I could never go into that bathroom again after that and I used to have to go into the leisure centre for a shower. So that was it for me then and aside from one or two slips, I’ve been off it for 10 years now.’
I can see why Gerard loves island life; it’s another form of escapism. There is an island mentality that takes a while to get used to though. For example, some locals he knows have a saying: ‘If you don’t like it, there’s a boat in the morning.’ On one level, you’re never fully accepted coming from the mainland, but that suits him. He’s never quite fitted in anywhere anyway. It’s a safe environment for the kids and a totally different kind of upbringing from the one he had in Northern Ireland during the Troubles.
He hasn’t entirely cut his ties with his Republican past though, and he maintains an active interest in history, especially all things 1916. He rolls up his sleeve to proudly show me a Pádraig Pearse tattoo with the words: ‘Éire Gan Saoirse. Éire Gan Síocháin’ – meaning ‘Ireland without freedom, Ireland without peace’. We talk about how complex Republicanism has become, particularly post 9/11, and how the bombing campaign on mainland Britain impacted on the many tens of thousands of Irish living there.
His interest in Republican tradition continued and it merged with his passion for online ads. His small time online buying and selling b
egan a few years ago when he saw a fiftieth anniversary Pádraig Pearse coin for sale online and bought it. We’re now in the office where he works. On the table is a box which he opens and takes out three medals related to the War of Independence.
‘I never thought I’d get something like this,’ he says, handing me the ribboned discs. He has a framed copy of the Proclamation in the hallway of his home and had been on the lookout for medals to hang off it. By chance, he saw these medals and had some spare money so he went for it. Soon after he bought them he put them up for sale online, but later grew attached to them, and has taken them down again since we spoke on the phone. He’s determined to hold on to them, especially now he has done a bit of research into where the medals came from and who owned them.
‘The guy I got them off told me they were belonging to his grandfather,’ Gerard tells me. ‘But I didn’t believe it 100 per cent until I looked into it. I was worried whether they were going to be real or fake or what. Then he was telling me about his grandfather and I checked up on it. I couldn’t believe it. I was able to put a face to the medals, an actual human being, and now I’m obsessed with finding out more about him and his fight for freedom.’
He says while he’d like to leave the medals to his own son one day, he doesn’t want him to inherit any hang-ups about the Troubles. ‘I don’t even want him to be playing rebel songs,’ he says. ‘Why should another generation be burdened with that? I felt kind of strange buying something so personal from the grandson of the man who was awarded them. So the other day I texted the guy I bought them from and told him I would give him first option to buy them back. He said no thanks, and told me they’d been lying in a press for 50 years. I could sell them if I wanted and have a nice holiday, but after I’d come back, I’d have nothing to show. To be honest, I don’t think I’d ever get rid of them now.’