Those Tyrannising Landlords, the new novel by my
Ringwood Publishing stablemate Seán Damer, is an important book. It’s not often
you say that about fiction, but Damer’s novel fills a fairly inexplicable gap –
the story of the Irish immigrant families who descended on Glasgow between the
Famine and the Great War to fashion new lives. The sheer number of such
immigrants is extraordinary. In 1921, there were 160,000 Irish born people
living in Scotland, mostly in Glasgow and the major towns of the west of Scotland,
accounting for about 4% of the total population of the country. Back in the 1850s
there were over 200,000, about 7% of the population. From the time of the
Famine, these families came in search of better lives. By the twentieth
century, a common cause was to escape the “tyrannising landlords” in Ireland ,whose
frequent and brutal rises in rent left families almost destitute.
When they reached Scotland, of course, more often than not
they encountered exactly the same problem.
In the 1910s and 1920s, when Those Tyrannising Landlords
is set, the housing stock in Glasgow was abominably poor. The Irish immigrants
tended to cluster in particular areas, such as Neptune Street in Govan, dubbed
The Irish Channel because of the number of Irish families living there. And the
housing in such areas was woefully substandard. Such was the level of
overcrowding the Glasgow Corporation employed Sanitary Inspectors who would
check on houses in the middle of the night to see how many people were living
in them and prosecute the owners if there were too many. Two-thirds of
Glaswegians lied in single-ends and rooms-and-kitchens with outside toilets.
The lack of sanitation was a serious health hazard and life expectancy was low.
All this forms the backdrop for Damer’s novel, the story of
the O’Donnells, from The Rosses in Donegal. In particular, it tells the story
of Peggy, the only girl in the family, an intelligent and single-minded young
woman, stubborn and determined. Appalled by the grinding poverty, violence and
bigotry she sees around her, she becomes politicised, joining the Independent
Labour Party and participating in rent strikes and demonstrations against the
slum landlords and a political system that had no intention of doing anything to
change the status quo. With the idealism of youth, she is intent on changing the
world.
Those Tyrannising Landlords is a fascinating novel. Seán
Damer is an academic with an intimate knowledge of both Glasgow and its Irish
immigrant communities. That knowledge lends the novel a rare credibility and we
are left with a feeling of revulsion that such conditions could have been
allowed to fester for so long. The story of the O’Donnells, and in particular
the delightful Peggy, is engrossing, entertaining and highly revealing.
