Define: Pincher laddies

Subject: RE: Define: Pincher laddies
From: GUEST
Date: 26 Sep 23 - 03:41 PM

I’m unsure of the origin of Pincher but I can add to ssomething Pinchers wore and they were YARKS or YERKS. They were pieces of string or twine tied below the knee to keep their
trousers out of the muck,in earlier times Sugans. were used.
PELTER or Walking PELTER was a Ganger who walked up and down roadways under
construction.Later some used bicycles but the advent of the Jeep made the job
obsolete .
AchillPat

Subject: RE: Define: Pincher laddies
From: GUEST
Date: 26 Sep 23 - 03:41 PM

I’m unsure of the origin of Pincher but I can add to ssomething Pinchers wore and they were YARKS or YERKS. They were pieces of string or twine tied below the knee to keep their
trousers out of the muck,in earlier times Sugans. were used.
PELTER or Walking PELTER was a Ganger who walked up and down roadways under
construction.Later some used bicycles but the advent of the Jeep made the job
obsolete .
AchillPat

Subject: RE: Define: Pincher laddies
From: GUEST,Mick proctor
Date: 24 Aug 23 - 04:46 PM

Pincher was an Irish man who lived in Wolverhampton known better as pincher Harrington he and my grandfather pat creaby a mayo man worked for mc alpines and were both known as mc alpines fuseliers

Subject: RE: Define: Pincher laddies
From: GUEST,Dan
Date: 24 Jun 21 - 01:36 PM

My Dad came to the UK in 1941 god rest his soul he knew darkie Finn when working on the isle of grain power station he also worked on kings ferry bridge sheppey and London. Shrewsbury etc

Subject: RE: Define: Pincher laddies
From: mayomick
Date: 26 Feb 19 - 02:36 PM

For Guest from 2008 who asked about the melody. It’s the old Jacobite song The Jackets Green :

When I was a maiden fair and young
On the pleasant banks of the Lee
No bird that in the greenwood sung
Was half so blithe and free
My heart near leapt with flying feet
No love sang me her Queen
Till down the glen rode Sarsfield's men
And they wore the Jackets Green
https://www.kinglaoghaire.com/lyrics/665-the-jackets-green#s5_video

Subject: RE: Define: Pincher laddies
From: GUEST,GPM
Date: 25 Feb 19 - 05:19 PM

"Hot racking" was also a term used in the US Navy for sailors on different shifts who shared a "rack", or bed.

Subject: RE: Define: Pincher laddies
From: GEST
Date: 26 May 11 - 07:07 AM

Here is the intro to Ultan Cowley's book, THE MEN WHO BUILT BRITAIN, on this topic. (No SPAM intended.) :-)

WHAT HAVE THE IRISH EVER DONE FOR US?

Anyone asking this question, in the aftermath of the Queen's historic visit to Ireland, will find many fascinating answers in Ultan Cowley's definitive history of Irish Labour in British Construction, The Men Who Built Britain, just published in a special Veteran's Edition…

By 1960 over 200,000 Irishmen worked in British construction. The ubiquitous Irish Navvy was at the cutting edge of landmark UK civil engineering triumphs such as the first Wembley Stadium, built in 1924 by 'Concrete Bob' McAlpine (whose deathbed exhortation was, allegedly, 'Keep the Big Mixer goin', and keep Paddy behind it!'), the Victoria Line ('If it wasn't for the Irish there wouldn't be a single bloody tunnel built in England', Cockney engineer Tubby Buesden, London Evening Standard), the ubiquitous Motorways including Birmingham's iconic Spaghetti Junction, the Thames Barrier ('one of the largest moveable flood barriers in the world'), Scotland's massive hydro dams, oil terminals, power stations, and the Channel Tunnel.

Cowley's book breathes soul into the statistics with riveting and often entertaining first-hand quotes which illustrate why 'The Craic was good in Cricklewood' and how barriers bearing such names as Murphy, Clancy, and McNicholas have become commonplace on London's streets ('You'd mark off every 35 yards with a piece of chalk and tell a new man, "If you can't dig that out before this evenin', don't come in tomorrow").

For Irishmen such as Murphy and many of his generation who, after World War Two, left Ireland to help rebuild Britain with little formal education, few skills, and even fewer financial resources, there really was gold in the streets, as the old song had it. When he died in 2009 John Murphy's personal fortune was estimated at close to £100M. Many others made more modest livings in Britain whilst maintaining families at home in Ireland.

'If I were asked about the legacy of Irish labour', said Cowley, 'I'd have to quote Wren's epitaph: "If you seek a monument, look around!"

Contact: Tel. [phone]. Email: [e-mail]

Website: www.ultancowley.com

Subject: RE: Define: Pincher laddies
From: GUEST,LongOlWoody
Date: 08 Mar 11 - 06:23 AM

Further to the queries above about gangers; in John Laing construction on civil engineering jobs in the early 60's you had foremen who normally had a number of gangers working under them. Each ganger ran a team of between half a dozen to a dozen men.

Gangers, in turn, were normally supervisors who worked alongside the men in their gang. There were also "walking gangers", who did not work beside the men, but who filled the position of a sort of junior foreman. A walking ganger might therefore supervise several groups of men, each group being supervised by a ganger who worked with them.

Subject: RE: Define: Pincher laddies
From: GUEST,ssaghiaeirina
Date: 15 Sep 10 - 02:53 PM

worked in england as a navvy,lived in the spike,tough times.

Subject: RE: Define: Pincher laddies
From: GUEST,achillbeg fooreen
Date: 15 Sep 10 - 02:46 PM

i lived in the spike for years,god it was rough,all irish,how we did it ,tough times,pray god that they never come back again..

Subject: RE: Define: Pincher laddies
From: GUEST,ultan cowley
Date: 29 Jun 10 - 04:16 PM

Email me at [e-mail] for news re. new book, McAlpine's Men: Irish Stories from the Sites

Ultan

Subject: RE: Define: Pincher laddies
From: GUEST,ultan
Date: 28 Jun 10 - 12:16 PM

Hello Martin

            I haven't been looking at this forum for ages and don't know if you're still in the loop but, if so, I'm delighted to be able to finally answer your query to the effect that my latest book on the navvies, 'McAlpine's Men: Irish Stories from the Sites', is finally to hand.

Its a collection of first-hand accounts, across the whole spectrum of experience, collected over the past decade. The time frame is 1940's - 1980's.

A percentage of the profits will go to the Irreland fund of Greast Britain's 'Forgotten Irish' Campaign which helps, amongst others, many former construction workers down on their luck.

I won't get into price etc. here so as not to abuse the forum but full details can be had from me at [e-mail]

Do spread the word!

Best

Ultan

Subject: RE: Define: Pincher laddies
From: GUEST
Date: 27 Feb 09 - 07:00 AM

MacDonnchaidh, Co Doire
The two lines from mayomick are the only two i remember hearing myself, but i think there were a lot of these type of songs and the words were often forgotten, though a couple of lines would be remembered through common usage, probably as ard mhaca says,they would be used sarcastically against some particular gangerman

One i remember hearing on the cable work went as follows ;    ''I watched the frame as it took the strain, and i standing on the top, the timbers were all cracking, and the trench was caving in, so McAlpine sent to Leicester for the famous Darkie flynn.'' The Darkie Flynn [or Finn,depending on who was saying it ]   of the song being a legendary ''timberman'',this being the term used for the men who shuttered the trenches after they were dug out

Subject: RE: Define: Pincher laddies
From: GUEST,Denmark
Date: 21 Feb 09 - 04:36 AM

Great stuff - thoroughly enjoyed reading it! Would love to read the book - has it been published?

My late father was a Boyle from Donegal, and left home at the age of 14 to work in Scotland and England, sending money back to his parents. After working as a farm labourer , he then spent a large part of his working life with the big contractors including spells with McAlpines - as did many of his friends and relations from 'home'. They did have a reputation as hard working hard drinking men and many of their wives would time a visit to the pub on pay day to prevent all of the the pay packet reaching the hands of the landlord before the end of another drunken night. There were of course many exceptions to this hard drinking image - my father was a long term 'pioneer' - but this quieter side of the Irish personality understandably went unnoticed. As far as drinking is concerned, It seems to me that there was no middle ground - I don't remember who first said this but it was often a case of "one Guinness is too many, and twenty is not enough". Perhaps the alcohol was the help some of these men needed to throw off the inhibitions they brought with them from strict their Catholic upbringing when they left home. As my brother and I left school and were heading for further education, my father gave us both a taste of his working life for a couple of weeks each - about as much as we could take - and enough to convince us of the merits of a good education. That education lead me to work in the head office of the London pub company who owned the Crown in Cricklewood, so the song had an additional relevance to me as well as the one it had when I first heard it played back home in Edinburgh. In my view,like a previous poster has said I think, the men who worked for McAlpine and the other big firms were proud of what they did, despite the conditions and body-breaking nature of the work. They were also fiercely proud of their country, and the song gave their feelings a voice.

Subject: RE: Define: Pincher laddies
From: GUEST,axel
Date: 09 Dec 08 - 08:43 AM

Is a 'Bear' not someone who is hairy?

Or is that just jocktalk?

Subject: RE: Define: Pincher laddies
From: GUEST,Colin Bargery
Date: 21 Nov 08 - 07:27 AM

David Brooke says in 'The Railway Navvy; that despicable race of men' that Pincher was a term for an experineced navvy. The Oxford english dictionary says that a rare usage of pincher is for one who uses a crowbar to move rock and cites a usage from 1855. Tregelles says in 'the ways of the line', 1858 that 'the navvy proper deals only with the shovel, the pick, the crowbar, and the wheelbarrow'

Subject: RE: Define: Pincher laddies
From: Snuffy
Date: 14 Nov 08 - 02:51 PM

Do you mean a "Turdis"?

Subject: RE: Define: Pincher laddies
From: Volksman
Date: 14 Nov 08 - 09:38 AM

I was born in Ireland and have spent most of my working life in Construction (mainly piling) and have never heard of "Pincher Laddies"

The working conditions of the original navvies were disgraceful. However I have been on building sites in the past 12 months were the provisions were not much better. Ther are still some contractors who think that a "thunderbox" in the corner is all the welfare a working man needs.

[Thunderbox - a one man chemical toilet, aka "Glasgow phonebox" (sorry I just made that up)]

Volksman

Subject: RE: Define: Pincher laddies
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 09 Nov 08 - 06:54 PM

great thread. I've passed it on to a friend who works in the construction industry on the health and safety side - to see what he makes of it.

I've really enjoyed it. thanks to all the contributors.

Subject: RE: Define: Pincher laddies
From: GEST
Date: 08 Nov 08 - 06:49 PM

The YouTube video in the first post can't help you with the melody, GUEST BJK???

GEST

Subject: RE: Define: Pincher laddies
From: Leadfingers
Date: 08 Nov 08 - 01:09 PM

The D T has a 'Click to play' but it doent go anywhere !!

Subject: RE: Define: Pincher laddies
From: GUEST
Date: 08 Nov 08 - 11:20 AM

Can anyone shed any light on the melody to McAlpne's Fusilires? A lovely tune where can I get it??

TVM
BJK

Subject: RE: Define: Pincher laddies
From: ard mhacha
Date: 01 Sep 08 - 04:18 PM

Mayomick I always made sure any work I done was above ground, I was never that fond of money.

Subject: RE: Define: Pincher laddies
From: GUEST,mayomick
Date: 01 Sep 08 - 07:22 AM

Ard mhacha , In the tunnels they used to also have it as 'twenty years a leading miner and never sacked a man ' . Am I right in thinking that a leading miner would be the equivalent to a ganger ? I've had little first hand acquaintance with the shovel myself , and am happy to be corrected by anyone with direct hands-on experience of it .I'm just recalling some of the things recounted to me by my father who was a leading miner ,but by no means a thug or a fascist.

Not all gangers or leading miners were mindless gorillas . To work as a leading miner for instance you had to know the job - how to follow a line underground and make cuttings in the timber . That required a certain degree of training . The majority of the workers in a gang would be unskilled ; the leading miner an ex coal miner or perhaps somebody who had experience in digging wells in Ireland. It was no good just being a hard man with your fists ,although you couldn't afford to be a wimp of course.

Subject: RE: Define: Pincher laddies
From: ard mhacha
Date: 30 Aug 08 - 10:52 AM

Mayomick, I have heard the last line of that stanza repeated on many a job, but never expanded on, it was always used by the men as a sarcastic dig at the ganger, always out of his earshot of course.

Subject: RE: Define: Pincher laddies
From: mayomick
Date: 30 Aug 08 - 07:25 AM

"I have cut the rock against the grain from Derry to Strabane
Forty years a ganger and never sacked a man"

Somebody wrote to Mudcat a few years ago looking to see if anyone knew the rest of the words - without any success. I remembered my father quoting the same lines saying it was from a song the men used to sing in the tunnels .It gives a different angle on the popularly held view of the barbarian ganger .I wonder if Guest macDonnchaidh from Co Doire knows the song or what job it referred to.

Subject: RE: Define: Pincher laddies
From: Newport Boy
Date: 29 Aug 08 - 05:13 PM

Den

The motorway would be the M6 through Westmorland (not Cumberland). Construction was between 1967 and 1970, and the story and some pictures are here .

Westmorland services at Tebay are still the only decent services on UK motorways.

Phil

Subject: RE: Define: Pincher laddies
From: Den
Date: 29 Aug 08 - 03:21 PM

Fascinating thread. Thanks to everyone who contributed. Its a subject in which I am very interested too as my own father worked for many years in England in the sixties for Wimpey and John Laing. I remember spending a summer in Cumberland in a little place called Tebay in a house with no running water or electricity that my Dad had rented. He was working on a motorway. I'm not sure now which motorway I was very young at the time.

Subject: RE: Define: Pincher laddies
From: ard mhacha
Date: 29 Aug 08 - 04:25 AM

No doubting that the Foreman can be included in the same light as the Ganger, this was the case in all of the firms I worked for.

Subject: RE: Define: Pincher laddies
From: Newport Boy
Date: 28 Aug 08 - 05:11 PM

I don't think those descriptions are quite right. My background is on major construction sites from the 60s through the 90s, mostly working opposite McAlpine, Wimpey, etc.

The basic contractor's hierarchy was Agent, Sub Agent, Foreman, Ganger, Craftsman or Labourer. The first two were the technically qualified or long-experienced staff. The foreman was the management supervisor of the labour and plant, and normally did no physical work. (I have a photograph from my first site in 1960, captioned "foreman carpenter on the tools!".)

The ganger worked as part of the gang, and controlled operations. It was common on timesheets to have him recorded as "working ganger". When work was paid for by the hour, the ganger could be included, but not the foreman, whose costs were covered in the supervision overhead.

From the point of view of the labourer, the ganger was often a hard taskmaster, but any foreman would take a dim view of a ganger who didn't do a share of the work. Foremen were usually less popular among the men than gangers.

The term 'navvy' was really applied only to the labourers who shovelled or barrowed earth or concrete. Labourers assisting carpenters, etc wouldn't expect to be called a navvy. The term dates from the construction of the canals in the late 1700s/early 1800s, and is short for navigator - the early canals being commonly known as 'navigations'.

Phil

Subject: RE: Define: Pincher laddies
From: ard mhacha
Date: 28 Aug 08 - 05:28 AM

Almost all gangers were viewed in the same light as Kapos in concentration camps, the majority were ruthless, just the type of man the employers wanted.

Subject: RE: Define: Pincher laddies
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 28 Aug 08 - 05:12 AM

Navvy is a general term for a labourer - a ganger is an overseer or foreman; best illustrated by a story I was told about the making of a film in the 60s about Irish labourers in Britain.
For the recording of the music for the film a studio was booked at the BBC in London (apparently at great expense).
Before the session started those involved gathered in the hospitality suite for a drink and to relax.
Two of the musicians, a fiddler and a flute-player, both from Galway, had previously been great friends, but had not seen each other for some time and greeted each other warmly. The conversation went something like this.....
Flute - "What are you doing these days ******?"
Fiddle - "I'm a ganger on a site in Edgeware."
Long cold silence... then
Flute - "I'm not playing with any ******* fascist."
Flute player made to leave, but was, with a great deal of difficulty, persuaded to stay.
The session proceeded, but was subtlely sabotaged by the flute player, who, very skilfully played wrong notes, or went out of time, blaming his former friend with an accusing glare.
The session had to be re-scheduled.
Jim Carroll

Subject: navvies v gangers
From: GUEST
Date: 28 Aug 08 - 04:57 AM

Hi Can anyone tell me the difference between a ganger and a navvie please. I am researching a place in Blackpool where many gangers lived. But the navvies also stayed in some of the lodging houses. The old ladies I am interviewing seem to think the difference is purely Irish vs English.

My email is [e-mail]
Thanks
lyn

Subject: RE: Define: Pincher laddies
From: GUEST,lyn Butterworth
Date: 28 Aug 08 - 04:51 AM

Hi can anyone tell me the difference between a ganger and a navvie. I researching a place in blackpool where the roadbuilders and railway workers mainly settled once everything had been built. The old ladies I interviewing call their dads 'gangers'. However some of their mothers 'put up' navvies for the week or night.
What is the difference between the two?
Thanks
Lyn

Subject: RE: Define: Pincher laddies
From: GUEST,macDonnchaidh, Co doire.
Date: 23 Aug 08 - 10:04 AM

I remember the gimp all right, and they used to say of a bluffer,who would look and dress the part, but could'nt stick the work, maybe through no fault of his own; 'he's got the gimp, but he has'nt got the go'. Sometimes some comedian would add 'well he'll go on friday night alright', and they generally did if they even lasted that long.I saw fellas sacked before breakfast time, miles from home and not a penny in their pockets.

Subject: RE: Define: Pincher laddies
From: GUEST,Martin Farrell
Date: 22 Aug 08 - 05:35 PM

Ultan, when can we expect to see your new book published? I'm really looking forward to it.

Subject: RE: Define: Pincher laddies
From: ard mhacha
Date: 22 Aug 08 - 04:23 AM

Great stuff from MacDonnchaidh, do you remember, `the gimp`, this was the characteristic walk, there was no marks for defining the nationality of anyone with `the gimp`, he was sure to be a `paddy`, the exaggerated
sway of the shoulders and the splayed feet, stand aside or `Faugh a Ballach` here comes `the paddies`.

Subject: RE: Define: Pincher laddies
From: GUEST,MacDonnchaidh Co Doire
Date: 21 Aug 08 - 06:11 PM

I went to England in my teens and worked as a navvy in the sixties with the Murphy brothers etc, 'The green and the grey and RSK' as the saying went at that time,i done a spell with them all and the saying of the long distance men was always 'pincher kiddies' only very seldom was it laddies.   A pincher was also a temporary frame consisting of two upright planks with two struts between them used to shore up a trench until it was properly timbered. A lot of the old timers back then used to have songs and poems about the Irish naavy life, and 'the crack was good in cricklewood' was one of them, i would say it was out long before Dominic Behan wrote McAlpines fusiliers. we had a lingo of our own looking back, where men were skins, the ganger man had the 'shout',an expression which came from pulling in cable by hand, and we pulled each time the ganger man shouted. Cookin was 'shacklin up'.and going to the pub at night where they spent the sub was doing the 'session' There was 'rakes of beer','deadmen',the 'skipper''gresheens' and 'dampers' tarmackers and narrowbacks. Damping, wetting the bed, was very often blamed on kidneys weakened by sleeping out but the truth was it was more often caused by drinking 20 pints of beer on the way home from work and falling into bed drunk. When the oul landlady discovered the damage in the morning you would be sleeping out under the ditch. There is probably no Dictionary meaning to a lot of the slang used by the navvy's. As for nicknames, Bere V Bear,i worked with rakes of men nicknamed Horse,also the Pony,the Donkey, Racehorse,Elephant, and even the Pig. I remember when we moved to a new town on a job we would be told not to say we were Murphy's men when looking for digs or drinking in a new pub, as a lot of them had a bar on the cable men,especially Murphy's men because of the fighting and drinking. A lot of people resented the Connemara men because they spoke the gaelic but i always got on well with all but a tiny minority of them,and respected them for using the language, and this held true for every county, as they all had their blaggards my own county included. I remember working with three Connies who spoke practically no English, and i did'nt see anyone worried about the fact that all around them were talking in English,though if it had been the other way around a bit of paranoa would doubtless have set in. Ultan Crowleys book gives a good picture of what the times were like then,and while i loved the life back then, and had good friends from every county in Ireland, those times are probably better gone. By the way i still have the foot iron given to me when i was 18 by Mick Gallagher from Mayo, the grey Murphy's gangerman. McAlpines rubber boots worn by the tunnel tigers had the footiron built into it.

Subject: RE: Define: Pincher laddies
From: GUEST
Date: 15 Aug 08 - 08:08 AM

London Business School was my first experience of site-work and of sunstroke.
Worked on the slab without my shirt on the first day and passed out going down the ladder - carried down on the shoulder of a Mayo man.
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Define: Pincher laddies
From: ard mhacha
Date: 15 Aug 08 - 04:36 AM

Jim Carroll is right about the insurance cards, I worked with a man from Sligo who told me to call him Tommy, I couldn`t understand why his friend kept referring to him as Sean, later I found he had three national Insurance cars.

Subject: RE: Define: Pincher laddies
From: hobo
Date: 14 Aug 08 - 06:34 PM

Jim

   Lots of Dubs used to cross to Liverpool every week & draw there as well as at home! Not to mention the old scam of declaring tribes of children in Ireland to the British taxman...

Swapping insurance cards was also commonplace; I' ve often wondered why it was that, when Joseph Murphy of JMSE died a couple of years ago, the (British) death certificate gave his name as 'John' (cf. the Irish Times of the day)!!!

Ah, the good old days before computers...

Spent part of a summer in the early 'Seventies painting the student study bedrooms in the London Business School, by the way. Never want to see soft sheen magnolia, or white emulsion, ever again!

Ultan

Subject: RE: Define: Pincher laddies
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 14 Aug 08 - 03:00 PM

Ultan,
Wasn't singling the navvies out as being tax dodgers - we've all.... s**t, there might be a tax man in the vicinity.
My first job when moved to London was on the site of the London Business College at the end of Baker Street near Regents Park.
Every Thursday half the site would empty out; the men would climb down the ladder, go into the hut and shortly afterwards emerge dressed in collar and ties and make their way to the dole ofice over the road.
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Define: Pincher laddies
From: ard mhacha
Date: 14 Aug 08 - 02:59 PM

Hobo, Woe betide the person with the northern accent who had the misfortune to be in earshot of the `connies`, and I include Donegal gaels, they were the most clannish of any Irish men I encountered.

Subject: RE: Define: Pincher laddies
From: hobo
Date: 14 Aug 08 - 10:08 AM

Jim

   Didn't know about this particular take on the 'Connies' attitude to Irishmen speaking English in their company, but I have often been told of the reverse situation, where non-Irish speaking workers would react adversely (in a wagon, for example) to conversations conducted exclusively in Gaelic on the grounds that the offenders must have been speaking (critically) about them! Also heard of Connnies who didn't have English being exploited by subbies who withheld their papers. On a one to one basis, however, I'm told the Connies - the 'Heavy Diggers', were no pussycats!

Donegal men, especially tunnellers, by contrast had a reputation for canniness, diligence, and relative sobriety, probably because they worked in teams, and therefore couldn't afford to indulge loose cannons...

Never heard the expression 'under the lamp' either but I imagine all industries employing casual labour indulged in tax-dodging to some degree; inevitably, of course, to the ultimate detriment of the labourers.

The industry has always been characterised by sharp practice. One labour historian - I think David Brooke, citing a minor British civil engineering firm which was paid a subsistence allowance for the construction of a spur line in the final decade of the 19th century, gave their labour force only a small percentage of it, and used the remainder - a considerable sum, to finance its expansion a contract which elevated it into the 'premier league' of contractors shortly thereafter...

Subject: RE: Define: Pincher laddies
From: hobo
Date: 14 Aug 08 - 09:49 AM

Ard Mhaca

         As I recall, I seemed to demonstrate very little in the way of common sense in my youth, and did an awful lot of stupid things - often, I suspect, because of the unaccutomed degree of freedom which I enjoyed in England. So I don't consider that I have the right to castigate anyone - lumpers or otherwise, for their follies.

Because there seems to have been a consistent pattern to them I do, however, feel obliged to look for possible explanations for them...

Subject: RE: Define: Pincher laddies
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 13 Aug 08 - 02:25 AM

Ultan,
I can't remember if you covered it in your book (on loan at the moment), but there was an 'Irish-speaking only' club in Greenland Street, at the North end of Camden High Street which was said to be frequented by mainly Connemara men who had a reputation as being 'hard men'. If they heard anybody speaking 'the tongue of the oppressor' would eject the offender, often forcibly, down the steep flight of stairs.
We got this from several people, mainly musicians, who were around at the time.
Also, can't remember if you used the term 'under-the-lamp', which is still in use in my native Liverpool (or was when I worked on the docks there) for clandestine payment to avoid the tax man. It referred to the practice of subbies paying the men under a street lamp at the end of a days work.
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Define: Pincher laddies
From: ard mhacha
Date: 12 Aug 08 - 02:24 PM

Hobo, the figures for crime in Ireland from the 1930s through to the 1960s would give no cause for concern, again I worked alongside Irishmen from rural backgrounds and they were no better or worse than the urbanites.
Concerning `the grace of God sentiment`I would be inclined to lean more to `wee bit of common sense` sadly lacking with many of the `lumper` fraternity.

Subject: RE: Define: Pincher laddies
From: hobo
Date: 12 Aug 08 - 07:50 AM

ard mhaca,
         
         Undoubtedly the majority of Irish male (and female) migrant labourers were relatively well-adjusted people, dealing rationally and effectively with the economic circumstances in which they found themselves by emigrating to a more dynamic economy,and behaving responsibly in their new situation.

Like the presence of the Irish in the industry however (statistically small but disproportionately significant by virtue of their concentration in groundworks and their 'can-do' mentality) the very public profile of the 'navvy' meant that the public got a distorted impression of the extent of Irish anti-social behaviour in Britain.

Nevertheless, the industry has always been synonymous with over-dependence on alcohol, a macho mentality, and a level of brutality not usually associated with other labour-intensive industries. Some, for reasons which I've tried to suggest, were perhaps more susceptible than others.

Emigration, especially from a collective and communal pastoral environment to an urban, industrial, and anoynymous one (often characterised by varying degrees of anti-Irish sentiment), is a hard choice - some would argue, no choice at all. I think a charitable response would be to say, simply, 'There, but for the Grace of God...'

Subject: RE: Define: Pincher laddies
From: ard mhacha
Date: 12 Aug 08 - 05:54 AM

Hobo, All I can say is that my home town had mass emigration and during the 1950s when I started out at as a 17 year old, I can vouch for the fact that the men and boys from my town were not old or young `lags` just honest people in search of work.
I think you are referring to a very small minority when you suggest that they had `problems, I would suggest too minute to consider as a factor in the problems they brought on themselves in their new homeland.

Subject: RE: Define: Pincher laddies
From: hobo
Date: 11 Aug 08 - 03:50 PM

A lot of Irish subbies had friends & relatives in the pub trade with whom they colluded to releive lumpers of their cash in the process of 'obliging' them in cashing cheques... I was also told by an Irish Tarmac exec. that, when he was a junior engineer with Wimpey, men who didn't 'sub' weren't as welcome as those who did- for obvious reasons.

'Ard Mhaca': Like the existence of 'Dry Money', a criminal conviction wasn't likely to be publicised and the 'gaol or England' offer is very well documented in the archives of Irish provincial newspapers...

'ard mhaca': an awful lot of damaged people emigrated from this country, many from state institutions and abusive family situations, in the half-century following Irish independence,and the UK statistics on alcoholism, criminality, and psychiatric disorders amongst the Irish in Britain reflect this.   

I'm not indulging in special pleading for any sub-group here, just suggesting some of the roots of people's problems, as I have found them both researching The Men who Built Britain and living in Britain over almost twenty years beginning aged fifteen in 1961. Never had any problem with the English - a bit slow on the uptake, maybe, but fair and even-handed. Slow to make friends, unlike Paddy, but rock-solid thereafter - unlike Paddy...