¹ Engels, F., The Condition of the Wording Class in England, ed. Henderson, W. O. and Chaloner, W. H. (Oxford, 1958), p. 309.Google Scholar

² Handley, J., The Irish in Modern Scotland (Cork, 1947), p. 320. This article was written before Dr Handley's death.Google Scholar

³ Wheatley and MacManus were born in Ireland and Connolly and Gallacher in Scotland.

⁴ Handley, , op. cit. p. 302 and p. 289.Google Scholar

⁵ Turner, H. A., Trade Union Growth Structure and Policy (London, 1962), p. 69,Google Scholar has described John Doherty, an Irishman distinguished for his work on behalf of Lancashire cotton workers, as “one of the great figures of the early working-class movement’. Higgins, R. O., “Irish Influence in the Chartist Movement’, Past and Present, no. 20 (Nov. 1961),Google Scholar has argued that O'Connor and O'Brien were not alone of the Irish in England at this time “ready to participate in movements against the existing order’.Harrison, R., Before the Socialists (London, 1965), pp. 215–46,Google Scholar has revealed the significance of the Land and Labour League in England, and the importance within the League of its Irish president Patrick Hennessey. Handley, , op. cit. pp. 269–90,Google Scholar has shown how land reform in Scotland assisted to bring John Ferguson, the founder of the first branch in Britain of the Home Government League, into fruitful contact with Cunningham Graham and Keir Hardie. Sexton, J., Sir James Sexton Agitator (London, 1936),Google Scholar has recorded his contribution to the Labour movement as general secretary of the National Union of Dock Labourers, pioneer in the I.L.P., and Labour member of parliament. All this leaves out of account the anonymous and insensible impact of immigrants who traced Ireland's constitutional woes and their own economic hardships to the governing class of England. By the elaborate machinery designed to win constitutional concessions for Ireland, the immigrants gave example to the native working class in the art of political organization. At the same time, the self-assertiveness of the immigrants found a natural channel of expression in industrial militancy. Ashworth, H., “The Preston Strike; an Inquiry into its Causes and Consequences’, The Quarterly Review, vol. CVI, no. 212 (London, 1859), p. 501,Google Scholar thought it “certainly remarkable to observe the number of persons from the sister isle, if we may judge of their nation by their names, who appear among the leaders of strikes in all our large towns’.

⁶ A large part of Dr Handley's work discusses the reception received by the Irish in Scotland. He has undertaken a frank defence of the immigrants, and his viewpoint is essentially that of a Catholic scholar who is pro-Irish except when he is first pro-Catholic.

⁷ Which would be consistent with the frequent exhortations made by clergy to laity in the twentieth century, that they should secure Catholic influence within the Labour movement just so long as that movement did not attempt to train Catholics in socialism.

⁸ See Middlemas, R. K., The Clydesiders (London, 1965), pp. 37–40,Google Scholar for a brief description of the fortunes of this body.

⁹ McGovern, J., Neither Fear Nor Favour (London, 1960), pp. 39–41,Google Scholar has recalled the animosity shown to Wheatley and himself by a priest and fellow-Catholics in Glasgow. He expresses puzzlement that “the Glasgow Roman Catholic authorities allowed this bitter denunciation … of men and women who should have been a credit to the Church’. McGovern ultimately returned to Catholicism but he regrets that others were “driven away … for life’.

¹⁰ Handley, , op. cit. pp. 320–1.Google Scholar

¹¹ Myles, J., Rambles in Forfarshire (Dundee, 1850), p. 25.Google Scholar

¹² The Free Press, 20 Aug. 1864. This paper, catering for the Irish in Scotland and initially entitled the Glasgow Free Press, was launched in 1851. Following a history of outspoken opposition to the Scottish Catholic clergy and the espousal of a political nationalism which inevitably acquired a tone of social radicalism, the paper foundered in 1868 when, at the instrumentality of Manning – the “Apostle of the Genteels’ – it was formally condemned by ecclesiastical authority. In an adjudication, Dr Handley has condemned the “unscrupulous behaviour’ of those associated with the paper while, in an aside, he mentions the “distaste of the Church in general for political impulsiveness among her children': Handley, , op. cit. pp. 88–92.Google Scholar

¹³ While The Free Press in its long anti-clerical phase directed its criticisms at Scottish Catholic clergymen, there is no evidence that Irish priests in Scotland were any less hostile to radical Irish nationalism than their Scottish counterparts.

¹⁴ Quoted in The Free Press, 1 Feb. 1862.

¹⁵ Ibid.

¹⁶ For the part played by St Patrick's Brotherhood in Irish republicanism, see Norman, E. R., The Catholic Church and Ireland in the Age of Rebellion (London, 1965), pp. 86–134.Google Scholar

¹⁷ The Free Press, 8 Feb. 1862.

¹⁸ Dundee Advertiser, 31 Jan. 1862.

¹⁹ The Free Press, 22 Feb. 1862.

²⁰ Dundee Advertiser, 18 Feb. 1862.

²¹ On Lavelle, see Norman, op. cit. passim.

²² The Free Press, 9 July 1864.

²³ Dundee Advertiser, 13 Feb. 1872.

²⁴ Handley, , op. cit. pp. 47–92.Google Scholar

²⁵ The Free Press, 1 Aug. 1863.

²⁶ The church of St Andrews, built in 1836, still had a debt of £9,000 in 1909: Dundee and District Catholic Year Book 1910.

²⁷ See above, p. 653, n. 18. The Advertiser was taken to task by a correspondent who pointed out that this cellar was “two large oblong rooms 44 feet in length and 27 feet in width and 13 feet in height’.

²⁸ This figure, while an impressionistic one, cannot be improved upon by the historian. The population censuses give figures of Irish-born in Dundee but exclude children of Irish parentage born in Scotland. Nor do the censuses inform as to what proportion of immigrants were Catholic, while the Catholic Directory for Dundee fails to distinguish what proportion of Catholics were Irish. However in 1861 there were 14,366 Irish-born in the city, and in 1871 the figure was 14,195: Census of Scotland 1861, 11, 332, and Census 1871, 11, clii. Beyond doubt the vast majority of the Irish-born in Dundee were Catholics (the city was entirely free from Orangeism) and, given that in 1861 more than 80 per cent of the Irish-born were adults, a figure of 20,000 for the entire community seems reasonable.

²⁹ The “Young Men's Academy’ offered geometry, algebra, book-keeping, and French in addition to “Elementary': Dundee Directory 1871–1872 (Dundee, 1871), p. 27.Google Scholar

³⁰ Dundee Advertiser, 21 Aug. 1866.

³¹ Dundee Courier and Argus, 18 Oct. 1873.

³² Dundee and District Catholic Year Book 1915.

³³ The ‘Police Court work’ was undertaken by the St Vincent de Paul Society at the beginning of the twentieth century. In 1906 the “total number of cases under the supervision of the Brothers attending the Court numbered 845’: Society of St Vincent de Paul in Scotland, Report On Councils and Conferences (Edinburgh, 1907), p. 7.Google Scholar

³⁴ The Irish formed the most strike-prone element in the jute industry. Concentrated in the west-end of the city, and adjacent to the largest jute mill in Europe, the Irish were of a homogeneity which facilitated industrial militancy

³⁵ See Dundee Advertiser, 18 Mar. 1889.

³⁶ Rules of the Catholic Young Men's Union (Dundee, 1874).Google Scholar Item 187 (3), Lamb Collection, Dundee Reference Library.

³⁷ Anon., The Boyhood of a Priest (London, 1939).Google Scholar

³⁸ Newspaper cutting dated 5 Aug. 1878, Lamb Collection 187 (5).

³⁹ Stewart, R., Breaking the Fetters (London, 1967), p. 45.Google Scholar

⁴⁰ Anon., Boyhood, pp. 76–80.Google Scholar

⁴¹ The Society was founded in Ireland in 1849 by Father Richard Baptist O'Brien later Dean O'Brien of Limerick. While an opponent of the brand of nationalism represented by Lavelle, O'Brien played a major part in the inauguration of the Home Rule movement: see Norman, , op. cit. p. 345.Google Scholar

⁴² Manual of the Society of St Vincent de Paul (Dublin, 1935), pp. 18–23.Google Scholar

⁴³ Catholics and Communists may find the comparison offensive but it is not far-fetched. Priests were in no sense elected officials, while in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union the prior selection of a secretary by higher authority made the element of election by the primary organization a purely nominal one. The functions of priest and secretary were almost identifical: to ensure that “proper’ sentiments prevailed and that “correct’ decisions were arrived at. Within the Catholic Young Men's Society, a chaplain's right of veto over all proceedings was not unlike that convention of the Communist party whereby decisions once arrived at were not subject to further deliberation. And just as the organs of the State were bound to the Party, so Catholic organizations were bound to the hierarchy.

⁴⁴ Catholic Young Men's Society, Weld to Wield (Glasgow, 1935), p. 29.Google Scholar

⁴⁵ Anon., Boyhood, p. 100.Google Scholar

⁴⁶ Catholic Young Men's Society, Centenary Celebrations (Glasgow, 1949), p. 53.Google Scholar

⁴⁷ The essayist was given generous access to the local records of the Society of St Vincent de Paul, and these testify to cases of children being “turned adrift’, and deal with “reputed fathers’, mothers who “died in prison’, and parents of “unknown residence’. The local press frequently reported cases of street-rioting by “bands of desperate youths … armed with clubs and sticks, canes loaded with lead, stones in stockings’ and “the majority of them’ at least allegedly “were Irishmen’: Dundee Perth and Cupar Advertiser, 11 Jan. 1850. The seriousness of the drink problem among the Irish can be gauged by the number of temperance societies sponsored by parish churches. Anon., Boyhood, p. 72,Google Scholar observes that “while the cult of respectability was making a fool of the protestant half of the town the cult of the Public House was making a dupe of the papist part of it’. The same authority, p. 80, in writing of local priests, acknowledges that: “While claiming the right to blackguard their flock to their hearts’ content, woe betide the Parish Councillor or Minister who ventured to do the same’.

⁴⁸ Society of St Vincent de Paul, Dundee, General Quarterly Meetings’ Minute book, 19 July 1911.

⁴⁹ Society of St Vincent de Paul, Dundee Particular Council, Minute book no. 2, 1 Feb. 1880, reports a case of two brothers of the Society who tried to convince a widow that her son should be placed in a “Catholic Institution’ in Glasgow rather than in Dundee's industrial school: “she refused on account of the distance saying she wished to have him placed… where she could frequently visit him’.

⁵⁰ Anon., Boyhood, p. 65,Google Scholar in gentle irony observes that: “To go swallowing protestant eggs, at any rate at Easter, was to run the risk of asphyxiation. But Irish eggs! Sure you might eat them beaks and all and be never a hair the worse.’ The immigrant press in fact contained many advertisements for Irish dairy produce.

⁵¹ The Dundee Catholic Herald, 1922 passim.

⁵² One appointment in 1915 was interpreted as being “a decided compliment to the Irish community in Dundee’: Dundee and District Catholic Year Book 1916.

⁵³ Ibid. 1913.

⁵⁴ Dundee Catholic Herald, 30 Oct. 1920.

⁵⁵ Society of St Vincent de Paul, Dundee Particular Council, Minute book no. 2, 23 Feb. 1879.

⁵⁶ See above, p. 659, n. 45.

⁵⁷ The Weekly News, 19 Oct. 1878.

⁵⁸ Dundee Catholic Herald, 14 Oct. 1922.

⁵⁹ Ibid. 4 Sept. 1920.

⁶⁰ See above, p. 657, II. 36.

⁶¹ Manual of the Society of St Vincent de Paul (Dublin, 1935), p. 24 and p. 28.Google Scholar

⁶² Anon., Boyhood, p. 40.Google Scholar

⁶³ Ibid. p. 78.

⁶⁴ Ibid. pp. 121–2.

⁶⁵ Dundee Advertiser, 19 Mar. 1889.

⁶⁶ Ibid. 13 July 1895.

⁶⁷ Ibid. 13 Jan. 1906.

⁶⁸ Ibid. 7 May 1908.

⁶⁹ Priests were normally members of the platform party at Liberal party meetings and would sing the praises of the party's “great eagle-eyed statesman': Dundee Advertiser, 10 Apr. 1889.

⁷⁰ Ibid. 18 Mar. 1913.

⁷¹ The Free Press, 7 June 1862.

⁷² In the publications of the Society the proscription was of “Party Politics’ but the evidence suggests that in practice this simply meant any politics disliked.

⁷³ Dundee Catholic Herald, 10 Apr. 1920.

⁷⁴ Ibid. 16 Sept. 1922.

⁷⁵ Society of St Vincent de Paul, Dundee, General Quarterly Meetings’ Minute book, 14 Apr. 1918.

⁷⁶ On Diamond, see Handley, , op. cit. pp. 284–97.Google Scholar

⁷⁷ Dundee Catholic Herald, 13 Nov. 1920.

⁷⁸ Ibid. 21 Oct. 1922.

⁷⁹ Ibid. 13 May 1922.

⁸⁰ Ibid. 11 Sept. 1920.

⁸¹ Ibid. 28 Oct. 1922.

⁸² The endorsement was mechanical in manner with candidates being asked by a priest to give parishioners “an account of their stewardship': ibid. 21 Oct. 1922.

⁸³ Ibid. 11 Nov. 1922.

⁸⁴ Ibid. 4 Nov. 1922.

⁸⁵ Ibid. 12 Aug. 1922.

⁸⁶ Ibid. 29 July 1922.