Patrick MacGill (24 December 1889 – November 1963) an Irish journalist, poet and novelist, known as The Navvy Poet because he had worked as a navvy before he began writing. Patrick was born to a poor family living on the side of a mountain near Glenties in 1890. His childhood was generally unhappy, and his later semi-autobiographical work speaks of Irish life at the time as being held in debt slavery to the “gombeen man”, or local moneylender, while simultaneously being bullied from the pulpit by a local priest who ruled the town with a fist of steel. At the age of 14 he was sent to the hiring fair at Strabane, which he would later describe as “the slave market of Tyrone”. This was common at the time, as Irish families were generally too poor to support any extra mouths. He worked as a labourer on a variety of farms, eventually travelling over to Scotland to harvest potatoes in one of the groups that would go over for the harvest. Quite why he decided to stay in Scotland is unclear, but the protagonist of his novel Children of the Dead End made the same decision after he lost the money he had made “tattie-howking” in a gambling den, so it is possible that he had the same misfortune. (In fact, several of his later poems dwell on the evils of gambling.) If so, then in later life he might consider that gambling loss the most fortunate mistake he ever made. If he had returned to Ireland he might have disappeared into obscurity, but instead he moved into the profession that became associated with his name – that of Navvy.
Posted on: Sun, 31 Aug 2014 17:00:00 +0000