In the bookWherever Green is Worn, the journalist Tim Pat Coogan ambitiously attempts to examine why emigrants left Ireland in such large numbers, where they went, and what happened to them when they reached their various destinations. He discusses, for instance, the triumphant progress of Irish communities in the USA, and confirms the narrative that has been popularized by numerous dewy-eyed films and memoirs, declaring, ‘The story of the Irish in America is a chronicle of the triumph of the human spirit over adversity.’³ But when Coogan describes the Irish in England he has a different picture to paint,...

By Tuesday, 5 September 1803, William Charles McCready could consider himself a successful man. The forty-eight-year-old Dubliner had already pursued an acting career in Ireland and London, had mingled with some of the leading thespians of the day, and for the past eight years had worked as manager of the only theatre in Birmingham. To McCready’s satisfaction, this last career move had been the most lucrative part of his life so far, and he now sat beneath the decorative image of Apollo in his playhouse, the Theatre Royal on New Street, for the final show of the year’s theatrical season....

Early one morning at the start of 1832, Father Thomas Michael McDonnell must have felt a surge of panic. The Catholic priest had arranged for the people of Birmingham to be addressed by a famous speaker from Ireland who would be arriving in only a few hours. But at the last moment the plans of this lanky cleric had started unravelling. Nightmarishly, the local hotels had one by one refused to host the gathering, and McDonnell started to run out of options about where to turn next. As a final resort, he decided to approach the owner of Birmingham’s largest...

At three in the afternoon, on Sunday, 16 June 1867, a travelling preacher from Limerick, William Murphy, readied himself, stood upon a platform, and began to give the first of two sermons that he would deliver in the centre of Birmingham that day. As a result of what Murphy would say, the English and Irish residents of the area would come to regard one another with newfound hostility and suspicion, with parts of the town being ransacked and reduced to rubble during the ensuing week.

Murphy’s own origins are obscure, but according to the preacher himself, he had been born...

On 17 March 1900, about 3,000 men and women packed Birmingham’s town hall for the annual St Patrick’s Day meeting. This gathering had proved continually popular with local Irish Catholics ever since the turbulent 1860s, when the Church established the event in order to steal support away from the revolutionary nationalism of the Fenian movement, and in the ensuing years those in attendance had consistently endorsed constitutional means of achieving Ireland’s separation from Britain. The event of 1900 would be no different, and the evening began with a rendition of Thomas Moore’s melody ‘Let Erin Remember’, celebrating Ireland’s long-lost independence:...

On Tuesday, 15 May 1917, the thirty-four-year-old British poet John Drinkwater realized he had a problem. As manager of the relatively new Birmingham Repertory Theatre, he entered the auditorium to watch that evening’s show, sat in his brown leather seat, and must have looked on in horror as rioting erupted all around him.

The Repertory Theatre was attempting to perform a triple-bill of plays that had opened at the venue on the previous Saturday. Although the first two evening performances had been well received, Drinkwater presumably began watching the third show on Tuesday with feelings of trepidation. That evening, about...

In 1939 Birmingham enjoyed one of the sunniest Whit bank holidays in years. Across the city, people lounged over picnics, took lazy walks, and cooled down in the shade. At Birmingham University a lecturer from Belfast, Louis MacNeice, observed that on such restful days in the region, ‘the shops empty, shopgirls faces relax’, and factory chimneys wait ‘on sullen sentry’.³ Yet, only a short time later Hitler would move his troops into Poland and such sleepy city life would seem as unimaginably distant as the long Edwardian summers that preceded the First World War. Indeed, as that very Monday evening...

On the evening of 21 November 1974, twenty-three-year-old Eugene Reilly met his younger brother, twenty-year-old Desmond, by New Street Station. Their parents, John and Bridget Reilly, had moved from Donegal to Birmingham two decades earlier, and the sons had recently moved out of the family home. Yet both brothers had remained in the nearby suburbs, with Eugene now living in Saltley, and Desmond having married and settled in Erdington. Indeed, Desmond and his wife now anticipated a new family of their own, excitedly preparing their Erdington home for the arrival of a first child in March.

When the brothers met...

On Sunday, 17 March 1996, Birmingham witnessed the first St Patrick’s Day parade to be held in the city streets for many years. At first, a few hundred people congregated in St Catherine’s Catholic Church, where priests said Mass for peace in Ireland. By the time the service had finished, however, about 5,000 people had gathered in glorious sunshine nearby, where decorated floats and marchers in fancy dress assembled for the procession. The organizers wished to show how Ireland was emerging from a difficult past, and so began the outdoor proceedings by hushing those assembled on the tarmac into observing...