Thursday 31 October 2013

George Garrett Archive Project

George Garrett Archive project. 

Module Two, Workshop Two.

Babe Ruth to Coney Island. 1918 – 1920.


This week we looked at the issue of Ireland in relation to George Garrett, and in particular, the strike on the New York docks in August 1920, which centred on the Cunard ship, The Baltic, and Dr.Mannix, an Irish-born Australian Catholic bishop, who became the Archbishop for Melbourne, Australia. Dr.Mannix was known for his sympathy and support for the Irish struggle for liberation and independence, and was travelling from Australia, where he had been seen off by a rally of 200,000 at Circular Quay in Sydney, through San Francisco and New York, to visit England and Ireland, where mass meetings and processions were being prepared to greet him; Scotland Road in Liverpool was already decked with bunting in his honour. In New York sections of The Baltic’s crew, mainly Stewards, walked off in protest at him sailing. They were persuaded to return, but the engine and deck crew then walked off and refused to return if he wasn’t allowed to sail. 15,000 people poured down to Pier 60 and Mannix was finally brought aboard and the ship allowed to sail for Liverpool. However, a British frigate intercepted The Baltic just off the Cornish coast, and Mannix was removed from the ship and held under virtual house arrest in Penzance.

At the same time the Mayor of Cork, Alderman Terence McSwiney, who had been arrested and moved to Brixton Prison for his activities in the campaign for independence, was on hunger strike. In George Garrett’s papers there are two pages from an unidentified book, with a picture and an article about McSwiney, labelled ‘1920’ in pencil, in George Garrett’s handwriting.

When the Baltic returned to New York on August 27th 1920, McSwiney was entering the fifteenth day of his hunger strike. Four days previously, a group of seven women, led by the actor Helen Godden, and calling themselves ‘American Pickets for the Enforcement of America’s War Aims’ (one of those aims being to support national self-determination), had begun a protest calling for McSwiney’s release and for Dr Mannix to be allowed to visit Ireland and America. Their protest grew from a small picket, and formal meetings with the British Consulate in new York, to a mass walk out involving 15,000 workers on the docks and from the ships, that lasted for two weeks, and unified British, Irish, Italian and American workers, and brought together for the first time the black workers, a loading gang, who had previously been used as strike breakers.

Bruce Nelson, writing in ‘Divided We Stand: American Workers and the Struggle for Black Equality’, said, 
“Few if any developments in the entire history of the New York waterfront could equal, or explain, this extraordinary event and the convergence of class, nationalist and racial slogans it generated,” wrote “In this case, ‘British’ coal passers, many of them wearing small American flags on their coats, stopped work in support of the ‘Irish Republic’ and black longshoremen shouted “Free Africa’ as they joined the strike.”
At a meeting in Lexington Hall, attended by 3,500, with a further 5000 outside the hall, the biggest cheer of the night was for fifty of the below crew of The Baltic when they walked up to the table of honour.

This wasn’t a strike for wages or conditions; people were giving up a wage, when jobs weren’t guaranteed, for a cause three thousand miles away. When the shipowners, aided by the Longshoremen Union, recruited a huge phalanx of black dockworkers to break the strike, three members of the American Women Pickets went to the offices of Marcus Garvey’s Negro Universal Improvement organisation to appeal for support. Garvey sent two of his lieutenants to Piers 58 and 59. The black dockworkers didn’t break the strike, however, the Foreman of the black workers agreed to support the strike on the condition that they gained access to jobs on the piers that were always historically the Irish Piers. Negotiations went on for two to three days, but finally broke down without agreement. The leader of the Irish Dockers wanted it to happen, but was cut across by the rank and file; an indication of just how complex the strike around The Baltic had become. Although agreement wasn’t reached, after The Baltic finally sailed, Black Dockers began to appear on Piers 54 to 60. 

There’s no direct evidence as yet that George was involved in this strike, but there is no doubt he was affected by it, as many ships in New York harbour or at sea waiting to sail, were tied up while the dispute lasted. There’s no doubt either were his sympathies lay.

One significant aspect of the dispute, was the people involved, their background and what they represented in society; five out of the seven American women Pickets were actors. In New York there was the beginning of The Ghetto Pastoral; the notion that every worker, of every gender and race, has a story inside of them – the issue being how to tell that story. There developed a plethora of new magazines, such as The New Masses, devoted to new writing, seeking out new voices – an early form, maybe, of proletarian Culture. These were the voices of the Tenements, and there’s little doubt that this would have been a major inspiration to George Garrett, who would have identified with the close living and often squalid conditions. It’s easy to imagine his realisation that he too had stories to tell, from tenement courts and tiny houses in Liverpool, and he would be inspired by this different way of imagining a life of protest and song. 

The strike, the developments around it, and the methods used to organise the protests that led up to the strike, were an early indication of the forms of protest and culture that came to be synonymous with the development of the CIO (the International Longshoreman’s Association originally only associated with the AFL but then later joined the CIO as well). These methods, and the ethos of merging cultural activities with protest movements, were originally perpetrated by the Wobblies.

One of the most intriguing finds in George Garrett’s Archive is the poem Blanco Jack (An Epic of Easter Week, 1916). The poem, or ballad, is not dated, so for now we cannot comment upon it in relation to the development of George’s writing, but it is clear that he worked through a number of drafts, even gluing pieces of it together and writing verses and corrections by hand. The piece, with its rhythmic structure, and repetition of ‘Loot, loot loot’, could easily be read as a song, or ballad, and would fit in with the idea of the Liberty Balladeers, the street singers from the area in Dublin, frequented by Garrett’s friend, Jim Phelan, known as The Liberties. It’s interesting to see, no matter when it was penned, that George is playing around with new styles, trying his hand at different forms, and it wouldn’t surprise if ‘Blanco jack’ was being prepared for publication – maybe even in the form of a flyer for distribution on a march or parade.


Although ostensibly written in support of the Easter Uprising, when James Connolly led an assault on the Dublin Post Office in a revolutionary movement that was soon put down and its leaders, including Connolly, were executed by the British Army, Garrett’s ‘Blanco Jack’ is a clever piece of work, that reveals once again, George’s sympathies with the underdog, who even in times of revolution can often get overlooked. There isn’t the time here for a detailed analysis, but in the workshops we noted his simple use of the word ‘Fat’ to denote the boss class, and that although Blanco was an irresponsible man, his heart clearly lay with the poor, who this latter day Robin Hood seeks to help under cover of the revolution and gunshots all around him. Garrett’s sympathies are clear when he calls the rebels Martyrs, but, in what could be a critical remark based on the view of some that the uprising was ill-timed, he also says their deaths were ‘no surprise’. A rattle, of a gun, or of death, takes Blanco out, and Garrett leaves you with the pathetic image of the children of the slums who now wait in vain for food, or loot, loot, loot.

Significantly, George crosses out his pseudonym, Matt Low, and replaces it with his own name. 
The workshops are free and open to all. We meet every Monday, 6-8pm in Liverpool John Moores University’s AldhamRobarts Library, Maryland Street, L1 9DE (off HopeStreet).

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