'We Built This City' uses visual and oral recorded histories ..

The contributions of Birmingham's Irish ..

An exhibition recording the contribution Irish workers made to the rebuilding of Birmingham in the post-war period has attracted record numbers of visitors to the city’s museum and art gallery.

"Building on success"

Featured Image: Fabian Cowan is lifted aloft by his friend Larry Miller while another friend takes their photograph as they worked on construction of the Marks & Spencer building in High Street. Photograph: courtesy of the Cowan family


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 We Built This City uses oral histories recorded in conversations with 35 Irish immigrants, photographs, archive footage and reconstructions to convey the experiences of the Irish immigrant population that flocked to the city to work on building sites, in road construction, on railways and buses, and in hospitals and factories.
The Heritage Lottery-funded project took 12 months to put together, and the exhibition, which opened on 11 March 2017, was extended to run until 4 June 2017 at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery.
Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery ..

The Background ..

A former employee of Birmingham Irish Association Yvonne Price, was a project co-ordinator for the exhibition, she was born in Birmingham to Irish parents who came to the city from Kildare. 

In addition to the spoken word testimonies from contributors, photographs and film footage, there are installations recreating a typical bedsit, and a transit van transporting workers. "We recreated a bedsit showing the isolation experienced by the young men and women arriving from Ireland,” says Price. 

To locate contributors for the oral histories, a publicity campaign was launched using an archive photograph of workers constructing the city’s infamous ‘Spaghetti Junction’, asking the question, “Where are they now?”
The response was overwhelming. We could have recorded 3,500 stories never mind 35. 

"We are still receiving offers now,” she says. 
“The recordings set the tone. I listened to every story and noted the things that touched me, things that demonstrated just how hard it was, but no one complained, how the communities developed, how the Irish in Birmingham sent money home and how they still, no matter what, enjoyed the craic.

"Much of the exhibition will be preserved or recycled. The oral histories will go into the museum archives, the DVD and newspaper will be used as an educational tool for schools and also out into the community. Parts of the exhibition will be put up into our offices, the van will be on temporary display outside the building, and the bedsit donated to a local charity,” says Price.
See the Irish Times article ..

Watch the video ..

A video using archive footage to accompany the exhibition can be viewed on YouTube. A souvenir newspaper recording the oral histories and photographs was also printed.

Watch on YouTube ..

Extracts from stories by contributors  ..

What follows are extracts from some of the stories told by contributors to the project, and photographs illustrating their experiences, reproduced by kind permission of the exhibition organisers and the photographers credited, or their representatives.

Featured Image: The late Fabian Cowan’s photograph of an Irish builder working without safety harness on the construction of a building in Birmingham city centre. Photograph: courtesy of the Cowan family


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Carmel Girling, Writing about her father


"My father, Fabian Francis Xavier Cowan, was born in 1927 in Welsley Place, Dublin, the youngest of nine children in a family that had been well off in the Edwardian times but which had fallen on hard times. His mother Mary Cowan (nee Synott) had been home educated and was a teacher, whilst his father, James, was a fine carpenter and cabinet maker and is believed to have worked on the Titanic.

"Fabian had a good education, taught by Jesuit brothers at O'Connell's school on North Circular Road Dublin, and was a talented man able to play the piano with skill and indeed any instrument he could pick up. As a young man, before leaving Ireland, he did his national service with The Irish Army in the Engineers.


“He arrived in the city with a brown paper bag clutching his few clothes and little else. With no money or anywhere to stay, he slept rough on New Street railway station until he got a ‘sub’ (financial advance from wages) from his first job on the buildings.


“Why Fabian had a camera when he had little else was probably because he was from a creative family and he may have acquired it from one of his older brothers.

Irish construction workers on the roof of the Britannia building in Birmingham

"The brothers were all fascinated by the developing media, taking pictures and experimenting turning black and white images into colour.


“Fabian himself turned any spare space into a dark room to develop his own images – these are just a few examples. Forgotten for four decades, rolls of negatives were found in a biscuit tin in the garden shed after he passed away in 2004.

Irish 'clippies' on the Birmingham buses
 Larry Toal 

"I drove a cattle lorry in 1953. There was a lot of cattle across the borders them times. I drove from Belfast market to Dublin market but the cattle failed. There was no work so that bought me here to work. I was 21 and travelled alone. I worked with Mason McCabe contractors from Castle Blayney then I went to Gallagher's to drive a lorry and then they took me off the lorry and put me in charge of demolition, and I was on it for 44 years.

“Accommodation was one room with a bed, gas ring and two in a room. 30 bob a week. We used the laundry once a week, you put a shilling in the meter to get the gas, one ring is all they supplied for you with a kettle, pan and bowl. 

"At that time you knew the English wouldn’t take the Irishmen, there was signs ‘No Irish No Blacks, No Dogs’. You just had to get used to it, as you had no choice.”
Mary Hoare

"I was one of 10 kids. Then one day my Dad said, 'Mary you really have no business here, you have nothing here you'd get a better job in England. ‘So I wrote to people in Dublin, the nuns actually, and they sent me a form and got me a job on the Hagley Road in a nursing club.

“I arrived in 1952 the first thing I done was to go to St Catherine’s, because my love was for dancing, ceilidh, you name it. I  went for five to six weeks and met my husband, Michael. 

"My husband had a lot of jobs over here. He worked for Wimpy, and they got the Rotunda. It was a long job from start to finish. I got the fright of my life when I went up there in the lift and from this day I won’t go in a lift. It was 280 foot high. It was very hard work from 5am till 11pm. The Rotunda was very hard, quite a lot of lads were killed, but they all had good fun.”
Maurice McElligot

“I’m from the Mountains of Kerry and at that time people were coming back from England in nice clothes and if you had a watch, Oh My God, and if you had a bracelet watch! 

"I was about 18 and I seen the fellows and decided to go on the beat with them. I took off on the ‘Princess Maud’, arrived in England. I lived in hostels.”
Sally Conway

“I came to Birmingham from Belfast after my father had got in at a factory. He could do anything, he was a carpenter and he could sole shoes. He stayed with his brother then he got a back-to-back house in Hope Street off Gooch Street.

"The yard had 10 houses on it. My mother said, 'Where is my back door?' My dad said that it’s your front and back. The toilet was across the yard and the dust bins, the brew 
house for the washing.”

The Spaghetti Junction ..

Father Dan Cummings (1907-1977)

Birmingham Irish Association’s efforts to uncover the identities of the men disclosed one very incredible life story in particular. 

In the Spaghetti Junction photograph one person towards the middle of the picture looks slightly out of place; a hard hat on his head, a long dark coat on rather than a jacket, and most revealingly, a clerical collar around his neck. 

Fr Dan Cummings had already led an interesting life before he had volunteered as a chaplain for the Irish workers in Birmingham. 

The Belfast native worked as a missionary in the Philippines before returning to Europe as a Second World War chaplain, landing on the beaches on D-Day. 

He witnessed first-hand the horrors of the Holocaust as part of the liberation force on scene at the Belsen concentration camp. 

Fr Cummings was there to give aid and comfort to the survivors of the atrocities, one of whom was particularly grateful. Hans Baumeister, a Polish survivor of Belsen and talented artist, expressed his  gratitude by producing a portrait of the priest. 

After the war he returned to Ireland before volunteering as a chaplain to the Irish immigrants in England in the 1960's.

In Birmingham, his duties were not only spiritual, he was also key to settling many Irish workers into the city by finding them accommodation and even frequently bringing them their Irish newspapers.

"He would’ve been very close to a lot of them. 
He established an Irish club for the workers and was very meticulous about his care to them,” said Rosemary Doherty, Fr Cummings’ niece.
Father Dan Cummings (1907-1977)
Father Dan Cummings and Workers

Enlarged Images: Click the links below to see images in a new window (in order of appearance above).

“A lot of them were very, very young and were over just literally with the clothes on their back.

“He would have helped them with lodgings, with advice on how to budget themselves financially, and he got very close to all those men and those families in Birmingham."

Fr Cummings regularly took notes in his capacity as chaplain to the workers in Birmingham, one entry specifically mentions the taking of the famous Spaghetti Junction photograph.

"As priest to immigrants in Birmingham I regularly visited building sites, as here in the Southern Section of Spaghetti Junction - the Gravelly Interchange as it is now known,” he wrote.

"All but two men are Irish. One has borrowed my hat and given me his own white helmet. Most of the men left their white helmets - which were compulsory - at their jobs on site when coming to their meal-break."

Fr Cummings died in 1977 at the age of 70, but his life’s work is evidenced by the numerous iconic structures built by the men he looked after.
Spaghetti Junction being built ..

A long history of supporting people ..

The Irish Welfare & Information Centre (IWIC) was founded in June 1957. In 2009 IWIC developed a partnership with Birmingham Irish Community Forum (BICF) and combined they were to become what's now known as Birmingham Irish Association.
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