When people picture the Irish who went to Britain, they picture a man with a shovel.

I worked for Irish contractors that used to import Irish labor to work on Britain’s roads and construction sites; the most famous was Murphy’s and it was a brutal place to work many Irish workers told me. The poem went like this:

 

“You never work for Murphy’s McAlpine or John Laing

For they’ll have you behind the mixer doggin’ In the sand.” 

 

The Irish Band the Dubliners have a song called MacAlpine’s Fusiliers and there was another song I remember titled Building up and Tearing England Down.

 

When I lived in London one of the famous Irish pubs that came to mind was The Elephant’s Head in Camden Town. I was in Camden with Roger Martinez and we were outside that pub but I never went in and it’s a much trendier area now I think.

 

And this Irish guy I worked with used to say all the time, “The craic is good in Cricklewood, where glasses are crackin’ amd Paddy is Jackin’” Jackin refers to quiting your job. Also, when I left England, the NHS was being saved by immigrant doctors in particular. Many English doctors left for the US where medicine is a business and having your own practice is such a prestigious accomplishment. I do recall lots of Irish women as nurses too but never realized the depth of Irish female immigration. My own great grandparents on both sides came from Ireland.  Richard Mellor

 

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When people picture the Irish who went to Britain, they picture a man with a shovel.

 

Here's what the numbers actually say. For much of the twentieth century, more Irish women emigrated than Irish men. Between 1946 and 1951, for every hundred Irish women who left, only seventy-three men did.

 

And a huge number of those women went into one job.

 

Britain founded the NHS in 1948, and immediately discovered it couldn't staff it.

 

So they came recruiting. Advertisements went into the Irish national and provincial papers. On 6 August 1949, the Connaught Telegraph ran a notice telling readers that a recruitment officer named Miss Lavelle would be touring the region in the coming weeks — Ballina, Westport, Castlebar, Claremorris.

 

Through the 1950s and 60s, NHS staff travelled all over Ireland, took rooms in local hotels, and interviewed teenage girls for nurse training.

 

The offer was simple and it was enormous. Training in Ireland was limited and expensive. In Britain it was free, and it came with a bed in the nurses' home. For a seventeen-year-old from a farm in Mayo with no money, that was a life.

 

Thousands went.

 

The scale is staggering. By the 1960s, eleven percent of every nurse recruited to hospitals in the south-east of England had been born in the Irish Republic. By 1971 there were 31,000 Irish-born nurses in Britain — twelve percent of the entire nursing workforce.

 

At one Liverpool hospital, of 641 recruits over those years, 350 were from Ireland. Just over 38 percent were English. Several of the Irish nurses interviewed later said the English were a minority in their own training class.

 

One of them described it plainly: they were the backbone of the NHS.

 

They were seventeen and eighteen years old, a long way from home, homesick, and everybody called them Paddy no matter how often they protested.

 

A Sligo woman named Nessa, who started training in Yorkshire in 1957, put it simply years later — the hospitals would have been short an awful lot of staff if the Irish nurses hadn't been there.

 

The men who built Britain got a ballad.

 

The women who kept it alive got nothing at all.

 

Was your mother, your aunt or your grandmother one of them? Which hospital?