Canavan’s people

Art Canavan and his people

Eamonn Lynskey considers the paintings of Bernard Canavan

The pub is crowded. A group of men are at the bar, pints of stout in hand. These men, pictured in one of Bernard Canavan’s paintings, are Murphy’s Men, men in the employ of the construction company named on the jacket of the one whose back is to us. We cannot hear their animated conversation but their accents are surely Irish, rural Irish, full of the strong vowels of the western counties, with one or two men from the other provinces. In the painting’s foreground a woman, not-too-young, not-too-old, sits deep in thought, glass and cigarette in hand, a small island of quiet in the noisy barroom. These are Canavan’s people, the men and women who emigrated to England in the period after the Irish State struggled into existence in the 1920s. The men and women who continued to leave its shores for many years afterwards to find work.

Another painting, Holyhead Euston, documents the end of a wearisome boattrain journey undertaken at a time when scheduled air travel was virtually nonexistent or, if available, very expensive. A man has just boarded the crowded train and has found a compartment with just one vacant seat left. Gratefully he pushes his suitcase onto the overhead rack while others look in from the corridor to see if there are any more spaces. Their expressions show their disappointment at the prospect of having to make do with sitting on their suitcases for the journey to Euston. In the compartment everyone looks tired, tired and sunk in their own thoughts. An elderly man, glad to have secured a seat, drowsily looks out at us with the air of someone who has done this journey often and will continue to do it until he can do it no longer. The women have left their suitcases at their feet and keep their handbags close. No one talks.

Bernard Canavan was born in 1944 and grew up in Edgeworthstown, Co Longford. Illness held back his school attendance, but he read and drew pictures at home. He emigrated to England in 1959 with his father to work on construction sites, the only type of employment – along with factory work or ‘down the mines’ – open to the unskilled. This experience, together with his first-hand knowledge of the tradition of emigration in which he grew up in 1950s Ireland, informs his representation of that era and its hardships. His style is a type of social realism, depicting in close detail the life of the people who had to leave their country to find work elsewhere, particularly in England, after the failure of their new Irish state to break its long history of emigration.

It is often argued that the newlyindependent Irish State, coming into existence as it did during a world-wide depression, could not have been expected to find employment for these men and women. And it is true that its economy and infrastructure were in ruins after a war of independence and a subsequent civil war. The new State had many other problems as well, including its refusal to pay monies to Britain (the ‘annuities’ agreed under the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921) for loans received prior to independence. This led to a retaliatory trade war of 19321938 between the two countries which caused severe damage to the Irish Economy. And in contrast with the northern part of the island, which remained within the United Kingdom, the new State had a predominantly rural economy and virtually no strong industrial base, and therefore was unable to provide employment on a mass scale. Things were as they were, and the hope that the lot of the common labourer would improve with the establishment of the new State proved to be a hope misplaced.

While there is no doubt that the new Republic faced difficulties, the perception that in the years up to, and after, the1950s it was too poverty-stricken to provide for its less-advantaged citizens is a perception not universally shared. A different view of those years was put forward by Bernard Canavan at a conference held in the Irish Centre in London in 2017: ‘Eight-hundred thousand people sending back £5 a week [from England] is a lot of money and that kept the Irish economy going. It made it possible for Mr de Valera and all of the rest of them to live in a kind of comfort there, talking about how awful England was, and what a terrible place it was, when they were living off the remittances being sent back.’ And a photograph published in April 1954 in The Independent newspaper provides some incidental evidence that things might not have been as bad as is sometimes made

Murphy’s Men

The Train Bernard Canavan was born in Edgeworthstown, Co Longford

out. The photograph is accompanied by the description ‘Five thousand private cars packed with racegoers, more than fifty buses as well as innumerable cyclists and people on foot contributed yesterday to the life and movement generally associated with Punchestown [Races] on opening day.’ This would seem to suggest that there was indeed plenty of money to spend for those who had it and therefore did not face the difficulties of an emigrant life. Those who, in the common phrase, ‘were doing alright for themselves’.

Any amelioration of the emigrants’ lot would have to await the administrations of Seán Lemass as Taoiseach (19591966) when the focus was shifted from the cherished vision of his predecessors for an Irish-speaking Roman Catholic State to one more shaped to deal with the twentieth century. Welcome as they were, Lemass’s modernising policies came too late for the post-independence generations of Irish emigrants. Bernard Canavan again: ‘When [my father and I] disembarked at Holyhead, with neither skills or educational qualification of any kind, we took whatever employment we could find in factories, scrap yards and building sites, living in cheap lodging houses and trailer parks in the same way [as] hundreds of thousands of others from Ireland’s new Catholic Republic, and sending home remittances to save, or delay, other family members from our fate’.

But back to the paintings. Camden Rooming House pictures a man (surely our boat-train traveller?) arriving at his ‘digs’ after the wearisome journey from Holyhead. If the fellow-lodger who has just passed him on the stairs has asked if he wants to go out ‘for a few’, his answer must have been ‘no, thanks’. His journey has taken its toll. Perhaps also he feels the effects of that traditional ‘last night’ in Dublin when he met up with some emigrant friends and drank a ‘few’ more than he should have done. He inserts his key in the lock. Upstairs a door opens and floods the darkness with light. A female figure calls down his name.

The Bed-sit displays his room, starkly furnished with table, wooden chair and a bed. It also contains a cooker and a sink. A window looks out on a brick wall and shows a tiny patch of sky. There is also the once-ubiquitous self-standing bedsitwardrobe, the one with the mirror on its single middle door. Besides his work, this room, the pub and the weekly smoky dancehall will be his life until he journeys back home again for a week or two in Ireland. He is pictured sitting on the bed, a man no longer young but not yet old, with his back to us, and we catch a glimpse of his rather downcast face in the wardrobe’s mirror. Perhaps of late he has begun to wonder about his future? Morning sees him making his way through the crowds in Camden High Street. Cigarette in hand, he pushes through the throng, anxious not to be late, perhaps because he has already had a number of warnings. Black clouds fill the sky. In The World Above we see him digging in a roadside trench, working bare-backed, swinging the pickaxe in rhythm with the man behind him, who shovels out the broken soil and heaves it upward. The other world of pedestrians passes above, going about its business and no one takes any notice of the men working in the trench below except the overseer (pictured in the painting Subbie), anxious to get the most work out of them that can be had.

Canavan’s people lived and worked in an era now largely obscured in the Irish psyche by the industrialisation of 1960s Ireland and the high adventures and ignominious downfalls of the ‘Celtic Tiger’ years which came to such an abrupt end in the late 2000s. The people portrayed in his paintings are those who lived through pre- and post-World War II period as guests of the ‘perfidious Albion’ they had been taught to abhor during their Irish state schooling. There they had learned to read and write but had acquired little that might have prepared them for the life of the emigrant, the life pictured by Bernard Canavan and described by Dónall Mac Amhlaigh in his Dialann Deoraí (An Emigrant’s Diary), published in 1960; a book which, despite its accounts of hardship, is yet replete with the good humour of a people determined to make the best of a bad situation. However, most of Mac Amhlaigh’s fellow emigrants would not have read his book since it was written in their lost native Irish language; a language which the forced-feeding methods of Irish language teaching in the new State educational system (‘aided’ by corporal punishment) had done little to revive.

Canavan did not forget to represent the families left behind. Although many eventually joined their emigrant spouses and set up households in London or in the back-to-back housing of the coalmining industrial north, many did not. One of the most poignant of Canavan’s canvases is Reading the Letter. We see the family at their front door avidly reading, even before the postman has cycled away. As with all his other canvases in this chronicling of emigration there is no maudlin sentimentality, just a clear depiction of the joy of receiving news from a loved one, coupled with the ever-present heartache of absence. It is a painting which records the devastating tragedy of family separation.

While working in unskilled labouring jobs in London in the 1960s, Bernard Canavan began to draw for many of the radical London Underground publications such as OZ and Cyclops. He then returned to work in Dublin as a graphic artist in an advertising agency. He finally settled in London where he won the Lowes-Dickenson medal and a travelling scholarship to Europe in 1965. This was followed by a State Mature Scholarship to Ruskin College, Oxford in 1971 where he read for a Diploma in Social Studies. He then studied for a degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Worcester College, Oxford. He has exhibited in London and other cities in the UK and in Ireland. He received the Irish Presidential Award from President Michael D Higgins in 2017 during an exhibition of his paintings entitled ‘The Forgotten Irish’. The following year he was invited to have an exhibition in the English House of Commons.

Canavan’s work covers a wide field but it is his depictions of the experience of mass emigration by the Irish underclass during the 1940s to the 1960s, and the hardships they suffered, that strikes a chord in anyone touched by that experience.

The Crown

The Nurses’ Home

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