Tom Devine on Patrick MacGill
Children of the Dead End
The book that changed his life

As a pupil in a Scottish secondary school in the 1960s, history was by no means my favourite subject. It seemed irrelevant to contemporary issues and fixated on dates and arcane facts. Two things blew away that youthful alienation and set me on the path to making a career as a research historian. The first was the broadbased Scottish arts degree, which enabled me to experience the subject from a much more interesting and stimulating perspective. The second was reading Patrick MacGill's autobiographical novel, Children of the Dead End, in my first year at university

MacGill was born on a poor farm in Glenties, Donegal, about 1890. He left school at 10 (after striking the master with a pointer!), then laboured on local farms before migrating to Scotland to work as a potato-picker, navvy and railway platelayer.

His book is remarkable on several counts. MacGill was virtually selftaught and spent most of his life before the novel was published as a manual labourer. Yet he writes with great power, clarity, passion and humour.

At one level the book is a moving story of one man's heroic struggle against all the odds of background, poverty and inequality. But it is also a richly evocative, individual account of the great Irish diaspora of the 19th century. This struck a chord because my own forebears had come to Scotland from Donegal in the later 19th century.

Even more fundamentally, however, MacGill's prose brought vividly to life for me some of the key areas of British social history for the first time. His work is a social commentary on subjects as varied as agricultural labouring, slum life, prostitution, class relations and the way of life of the navvies. Until that time I had studied little other than political and diplomatic history. What MacGill did for me, as a young undergraduate, was not simply to deepen my interest in the past but also extend the range of subjects which could be considered as significant in order to understand the present.

Professor Tom Devine is director of the research centre in Scottish history at the University of Strathclyde, Scotland.

This homage to Patrick MacGill's Children of the Dead End, first appeared in the Guardian, Tuesday, November 25 1997, and is displayed here with Tom Devine's permission.