FARRIERS. COOPERS. A mother of 20 children. Bell-ringers. Priests. Piggery owners. When you open social historian Kevin C Kearns’ new book, In Our Day, what greets you are people who populated a long-gone Dublin.
Kearns is known as a chronicler of Dublin’s past, having written books on the great winter of 1947, tenement life, and Dublin pub lore for example. He spent around 26 summers in Ireland, having travelled over from the US to interview people about their lives. Not that he’d call it an interview – they were more like conversations.
He started after finishing graduate school in St Louis, Missouri, coming out with a PhD in social history. “When you had a PhD, you took a position as a professor at the University but then your summers were always free for three months, during which you were expected to do research and writing,” he told The Journal. ”And so I decided on Ireland for a whole host of reasons.” First of all, he was a proud Irish American.
“So I read bits and pieces about the rich rural folklore, but that’s not what struck my ear – what struck was that oral history generally was declining and disappearing very rapidly, and historians and sociologists and others were very alarmed,” said Kearns. “Because the folklore and the oral history has always been such a treasure to Ireland and Ireland was known for it.”
In order to capture some of this oral history so that it wouldn’t be forgotten, he headed to Ireland, inspired in part by books like Studs Terkel’s groundbreaking oral history of workers in the USA, Working.
With him he brought a “good, sturdy mountain backpack”, and stuffed it with two small tape recorders, worn jeans and comfortable shoes, so that he wouldn’t look like a tourist on his jaunts around the city. The fact that tape recorders were being developed in a much smaller size by this time helped too.
He started wandering around Dublin’s oldest streets, talking to the shopkeepers, postman, parents, factory workers, firemen – all those who lived and worked in the city.
“I’d chat up everybody who I came across and if they seemed interested in talking to me, I’d ask if I could meet with them in a few days or a week at their convenience, and the two of us could sit down in a quiet place together,” said Kearns.
They would meet “on their own turf”, often the person’s home, a park bench or a pub. The chats would last one to three hours on average. “Occasionally I’d have to go back again, or they even asked: ‘Could you come back, now I haven’t told you the whole story…’,” laughed Kearns.
‘That’s a good Irish name’
Kearns gathered hundreds of interviews across the decades, and used them to inform his books and collections of oral history. Thanks to them, he has been able to tell the story of Dublin’s development using the voices of the people who lived through it themselves.
Kearns is 82 now, and a few years ago decided to sit down and put together “a very special book” that would draw on his 50 years of interviews. That became In Our Day. In the book’s introduction, he explains how when he took to the streets to meet people, he found his Irish-American identity helpful in bringing a sense of camaraderie and connection.
“They would say, ‘Oh, Kevin is it – now that’s a good Irish name’, and we’d both smile at each other,” Kearns told The Journal. “So I knew right away there was kind of a comfort level. And that was very important.”
He was mainly seeking people to talk to who were from the period of 1900 to the late 1940s, meaning people aged in their 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s. This was a time before TV and computers, a time he describes as “a wonderful age in which so much of the old life was preserved and family life was so intact”.
“I was so touched by that right away, the respect for parents and grannies and grandparents,” said Kearns of the stories he heard. But as the interviews showed, it was also a difficult time too, particularly for women who had to shoulder the responsibility for child-rearing. “The families also back then typically had eight to 12 children. Now that sounds appalling, it was difficult. I did some interviews myself with people who had up to 21 children.”
But he said that conversation was thriving then – people loved talking, and they were usually happy to talk to him. Visiting Ireland every year became a mission, and then a passion, said Kearns. Many of the people he met became lifelong friends.
He describes the inner-city Dublin he visited in the 60s and 70s as “very, very poor”, with cobblestones and crumbling tenements. He’d chat to local gardaí, social workers and priests to get the lie of the land in some areas – one garda walked around with him to point out who to chat to.
“There were some tough, poor areas and there was some crime and some gangs and things in the 50s, 60s and 70s,” he acknowledged. “Parts of Ireland, if you went back 50 or 60 years, in either part of Dublin were almost out of a Dickens novel. I don’t mean to be hyperbolic. But really it was true.”
But when he spoke to people, he found that from the start they “understood pretty quickly that I was interested in their real life stories”. “I really had an interest in this. I wasn’t just coming in barging in,” he said. If someone had a ‘bad attitude’, he’d suggest they go away and think about chatting to him. Sometimes, once he mentioned he knew a neighbour, they would soften.
Once he made contacts, he kept making more. “You know, if an Irish historian came in here, it wouldn’t be that comfortable. But there’s a Yank coming, you know, an Irish American. They were very comfortable with me,” he said. He attributes part of that to his down-to-earth attitude: “If I had to sit on the floor or curb or something to talk to them, I’d do it without a second thought.”
The rare old times
Kearns found from talking to people that there was a similar message about the old times. They’d say “‘oh, sure, times were hard. We were poor’. And then they’d say, oh, but we were happy’”. After the tenements were cleared out and razed, suburbanisation came in. But many people Kearns interviewed told him they’d rather go back to the poorer days, he said, as it meant being part of a neighbourhood and a community.
Kearns sees his book not just as a chance to capture a moment in Dublin’s history, but as a form of escapism for people today. “This is an age for humanity of great stress and worry. People want just security. And I thought: I want to write an uplifting book,” he said. “It’s not about the Dark Ages. This is a period in which my parents and my grandparents grew up. I wanted to take and identify what I call historical vignettes, which is a small story or memory, recollection or image.”
The book is a collection of “fascinating and entertaining, amusing, nostalgic and touching” vignettes, organised by theme, like Characters, Working, Struggle and Conflict.
The stories in In Our Day are by turns funny, sad, and eye-opening. The honesty of the people interviewed is impressive, and they give a great sense of what Dublin was like during the years. The book is easy to dip into too, thanks to the short vignettes. One of those that will always stand out to Kearns is that of the postman who told him about how he’d deliver his post by bicycle, using an oil lamp when it was dark. He loved his job, but it was hard during the war years, when he would have to deliver telegrams that announced the deaths of Irish members of the British Army.
“And he said: we all knew what telegram it was because first of all, it had urgent on the outside; on the upper left hand corner it had a little red sticker,” said Kearns. “And he said, ‘Oh God, I hated that’.”
Kearns described his collection of over 450 stories in the book as “a gift to Dubliners”. He’s been praised by Joe Duffy, who said that without Kearns, the lives of “ordinary decent Dubliners would be forgotten”. What does he think about that praise?
“I would love to be well remembered in Ireland and Dublin as somebody who tried to record and preserve their history,” said Kearns. “When you read my book, you’re not reading somebody else’s interpretation. These are the exact words that came out of their mouths. I want the book to be poignant – it is poignant. I mean, readers will have to judge themselves. I think it’s a book for almost anybody, from 20 to 90.”
Though the book is published in Ireland now, due to his age and health Kearns won’t – for the first time – be able to make it over here for a book launch. There’s a cruel irony in him being unable to visit Dublin as his latest book reveals more of the city’s story.
“It kind of breaks my heart that I can’t go and see this book in the shop windows as I always have, and to go in and talk to people about the book,” he said.
In Our Day: An Oral History of Dublin’s Bygone Days, is out now, published by Gill Books.
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