A 1950s Irish Childhood

Author: Ruth Illingworth
Publisher: The History Press
ISBN: 0750986735
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 158

Book Description
1950s Ireland was the age of De Valera and John Charles McQuaid. It was the age before television, Vatican II, and home central heating. A time when motor cars and public telephones had wind-up handles, when boys wore short trousers and girls wore ribbons, when nuns wore white bonnets and priests wore black hats in church. To the young people of today, the 1950s seem like another age. But for those who played, learned and worked at this time, this era feels like just yesterday. This delightful collection of memories will appeal to all who grew up in 1950s Ireland and will jog memories about all aspects of life as it was.

A 1950s Irish Childhood

Author: Padraig Connolly
Publisher: History Press (SC)
ISBN: 9781845887650
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Book Description
A 1950s Irish Childhood

The Speckled People

Author: Hugo Hamilton
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1408171201
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 94

Book Description
Adapted for the stage from the best-selling memoir, The Speckled People tells a profoundly moving story of a young boy trapped in a language war. Set in 1950s Ireland, this is a gripping, poignant, and at times very funny family drama of homesickness, control and identity. As a young boy, Hugo Hamilton struggles with what it means to be speckled, "half and half... Irish on top and German below." An idealistic Irish father enforces his cultural crusade by forbidding his son to speak English while his German mother tries to rescue him with her warm-hearted humour and uplifting industry. The boy must free himself from his father and from bullies on the street who persecute him with taunts of Nazism. Above all he must free himself from history and from the terrible secrets of his mother and father before he can find a place where he belongs. Surrounded by fear, guilt, and frequently comic cultural entanglements, Hugo tries to understand the differences between Irish history and German history and to turn the strange logic of what he is told into truth. It is a journey that ends in liberation but not before the long-buried secrets at the back of the parents' wardrobe have been laid bare.

A 1950s Childhood

Author: Paul Feeney
Publisher: The History Press
ISBN: 075246227X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Book Description
Do you remember PathÉ News? Taking the train to the seaside? The purple stains of iodine on the knees of boys in short trousers? Knitted bathing costumes? Then the chances are you were born in or around 1950. To the young people of today, the 1950s seem like another age. But for those born around then, this era of childhood feels like yesterday. This delightful collection of photographic memories will appeal to all who grew up in this post-war decade; they include pictures of children enjoying life out on the streets and bombsites, at home and at school, on holiday and at events. These wonderful period pictures and descriptive captions will bring back this decade of childhood, and jog memories about all aspects of life as it was in post-war Britain.

Growing Pains

Author: Anne Mac Lellan
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780716531609
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 254

Book Description
Despite the immense interest sparked by recent child abuse and orphan vaccination trials, the history of childhood illness in Ireland has remained largely hidden. Spanning two centuries, Growing Pains is the first history of Ireland's unique social, cultural, and political responses to safeguarding childhood health and treating physically, psychologically, and socially vulnerable children. The book also investigates medical management in the home, hospitals, reformatories, industrial schools, and workhouses - places where treatments ranged from the unorthodox to the experimental. Growing Pains provides an account of infectious and non-infectious diseases, such as rickets, smallpox, tuberculosis, Spanish flu, epilepsy, and opthalmia, and it explores community and institutional responses to these illnesses across the centuries, as well as describing the medical pioneers who fought for better treatment and condition for Ireland's children.

Youth and Popular Culture in 1950s Ireland

Author: Eleanor O’Leary
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350015903
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 253

Book Description
Focusing on a decade in Irish history which has been largely overlooked, Youth and Popular Culture in 1950s Ireland provides the most complete account of the 1950s in Ireland, through the eyes of the young people who contributed, slowly but steadily, to the social and cultural transformation of Irish society. Eleanor O'Leary presents a picture of a generation with an international outlook, who played basketball, read comic books and romance magazines, listened to rock'n'roll music and skiffle, made their own clothes to mimic international styles and even danced in the street when the major stars and bands of the day rocked into town. She argues that this engagement with imported popular culture was a contributing factor to emigration and the growing dissatisfaction with standards of living and conservative social structures in Ireland. As well as outlining teenagers' resistance to outmoded forms of employment and unfair work practices, she maps their vulnerability as a group who existed in a limbo between childhood and adulthood. Issues of unemployment, emigration and education are examined alongside popular entertainments and social spaces in order to provide a full account of growing up in the decade which preceded the social upheaval of the 1960s. Examining the 1950s through the unique prism of youth culture and reconnecting the decade to the process of social and cultural transition in the second half of the 20th century, this book is a valuable contribution to the literature on 20th-century Irish history.

Nothing Quite Like It

Author: Nicholas Grene
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780956223159
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 173

Book Description
Tells the story of an unusual childhood. The child of academic parents, the author was transplanted from Illinois to rural Wicklow in the 1950s. This vivid and wryly humorous memoir recalls a vanished world from a unique angle.

Another Country – Growing Up In '50s Ireland

Author: Gene Kerrigan
Publisher: Gill & Macmillan Ltd
ISBN: 0717166562
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Book Description
From First Communions to CIÉ Mystery Tours – the heartwarming story of award-winning journalist Gene Kerrigan's childhood in Dublin in the '50s In his highly addictive style, Gene Kerrigan effortlessly reconstructs the Ireland of the 1950s and early '60s in which he grew up. An adult world of absolute moral certainties, casual cruelties and mass emigration; for children an age of innocence, but an innocence hemmed in by fear and guilt. In this brilliant and humorous memoir, Kerrigan tells of a world that now seems as distant as another country. Into the details of school, street and family life, of Christmas, First Communion, school violence, CIE Mystery Tours and the arrival of television are woven the political background of the day and recollections of the impact of major figures: Michael O Hehir, Seán Lemass, Eamon 'Dev' De Valera, JFK, not to mention Hector Grey, Shane, Davy Crockett and Audie Murphy. It's a compelling, touching and often very funny account of a happy childhood in a country that was itself far from happy.

Me and Mine

Author: Anna May Mangan
Publisher: Virago Press
ISBN: 9781844086733
Category : Irish
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
A wonderfully compelling and entertaining memoir about the experiences of a London Irish family. In the tradition of ANGELA'S ASHES.

My Mother Wore a Yellow Dress

Author: Christina McKenna
Publisher: Neil Wilson Publishing
ISBN: 9781903238769
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
'I learned about conflict from my parents.' So begins Christina McKenna's haunting memoir of her lonely early life. Recounting scenes from her childhood in Ulster, she paints a memorable and poignant picture of violence and oppression with her brutal father and protective mother, whose retalliation to her husband's meaness came in the form of a secret yellow dress. This is a rite-of-passage account of two generations of Irish women, told with great humour and compassion. On the one hand is the writer; on the other the heroic mother who showed her love as best she could. McKenna concludes that our past, no matter how painful, need not keep us bound - once we choose love over hate. That choice, she suggests, will set us free.