Issue No.5 Summer 2001

The Privileged Prod and the Travelling Tinker 

by Billy Mitchell

     Nothing irritates me more than the accusation that I enjoyed special social and economic privileges because I was born and reared within the Protestant-Unionist tradition.
     The home where I spent the bulk of my childhood was a wooden hut that has long since been demolished years after being declared unfit for human habitation. There was no running water. Hail, rain or snow my widowed mother carried water in two large white enamel buckets from a spring well some ten minutes walk away. We washed thrice daily in a wee round white enamel basin and were bathed weekly in a galvanised bathtub in front of the range. The water for these ablutions was heated on an old gas stove that sat precariously on rotten floorboards in the scullery.
     For answering the calls of nature we had a wee corrugated tin shelter, a bit like a sentry box with a door. Inside, a wooden frame with a hole in it fitted over the large bucket that served as a toilet. This receptacle was emptied daily into a large cesspit and the contents covered with a layer of ashes and soil. A large sheet of corrugated tin served as a lid to prevent us weans from falling into the cesspit.
     An old black iron range that burned anything and everything combustible squatted in the kitchen and provided heat for the whole hut. The range, polished daily to a high gloss with a substance called black lead, was the focal point of the home. It had a wee back oven that was used for baking soda bannocks, keeping the dinner hot, warming clothes, seasoning ³cheesers² and heating up the bricks that we wrapped in blankets to warm the bed on a winters night. A single gas-lamp provided light for the kitchen-cum-sitting room while candles provided a shadowy light for the rest of the home. For entertainment we had a wireless that was powered by both wet cell and dry cell batteries and for pets we had field mice that seemed to think the hut was as much theirs as ours.
     Sounds primitive! By today¹s standards I suppose it was, considering I was supposed to one of those privileged Prods who had a whale of a time while my Catholic neighbour lived in poverty.
My mother eked out a living as a stitcher in several of Belfast¹s clothing factories. Her widow¹s pension, plus a few bob from the National Assistance, supplemented the pittance that she earned in wages. There were none of the luxuries that one would associate with an allegedly privileged people. Porridge, bread & milk pudding and potatoes were the stable diet. Hand-me-down clothes kept out the cold and oilcloth insoles tried in vain to keep the wet coming through the holes in our shoes.
     Growing up I knew other families, Protestant and Catholic, living in similar conditions. Some lived in wooden shacks similar to the one I grew up in. One family I knew lived in an old single decker bus in the corner of a field. Even those who lived in brick houses and had cold running water with outside toilets and no bath were only slightly better off. All lived with the hardships arising from a common culture of poverty and deprivation. Dodging the tick-man was a natural extension of our five senses – it was an art-from and a sport, as well as a necessity of life.

     Once a year, regular as clockwork, a travelling family came to camp about half-a-mile from our home. A local farmer provided a wee fenced off area of a field for these hardy folk who travelled the country in a horse drawn caravan. Tommy, the husband, dealt in horses and carried out some seasonal work for farmers. They were probably the first ³taigs² that I ever encountered. But that was long before words like ³fenians² and ³taigs² became part of my vocabulary. To us weans Tommy was just the ³oul lad with the horses². His wife made a great pot of hot broth, which she dolled out liberally to all and sundry from a big black witch¹s pot.
     Tommy¹s weans were just like us, full of fun and abounding in energy, wearing hand-me-downs and blissfully unaware of the difference between Prods and Taigs. Like their parents and my mother, like my brother and myself, they washed in a basin and crapped in a bucket. There wasn¹t a great deal of difference between the Œprivileged Prod¹ and the Œtravelling tinker¹. Poverty is a great leveller. Not that today¹s young academic socialists would know much about that.
     My childhood interaction with these travellers ensured that I never grew up with a bias against the travelling community or felt threatened by the sound of a Free State accent. It took bombs and bullets and violent political conflict to achieve that. There is a lot to be said in favour of childhood exposure to what we adults regard as ³the other sort². Perhaps that¹s why I favour integrated education and, ideally, integrated housing. My childhood experience of poverty also ensured that I never believed the myth that my mother, my brother or I enjoyed the so-called privileges of an ascendancy caste.
     It galls me greatly when nationalists and champagne socialists lecture me about the privileges my grandparents, my parents and my brother and I are supposed to have enjoyed. When I was in Long Kesh I encountered dozens upon dozens of loyalists from the four corners of Belfast and beyond whose experience of growing up were similar to my own.
     Students en-caged at the University of Long Kesh began, under the tutelage of Gusty Spence, to expose and then to debunk the myth that they were ever part of a privileged people. Graduates returning from Long Kesh to loyalist communities throughout the Greater Belfast area began to articulate a different brand of Unionism and a different brand of Protestantism. We are not so blind to history as to suggest that there were no inequalities under the old regime but as far as people like myself were concerned it was a matter of ³tuppence ha¹penny looking down on tuppence².
If people like Billy Hutchinson and myself use language that sounds Œsocialist¹ and engage in the sort of politics that we hope will enrich and enhance the lives of ordinary working and workless class people, it is because we know from personal experience what it is like to live below the poverty line. Our upbringing made us practical social activists not whinging academic socialists.

Billy Mitchell , a former UVF lifer, is a senior member of the Progressive Unionist Party and an active trade unionist. Billy has a weekly column in North Belfast News and is a regular participant in both single-identity and inter-community gatherings.

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