'Did the Irish community tend to stick together very much?'

'Yeah they did, very much so. I mean we didn't have friends outside school that were English. All our friends, you know, in Trafford Park were kids of Irish parents and my parents sort of stuck to their own, as they put it, which I suppose made life easier for them really. It was very difficult in some ways because we had this Irish culture at home, and at school it was something entirely different. It was things like, 'don't play with these English kids'. I remember my father one day saying, talking about these English kids, 'The English live on fish and chips and jam butties'. And I used to think, 'Oh my God! I wish I was English It would be wonderful to live on things like that you know'. We used to really believe it. He was pretty racist towards the English actually.

'So it went both ways?'

'It went both ways, yes.'

'Did they have much problem at work?'

'I think where my father worked there were a lot of Irish men and, as I say, he stuck quite close to them. But there was quite a few problems, from what I can remember. My mother talked about various different comments that were made to her at the time, whereas nowadays it's practically unheard of. Well there is still Irish racism, but it's practically unheard of that you get a hard time at work for being Irish.'

The annual party for the children of St Patrick's School, Wapping during the 1950s. Catholic schools in areas like this played an important part in preserving the identity of the Irish community Moving Here catalogue reference (MOL) DK2834NG

'Oh at St Anthony's church there was the um, guild of St Agnes, I think it was called. We weren't that impressed about going there, as you had to say your prayers and do all sorts of religious things and collate religious books so it was pretty boring really.

'Right, so a lot of the social activities were based round the church?'

Well for the Catholics, I don't know what the Protestants...'

'The Protestants at St Cuthberts?'

'Yes, I think there was two, there was another one. I can't remember now what it was called but, as I say, we were totally isolated from non-Catholics until I sort of got to an age when I could decide for myself who I associated with. They were sort of seen as these people who you don't associate with and if you brought somebody home and if your parents didn't recognize them straight away it was, 'Who is it?', 'Are they Catholic?', 'No? Well don't have anything to do with them then'. It was really claustrophobic in a lot of ways.

'So you didn't really have any non-Irish friends?

' 'Non-Irish and non-Catholic friends just was unheard of. I mean you didn't do it at all.'

'Towards the beginning of the sixties, a lot of Asian people started arriving in Trafford Park and I used to be absolutely fascinated by these people especially the women, cos' they had these wonderful saris and the wonderful smells coming out their houses. There was quite a lot of racism towards them as well. I always remember that they used to paint the houses in these really brilliant yellows and pinks that the neighbours used to be outraged by. And they were very much isolated. A lot of them kept to their own communities. A lot of them, especially the women, couldn't speak English. Although my father was quite racist towards the English, he was also quite racist towards the Asians as well. So they were another sort of community that you weren't supposed to have anything to do with. "Bloody foreigners coming over here"'