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Life
| 1895-1966 [James Leo Phelan]; b. Inchicore, Dublin, son of an iron-worker at the railway depot, and Catherine [nee Colin], of itinerant descent from Westmeath; Fenian and Republican kinship; ed. CBS, Inchicore but left school at 13 to become telegraph boy; dismissed and stowed away on ship to Glasgow; returned to Dublin and faced chastisement from his father; served as apprentice iron-worker; sexual initiation with a prostitute and loss of religion, aged 18; involved in 1913 lock-out marches; attended Metropolitan Art School as part of metal-work training; left Dublin to avoid a shotgun wedding and travelled in England as tramp [itinerant, gypsy, - earning the Romany name “Dollcie Jim”)]; sailed to Galvaston (Texas) on an oil tanker; returned to Ireland and joined Republican movement - purportedly running guns for the Irish Citizen Army, of which his younger brother Liam was a member; m. Dora O'Brien, c.1921 (d. septicæmia, 1923), with whom a dg. raised by his sister; joined in Liam O'Flaherty’s [q.v.] ‘Soviet’ Occupation of the Rotunda, Jan. 1922; travelled to Cork with O’Flaherty and Sean McAteer to establish Irish Citizen Army units there; |
| travelled with wife and dg. to Liverpool, March 1922, living as iron-worker; participated in an armed Post Office robbery with McAteer, 11 June 1923, resulting in a murder, and sentenced to death as accomplice, 1923; held in Manchester Prison; sentence commuted to life term by Home Secretary, Aug. 1923; imprisoned at Maidstone, Dartmoor and Isle of Wight for 15 years; permitted to engaged in a creative writing correspondence course; composed Lifer and some short stories in prison, and succeeded in carry his many papers out with him on release in 1937; settled in Camden Town (London), and resumed tramping life but contacted publishers and writers incl. H. G. Wells and George Orwell to promote his writings - receiving mail at post offices en route; m. Jill [Cosntance] Hayes, a left-wing idealist who visited him in prison, with whom a son Seumas; issued Ten-a-penny People (1938), an account of exploitation and strike-breaking among Liverpool dock-workers; filmed as Night Journey (dir. Oswald Mitchell, 1938); his wife Jill suffered brain injuries in a London blitz (8 Sept. 1940), and twas aken into hospital care after bouts of mental illness; Phelan went on the road with his son Seumas; m. Kathleen Newton (1917-2014), 1944, who shared his tramping life with her [presum.] on death of his wife]; |
| associated with literati and musicians in Soho and Fitzrovia, working as a journalist and an actor; served as scriptwriter on documentary films in the 1940s and later made four television programmes on tramping life for BBC Wales, 1964; issued num. novels - sometimes classified as ‘tramp’ literature’, incl. Turf Fire Tales (1947) and Vagabond Cavalry (1951); also The Green Volcano (1938), a novel set in 1916-22, dealing with the tracking down of a government spy which incidentally describes the rising despotism of ‘strong’ farmer in that period; also The Underworld (1953), Criminals in Real Life (1956), and others based on his prison experience. IF2 DIW DIL |
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Works| Fiction |
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Filmography (incls.) |
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Note: Phelan’s son Seamus contrib. “Naughty Mans” to Horizon, ed. Cyril Connolly (c.1944) - a childhood work (Books Ireland, Nov. 2007, p.246).
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Criticism
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Liam Harte, ed., The Literature of the Irish in Britain: Autobiography and Memoir, 1725-2001 (London: Palgrave Macmillan 2009) - includes writings of Jim Phelan [see review by Fintan O’Toole in The Irish Times, 25 April 2009, Weekend].
Patrick Maume, “Jim Phelan’ [art.], in Dictionary of Irish Biography (RIA 2009) - writes: ‘[...] In two books published in the early 1940s, Churchill can unite Ireland (1940) and Ireland: Atlantic gateway (1941), Phelan argued that Irish neutrality was not based on immemorial hatred but on misguided perceptions of immediate self-interest, and that Britain should sponsor Irish reunification to secure its own strategic position and promote American intervention on the side of the allies. (Incidental features worth noting include dismissal of reports of the activities of Frank Ryan and Francis Stuart in Berlin as propaganda by anti-Irish tories, and a tendency – visible in some of his other writings – to portray the Irish Republican Brotherhood in terms deriving from the remorseless underground workers’ Vehmgericht of Jack London’s 1908 novel The Iron Heel, which Phelan greatly admired.)’
Further (Maume, 2009): ‘Phelan’s most productive period as a writer stretched from his prison release to the early 1950s. Although he produced several novels and collections of short stories, some with Irish settings (e.g., the short-story collection Bog blossom stories (1947), and the execrable war of independence novel Green volcano (1938), which combines a melodramatic plot, some cowboys-and-Indians descriptions of fighting between IRA and Black and Tans, and a nasty streak of prurient cruelty), he is best appreciated as a writer of fictionalised memoir reflecting his statement that professional tramps were not mere beggars but raconteurs whose development of plausible cover stories to catch the imagination of the “mark” should be recognised as part of the entertainment industry. The name’s Phelan (1948), a memoir of his early life up to the commutation of his death sentence, is probably his best-known work [...].’ (Available online; accessed 11.12.2025.]
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Commentary
James Cahalan, Great Hatred, Little Room, The Irish Historical Novel (1983), describes Jim Phelan’s And Blackthorns (London: Nicholson & Watson 1944), concerning episodes during the 1920s quoting; ‘when the fanatic[s used] rifles, revolvers, shot-guns, old swords, and Blackthorns’ (p.7) [133].
Seamus Phelan [extract from biography-in-progress by his son], in Books Ireland (Nov. 2007): ‘James Leo Phelan was born in Ireland at the close of the 19th century and spent his early years in the village of Inchicore, now a part of the sprawling conurbation that is Dublin. A father who had travelled extensively and a mother who constantly recited fairy stories combined, with a natural wanderlust, to nurture a child with a unique vision of his world; a world where change was the only constant he yearned. This was further fuelled, in no small part, by the romantic sounds, smells and sights of the horse pulled cargo boats that were untethered at the mouth of the Grand Canal and set free to deliver their wares to, according to the young Phelan, exotic places around the world such as Guatemala. From an early age this imagery prompted Jim to escape from home repeatedly, stowing away beneath tarpaulins only to be discovered, disembarked at the nearest convenient point and returned to his despairing parents by equally despairing policemen. […]’ (p.246; also given in Wikipedia as author-entry [See full text online; accessed 19.08.2008].)
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Quotations
“Johnny the Rag”, in The Penguin New Writing, ed. John Lehmann ([n. iss.] 1947), pp.65-75: ‘Half two, sir, the bus comes back. Aye, half two. Only one a day now, this time of year, after the October fair. They run two in the summer, when people comes up to look at the scenery. But it’s few strangers you’ll see in a little hill-village in winter. Aye, few indeed. /
A pint, and thanks. Good health, sir. Aye, not till half two, the bus. You have over an hour. But sure it’s a fine dry day, and anyway it stops just outside the bar door there. Half two. /
Indeed you may say that, sir. Indeed I do remember it with no bus at all. A lonely little place it was, them times. Sure what’s in a hill-village, in winter time especially; when it’s twenty mile to the town and no way of getting in or out?’ (p.65.) [Johnny recounts how he came into possession of, and lost, his Slievacattra hill-farm.] stranger. Meals I had like before, and I suppose he’d have gave me a room too but he was wanting the place for his family later, and anyway the barn was cosy, enough. Four month and that’s all, and he was gone eleven days before they fished his body out of the river, fifteen mile away. ‘So it’s nine year now I’ve been oul’ Johnny theRag, around the village here, and the kindness of people is a marvel. For it’s the God’s truth, sir, there’s more of the black stuff now - and sure I love: it - than there’s ever been this forty year, since Jem, God rest him, came to look after me first. Aye, more indeed. /
Sure it’s a great thing to be alive, and eighty-five year old, when a man thinks of all the decent well-meaning people that’s dead-and gone. There’s the notice now, on the wall, and that’s the end of Slievacattra. Belongs to the Government or something now, and it’s been sold to-day. Sure it’s not what poor decent Jem Harney planned, but it’s hard for a stranger to know the hill-farms and. hill-people. Poor Jem, he tried his best, God be good to him. /
Indeed, I will, of course, and thanks. A pint, sir. Good health to -. There y’are, sir. There’s the half two bus. /
Good-bye and good luck.’ (p.75; end.)
| “Life Line”, in The Penguin New Writing (April 1946), pp.85-96. |
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| —For full text, see RICORSO Library, “Criticism > Reviews”, via index, or direct. |
Tramping the Toby (1955): ‘One day Dylan Thomas sat down beside me, to drink black coffee at the Madrid in Soho. Next day I was scriptwriter in a film company, with Dylan and the rest of the boys. Many of the films were about forestry work, lorry-drivers, trawler men and the life. I got out on the road a great deal, collecting material. I twas the next thing to being a tramp - I had found the halfway house.’ (From Tramping the Toby; quoted in ‘Lind of Guff: The Tramp’s Tale’, interview-article with Seamus Phelan, in Books Ireland, Nov. 1007, p.146; [online].)
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References
Desmond Clarke, Ireland in Fiction [Pt II] (Cork: Royal Carbery 1985), fiction inc. The Green Volcano, Murder by Numbers; Banshee Harvest; Moon in the River; Turf Fire Tales; Fetters for Twenty; In the Can, and Bog Blossom Stories; gives details of Banshee Harvest (n.d.); Green Volcano (1938), set in 1916-1922, Glasgow and Dublin, the tracking and execution of a govt. spy; also Blackthorns (1946) [var. Nicholson & Watson 1943, 190pp.]; Turf Fires Tales (1947), and Bog Blossom Stories (1949). [See plot details - infra.]
Robert Hogan, ed., Dictionary of Irish Literature (1979), rates Phelan highly.
Hyland Books (Cat. 224; 1998) lists Churchill Can Unite Ireland (1940) [‘one of our favorite titles’]; Green Volcano (1938).
Wikipedia: There is a Wikipedia entry [online]; see also his son Seamus’s response in the Talk section of that webpage [online].
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Notes[ top ]