A Brief History up to the Second World War

Irish people have been deeply woven into the fabric of London life for centuries. The first records of Irish migrant workers originate from the twelfth century, when the majority were employed as labourers and street-vendors, although some had to resort to other means of survival, as evidenced by a statute in 1243 to expel Irish beggars. By Tudor times, the Irish were no strangers to a city which had, in John Denvir's lurid description, ‘seen many an Irish chief and noble brought in chains to perish miserably in the gloomy dungeons of the Tower’. Lesser mortals were excluded from work by the regulations of the trade guilds and settled outside the walls of the City of London, but Irish enclaves were discernible in other parts of London from as early as the sixteenth century. Even in these early years, Irish writers had already started to have an impact in London. The first play staged by an Irish writer in the capital was Ram Alley by Lordinge Barry, a contemporary of Shakespeare, whose bawdy comedy appeared in 1608. It was titled after the notoriously crime-ridden quarter of the city in Whitefriars, near Fleet Street, where it was set, and proved so popular that it continued to run almost uninterrupted for the next twenty years.

Overt public displays of national identity by Irish people were rare due to widespread anti-Irish prejudice, which was endemic in English culture at this time. This was not only directed at Catholics, however, as the Protestant playwright George Farquhar discovered. Despite having immortalized William III's victory at the Battle of the Boyne in verse, he found that he was as subject to racial stereotyping as any other Irish person once he arrived in London. His experience of this is reflected in his first play, Love and a Bottle (1698), through the character of Roebuck. Refusing to be bound by the rules of honour in London society, he is an early example of what Roy Foster has described as ‘a Mick on the make’, something revealed in a notable exchange with a young Englishwoman called Lucinda. Rather than taking exception to her preposterous notions of the Irish as semi-wild beasts, Roebuck mischievously indulges her fantasies for the purpose of personal advancement.