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In the city of Glasgow there is a lodging house for women known as
'The Rat Pit'. Here the vagrant can get a nightly bunk for a few
pence...'The Rat Pit' is a transcript from life and most of the
characters are real people and the scenes only too poignantly true.
This is a fascinating novel of the period and still an interesting
read. Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to
1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly
expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable,
high quality, modern editions, using the original artwork and text.
A poet's war in the mud of the First World War in Europe. After the
outbreak of the Great War in 1914, Irishman Patrick MacGill
enlisted in a territorial army unit the 2nd London Irish Battalion
as a rifleman. His claim at the time was that he and its colonel
were the only true Irishmen serving in it. MacGill, already a well
regarded author and poet, would record his experiences from
training to his unit's embarkation to France and then onwards to
his early experiences of trench warfare and finally to the time of
the great attacks which included the battle of Loos and in which he
was seriously wounded. During the course of the war-which he
survived-MacGill wrote several books on the subject, but three-The
Amateur Army, The Red Horizon and The Great Push, directly concern
his time with the London Irish and it is these books that have here
been combined-in their entirety-by the Leonaur Editors to create
this single comprehensive volume of his life as an ordinary
rifleman in the front line. MacGill employs his talent to great
effect in this volume so the reader is not only taken into the
heart of the war through his sensitivity to the description of
events, emotions, sights and details but also because of his
ability to convey realistic dialogue that portrays the various
types of the army in the trenches authentically and often with
great affection and humour.
Based on personal memories of his life in Ireland and Scotland in
the early 1900s, this was Patrick MacGill's first novel. It tells
the story of Dermod Flynn an independent and feisty youth who earns
a meagre living as an itinerant farm hand in Donegal and County
Tyrone before coming to Scotland with a potato-picking squad. After
living on the road, labouring and navvying, Dermod finds work on
the hydro-electric scheme at Kinlochleven -an extraordinarily
brutal and unforgiving environment where hundreds died on one of
the biggest engineering projects of its time. Against this
background, Dermod reads voraciously, begins to discover his talent
as a writer and is eventually lured to Fleet Street, where he
briefly becomes a journalist. Peopled with extraordinary
characters, Children of the Dead End is a gritty and uncompromising
expose of the near slavery endured by the poor in Scotland and
Ireland at the beginning of the twentieth century.
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Songs of a Navvy
Patrick MacGill
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R406
Discovery Miles 4 060
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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