Confessions of a poacher - Jim Connell

Jim Connell (1852-1929) is a forgotten hero of British and Irish Labour history, responsible for introducing the eight-hour day (after the London gas-workers strike of 1889) and for penning the international Socialist workers' anthem, 'The Red Flag'. Born in Kilskyre, County Meath, and reared in Birr, County Offaly where his father worked as a gamekeeper for the Earl of Rosse, Jim was sworn into the IRB and moved to London in 1875 having failed to unionize the Dublin docks. He became an executive member of the Irish Land League, a prominent trade unionist and friend to Kier Hardie, and a popular figure on Fleet Street. From his journalism grew his books, the first of them Confessions of a Poacher (1903).;Confessions of a Poacher presents a charming bucolic view from below, developed through autobiographical sketches. It details Connell's early life among the Slieve Blooms and his move to London's East End, whence he sallied forth at weekends with his mates and beloved lurcher Nellie in quest of game: hare, pheasant, rabbit, pigeon and salmon - most of it illegally trapped, snared or shot. He describes encounters with magistrates and landlords enforcing medieval Game Laws, evoking an innocent late-Victorian world in which town and country merge, and gentry and peasant find common cause in a love of sport and the call of the wild. A biographical appendix, 'In Search of Jim Connell' by historian Andrew Boyd, accompanies the reissue of this lost rural classic.