Pod Insights The Blindboy Podcast The Revolutionary history of the English Working classes, with Professor Carl Chinn About this episode Professor Carl Chinn is a British social historian whose research explores the history, communities and everyday lives of England's working class. He has become a friend and I adore the chats with him
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1:00 Blindboy Boatclub? Dangle your ankle on the meniscus of a gimlet you star spangled against. Welcome to the Blind By Podcast. If this is your first episode, consider going back to an earlier podcast to familiarize yourself with the lore of this podcast. But if you're a regular listener, you know the crack. I'm just back from a grueling few days of travel. Did a wonderful live podcast over in Sheffield and I was away for the entire weekend. But now I'm back. Won't be gigging and traveling for a good few months. So I'm really looking forward to having time to research, to have the entire seven days
1:42 Blindboy Boatclub? to research hot takes as opposed to when I'm gigging, that time is cut short. And I get a sleep pattern back. When you're working professionally as an entertainer and you're on the road a lot, you get off stage at 11 p.m. You're usually not home in bed until about maybe 3 a.m. Then you can't sleep until 6 or 7 a.m. because being in front of a crowd is so... The adrenaline of it is absolutely huge. You never get used to it. Doing it a long time, you never get used to going out in front of a thousand people.
2:19 Blindboy Boatclub? It's so unnatural that your body finds reserves of adrenaline and cortisol that you didn't know you had, and you're just fucking wired. I've done gigs in my time where I've been physically sick, aches, pains, shivers, fever. And when you go on stage, the symptoms disappear. There's such a rush of adrenaline that you're not sick for those 90 minutes or the two hours. Then you get off stage and you fucking crash. I'm gigging 20 years. The only time I've ever not gone on stage because of sickness, I think it was last year when I got the chicken box.
3:01 Blindboy Boatclub? That was the only time where I was too sick, where I'm just, I cannot do this and I don't want to give people the chicken box. But any, any performer will tell you, just one gig a week is enough to entirely disrupt your capacity to sleep. For DJs too, even though that's not really a job anymore, because nightclubs are disappearing. But I used to have buddies and they'd, they'd be a DJ in a nightclub. They might gig Saturday and Sunday. They're home at 3am, they're not sleeping. So they just become night people, sleep all day and awake all night. So I'm really looking forward to, I'm not doing any serious gigs until next October.
3:44 Blindboy Boatclub? I love doing gigs, but having three months of no gigs, really what that means is a predictable sleep schedule and everything that goes with that, the emotional regulation that goes with that. Because if you're tired, you're irritable and emotionally reactive. And I just got an email there to say that a synthesizer that I'd ordered months ago is now in the post on the way. So that's what I'm going to be doing until October, living in the land of flow, whether it be researching and writing this podcast or making tunes. Actually, I mentioned at the end of last week's podcast that I was putting out a new, a new little song on Instagram. I'd made a house track out of a potato.
4:29 Blindboy Boatclub? My potatoes have blight, well, only one plant has blight. But what I did was, I was inspired by Poochin.
4:39 Blindboy Boatclub? The illicit Irish spirit, which is sometimes made out of potatoes. And potato blight, it's a common disease, it's common in potatoes. We associate it with the Great Irish Famine. But blight happens all the time. So sometimes if blight was identified early on potatoes, before the potato becomes rotten, when people wouldn't eat the potato, but they would use those blighty potatoes to make pochine, it'd get mixed in with barley or oats, and then fermented. So that got me thinking, so what I did was, okay, I've got early blight potatoes, I'm not gonna eat them, so why don't I hook electrodes up to them and try and make house music out of them, so that's what I did, for fun, for enjoyment, for giggles.
5:23 Blindboy Boatclub? But anyway, I put the song and the video up on Instagram. The song's name is "Wear Jarts To My Funeral". It went mad fucking viral. It has, it got half a million views in six days, which is mad. That is six sold-out nights of Croke Park, worth of people, hearing a song I made out of a potato. So that's a lovely little buzz, and it inspires me as well, even though, you know, I don't like external validation. I'm, you honestly think I'm fucking, you honestly think I look at a potato plant with blight and get the idea to hook electrodes up to it and think to myself, oh, I'm gonna
6:06 Blindboy Boatclub? make a song out of this, and half a million people will listen to it? No, I'm informed purely by curiosity. Can I do that? This idea is mad. It is utterly mad, and the madness of it is really pushing me to find out if it's possible. So let's give it a go, and I bet you trying, trying to do it, is gonna be fun. So let's do it for that, for the fun and enjoyment of the process and the doing. So that's what I did. And then when I was happy with the results, I thought, fuck it, I'll show people. But having said that, it is...
6:45 Blindboy Boatclub? I suppose there is a bit of a kick out of doing that and then other people liking it. There is a bit of a kick out of that. But I wanna, I wanna move on to the next thing, which is the starlings have returned to the bird shit district in Limerick City, and I have contact microphones. They're microphones that don't, they don't record sound, they record the vibration of sounds in solid objects. So I want to, wanna stick those microphones to the trees when they're pregnant with starlings and see if I can pick up those vibrations and maybe make a G-Funk song or some acid house. Might work,
7:30 Blindboy Boatclub? might, might not. Might be good, might be shit. That's not the point. I wanna do it for the love of doing it. Process based enjoyment for my mental health and my emotional regulation. I've had the best mental health I've had in the past four months than I've had since, since before the fucking pandemic because of my analog synthesizers, because of the flow state I get to enter when I play with them. And that recent study, which I spoke about on about five podcasts ago, the recent study about autistic people, autistic people being uniquely attuned to flow, not just uniquely attuned, but the findings of
8:15 Blindboy Boatclub? this study were autistic people need flow. It's, it's an actual need for us. So our mental health, emotional wellbeing, emotional regulation. What's emotional regulation? I used to call it emotional intelligence.
8:36 Blindboy Boatclub? Emotional regulation for me is, can I respond to my emotions instead of reacting to them? That's it. Anxiety pops up, anger, frustration, irritation. Can I notice that and go, oh, I notice I'm feeling irritated? Great, I've noticed it, I'm feeling it. Now I can make a choice about my behaviour. You know what? Even though I'm feeling irritated, I'm gonna really focus on my breathing in this present moment now. I'm gonna breathe from in my nose, feel my belly expand, gonna get a load of oxygen, and I'm gonna let that feeling pass.
9:20 Blindboy Boatclub? See, if I don't have that awareness, then I react to the irritation. The irritation becomes how I'm feeling, and then I'm grumpy.
9:32 Blindboy Boatclub? I view things, everything else, through a negative irritated filter. And I have an unhappy day, and I'm not nice to be around. So playing at my synthesizers the past three months, that is, that is straight up proving to me, that paper that I read about autistic people and flow states, and flow states being an essential part of our, how we manage our mental health, our mental hygiene. I did something last week that I was very proud of. It was something that, confirmation from my environment that I'm in a good place emotionally. I bumped into someone who I hadn't seen in, I don't know, fucking 23 years.
10:16 Blindboy Boatclub? Like, school, literal secondary school would have been the last time I saw this person. It was one of these situations, I've mentioned them before, I don't wear a bag on my head.
10:27 Blindboy Boatclub? I don't wear a bag on my head for 99% of my life. I'm just a human being. And I met a person, and their context for me was, the lad from back in school. The lad from back, not my job, nothing like that, the lad from back in school. And when I met this person...
10:46 Blindboy Boatclub? They immediately just started, I suppose bragging, I don't know if bragging the right word, because that's not fair. They immediately jumped into telling me their salary, how important their job is, the house that they own and where it is, and then how much respect they have at work and how they can do whatever they like because they're so high up. I suppose you could call it bragging. Letting me know quite explicitly that they're doing really, really well. Financially, career-wise, because I haven't seen them in 20 years, they are doing really, really well.
11:29 Blindboy Boatclub? This person too, I'd call them a level one or two neurotypical person, someone who's profoundly neurotypical. What I mean by that is, I knew when I met this person, that this is going to be difficult for me because I'm going to have to do ritualistic small talk here. When I say someone is level one or two neurotypical, for me it means, okay, there's the person coming towards me, right, okay, I'm going to have to say hello, I'm going to have to speak, right, okay, we're going to have to talk. Often, I'm going, how quickly can I start talking about facts with this person?
12:09 Blindboy Boatclub? Once we've said hello, how quickly can I say to them, did you know that cornflakes were invented to stop people wanking? Or, you're wearing a purple jumper, you know, the history of purple dye, don't you? Comes from a snail called the Myorex snail in ancient Phoenicia. And the reason I do that is, that's where I'm comfortable speaking with a person then. If I'm going to have a chat with a person that I haven't seen in ages, if I can shift some of that into, I'm going to give you some really entertaining facts and then entertain that person, and they're willing to listen and they want to hear this, then that's going to be a nice conversation for me.
12:52 Blindboy Boatclub? And then ideally, they might have a few facts to throw at me. But when a person is level one or two neurotypical, as I'd say. I go, oh shit, okay, I can't start dropping facts with this person. If I bring up, do you know about the history of cornflakes with this person? I will not get a positive reaction. It's too lateral, it's too left of centre. They, they won't be interested, they don't give a fuck about the history of, of cornflakes. They don't care about this shit, that's not, that's not their world. So when I see these people, I'm like, right, fuck shit, okay, time to mask up. Mask up now, now it's small talk time, okay? And resist these fucking facts, can't be dropping facts here.
13:36 Blindboy Boatclub? You need to go into small talk rituals. How are you getting on? What are you doing? Isn't that lovely? What holiday did you go on? Please, when you tell me where you went for a holiday, let it not be a place that I have an interesting fact about. Like with this person, when they were walking towards me, I was going, I know that he likes soccer. So there's a chance that he's gonna bring up the World Cup. And I'll have to engage in World Cup discourse. I know fucking nothing about soccer, I know nothing about sports. But what I did know is that the night previously, Argentina had played Cape Verde. And I had to go, shit. Don't tell him the Cape Verde fucking fact, do not, cause I've got the most amazing fact in the world about Cape Verde. So Argentina played Cape Verde. It was a big deal, I don't know why it was a big deal.
14:22 Blindboy Boatclub? Doesn't matter, Cape Verde. It's this teeny tiny island off Africa, fucking tiny. And in nineteen sixty eight, right?
14:33 Blindboy Boatclub? There was a shipment of synthesizers, analog synthesizers, mugs. And these synthesizers, they were coming from Italy or Britain or somewhere, from Europe. And they were on a ship and they were being sent to the United States. But anyway, the ship fucking sank.
14:52 Blindboy Boatclub? And containers of these synthesizers, these, like in nineteen sixty eight, synthesizers were the price of a car or a house. This container of synthesizers washed up on the beach in Cape Verde, this tiny African island. The president of Cape Verde at the time, I believe, was socialist. So when the container landed and they saw all these synths, the president said, "First off, they're ours now. Fuck off, we're keeping them." And instead of taking the synthesizers and trying to sell them, or give them to rich people, or whatever, or capitalize on them, the president took like 150 synthesizers
15:34 Blindboy Boatclub? and put them in every single school in the little country. So now all the kids in the 60s, late 60s, early 70s in Cape Verde, they had these class synthesizers in their fucking classrooms. But they'd never heard electronic music. 1968, 1969, electronic music wasn't much at that point. They'd never heard it. But what they did have were their indigenous folk songs. So Cape Verde ended up developing this completely unique type of music, type of electronic music called Cape Verdean Cosmic Disco that sounds like nothing else on the planet. It'd be like if a synthesizer fell off an alien spaceship and landed in my back garden. But I find that fascinating.
16:20 Blindboy Boatclub? And as this fellow was walking towards me, I'm thinking, "He doesn't want to hear about that." Like, I've been this way my whole fucking life. It's only five years ago, I think it was, that when I said this shit to a, to a psychologist, they're like, "That's autism, sir." Like, when I'm speaking to a person who I haven't seen in 20 years, or a stranger, I, I ground myself mindfully. So I'm having, I'm mindfully grounded in the middle of the conversation and I'm engaging in what's called metacognition, where I'm not just talking to the person, I'm thinking about what I'm gonna say, what I am saying, the tone that I'm saying it in, and doing all that with their words as well.
17:04 Blindboy Boatclub? And that metacognition, that is autistic. That is what social interaction is like for an autistic person. And that's why we avoid it so much and why it takes so much out of us. I use the fart metaphor to try and describe this to people who might not be able to empathize with. Imagine you have to do a huge giant fart. Big Matt, you're in work, sitting at your desk and you have to do a huge fucking fart. Just before you're about to do the fart, your boss walks in, they speak to you about something and you have to pretend that you're not holding in a giant fart. And also, you're not listening to what they're saying. You're pretending to listen to what they're saying because really all you're thinking about,
17:49 Blindboy Boatclub? you're thinking about that giant fart and you're thinking about, please go away, cause I need to fart. Then they leave, you do the fart, you feel a sense of relief, but you say to yourself, fuck, my boss walked in, said something important to me and I don't know what they said. I haven't a clue and I can't go back and ask because it'd be too awkward. That's a bit what being autistic is like. And similarly, you've got other people who you can fart around. You have other people, you don't have to hold farts in around them. You can fart in front of them and that's fine, they don't give a shit. They'll fart as well, they might even make a joke about it. And that is, that's your little close circle of people who you can unmask around and then also other neurodivergent people.
18:33 Blindboy Boatclub? So when I saw this fella coming towards me, it's not like, oh fuck, I'm gonna avoid them. Oh shit, I have to talk to that person. It's like, no, brilliant, I haven't seen him in 20 years. I'm gonna go up and say hello, but I am aware that this is gonna be difficult unless they change it massively as a human being since I knew him 20 years ago, but they didn't. So when I said hello, their only context for me was school. So it became very apparent to me, this person wants to tell me how well that they've done since school. And then they listed out other people who we bought new, who we didn't ask about and proceeded to tell me about how they weren't doing well.
19:15 Blindboy Boatclub? Got fired, had to immigrate at the recession, not allowed to see their kids. So then with the metacognition that I'm going through, thinking about what I'm gonna say and thinking about what the other person is saying, I'm now formulating an assessment in my head and the assessment is.
19:33 Blindboy Boatclub? Look, where this person is at, because I'm trying not to be judgmental. Where this person is at. External markers of success are very important to this person. Because they've just told me how well they are doing. And then told me about how other people are not doing well. And that has been the entirety of the conversations thus far. Has been about these binary oppositions. And then they moved to me and said, what have you been up to? And then immediately brought up. A novelty song that I released in 2010. Which would have been very mainstream. That's an immediate red flag, you see. If someone, if someone brings that up from 2010.
20:15 Blindboy Boatclub? It means that that person is not aware that I've had a career beyond that. And then he went for the, so what are you up to anyway? Are you working? Because it was like a Thursday, you see. Thursday at about 11am. Now, he's in work in his work clothes, in his suit. And I'm just wandering around town. And you've got to remember too. If you knew me from school, you wouldn't think I was going to amount to anything. This is, here's why I'm speaking about this. I stood face to face with a person who.
20:46 Blindboy Boatclub? Within their value system. I, I did not have value. Someone who didn't think much of me. And in that moment. I felt very, very insecure. I felt shame. The sudden contraction of self. I felt worthless.
21:09 Blindboy Boatclub? And it was painful. And I knew I felt this because what I wanted to do. Was to reassure this person. To start listing out my achievements and say. Oh, well, actually, I, I've written books. I've written books and I have a podcast and I do gigs. I felt like I needed to. List out external achievements in order to. Let this person know that I'm worth something and I didn't do it.
21:41 Blindboy Boatclub? Instead, I noticed the feeling of shame. I noticed it in the moment and relished it as an opportunity to go, "Here you are now, you're feeling insecure. Let's feel it, let's sit with it.
21:57 Blindboy Boatclub? We're not reacting to it, we're gonna respond to it. What a wonderful opportunity you've been given to experience the thing that you're afraid of." And I made the choice to, to not tell this person what I've been doing, or what I'm up to, or anything about my life whatsoever. I responded by saying, "Ah, you know yourself, tipping away", which is an Irish neurotypical nothing answer, which means, "Don't ask any further questions because I've nothing interesting to add." And I, I said, "Chat to you later", and I felt great, it felt wonderful to go,
22:40 Blindboy Boatclub? "That person in their reality, external success is, is very important to how they see themselves and how they see other people. If they don't think much of you, it doesn't matter a fuck. It does not matter a fuck." And I gotta be clear, this person wasn't being mean. They weren't being mean to me, they weren't having a jab by asking me what I'm up to, by telling me how well they're doing. They're soothing their own insecurity, that maybe they were afraid that they needed me to know that they were doing well. That's fine, if that's where a person is at, that's where a person is at. But I was just, I felt great because that showed me that my self-esteem is in a good place,
23:23 Blindboy Boatclub? that my self-esteem and my mental health is in a solid enough place, that I don't have to reassure someone, I don't have to let someone know, "Actually, do you know what, I'm, I'm worth something, I am. I've achieved things since school, I have." Bullshit. I'm worth something because I'm a human being. He's worth something because he's a human being. We have the exact same fucking worth. And external achievements, they're just behaviours, nothing to do with worth. And the lads that were listed out that fell on hard times, they have the same worth too. And also...
24:00 Blindboy Boatclub? I was happy because what I'd done was actually quite compassionate.
24:06 Blindboy Boatclub? If someone, if you haven't met someone in 20 years and the first thing they start talking about is their achievements, then it means that that person, they're probably not genuinely secure or genuinely happy. It's a position of insecurity and letting someone know how well they are doing and telling me what their salary is. That's a temporary relief from their feeling of shame. So by me allowing that and holding space for it and letting them walk off, feeling good, feeling better, that's actually a compassionate and kind thing for me to do. And I was so happy to have, to have had that awareness, to have had that opportunity and to be putting in fucking work.
24:51 Blindboy Boatclub? That's, that's, that's solid self-work there. That's like the recovering addict when they turn down that drink. That's what that's like. I didn't give in, I didn't give in to my shame and insecurity. Because what would have happened? If I did go, well, well, actually, no, here's a list of things I've done since 2006. It would have just given me temporary relief, a very temporary relief to avoid taking ownership, taking ownership of the feeling of shame. That's what I'd, I took ownership of my shame. This fella knows I don't have a leave in cert. He knows I was expelled from school.
25:37 Blindboy Boatclub? I have a lot of shame and insecurity around that and I have to take ownership of it. I have to take ownership of it, sit with it, feel it somatically. And, and sit with it as, yes, I have shame. Yes, I'm feeling shame.
25:55 Blindboy Boatclub? But it's not real. I've no reason to be ashamed. There's nothing shameful at all. I'm a human being and I have worth. Shame is bullshit. I should feel ashamed because fourteen-year-old me couldn't concentrate in class? Because autistic me couldn't concentrate in... I should feel shame in my forties over that? That's a... what a highly unrealistic way to view me as a human being or any other human being. And that there is the objective reality. And sitting with the shame there. I've said it before, but it's like the Buddhist monks in Tibet. They need to take ownership of the fear of dying. They need to take ownership of, "I am a mortal human being and some... one day I will die."
26:41 Blindboy Boatclub? So they meditate beside corpses. They meditate beside dismembered corpses that are strewn around the mountains by vultures. And they sit with the stench of death so that they're not avoiding the feeling of fear. And of course, the most autistic thing in the world I could have done would be to stop mid-conversation and say to him,
27:07 Blindboy Boatclub? "I noticed that you would think I've done fuck all up myself and I'm feeling shame here. And this is reminding me of Buddhist monks that meditate around corpses. Do you know about that, do you?" I couldn't do that. But you're level one, level two neurotypicals. You see him from a distance and you go, "Right, strap in. Strap in now for some small talk." Like, the goals of neurotypical conversation versus neurodivergent conversation. I find neurotypical conversations,
27:39 Blindboy Boatclub? the main goal is about building and maintaining relationships, reinforcing the social connection, gossip, establishing hierarchy. That's what that conversation was. That was a... two dogs sniffing each other's arses. That was... that's what that conversation was. He had a good sniff on my arse and just thought, "Okay, I'm higher up than him. I know by the smell of his arse." And that's what dogs are doing there. That's why dogs have so many receptors in their nose.
28:13 Blindboy Boatclub? A dog sniffing another dog's arse is like they're going through that purse, that other dog's, nine hours of that dog's Facebook history. That's what that interaction is. So the interaction I had with this fella from school, two dogs sniffing each other's arses. He came away quite happy with the smell of his own arse. I've already made that highly autistic there, that dis- Jesus Christ. Neurotypical conversations, it's the arse sniffing, alright? Building social rapport, gossip, all about social connections and sometimes hierarchy. Neurodivergent conversation, that stuff is secondary.
28:54 Blindboy Boatclub? And what's most important is facts, information, the sharing of information or problem solving. It's not exclusive to either group. Like it's, there's plenty of fucking very definitely neurotypical people that I know. And I'll see them from 50 yards. They'd see me and go brilliant. I'm gonna go over to him, he's gonna tell me something interesting. Every time I chat to him, he's gonna tell me something mad. And then I see that person and go, excellent, they like it when I tell them facts. And that person's neurotypical. But then other times you have your profoundly neurotypical people where that doesn't work. And now it's, uh-oh, small talk. And those ones are by far the most challenging for autistic people.
29:38 Blindboy Boatclub? Those are the ones where we must mask. And those are the ones, that's why I can't have a normal job. That's why I cannot have a normal job. Because normal jobs, you're guaranteed to meet those people. I had it, I had it. The one normal job I ever had, I worked in a fucking call centre, in a team, a team of, of 80% profoundly neurotypical people, two other people on the team who were responsive to hearing about facts, but the other 80%, do not do it, forget about it, they look at you weird, you think too much, they pull a face, the facts are not welcome here. So at lunchtime, I used to have to go to the car park just to be by myself for an hour.
30:22 Blindboy Boatclub? I had to be by myself, I had to, and I used to get in trouble for it. I used to get in trouble for it in work. The team leader brought it to my attention. People are upset that you are not sitting with them for lunch. And they think that you don't like them because you're going out to the car park at lunchtime. And I didn't have the words to say it. I didn't have, I couldn't explain it because I didn't know I was autistic. I could not explain it. But really, I had to. I'd been masking like a fucking lunatic all day. And I had to go to the car park to unmask. And that meant pacing up and down, listening to music and thinking about dogs sniffing other dogs' arses or whatever. No, CIA crack cocaine trafficking was my thing at the time, which is what got me fired.
31:07 Blindboy Boatclub? I'm not going to get into that story. You know it. That's what got me fired. But that, that inability to exist with ease and comfort in highly neurotypical conversations is why I could never have a normal job. It is why I failed school. School is a normal job. That's what the fuck school is. School is a normal job. Wear a uniform, turn up on time, follow lots and lots of rules. Don't be weird, don't fidget and don't go off topic. So, school is training for a normal job and school is a normal job. And that's why I don't have a leave insert. My nervous system will not allow me to emotionally regulate.
31:50 Blindboy Boatclub? And then if I'm not emotionally regulated, then I'm into mental health difficulties territory. I'm speaking about this.
32:00 Blindboy Boatclub? To let people know what it's like to be autistic and for the autistic and neurodivergent people listening to go, oh, great. He's speaking about an experience that is my daily life. It feels cathartic and it feels normal to know that another person is dealing with this shit too. Because it is fucking normal. Forty percent of the population are estimated to be neurodivergent in some way. So this is common crack. The bit that's abnormal is that social systems are designed around the neurotypical, the majority. I actually didn't expect that I was going to talk about that there for 30 minutes.
32:41 Blindboy Boatclub? So I obviously needed to get something off my chest. That was unplanned because this week, this week I have an interview, a chat, and I was gonna just go straight into that. And I didn't expect to be speaking for that long, but I'm glad that I did. Before I get into the chat, because I don't want to interrupt it too much, I'm gonna ask for you to support the podcast via Patreon. If you enjoyed the podcast, if you listen to it regularly, if it brings you mirth, merriment, entertainment, whatever has you listening, please consider funding this podcast directly because this is my job. This is how I earn a living and I love and adore. And I'm so fucking excited that I know for the next three months,
33:24 Blindboy Boatclub? what I have to do is spend every single day in deep curiosity, following threads of subjects that interest me, achieving flow state, following little fizzy connections and then the utter enjoyment of writing that and delivering it to you as a podcast episode. That's daily joy and meaning and I can do it by myself. And I don't have to talk to anyone if I don't want to talk to them. And I have my lovely office that I can rent out and spend time in solitude, immersed in my self-directed work that I love getting up out of bed in the morning to do
34:07 Blindboy Boatclub? and that I have to drag myself away from. So if you listen to the podcast and you enjoy that, please consider funding that. Funding that. All I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee. If you met me in real life, would you buy me a cup of coffee or a pint? Pint or a cup of coffee once a month. That's it. You get four podcasts a month. And the best part, if you can't afford it, don't worry about it. Listen for free. Keep listening for free. If you can't afford that, that's no problem at all. Because the person who is paying is paying for you to listen for free. Everybody gets the exact same podcast. I get to earn a living. It's a wonderful model. This is
34:48 Blindboy Boatclub? listener funded. And I'm not beholden to advertisers. I'm not worried about, is this gonna be popular, is it not? Or an advertiser ringing me up saying, don't talk about that. Or, can you talk about this because we think it'll get more views? Fuck off. My job is to be curious. That's it. And my job is to fail and be wrong. Because with that process, you get occasional brilliance. But the other process, listening to advertisers dictating what you do, you just get consistent mediocrity. Anyway, patreon.com/theblindbypodcast. And try and do that, if not on a desktop, don't do it through the Patreon app on your Apple
35:30 Blindboy Boatclub? iPhone. Don't do it through the app on the iPhone. Because Apple will take 30%. So do it through your browser on your phone, or the browser on your fucking laptop. So my guest this week is one of my favourite people in the whole fucking world. Professor Carl Chin, who, Carl is one of these, is definitely neurotypical. A neurotypical person who I just have incredible rapport with. We chat, oh my god, we have so much fucking crack. He is my English Manconmagon. Mancon isn't with us anymore, unfortunately. Carl is
36:12 Blindboy Boatclub? my English Manconmagon. He's fascinating. He's a font of knowledge. The reason I would say, call him neurotypical, he's highly, highly social, incredibly social person. Bubbling with friendliness and kindness and warmth for every single person that walks into the room. Just a lovely man with incredibly sound politics, based around compassion and empathy and fairness. He's one of the voices that we need to be hearing more of. Because-
36:44 Blindboy Boatclub? He can heal communities with his words, in particular, the people of England. England is moving towards some far-right shit. Nigel Farage and those pricks. The place is decimated by Thatcher neoliberalism. Public services all privatized. Brexit has been a shitshow. The social and economic conditions for division have been sowed very effectively. And Karl Chin has got the type of words that can heal those divisions. This will be my second time having Karl on. The last time was 150 podcasts ago, so nearly three years ago. He's a broadcaster. He's written books.
37:27 Blindboy Boatclub? He is an academic, a social historian, which is the history of ordinary people, of working-class people, not necessarily the history of the elites. And in this podcast, this chat that we had in Sheffield the other day, we focus on the history of the English working class. And the English working class have got a huge amount to be proud of, in particular, how they fought for workers' rights, contracts, unions, things that are now disappearing because of neoliberalism, that need to be brought back so that we have a social net. Also, Karl launched a podcast of his own about three months ago, and I want to plug the fuck out of it.
38:07 Blindboy Boatclub? And please go and listen to it and subscribe to it and give Karl your support. The podcast is called Our Lives, Our Stories with Karl Chin. And if you like the chat that we have, you like listening to him, go and support his podcast. Right, so here's the chat I had with Karl. And you know what? It's a long podcast this week, and that's absolutely fine, because it's a podcast. You don't have to listen to it all in one setting. Listen to bits of it over a couple of days. Make a week out of it if you want. That's the joy of a nice, long podcast. Karl, do you know anything at all about the invention of Greenwich Mean Time? Yes. Excellent. Bring your mic up a bit there. It's had to be brought in for the railways.
38:50 Speaker 03 Because there was a different time in every major town, city and village. And they'd have a clock in the middle. And so let's say for example, I'm from Birmingham, say it was eleven o'clock in Birmingham. It might be five past eleven in Sheffield or five to eleven in Barnsley.
39:04 Blindboy Boatclub? Now, you mean literally because of the sun?
39:06 Speaker 03 No, because the clocks were not synchronized.
39:08 Blindboy Boatclub? Okay, yeah.
39:09 Speaker 03 So when they had the railways, the railway system's got to run on time. So they decided they would have Greenwich Mean Time.
39:17 Blindboy Boatclub? And that's grand if you're dealing with Sheffield and Birmingham bus. But the thing is, they went for the entire fucking empire, that's the problem. Well, it was like, you know, if it's six o'clock in Limerick, it's also six o'clock in London. But it's a very different six o'clock.
39:34 Speaker 03 A very different six.
39:35 Blindboy Boatclub? We can deal with this. Worst things happened. We can deal with that. But it was chaos in India. There were riots and nearly social collapse in India because they just stuck to Greenwich Mean Time. And you had two different parts of the country. And it's like morning time and nighttime, but it's still the same. And that was nuts.
39:55 Speaker 03 They had the same thing when they changed from the old calendar to the new calendar and they lost days.
40:01 Blindboy Boatclub? What?
40:01 Speaker 03 Right, from the Julian, if I get it right, the Julian to the Gregorian calendar.
40:06 Blindboy Boatclub? That, you're talking twelve hundreds there, yeah?
40:08 Speaker 03 Uh, seventeen hundreds.
40:10 Blindboy Boatclub? Yeah, because there was another one before that. It caused a lot of bullshit in Ireland. Around the eleven hundreds of, oh, about the date of Easter.
40:17 Speaker 03 That was the Easter one. That was when they went from the Celtic Easter.
40:21 Blindboy Boatclub? Mm hmm.
40:21 Speaker 03 To the Roman Easter.
40:23 Blindboy Boatclub? Because we have a strange, there was a strange little holiday where people were basically allowed to have sex outside a wedlock. I think it was, I think it was because they rejected the Easter. It was like, this, this is a day that God doesn't know about, so you can just do what you want. Seriously. And it was celebrated up until the seventies and people had sex out of wedlock and everything going, it just doesn't count, God doesn't know about it.
40:47 Speaker 03 I did have learned some things off him.
40:50 Blindboy Boatclub? Yeah, I have a couple of things mangled up there. And you're Birmingham. And the reason I brought you on here in particular is I, we did not learn about the English working class over in Ireland, you know?
41:06 Speaker 03 Yeah.
41:06 Blindboy Boatclub? And it's something we should learn about. It's something, I mean, I'm assuming you learn about some of it in history, but.
41:15 Speaker 03 We don't really, do we?
41:16 Blindboy Boatclub? Really?
41:17 Speaker 03 No, it's all about the upper class.
41:19 Blindboy Boatclub? Are you fucking serious?
41:20 Speaker 03 We don't learn about our own people. Sheffield is a city rooted in working class England. We're on the borders here between Mercia and Northumbria. The borders between the Peak District and then going down to the lowerlands towards, towards the east. You've got this city bigger than Manchester.
41:39 Speaker 03 And you've got a city that thrust itself onto the world stage through cutlery, the grinding of cutlery and steel. And if you look now, you can't see too much, it's still there, but you would have gone down to Attcliff, Brightside, the east end of Sheffield. One of the greatest working class neighbourhoods in the world.
42:06 Blindboy Boatclub? Something I would love to get your opinion on is, so when I research anything about Ireland.
42:14 Speaker 03 Yeah.
42:15 Blindboy Boatclub? We are great at writing about our mythology and our history. We're fucking really good at it. And when I go looking for similar stuff, for anything to do with England, Waze is a bit, no, Waze is pretty good actually. Cause they have that, I can't remember the name of the book, you know, their big fucking book of mythology, you don't know the name?
42:32 Speaker 03 Mappy Doggy.
42:33 Blindboy Boatclub? That one.
42:34 Speaker 03 Yeah.
42:34 Blindboy Boatclub? And the Scots, kind of a lot of that is Irish mythology, because they had Dalírta. So something that, a feeling I have in my fucking bones, right? Sheffield Cathedral.
42:48 Blindboy Boatclub? They found there the Sheffield Cross, and that Sheffield Cross is eighth century. It's up now in the British Museum. And if you look at the Sheffield Cross, it's, it's not Celtic, it's not like what we have in Ireland. It's very unique. It's a cross, but all over it are motifs of vines. Now, in Ireland, I know, every single fucking old church that we had, it was a pagan site first. It was either a holy well, or, you know, we, we used to do that. So we would can't, the, the priests in the fifth, sixth century would consecrate sites that the people were venerating already.
43:28 Speaker 03 Yeah.
43:30 Blindboy Boatclub? I have a feeling in my belly that that means that it was a sacred grove of the Anglo Saxons.
43:38 Speaker 03 Yeah, it could well have been. I mean, what, originally this was a Celtic area. So you would have had a Celtic kingdom here. Eventually it got to cover by the Anglo Saxons. So really, South Yorkshire, well, nearly all of Yorkshire would have been Deir Yar, based around York. Further north.
43:55 Blindboy Boatclub? Deir Yar, is that a Germanic type of art?
43:58 Speaker 03 Yeah, but further north, then what made up the kingdom of, of Northumbria was two sub kingdoms. Deir Yar around York, and then further north, Benicia, which was based around Banbury and by Lindisfarne. And that would have been really a, a kingdom, a Welsh kingdom that was taken over by King Ida of the Angles, who would probably have moved up. The Angles originally, anybody with Anglo Saxon heritage were, were immigrants. We came here from North Germany. There's a little peninsula on the borders, just below the border of Germany, above the border of Germany, right by Denmark. There's a little peninsula called Angolan. It's the peninsula of the Angles.
44:40 Speaker 03 And the Angles came over en masse, and they settled in the land of the East Angles. Some of them went north, took over Benicia, which really stretched from Lothian, East Lothian, down to the Tees. And then south of the Tees was Deir Yar. So they came together eventually. You had this powerful kingdom called Northumbria that was evangelised by Celts. So there were mainly Irish monks that had gone over to Iona, off what is now Scotland. And then they came down to, to, to turn us pagans into Christians. So there's that melding of. Older Celtic, and if you go up just a bit further up in Yorkshire to Elmit,
45:23 Speaker 03 just to the west of Leeds, that was one of the last Celtic kingdoms in what became Anglland, England, became part of Northumbria about six sixteen, around about that time. And they've done DNA of people in West Yorkshire, don't tell them this, please. They've probably got more Celtic blood than English blood. But that tells us that over centuries, the majority of the Celtic population were not exterminated, as it used to be thought by the Anglo Saxons. That the kings and the warriors may have been defeated, killed or fled west. But the basic population stayed the same and over centuries, probably less than centuries, the defeated people, who we would now call the Welsh, which is a bit rich really,
46:08 Speaker 03 because the word Welsh in Anglo Saxon means foreigner.
46:13 Speaker 03 And we were the foreigners that came up. But the Welsh would abandon, slowly abandon their language because do you want to speak the language of the defeated? Or the language of the victor? So this is a really fascinating part of Anglland of England. So the North West, there was a big Welsh, what we might now call a Welsh, a British kingdom called Wreched, which later became Cumbria.
46:37 Blindboy Boatclub? What, what makes it British then? What does that mean?
46:39 Speaker 03 So British is pre, pre Welsh.
46:42 Blindboy Boatclub? Oh, you mean Breton?
46:44 Speaker 03 Yes, so it would be the old term for the Celtic tribes.
46:47 Blindboy Boatclub? Okay.
46:47 Speaker 03 Had been Romanised or not Romanised. So Brittany, some of the Britons, after the Anglo Saxon invasions, fled to what was then called Armoreca. And they intermated with the local Celtic population. And that's why their language can be understood by the Welsh.
47:04 Blindboy Boatclub? That's because, do you know, I went researching into this fucking, do you know the stereotypical image of a Frenchman? Has this stripy jumper and the onions around the neck? That's it.
47:15 Speaker 03 That's Breton.
47:16 Blindboy Boatclub? They were actual onion sellers.
47:18 Speaker 03 Yeah.
47:18 Blindboy Boatclub? Who would come over, they would, they had these pink onions that were grown in Brittany, that were, people loved them, they were very tasty. They would literally put them around their neck. The jumper they wore was a Breton jumper.
47:31 Speaker 03 Yeah.
47:32 Blindboy Boatclub? But they would go to Wales. And I think maybe Cornwall. Did people could understand what they were saying?
47:40 Speaker 03 Yeah, they would. And Cornish probably died out, well, it did die out, certainly by the end of the 18th century. Although thankfully, there's a revival of the Cornish language.
47:49 Blindboy Boatclub? I, yeah, I said it there. When I was there, I said it and a few people started shouting word. But what, again, what I found so strange was, again, it's just a pride thing. If I go to Ireland and I say, does anyone have a bit of Irish? They scream.
48:04 Speaker 03 Yeah.
48:05 Blindboy Boatclub? The shame I felt in the room, you know what I mean? The people who screamed a few words, there was an anger in the teeth, you know what I mean? And then the other people, I, I couldn't understand that. I'm like, what the fuck are you ashamed of that for?
48:17 Speaker 03 But, but, but we're taught to be ashamed of our accents, aren't we? Our dialect, it's dying out. I, I came here in about 1982, I was writing a book about the Sheffield gang wars. It was part of a book I was writing. And I interviewed an old man called Frank Harris from Alfred Road, I think in Attic Cliff. And his language was beautiful. It was all thy sense and thee and it was, it really was beautiful. I think older people still say it, but it dies out.
48:46 Blindboy Boatclub? What did he say?
48:47 Speaker 03 Thy sense.
48:48 Blindboy Boatclub? What the fuck is that?
48:49 Speaker 03 Tell him.
48:51 Blindboy Boatclub? Is that what it means? Tell him?
48:55 Blindboy Boatclub? Thy sense?
48:55 Speaker 03 Their self.
48:57 Blindboy Boatclub? Their self?
48:58 Speaker 03 Thy self.
48:59 Blindboy Boatclub? Thy self, thy self.
49:01 Speaker 03 And thee and thou's and it was, it, it was, it was like listening to Chaucer.
49:08 Speaker 03 Do you know what I mean?
49:08 Blindboy Boatclub? Wow.
49:09 Speaker 03 And South Yorkshire's always had a very strong dialect, hasn't it? And the accent been stronger than perhaps even further north, or certainly even further north in Yorkshire. We're losing our dialects. We're, we're taught from an early age. If you wanna get on, you've got to abandon how you speak. It's something I rebelled against, as you can gather.
49:29 Blindboy Boatclub? Just a, um.
49:35 Blindboy Boatclub? I mean, it pisses me off that so much of this is determined by, we say, by what London thinks, right? So, the Birmingham accent is associated with being stupid.
49:46 Speaker 03 Yeah.
49:46 Blindboy Boatclub? Like, Irish accent is associated with being stupid.
49:48 Speaker 03 Yeah.
49:49 Blindboy Boatclub? Liverpool accent, I think, is dishonest.
49:51 Speaker 03 Scally's.
49:52 Blindboy Boatclub? Yeah.
49:54 Blindboy Boatclub? Very proud there, fair play to you.
49:56 Speaker 03 East End gangsters.
49:58 Blindboy Boatclub? Yeah.
49:58 Speaker 03 They're the stereotypes that got us, haven't they? They must have a list.
50:03 Blindboy Boatclub? What is? Because I'm, the Sheffield accent to me, like, it's hard for me to hear it. It'd be like saying to you, can you tell the difference between Limerick and Kerry or something, you know? And the Bromley accent, what I love about it is it doesn't happen in the nose, it's somewhere around the top of the chest. Then you've got your, Liverpool is up in the nose and the throat, same at Manchester, and then here it's nosy and throaty. But is this a nasal accent in Sheffield, do you think, or?
50:33 Speaker 03 I wouldn't say it's too nasal, would you? I think Birmingham's got more of a nasal one.
50:38 Blindboy Boatclub? Do you think so?
50:38 Speaker 03 Yeah, I think what it is with the nasal accent, it's the smoke and the smell of industry, but I don't go against that with you think, look at Sheffield, which is not nasally.
50:48 Blindboy Boatclub? Mm-hmm.
50:49 Speaker 03 Unless there would be different accents, whether it had been between, say, the East End and the other parts of Sheffield, that couldn't well be the case.
50:58 Blindboy Boatclub? Um.
50:59 Speaker 03 But you know, this is such an interesting city because, sorry to interrupt us quickly there, because I didn't realise about, I was ginning up a little bit before I came here because I didn't want to be, look like a mog, but Mary Queen of Scots was here for 14 years.
51:14 Speaker 03 Yeah, it's.
51:14 Blindboy Boatclub? Doing what?
51:15 Speaker 03 Imprisoned.
51:17 Blindboy Boatclub? All right, we don't learn about that. Do you think they're fucking teachers about that?
51:22 Speaker 03 And this is where the greatest game in the world, football, was invented. Yeah?
51:28 Blindboy Boatclub? Fuck off.
51:29 Speaker 03 No. Sheffield FC, 1857.
51:33 Blindboy Boatclub? Really?
51:33 Speaker 03 Oldest football club in the world and eighteen sixteen Hallam F C. The oldest football ground in the world.
51:39 Blindboy Boatclub? Do you know what football was before it became that, before it became a thing? What like, as in, okay, we've in Ireland, we've got hurling, right? But we like, we can read about hurling from a thousand years ago longer.
51:51 Speaker 03 Yeah.
51:51 Blindboy Boatclub? So we know it was this thing. Was football a thing or did someone just go, let's do this today?
51:57 Speaker 03 There's still some old fashioned, well, they say it's football, it's more like a big battle.
52:02 Blindboy Boatclub? Yeah, hurling was like that too.
52:04 Speaker 03 You throw a ball in the middle and it really is just both sides of one town.
52:10 Blindboy Boatclub? Different towns and it might happen over miles.
52:13 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah.
52:13 Blindboy Boatclub? That it was with hurling and yeah, we had this.
52:15 Speaker 03 And pig splatters. Anybody in here that would play with a case ball? There's a few of my age group around here.
52:23 Blindboy Boatclub? What's that?
52:24 Speaker 03 So a case ball was made of leather and we would be ten and eight, nine, ten, eleven years or old, playing on full sized pitches, usually on a slope, in the middle of the winter, muddy, no wonder we couldn't have any skill, you'd just kick the ball and chase, wouldn't you? That's all you could do.
52:43 Blindboy Boatclub? I heard a lot of the old football players ended up getting punch drunk.
52:47 Speaker 03 Yeah.
52:47 Blindboy Boatclub? Because the the ball would get soaked with rain and then.
52:50 Speaker 03 So heavy.
52:51 Blindboy Boatclub? Yeah.
52:51 Speaker 03 So heavy.
52:52 Blindboy Boatclub? And before the interval, something I want you to chat about is, we were talking about the Sheffield gangs.
52:58 Speaker 03 Yeah.
52:59 Blindboy Boatclub? And the area that is now Park Hill, I believe.
53:02 Speaker 03 Yeah, so it was Sky Edge was the tossing ring. So if people don't know what tossing was, there was two types of coin games, there was lots of coin games. But one was pitch and toss, so a group of lads would stand together and they would have a mark and they'd pitch their pennies or hateleys to the mark, whoever got them first then would get them and toss them in the air. If they came down heads, you kept them.
53:28 Blindboy Boatclub? So there's no horseshoe?
53:29 Speaker 03 No horseshoe.
53:30 Blindboy Boatclub? It's money, throwing money.
53:32 Speaker 03 But it's hateleys and pennies. What then developed was a game called tossing. And in the, I'm gonna have to be very careful here. In the middle of the ring was a tosser.
53:46 Speaker 03 And he'd stand in the ring, and you'd have it in the little back streets. And he's standing there, my nan remembered it in Birmingham when they come out the pub. And that somebody would say like, two pennies, usually Queen Victoria, Diamond Jubilee. Chock them up in the air, I'm gonna toss them, let's say for fifty pence. And there's a group of blokes and you say, I'll cover that for ten pence until the fifty pence was covered. If they came down two heads, then the tosser won. If they came down heads and tails, you had to toss again. But it's very important, the coins had to spin. They had to spin. And when I was interviewing a bloke in Glasgow about this. He said he perfected a technique where they went up heads and they went round sideways instead of spinning.
54:30 Speaker 03 And it was dark in his house. I went to interview him late one evening. I said, what happened if you got caught? He said, look, and he turned the lights on and his cheek was a mass of razor blades. Cock throat razors where he'd been caught cheating. So you've got these tossing rings, you'd have little ones outside the pub. The Norfolk Bridge, they used to have tossing rings on the Norfolk Bridge. But then the big one was on Sky Edge. And it was a open land then, it was difficult for the police to get to. They would have crows, lookouts. And the gangs took over. And the gang that took over, because there was such a lot of money. Straight after the First World War, there was a short boom.
55:11 Speaker 03 So you'd have business people, small scale business people, butchers, little gaffers. People like that coming up, as well as working class men. And a guy called Mooney from Westbar, which then was, I know it's not the same now, but then was the Irish neighbourhood. He and his pals took over the tossing ring. And what they would do, because there were so many men. Everybody wanted to see the coins coming up to see which way they would drop. And there was a lot of money at stake. They'd be betting sometimes for thirty, forty, fifty pounds. So they would have what was called the belt man. He'd take his old fashioned belt off. And as people moving forwards and the men looking forward to see what was happening, they'd be whipping them back.
55:54 Speaker 03 They'd be whipping the belt. And Mooney took over with his men, but they had a man in the gang called Garvey. Garvey was a very.
56:04 Speaker 03 In Ireland, there's a word called a sleveen, isn't there?
56:06 Blindboy Boatclub? Sleveen, so that means kind of sneaky, can't be trusted.
56:10 Speaker 03 Yeah, he was a sleveen. And he got in with the Park Brigade, which was the biggest gang, Spack Street gang in Sheffield. And they took the, they took over Sky Edge from Mooney. That led to the Sheffield gang wars. And it was at the same time as the racecourse wars between the Birmingham gang and the Sabinis. And Mooney called on one of the most feared and frightening Birmingham hard men called Thomas Armstrong. But they were well outnumbered. Garvin was very clever. And this went on for about three, four years. Eventually, a chief constable called Sillyso came from Glasgow. He was supposed to be the man that put down the Glaswegian gangs. He hadn't. And he got all the praise for the gang's ending.
56:55 Speaker 03 The man who'd done it was the previous chief constable. And what he did was the same as what the Birmingham police did in the eighteen nineties and turn of the twentieth century. They recruited very tough, tall men.
57:08 Blindboy Boatclub? Okay, to kick the heads off the gang, yeah.
57:10 Speaker 03 Absolute, they took the fight to the streets. So there was Sergeant Robertson, would go out with an Irish bloke, they were six foot tall. There was Luxley and Lund. They would go out and they'd go into the pubs where the gangs were. And they'd close the door. And they'd take them on. So the Sheffield gang wars were really vicious. They were localised. And it was very much more, no, it was a civil war between one gang. And Sheffield got a really bad press. It was seen as the Chicago of England. But it was really hyped up what was happening. What was different about it was that Garvin and his men attacked Mooney and his family and his friends in their own house.
57:54 Speaker 03 Even in the bad fighting in London between the different gangs and in Birmingham, that never happened, you never attacked a house.
58:01 Blindboy Boatclub? That changed the rules.
58:02 Speaker 03 Yeah, it changed the rules badly. And on one occasion, Mooney was upstairs recovering from an illness. And they broke in on, I think it was on Boxing Day or a Christmas Eve, Christmas Eve. And his daughter Mary was sixteen, she was downstairs with a sixteen month old babby and a few months old babby and an old lady, Mrs Flynn, who was helping the mum. The mum had gone out, they burst in and they, that's right, it was Christmas Eve because they said to young Mary, we've got a surprise Christmas present for your dad. She managed to shout upstairs, shouting, they're here, they're here. Mooney heard, and this shows how daft some of these gangsters were. He hid in the wardrobe. Now, where's the first place you're gonna look if you go upstairs?
58:47 Blindboy Boatclub? Yeah.
58:48 Speaker 03 They didn't look in the wardrobe. But that shows that, I'm not even gonna say the caliber of them, and that shows how lacking in morals that they were, that they would break in to a house while there's babbies in the house and a young woman of sixteen.
59:05 Blindboy Boatclub? And it's something too, what I love about what you do is, because you'd often get asked to go on the radio uh speaking about the real Peaky Blinders and things like that, and you're always so conscious of the way that the culture will glamorise these people because it was long ago and you're reminding people, actually no, they're pretty evil. These were not nice individuals.
59:29 Speaker 03 The real Peaky Blinders, the Scottless of Manchester and Salford, the Mooney Gang, the Garvin Gang, the Park Brigade, the Hooligans of London, the Corner Boys of Liverpool, the Norman Conks of Glasgow, the Billy Boys of that, they were not meant to be admired. They were men that baited the police, battled each other, and the worst thing in my book that they did, they bullied the hardworking decent poor amongst whom they lived. My great grandfather Edward Derek was a real Peaky Blinder. His brother John led the, was one of the leaders of the Sparkbrook Gang. My great grandfather was a petty thief, a nasty horrible man. He, on one occasion, was in a fight, he hit the bloke with a shovel.
1:00:14 Speaker 03 When that ever worked, he picked up a meat cleaver and he cleaved the bloke's head. The bloke lived, he only got three years. You could get sent down for five years for uttering false coins. What price? Somebody's life. And the worst thing he used to do, which old people from our dad's street told me about, he used to come home mucky drunk. Back to back houses in Birmingham, just like Sheffield, you got the entry into the yard, courtyard, and if she could hear him coming home, she'd run with my great, my grandmother, to hide next door with Granny Carey, because she got five big sons, and he wouldn't beat her up there. Or she'd go into what was called the Brewus in Birmingham, which was a shared
1:00:54 Speaker 03 wash house by the shared lavatories. Many of the time though, he got passed, and she was on her own, he beat her up viciously, he threatened to kill her. And years, I was brought up saying that she divorced him, and I always thought, how could a poor woman, in 1921, divorce a bloke? And then I found the divorce papers, and she got a divorce under the poor woman's provision. And it was very moving and very emotional, because their illegal language was exactly what the old people from our dad's street who remembered what a toe rag he was. It was exactly the same what they were, that he threatened to
1:01:34 Speaker 03 kill her, threatened to burn the house down. The real heroes of the backstreet folks are not gangsters, they were the women.
1:01:50 Speaker 03 It was the big sister who never had a childhood, minded the babbies. It was your mum who worked and grafted to try and stay clean, in the most difficult circumstances. It was the grandmothers that brought you to order and had had remedies and acted as unofficial midwives. I'm not proud to be the great grandson of a Peaky Blinder, but I'm very proud to be the son, the grandson, and the great grandson of Broombridge and backstreet wenchies.
1:02:16 Blindboy Boatclub? Go on.
1:02:21 Blindboy Boatclub? Here, we're gonna have a little interval, right? You can go for a piss and we'll be back out in ten or fifteen minutes. Dog bless. And there we have a little natural opportunity for an Ocarina pause, where you're gonna hear some adverts, all right? So let's just play the Ocarina. We'll try and play it nice and low, so I don't disturb any dogs.
1:02:45 Blindboy Boatclub? That's too high.
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1:05:31 Blindboy Boatclub? That was the Ocarina Pause. You heard some adverts. Support the podcast directly, patreon.com/theblindbypodcast. This is listener funded. It's how I earn a living, full time job.
1:05:46 Blindboy Boatclub? Upcoming gigs, because I've got some time off now. I'm not doing any serious gigging until October, October 26th, where I'm going to be doing my tour of England, Scotland and Wales. And we're going to start off there in Brighton on the 18th of October at the Brighton Dome. Then we'll move on to Cardiff there in Wales on the 20th.
1:06:10 Blindboy Boatclub? Over to Coventry then. I sound like I'm, I sound like I'm describing myself as a type of storm. I sound like a weather reader and my podcast is a storm. Onto Coventry at the Warwick Arts Centre on the 21st. Fucking Bristol there on the 22nd of October. Guildford, G Live, London, sold out. Glasgow, as good as sold out. Gateshead, let's have a bit of fucking Gateshead. Gateshead, I'm Anglo-Saxon name. Means goat's head.
1:06:45 Blindboy Boatclub? And then Nottingham, bit of fucking Nottingham in the depths of October. Let's see what fun I can have. Then April 27.
1:06:56 Blindboy Boatclub? Australia and New Zealand, all right? This is almost sold out. Beginning in Auckland, at the Auckland Town Hall. Then on to Melbourne, Palais Theatre, Melbourne. Nearly sold out that one.
1:07:10 Blindboy Boatclub? Brisbane Powerhouse in Brisbane. Part the Astor Theatre and then Sydney Opera House, which I am proud to say is very nearly sold out. I know it's April 27th, I know it's a long way away, but if you want your tickets, get them now. All tickets will be available on the blind by podcast dot ie, assuming it fucking works. And tickets for the UK tour there, fan.co.uk, forward slash the blind by podcast. I used to say, look it up on Google. You can't trust Google for shit anymore. Follow me on Instagram at blind by ball club. Back to the chat with the wonderful fucking Carl Chin. And in this second half,
1:07:54 Blindboy Boatclub? we really get into working class history, speaking about the charitists. Thank you. I hope you all had glorious wee wees. I fucking, jeez, I was starving, right? So I had a yogurt backstage and then I didn't have a fucking spoon, so.
1:08:10 Blindboy Boatclub? I had to take the bag off, obviously. That would have been terrible. And then I was, I tried to eat it with those fucking, you know, the wooden coffee stirrers.
1:08:20 Blindboy Boatclub? So I'm there starving going, gotta get back on stage soon. And then I just went for the hand, just went fucking hand yogurt, like a toddler and washed the hands and put the bag back on, so.
1:08:35 Speaker 03 Are your hands clean now?
1:08:36 Blindboy Boatclub? Oh, they are now. They're clean, yeah. And nearly, nearly, because I wasn't thinking, I was panicking, saw the toilet water and nearly went for the toilet handle dish.
1:08:47 Blindboy Boatclub? So that's what I was doing when you were getting adverts for Amazon or something.
1:08:55 Blindboy Boatclub? You have a podcast, have you?
1:08:56 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah.
1:08:57 Blindboy Boatclub? Which I was telling you to do the last time.
1:08:59 Speaker 03 I know, my daughters and my wife have nagged me, so it's called Our Lives, Our Stories, because I believe everybody's got a story to tell. And it's about, it's not about famous people. It's about all of us. Because everybody has made their mark upon history. And that's again, something goes working class people, we need to emphasise that we're as important as they are.
1:09:23 Blindboy Boatclub? A goal of mine, to give back to the people of England on account of having so many family members in the IRA.
1:09:35 Blindboy Boatclub? I, to use every fucking opportunity to speak about folklore and mythology history, I really wanted to speak about the Chartists.
1:09:44 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:09:44 Blindboy Boatclub? Because I know fuck all about them. Tell us about the Chartists movement and why it was important for shepherdom and what was it and why?
1:09:51 Speaker 03 So in 1829, across the country, there was a union in Birmingham led by a man called Thomas Atwood called the Birmingham Political Union. And there was other political unions then all across the country in the big towns and cities. And it was about bringing together the middle class and working class to fight for the vote because the middle class were excluded for the vote.
1:10:13 Blindboy Boatclub? Why do you mean the vote there now?
1:10:14 Speaker 03 To be able to vote in an election.
1:10:16 Blindboy Boatclub? That didn't, people didn't have that?
1:10:17 Speaker 03 No, so what you had was in some places like where there were freemen like in Nottingham and Coventry, the freemen of the borough had a vote. But in many places like there was East Dulwich, which was under the sea, and the landowner had the right to appoint an MP. Old Sarum was just a hill, the landowner had the right to appoint an MP. Others, there were a slightly broader base of the electorate, but they were very much upper middle class and overwhelmingly Britain was dominated by the landed elite.
1:10:48 Blindboy Boatclub? Who were Normans?
1:10:50 Speaker 03 Most of them were descended from flipping Normans that took land from us. And the the you had the House of Lords, obviously, the Lords, but many of their younger sons became solicitors, barristers, and tied into the landed gentry, the sirs, the baronets. They dominated Parliament. So there was this big campaign to extend the vote. And in essence, what happened was, the middle class said, support us to the working class, we'll get the vote, we won't get it all in one go, but we'll get one man, one vote, men over the age of twenty one, a property qualification. And when we get it, we'll help you get the vote. So what did the middle class do? They closed the door.
1:11:35 Blindboy Boatclub? Like us and Home Rule.
1:11:37 Speaker 03 They they close, yeah.
1:11:38 Blindboy Boatclub? Same thing.
1:11:38 Speaker 03 They closed the door. So, middle class men, and they set, they set the fact, what they call the franchise, the right to vote. It was a property qualification. They wrote to Edward Baines, the editor of the Leeds Mercury, they wrote to different editors of local newspapers. If we set the property qualification at this level, how many working class men might get the vote? If we set it at this one, would it be better? We'll have virtually none. So they set it at a level which really excluded ninety nine point five percent of working class men. In response, in the mid to late thirties, there emerged a real anger amongst working class people that they'd been betrayed. And there was
1:12:20 Blindboy Boatclub? Do you mean eighteen thirties here?
1:12:21 Speaker 03 Eighteen thirties. So they gathered, there was a man called William Lovett in London, there was a number of others, and they came together, and eventually they came up with the idea of the People's Charter. Now, we're not taught about these things at school. The world's first great working class movement was in this country. And they called them chartists because they had six points to the charter. One was universal male suffrage. They actually originally wanted to go for adult suffrage, but it was so radical, go for male suffrage, they had to leave the women out and hope that they would bring the women in later. But ladies, the the female chartists, and if you want to read about them, there's a wonderful
1:13:04 Speaker 03 Football by a woman called Dorothy Thompson, whom I owe a lot to because she she was my tutor, who gave me confidence to write about the people I belong to. The women were vital to the Chartists movement. So there were six points of the Charter. One was paid MPs. Now, we look at paid MPs today, we think, uh, is that the right thing? Why did you need paid MPs? Because if you weren't paid, how could a working class man stand for Parliament?
1:13:29 Blindboy Boatclub? Mm hmm.
1:13:31 Speaker 03 Equal electoral districts, u- universal male suffrage, secret ballots. The only thing that we haven't got today, based on the six points of the Charter, was they wanted an election every year. So they had these six points, but the the government pressed down hard against them. And there were big meetings and in eighteen thirty nine, there were riots in Birmingham in support of the Chartists. And in Sheffield, they tried, they were looking to have a, really, start a rebellion. There'd been a rebellion in Newport in South Wales. It was put down in Sheffield before it started because they found out. The the movement continued into the eighteen forties. They presented huge petitions with millions of signatures to Parliament.
1:14:15 Speaker 03 And probably the greatest leader of the Chartists movement was an Irishman, Fergus O'Connor, who was Protestant despite his name O'Connor. And the the O'Connor, he would have been descended from the last High Kings.
1:14:33 Blindboy Boatclub? Yeah.
1:14:33 Speaker 03 Of Ireland. And in Roscommon, he's the oldest family in Europe.
1:14:37 Blindboy Boatclub? Mm hmm.
1:14:38 Speaker 03 The O'Connordon's of Roscommon Town. And the last of High Kings were the O'Conners, but to keep the land, they had to become Protestants.
1:14:45 Blindboy Boatclub? Yeah.
1:14:46 Speaker 03 So they were Protestant, but he came to England, his family were off, really interested. His brother, Francisco Francis, went over to South America.
1:14:58 Blindboy Boatclub? Oh, there's.
1:14:59 Speaker 03 He fought with Simon Bolivar.
1:15:01 Blindboy Boatclub? But there's loads, like, there's, if you go to Argentina, Chile, you look at their founding fathers. A lot of them were Irish, they were the wild geese, the ones who had to.
1:15:12 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:15:12 Blindboy Boatclub? Fuck off.
1:15:13 Speaker 03 So. He came to England, he set up a newspaper, he was really angry, as were some others from a slightly better off back, well, he was from a better off background, about the new poor law. So the new poor law came in in eighteen thirty four, and basically what it was, as in the past, from the time of Queen Elizabeth, each parish was responsible for its poor. So what they would do, they would levy a rate on the better off. The better off didn't like this, they thought that we were all able bodied scroungers. So they thought we've got to, we've got to spend a lot of money to dissuade the able bodied poor for helping, asking for help. So they built work houses.
1:15:55 Speaker 03 And a lot of our modern hospitals emerged from the infirmaries of a hated institution. And all of these work houses, they were called Bastilles, because just like the Bastille symbolised the oppression of the French people, so too did the work houses symbolise the oppression of our people. And they had archways, and when you went in, they might, it was called the archway of tears. And they might as well add above the door, abandoned hope.
1:16:21 Blindboy Boatclub? Mm hmm.
1:16:21 Speaker 03 All ye who enter here, because husbands were separated from wives, daughters from mothers, sons from fathers, they were stripped, they were put into a uniform. The men had to break stones or pick oak and really thick pieces of rope from the navy, which had got lots of tar on it. The women had to work, work away in laundries. And Fergus O'Connor felt that this was an abomination against the family by splitting families up. And you had a few people, particularly in Yorkshire, who were Tory, what they called Tory radicals, old fashioned Tories, who may not have wanted the vote, but didn't believe in the family being split up. So it's a really interesting mixture.
1:17:05 Speaker 03 And Fergus O'Connor brought out the Poor Man's Gazette, and then he became the great leader of the chartists. He had the Northern Star, which was his publication. And you've got to imagine a position where many people didn't read or write, but whomsoever could read. The people, a little group would buy the newspaper.
1:17:25 Blindboy Boatclub? Read this.
1:17:26 Speaker 03 And they would read it aloud. To the rest, you've got that communality of people coming together to fight for equality. And he was the leader of what was called physical force chartism. It's split into two, the ones who said, well, we can persuade the upper class, you could never persuade them. And he said, we need to be a bit stronger. They took that as meaning he was going to lead a revolution. He wasn't after a revolution.
1:17:51 Blindboy Boatclub? Did they have a crack at anything?
1:17:52 Speaker 03 He wanted to threaten them. He wanted them to be scared.
1:17:55 Blindboy Boatclub? Leffinian type shows?
1:17:56 Speaker 03 Yeah. Not quite as much as that.
1:17:59 Blindboy Boatclub? Yeah.
1:17:59 Speaker 03 But he was, he, he, he was a wonderful speaker. He was over six foot tall, can you imagine him on a, on a big platform? And there's thousands of people and he could project his voice. And he, it, the, the English working class idolized him. They idolized him. There was another one who was another Irishman, Bruntier O'Brien.
1:18:18 Blindboy Boatclub? Mm hmm.
1:18:19 Speaker 03 Who was powerful. There was a guy called William, William Cuffay, who was mixed race. His, his wa, his mom was white, his dad was a freed slave. These were leaders of the English working class movement, showing how we should all come together to fight for equality and justice. And one day we will break down that barrier, that great big door of class bias, with God's grace.
1:18:44 Blindboy Boatclub? And.
1:18:47 Speaker 03 So sadly, the movement failed. It, it began to run out of steam in the late eighteen forties. It carried on to about eighteen.
1:18:54 Blindboy Boatclub? What happened to the leaders?
1:18:56 Speaker 03 Fergus died, um. He, he, he, they don't know what caused him, but he was, became seriously mentally ill. And he died. Most of the leaders, some of them were imprisoned, others were pulled in by the, the better off. Eighteen sixty seven, the better off of the working class, the highly skilled, gained the vote.
1:19:22 Speaker 03 Then later on, in the mid eighteen eighties, the agricultural workers and unskilled got the vote, but most of them didn't vote.
1:19:29 Blindboy Boatclub? But when you say the movement failed, how did suffrage end up happening then?
1:19:36 Speaker 03 So gradually in the eighteen sixties, they're thinking, well, we need to open the door a little bit to letting the better off of the working class. So in eighteen sixty seven, there was an extension of the suffrage.
1:19:48 Blindboy Boatclub? So what are we talking about here? Butchers, shopkeepers?
1:19:50 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah. Well, yes, but also highly skilled workers and engineers, people such as that. Eighteen eighty four, eighty five, then there's another act passed, which supposedly gave the vote to unskilled workers. But the problem was that you still had to prove where you lived. So until nineteen eighteen, and the representation of the People's Act of that year, the majority of poorer men didn't have the vote. For example, my great grandpa, I was very lucky, I grew well off. But I owed debt to all those that came before me and up to betray them.
1:20:29 Speaker 03 And my great grandparents were always knocking the landlord on, doing a moonlight flick, you couldn't prove where you lived. Nineteen eighteen, in twenty eighteen, there were great big celebrations, a hundred years since women got the vote. Our women didn't get the vote. It was middle class women who were married with property. Where we should vote, when we should celebrate is nineteen twenty eight, when all women over the age of twenty one got the right to vote as same as men. That's when we should celebrate.
1:21:00 Blindboy Boatclub? And it's quite relevant too at the moment because if we think of the suffragettes.
1:21:08 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:21:09 Blindboy Boatclub? Physical force, they were physical force. And we had Palestine action over here getting tried as terrorists. And this, they went to the fucking judge. And it said, no, these are not the same as the suffragettes.
1:21:24 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:21:24 Blindboy Boatclub? And it really fucking pissed a lot of people off. Cause it's like, they're just damaging drones. Suffragettes, what were they doing, throwing hatchets at horses?
1:21:32 Speaker 03 Yeah, well, they didn't.
1:21:33 Blindboy Boatclub? I've got that wrong there. I'm sure they didn't throw hatchets at horses, but there was a horse and a hatchet.
1:21:38 Speaker 03 No, Emily Davidson threw herself in front.
1:21:40 Blindboy Boatclub? In front of a horse.
1:21:41 Speaker 03 And the Darby.
1:21:42 Blindboy Boatclub? And there was hatchets involved at some point?
1:21:44 Speaker 03 They burnt libraries. There was two, again, like the chartists.
1:21:48 Blindboy Boatclub? Why would they burn a library?
1:21:49 Speaker 03 Because it was a symbol of authority.
1:21:53 Blindboy Boatclub? Because, cause that's something else I wanted to talk to you about, right, is a trend all over, not just Europe, America too, the Gilded Age, where, and I wanna learn more about it. Rich people felt threatened by the French Revolution and then started building hospitals and libraries and all this shit to quell people down. What's the crack with that? What was that like here?
1:22:17 Speaker 03 I, I don't think it was so much fear of the French Revolution because the, the French, before the revolution, helped the Americans gain independence.
1:22:25 Blindboy Boatclub? Mm hmm.
1:22:25 Speaker 03 So the French, the Spanish went in to support.
1:22:28 Blindboy Boatclub? What, no, I mean, the, the people with money, they became afraid of the working class beheading them and said, you know what, let's build some libraries.
1:22:35 Speaker 03 Well, the, the one, the one person that really did that was a Scotsman.
1:22:39 Blindboy Boatclub? Mm hmm.
1:22:40 Speaker 03 Who made a fortune in Pittsburgh in steel.
1:22:43 Blindboy Boatclub? Carnegie?
1:22:43 Speaker 03 Carnegie.
1:22:44 Blindboy Boatclub? Yeah.
1:22:45 Speaker 03 He was the one. Most of them didn't build libraries. They just wanted to own, like today, certain big tech people. They wanna rule.
1:22:54 Blindboy Boatclub? And they just wanna own infrastructure.
1:22:55 Speaker 03 They wanna own everything.
1:22:56 Blindboy Boatclub? Own the books, own the education.
1:22:58 Speaker 03 And, and do you know what the really sad thing is? That in nineteen twenty eight, it would be a hundred years since the vote was extended to men and women over twenty one. If you look at the turnout in parliamentary elections, in working class constituencies, it's dropping to in the fifties and sometimes less. Within a hundred years of us getting the vote, people are so disillusioned with our politics that people aren't even bothering to vote. I think that is so sad and appalling.
1:23:28 Blindboy Boatclub? It's, it's one of, that there is one of the impacts of neoliberalism.
1:23:33 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:23:33 Blindboy Boatclub? Right? So when you have, I'm always trying to fucking explain neoliberalism in the simplest way possible. And the simplest way possible that I can explain it is. It's a way for very wealthy people to put a toll booth between a public service and your taxes. That's pretty much it. You pay your tax to fund healthcare or the rivers. And then a billionaire comes in the middle and says, I'm gonna take a lot of that because I run this company. And then what happens over years and years and years, people go, what's the point in voting? Nothing happens and nothing happens because everything's been fucking safe enough.
1:24:12 Speaker 03 So from the mid 19th century onwards, Birmingham, Sheffield, Manchester, Leeds, the great towns and cities.
1:24:19 Blindboy Boatclub? Is this the municipality thing you were telling me about that?
1:24:22 Speaker 03 So I believe passionately, we've got to get, stop fighting. Birmingham and Manchester fight over this pathetic title of who's the second city. Who cares? Why don't we just come together, Birmingham, Manchester, Sheffield, Leeds, Newcastle, Sunderland, Nottingham, Derby? We work city states. We had our own water supplies, our own police forces. We had our own fire service. We had libraries and parks. How are you going to pay for things in a municipality if you don't make money? So by owning the gas companies, the electric companies, you were making money. Then they take them away from us. Labour nationalised them and Thatcher privatised them.
1:25:07 Speaker 03 And now they're owned by big knobs who are making a fortune. Let's have our utilities back.
1:25:15 Blindboy Boatclub? And the thing is.
1:25:21 Blindboy Boatclub? It's like, how do you, like, protest isn't working anymore because protest is becoming fucking illegal. Like, it's, it's one of the things, you know that band Knee Cap from Ireland?
1:25:33 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:25:34 Blindboy Boatclub? Like, how I view Knee Cap is.
1:25:39 Blindboy Boatclub? What they've managed to, in a culture where protest is becoming, like, it's not illegal, right? But think of it this way, if you wants to go to a Palestine anti-genocide protest, the police show up and they have these facial recognition things.
1:25:57 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:25:57 Blindboy Boatclub? And you're being watched and you're being intimidated. And people are thinking, if I'm at this fucking protest and up there is an AI camera, and then that gets me, and then that goes into the database, so it knows my identity, what does that mean in 10 years' time? Do you get what I'm saying? If the Palestine Action people are now terrorists, how easy is it to flip that around? So a culture is created where most people go, I'm just gonna not go to that protest, I'm a bit unsure. And I think what kneecap have done is, when you go to a kneecap gig, you're not necessarily going there to hear their tunes. They've created a safe space for protesting. So people who go to a kneecap gig, it's actually,
1:26:40 Blindboy Boatclub? we're fucking protesting here, but you can't call it this, and there's no cameras here, and this is actually a gig, but really it's a protest. And that's what's had to have to happen.
1:26:50 Speaker 03 But there's also, you're right, you're spot on, but there's also been a shift in language.
1:26:54 Blindboy Boatclub? Go on.
1:26:55 Speaker 03 So for example, if I was to say that I'm against what's happening in Palestine and the West Bank, I'm suddenly antisemitic. I'm not antisemitic, I'm anti Benjamin Netanyahu and the murderers.
1:27:14 Speaker 03 And you get this conflation that the word Semite applies to Arab peoples, they're Semitic. So they've made this an inflammatory term that if you're against Likud and the rulers and these horrible people who are talking, Smoritz and the others, who are talking about exterminating Palestinians, they've made it that, and so you can't say that. Well, no, we're not antisemitic, we're anti-genocide.
1:27:46 Blindboy Boatclub? What I always remind people too, and this is like, we're talking about the findings of the International Criminal Court and the United Nations, right? So this is not a controversial opinion, it's actually quite a mainstream opinion. It is the findings of experts who are looking at this shit and I always fucking remember that, you know? And the other thing too, because the same shit, Germany is particularly bad. I was in Berlin, I couldn't even say it in the audience, but there was people leaving because they were afraid that the police were going to come in. There's a group there called the Olim Five who are arrested now, very similar to Palestine Action.
1:28:18 Speaker 03 The Bedouin are the poorest of the poor.
1:28:19 Blindboy Boatclub? The Bedouin.
1:28:20 Speaker 03 They can't prove they own the land because they've never owned land. They're nomadic peoples and they've settled on wasteland. They're going in, the army's going in, Israeli army going in and taking land from the poorest of the poor. There's one of the old, most ancient Christian villages that's now been surrounded. This isn't, this isn't an issue about religion, about Muslim and Christianity, it's about what's right and what's wrong. And what's wrong is to persecute people because they're there.
1:28:54 Blindboy Boatclub? Mm-hmm. And to never forget as well, I mean, you're talking about a US military outpost in the middle of the Middle East, that's what it is. And there's a quote that I fucking love, which is, when that area was a British mandatory Palestine, 1919, the first governor of Palestine, and he was proud of it, he said, since Punches Pilots, was an English fellow called Ronald Storrs. And there's a quote from Ronald Storrs in 1919, and he said straight out, "We are trying to create a little loyal Jewish ulster in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism." There you go, you know? And then the Yanks just took it from the Brits.
1:29:34 Speaker 03 What we need to realise, whether we're black, white, Asian, whatever our background, our colour, our creed, it's about time the working class came together and stood up for each other, instead of being separated by faith, by colour.
1:29:52 Blindboy Boatclub? And the interesting thing too, if you look at when movements are really crushed, let's take, let's take 60s America for example, right?
1:30:01 Speaker 03 Civil rights.
1:30:02 Blindboy Boatclub? When you had J Edgar Hoover with his FBI, they had a thing called COINTELPRO. COINTELPRO was, it was covert at the time, now it's fully out in the open. It was a way to dismantle the hippies, the Black Panthers, all of this. When they were, I think it was Fred Hampton of the Black Panthers, I think it was him, were forming the Rainbow Coalition, I believe it was. And what it was, was Black Panthers, Latinos, white working class farmers getting together. That's when the FBI said, no fucking way. That was the dangerous one because now it's like, well, we've got the whites here, we've got the blacks there, we've got the Latinos there. Shit, class solidarity?
1:30:46 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:30:47 Blindboy Boatclub? No thanks, we cannot have that. That's the one, every fucking time. Class consciousness, class solidarity. You know, that's the real dangerous one.
1:30:56 Speaker 03 What's a poor white kid, a poor black kid, and a poor South Asian kid all got in common in England? They're all poor. They're all poor and we've been separated and it's dangerous and it's wrong. And it's evil.
1:31:11 Blindboy Boatclub? And something too, just for this audience, how many people here come from Irish people? Yeah, fucking loads. So just remember like, what's the area you said, the Irish area here?
1:31:26 Speaker 03 West Barr was.
1:31:26 Blindboy Boatclub? West Barr. And the other one was the crafts, which is just around the corner, which was known as Little Ireland. Like if you look at the fucking newspapers from the time, right? So ye're great grandparents, ye. The way that the Irish were spoken about in Sheffield or in Birmingham by the press was the way that people from Yemen and Eritrea are spoken about now. We were considered the worst of the worst. I mean, what really got me looking into it was the... Do you know the gas destructor lamps of Sheffield?
1:31:58 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:31:59 Blindboy Boatclub? So there's Sheffield has the highest concentration of them, it has nineteen surviving gas destructor lamps. And they're fucking lamps sticking out of the ground. And sewer gas would go up there and then you'd light a flame and that would burn the sewer gas. But what got me looking into it was I noticed they were in all the middle class areas. They were all the Victorian middle class areas. So I went looking deeper and deeper going, what the fuck's going on here? It wasn't, so they didn't really do much. They burned gas from the sewer, but then I went looking into the fear of what sewer gas meant. We'll say circa eighteen forty, eighteen fifty. Miasma theory.
1:32:39 Speaker 03 Miasma, yeah.
1:32:40 Blindboy Boatclub? So the belief that there is a smell. I think that those lamps are actually like class signifiers. It's those filthy people down there, when you go past their slum, because they don't have toilets. It smells like shit and they all have cholera and diphtheria because they're in poverty. We're gonna catch that, so we need to burn that gas when it gets up the hill.
1:33:01 Speaker 03 And some of them did catch it, so that's what led to the eighteen forty eight Public Health Act.
1:33:05 Blindboy Boatclub? When the fucking rich people started getting it.
1:33:06 Speaker 03 They started to get scared.
1:33:08 Blindboy Boatclub? Go on.
1:33:09 Speaker 03 So my asthma was like this fog, this noxious.
1:33:11 Blindboy Boatclub? And it was smog from the fucking pollution as well.
1:33:14 Speaker 03 Pollution of the factories.
1:33:15 Blindboy Boatclub? Yeah.
1:33:15 Speaker 03 From the fact that there were no proper toilets, it was cesspits. From the fact there was, well, the water supplies in some of the poorest areas. When they closed down one well in Birmingham where people got the well from in eighteen seventy seven in Springfield Street. It was seventy five percent human manure to twenty five percent pure water. That's why bad people drank beer. It was brewed and advertised with pure, fresh water.
1:33:41 Blindboy Boatclub? Wow.
1:33:42 Speaker 03 And when they brought the water in, in Sheffield, in Birmingham and elsewhere, in the poorest back to backyards. There was one outside tap for sometimes up to hundred and fifty, two hundred people. In the better off middle class areas, they had a tap in every house.
1:33:58 Blindboy Boatclub? Mm hmm.
1:34:01 Speaker 03 So because of my asthma, although they got the wrong reason.
1:34:06 Blindboy Boatclub? Mm hmm.
1:34:07 Speaker 03 They started to do the right thing by bringing in drains, refuse collection, fresh water. But again, it was slow. In one of the poorest parts of Birmingham, I dare say it would be the same in the poorest parts of Sheffield. In nineteen oh eight, which is now by the ball ring, and in my city, and I don't know if it's the same here. You would never know poor people lived in the city centre anymore. It's so gentrified, it's as if the poor have been swept from history.
1:34:36 Blindboy Boatclub? That's Ireland as well.
1:34:38 Speaker 03 Yeah, it's the same in Dublin.
1:34:39 Blindboy Boatclub? Yeah.
1:34:40 Speaker 03 Clone cities.
1:34:41 Blindboy Boatclub? They're just like, we have.
1:34:45 Blindboy Boatclub? Ireland's economy is doing very well and for the first time in my life, I'm seeing shanty towns.
1:34:50 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:34:51 Blindboy Boatclub? I never saw shanty towns growing up and now, like, I mean, when I say shanty town, it's homeless people in tents, but they're staying there. And the fucking irony of it is there's this one field, butt size of this room, full of tents and it floods. And you know what they used to stop the, to float the tents? Election posters. I know, but it's just they put them underneath the tent and they're floating and that then it's climate change related to it.
1:35:23 Speaker 03 But the biggest problem with house building in this country, we stopped building council houses.
1:35:28 Blindboy Boatclub? With the financialisation.
1:35:29 Speaker 03 We have to build council houses.
1:35:31 Blindboy Boatclub? So you're not doing that?
1:35:32 Speaker 03 No, no, that when they started selling them off, okay, sell them off, but let the money gain from it by build new council houses. But they didn't want to build new council houses.
1:35:44 Blindboy Boatclub? Well, it drops the price of rent if that happens.
1:35:46 Speaker 03 Yeah, and what also has happened is New Labour didn't believe in council housing. If we're to overcome all these problems, we need a massive council house building programme, massive.
1:36:05 Blindboy Boatclub? Is... So when I try and give people a bit of hope back home, because we're the same shit, right, we're the same shit, and protesting isn't working, protesting is becoming dangerous, I tell people to join a community action tenants' union. Like, in Ireland, we have a thing called CATU, and it's brilliant, because what it is, is everyone joins it, and then if someone's getting evicted, 60 people show up outside, and it makes it really uncomfortable for that eviction to happen. Because what the police are doing in Ireland now as well, and probably the same shit here, they're neoliberalising the process of eviction. Police show up, stand outside, and then all of a sudden, this van comes up,
1:36:50 Blindboy Boatclub? often with no licence plates, men in balaclavas, no one knows who the fuck they are, it's a private security company, and they brutalise the tenant and evict them, while the police stand back, often with their backs to what's happening. And that they're, they have privatised the violence, because the police can't do it, you know?
1:37:11 Blindboy Boatclub? When you have a community action tenants' union, and you've got 100 people outside with cameras, and physical, the bodies, that's what stops it, that's what stops it. And I'm assuming that there's a community action tenants' union here in Sheffield, yeah?
1:37:27 Blindboy Boatclub? Acorn, yeah, I've heard of them cunts, Acorn. Sorry, autism.
1:37:34 Speaker 03 He promised me he wouldn't use the C-word today.
1:37:36 Blindboy Boatclub? I did that the last time too, I can't not. Art means a different thing back home.
1:37:40 Speaker 03 I told him off, I told him off last time.
1:37:42 Blindboy Boatclub? My ma calls me that. It's a whole different, the Yanks ruined it, man, the Yanks ruined that. In, who, we use it in a nice way, the Scottish do. I think some parts of London use the word in a nice way. And ye don't, in, here, if you use the C-word, it's just a bad thing.
1:38:04 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:38:04 Blindboy Boatclub? It's not like, "You're a grand cunt, you're a lovely cunt."
1:38:08 Speaker 03 I should have kept me gobshits, shouldn't I?
1:38:11 Blindboy Boatclub? My ma would say to me, my ma would, she'd listen to the podcasts, and then I'd get a phone call on a Wednesday morning, and she'd go, "You're some gas cunt."
1:38:21 Blindboy Boatclub? The first thing she'd say to me, like, you know, "I've been called a gas cunt since I was tit-feeding."
1:38:28 Blindboy Boatclub? The Yanks round that you see, because in America it's real nasty in America and it's misogynistic. So with Americans, they don't use that word, but whole different crack for us, you know.
1:38:42 Blindboy Boatclub? We have five minutes left.
1:38:44 Speaker 03 Robin Hood.
1:38:45 Blindboy Boatclub? Fucking go for a bit of Robin Hood for the crack, go on.
1:38:47 Speaker 03 Robin Hood? Loxley? Just outside Sheffield.
1:38:53 Blindboy Boatclub? Is Robin Hood?
1:38:53 Speaker 03 It's a suburb now.
1:38:54 Blindboy Boatclub? I thought he was Nottingham.
1:38:56 Speaker 03 Well, there's a big row over it, isn't there, between West Yorkshire, Sheffield and Nottingham?
1:39:00 Blindboy Boatclub? So what's the crack? He was from here, was he? Is he the real deal? Was he a real person?
1:39:05 Speaker 03 He's probably based, like all legends, on a variety of people.
1:39:10 Blindboy Boatclub? Couple of people, okay.
1:39:11 Speaker 03 And he probably, he may well have been-
1:39:12 Blindboy Boatclub? He's a Tommy Shelby?
1:39:13 Speaker 03 Yeah, he may well have been the nasty so-and-so, but the legend grows up, which I grew up with, that he robbed the rich to help the poor.
1:39:22 Blindboy Boatclub? And he was anti-Norman, because King John was his enemy, wasn't it?
1:39:25 Speaker 03 He hated King John.
1:39:26 Blindboy Boatclub? So we're talking 1100s here?
1:39:28 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:39:28 Blindboy Boatclub? So that's very much a Saxon-
1:39:30 Speaker 03 And what happened-
1:39:31 Blindboy Boatclub? Is it a harrowing of the North, let the carry on?
1:39:33 Speaker 03 Yeah, so 1068, 69, York rises up in rebellion, William's over in Normandy. He comes back and he harrows the North. And it was a terrible campaign of scorched earth.
1:39:49 Blindboy Boatclub? Okay, so that's everybody.
1:39:50 Speaker 03 And in the doomsday book of 1086, large parts of Yorkshire, Durham, Northumberland were wasteland because they burnt the crops and the virtually, very little was left. Sheffield had an Anglo-Saxon lord, Walthief, and he at first got on with William, but then he rose up and he lost his head and then it became a Norman that took over. So so much of our land was, or all of our land was taken by the Normans.
1:40:22 Blindboy Boatclub? Something I'd love to chat to you about too is- There were no surname's before the Normans.
1:40:28 Speaker 03 No.
1:40:28 Blindboy Boatclub? Is it true that the Normans came here, like, looked at everybody and said, I'm inventing your surname based on what your job is?
1:40:33 Speaker 03 Not, not quite that, but they didn't actually sit down and look at it that, but they brought hereditary surnames.
1:40:40 Blindboy Boatclub? So Collier.
1:40:41 Speaker 03 So, so, well, first of all, no, you'd have the Fitz's, so they think, like.
1:40:44 Blindboy Boatclub? Oh, Fitz's, we've got that in Ireland, Fitz's son of.
1:40:47 Speaker 03 Son of.
1:40:48 Blindboy Boatclub? Yeah.
1:40:48 Speaker 03 But you'd have Fitz, the tribes of Galway.
1:40:51 Blindboy Boatclub? Mm-hmm.
1:40:51 Speaker 03 The De Burgos.
1:40:52 Blindboy Boatclub? Yes.
1:40:53 Speaker 03 Yerkes, they're Norman names, so King Harold was not, he was Harold Godwinson.
1:40:58 Blindboy Boatclub? Yes.
1:40:59 Speaker 03 But his sons were Haraldson.
1:41:01 Blindboy Boatclub? Yes.
1:41:01 Speaker 03 So it changed by that, so by about, that by the 13th century, the better off Anglo Saxons were beginning to adopt surnames, hereditary surnames, so you take them either from where you come from, you might have moved from your little village, so they call you, or it might be topographical, it might be to do with the landscape, or the job that you do, or what your dance there was.
1:41:26 Blindboy Boatclub? Where do you get your, like, there's loads of names, Collier, um, fucking Weaver.
1:41:34 Speaker 03 So they were, they were occupational names.
1:41:36 Blindboy Boatclub? So, but are those working class people, and, and, and the Normans just went, that's your family name now, because that's what you did, Hatcher?
1:41:43 Speaker 03 The, the Normans wouldn't have said it just like that, because we couldn't understand them, because they spoke Norman French.
1:41:52 Speaker 03 Do you know, the first king to actually talk or send correspondence in English?
1:41:56 Blindboy Boatclub? Go on.
1:41:57 Speaker 03 Henry V.
1:41:58 Blindboy Boatclub? When, what, what are we talking there?
1:41:59 Speaker 03 If we're talking about 14, the early 1400s.
1:42:02 Blindboy Boatclub? Jesus.
1:42:02 Speaker 03 The law was Latin.
1:42:04 Blindboy Boatclub? Oh, sure, that's why Shakespeare was so radical, Shakespeare was like gangster rap, he's like, I'm gonna fucking write in, but it's like, he, he's like, I'm gonna write in English, and people go, what do you mean, you're writing in fucking English, that's not the, we speak French here.
1:42:15 Speaker 03 And, and then they, so, so the Normans, they took control, by 1086, there were only two landowners in England who were Anglo Saxon, one was in the North East, one was a man called Turtle, and he had his manners in North Warwickshire, the Forest of Arden, and he took a surname after the Norman fashion. What was Shakespeare's mother's name? Mary Arden.
1:42:41 Blindboy Boatclub? Okay.
1:42:42 Speaker 03 Churchill, one of the last Anglo-Saxon thanes, was the ancestor of Shakespeare's mother.
1:42:47 Blindboy Boatclub? Wow. Um, before we wrap up, what Anglo-Saxon shit is left? As in names, words we use, places.
1:42:56 Speaker 03 So, there's lots of different dialect words that have survived, but they're dying out. I can only give a few.
1:43:01 Blindboy Boatclub? Go on.
1:43:01 Speaker 03 Like what we said earlier on, that I said, and words like that would be Anglo-Saxon. When I was a kid, if you went over the rec, the park, the recreation ground, if you come back, a big kid had hit ya. Your mum would look at you and go, "Go and fight him." "I can't fight him, mum, because he's too big." "Go and fight him, or I will get you something to blart about." Cry, from the Anglo-Saxon of the bleats and the sheep. Shakespeare uses a word in Troubled St Cressida. And I was sat in the Royal Shakespeare Company, I wasn't a big fan, but Richard loved it. So when he was a kid, I took him. And this play was on and I was drifting away. And there was this geezer, Thirsetees, who came up with a list of vile insults.
1:43:44 Speaker 03 And he's, one of the insults was, "Your breath is as foul as anything I've ever smelt from the soff." And I must have been the only bloke in the room that knew what the soff was, because in Birmingham's back to backs, it was the drain.
1:43:57 Speaker 03 Brew house or wash house. So there's, there's, there's dialect words, which would be here in South Yorkshire, the North East, and other parts of the country. The word I used earlier on for backstreet Birmingham women, I wouldn't use it to a young woman that's not from Birmingham or didn't know. But to older Brummies, the term wench is a term of affection. My nan, our nan, was our wench. She was the oldest of twelve, she never had a childhood. And it's from the Middle English word wenchel. But we're taught that it's a rude word. I got pulled in by BBC, I was at a radio show on BBC WM. I was pulled in by the manager saying, "You use the word wench, we'd rather you didn't." I used it to an older woman. And the next Sunday, the first phone call I got was from an old Brummie who went,
1:44:42 Speaker 03 "Oh, Carl, I do love it when you call us old ones wenchies, it makes me think of me dad." I thought, "Put that in your pipe and smoke it."
1:44:52 Blindboy Boatclub? Here.
1:44:56 Blindboy Boatclub? We are on festival time and it is Carfu. Um, first off, I want to thank ye, the wonderful people of Sheffield. That was a beautiful evening. Thank you so much. Professor Carl Chin, I fucking love talking to you. That was amazing. Thank you. Thank you so much, the Carl lads.
1:45:14 Speaker 03 Thank you Sheffield.
1:45:15 Blindboy Boatclub? Dog bless Sheffield.
1:45:18 Blindboy Boatclub? I hope you enjoyed that. Now, I hope the sound was alright for you because I really, I really edited the sound in that and boosted the myself and Carl's voice. And I pushed the audience sound down quite a bit. So that one nearly didn't even sound like a live podcast. And I'm very, I'm very happy with that sound because that was a very large venue, full of people with quite a long reverb tail. It was the type of venue that an orchestra would be in. So there was a huge echo. So I managed to EQ out a lot of those echoes. So it just sounded like me and Carl in a room. I enjoy that. So look, Carl's podcast, Carl Chin's podcast is called Our Lives, Our Stories with Carl Chin.
1:46:04 Blindboy Boatclub? Check it out. Like it, follow it, review it because it's, it's only a couple of months old. So if ye give that likes and reviews, that would really help his podcast. And if ye give it follows. Carl has also written a couple of books. I'll catch you next week with a hot take. I have a number of hot takes on the pot that are brewing. So don't know what I'd pick, but we'll have some fun next week. In the meantime, rub a dog, wink at a kestrel, genuflect to a swan. Dog bless.
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