Each day on my way to work, I walk past a portrait of a family ghost. It hangs on the staircase outside my office at Queen’s University Belfast, where I teach history.
It is a drawing of a man who also taught history at Queen’s, long before I was born. He was one of the leading Irish historians of his day. Like me, he was interested in the lives and experiences of ordinary people. But the drawing is of a man I have never met: my grandfather, the historian KH Connell.
I never met him because, in 1973 at the age of 56, Kenneth died by suicide.
Afterwards, my mother, aunt and eventually my grandmother all left Belfast for England. They were not only leaving the violence of the Troubles, during which Kenneth had been among a tiny minority of Queen’s academics to openly support the Catholic civil rights cause. They were also fleeing the trauma of Kenneth’s death.
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I was born in Birmingham in 1985 and 10 years ago I got my first academic job in Belfast. I was appointed as a social historian in the same university where – unbeknown to my new colleagues – my grandfather once worked.
I never told my colleagues about this connection, not even when my department’s annual Kenneth Connell prize for the best undergraduate performance in economic and social history was being discussed.
I had joined the department in my late-20s, keen to be judged on the basis of my own achievements. So I would keep quiet during those prize deliberations. Later, I would text my mother to tell her about it. To this day, she still marvels at the bizarre twist of fate that has led to her eldest son following the path trodden by her deceased father.
Kenneth was born in Southampton in 1917 to Irish parents who had, some years earlier, moved to England from Kilkerranmore, a few miles south of Clonakilty in Co Cork. Kenneth often talked about what he called his “Irish peasant stock”. It was, in many ways, his profound respect and admiration for rural Irish traditions that underpinned his work as a historian.
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Kenneth was appointed by Queen’s in 1952, two years after the publication of his first book, The Population of Ireland, 1750–1845. The book was an attempt to understand the factors that contributed to the large increase in the Irish population during the century leading up to the Famine.
His argument went against conventional thinking, which held that it was a declining mortality rate that caused Ireland’s population to grow spectacularly in 1700-1841. Kenneth instead pointed to the importance of factors such as couples getting married at younger ages, the increased availability of small farm holdings, and a relative abundance of “nutritionally adequate food” – namely the potato.
The Population of Ireland sparked intense academic debate, not least because it also contributed to long-standing disagreements about the causes of population growth in England too. Although many of his findings have since been refuted, 75 years on Kenneth’s book is still quoted and still features prominently on university reading lists.
There were 18 years between The Population of Ireland and Kenneth’s second (and last) book, Irish Peasant Society (1968). The gap in time – unthinkable in the pressurised environment that constitutes modern academia – was partly the result of the challenge Kenneth had set for himself, to write a social history of rural Ireland before and after the Famine.
It was a politically motivated decision born out of Kenneth’s insistence on the essential importance of marginalised people – people who, at the time in which he was writing, were too often excluded from dominant historical narratives. It is here that the parallels between Kenneth’s work and my own are most clearly seen.
In Irish Peasant Society Kenneth drew on a wide range of sources that, until then, had largely been neglected by historians, and used them to paint a vivid picture of rural life.
The book is a series of essays on religion, marriage, illegitimacy and the drinking habits of rural Ireland. A contrasting picture emerged. The authoritarian influence of the clergy on post-Famine society, Kenneth argued, contributed to later marriages, sexual restraint and even growing rates of celibacy.
Yet well into the 19th century there remained the widespread, almost libertine practice of drinking illegally-brewed alcohol like poteen, made with anything from treacle and molasses to potatoes, rhubarb and apples. Poteen “enlivened the storyteller and his audience, the fiddler and his dancers, the game-cock and his admirers”; in extreme misfortune, Kenneth argued, it was the Irish peasant’s “only resource”.
Irish Peasant Society was a “heroic attempt”, one reviewer later wrote, to rescue Irish history “from the possessive parochialism of its political historians”. It was part of what became known as the “new social history”, which was shaped by socialist writers like the English historian EP Thompson.
Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class was published five years before Irish Peasant Society, and its political ethos was encapsulated by Thompson’s famous maxim that he was setting out to “rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the ‘obsolete’ hand-loom weaver [and] the ‘utopian’ artisan from the enormous condescension of posterity”.
By the time I began my doctoral research in 2009, social history had become a mainstream academic pursuit. But there were other subjects that new generations of historians argued also needed rescuing from posterity.
Where Kenneth’s focus was rural Ireland, my PhD thesis – later published as Black Handsworth: Race in 1980s Britain (2019) – was a study of an inner-city area of Birmingham that, like the part of the city I myself had grown up in, was home to large number of immigrants from Britain’s former colonies in the Caribbean and South Asia.
My subject was their experiences – their art forms, leisure activities, music and politics. I even had a chapter on pubs, and the forms of sociability that took place inside the Birmingham establishments often frequented by Black migrants and their descendants.
I dedicated the thesis to my grandfather. Yet it remains difficult to pinpoint the exact influence he had on my work. From a young age, I learned from my mother about his politics: his commitment to Communism, his dedication to social history, his decision (alone among Queen’s academics) to take part in an October 1968 Belfast sit-in protesting the police’s ongoing harassment of Catholics in the North.
Undoubtedly, I also benefited from the cultural capital that came from knowing that there was such a thing as a historian, that it was a profession one might be able to pursue.
But it was not until I was completing my most recent book, Multicultural Britain: A People’s History (2024), that I was able to gather the confidence to properly interrogate my family history, and Kenneth’s role within it.
Multicultural Britain is about Britain’s transformation, in the decades that followed the second World War, into the multicultural society it has become today. It’s a personal book – it opens with my memories of being one of only a small number of white children at school in inner-city Birmingham, and growing up with friends whose parents came from Pakistan, Jamaica, India and beyond.
Part of the book’s aim is to establish a more inclusive definition of “multicultural”, and thus provide a route beyond the toxicity that has characterised the debate around immigration, race and diversity in Britain for decades. To do this, I needed to come to terms not only with the role immigration has played in my own family story. I also needed to embrace our family’s “Irish peasant stock”.
Throughout his life, Kenneth was a committed Irish nationalist. He harboured hopes of one day returning to Cork, and often took his two daughters on long drives there from Belfast.
He never realised his dream. With his witty conversation, large eyes and tall frame (he, like me, was well over 6ft), Kenneth was often charming. His radical politics also meant he had an admirable commitment to sticking one in the eye of the academic establishment (or the “boys”, as Kenneth referred to establishment figures).
By many accounts, though, he could also be a difficult man. His struggles with what, in today’s language, would be called his mental health meant he often took the cut and thrust of academic life too personally.
Yet I feel certain he would have taken great pleasure not only in the fact his grandson is a social historian working at Queen’s University Belfast, but also that he now has two great-grandchildren who, thanks to the terms of the Belfast Agreement, are Irish passport holders.
It is not hard to imagine the kinds of conversations the two of us might have had under different circumstances.
Now, as I pass by his portrait each day, I try to remember him as one colleague did following his untimely death, “making and dispensing cider, or Irish coffee, or walking by the sea, talking and talking about Ireland”. Had he ever made it to Cork, “his neighbours would have benefited from his company and kindness”. Kenneth was, in the parlance of one Cork native who knew him, “a gentleman”.
Kieran Connell teaches history at Queen’s University Belfast. His most recent book, Multicultural Britain: A People’s History, is published by Hurst
