The re-transmission of a programme about the English Communist George Thompson, on TG4 in recent days (twice for good value) recalled a chance encounter while strolling through Birmingham about 18 months ago with an exhibition about his life and works. It was mounted in the city's magnificent Victorian Council House and dealt largely with his many contacts with the Blasket Islands.
A photograph of a group of islanders returning from the mainland, taken by Thompson himself in the 192's, stood out like a Paul Henry painting on the walls of the council chamber. The programme on TG4 came from the excellent series of interviews, Prionns∅as ag Caint, from the RT╔ archives of the mid-1970s.
It was strange that Thompson forged such strong links with Irish-speaking Ireland. He was born in London in 1903 and his only connection with Ireland was through his maternal grandfather, an Ulster Protestant and a republican. From an early age he developed an interest in the Irish language and went to Gaelic League classes after school. When he won a scholarship to King's College, Cambridge, he wanted to continue to study Irish but it was not on the curriculum.
Chance meeting
A chance meeting in London with another English academic interested in things Irish, Robin Flower, who had visited the Blaskets and written about them, aroused his interest in the islands and he travelled there in August 1923 to improve his spoken Irish. He returned frequently over the years. At Cambridge he continued to study Classics, often visiting Greece. After taking his degree he applied to teach Greek at University College Galway in 1931. It is said the interviewers were amazed when the English academic addressed them in fluent Blasket Irish. He got the job and taught Greek through the medium of Irish in Galway until 1934.
George then returned to Cambridge and, like many young scholars of the day, joined the Communist Party. For the next 30 years or so he was Professor of Greek at Birmingham University. He travelled widely - to Greece, of course, and Russia, China and other Marxist states. But all the while he returned to the Blaskets.
On his first visit he had become friendly with a young islander, Muiris ╙ Suilleabhβin, who later recalled: "George and I spent the next six weeks walking together on strand, hill and mountain, and after spending that time in my company he had fluent Irish." It was a friendship that was to last for nearly 30 years and was to produce one of the great literary treasures of the century.
Muiris had intended to take the boat to America, as so many islanders had done, but George encouraged him to stay in Ireland and to apply for a job in the new police force, the Garda S∅ochβna. The application was successful and Muiris was posted to the Connemara Gaeltacht. He corresponded with George and told him he found the long winter nights boring.
Early life
Thomas O'Crohan's book about life on the Blaskets, The Islandman, had just been published and George suggested to Muiris that he too should write about his early life. Muiris took pen in hand and, with George acting as editor, Fiche Blian Ag Fβs emerged a couple of years later. George and a literary friend in Dublin, Moya Llewelyn Davies, translated it into English as Twenty Years A-Growing.
In Birmingham George continued to spread the Marxist gospel, associating with like-minded writers, musicians and actors. He wrote an introduction to Marxism in three volumes, organised evening classes for workers and lectured on Communism to shop stewards at the Longbridge car factory. Looking back on his efforts to promote Irish in Ireland he wrote: "For many years I was working to save the culture of the Irish-speaking peasantry. In that I was unsuccessful. I failed to see that you cannot raise the cultural standard of a people without raising their economic standards."
Evacuation
When time allowed he returned to Ireland and the Blaskets and he viewed with sadness the evacuation of the few remaining islanders to the mainland in 1953. These were the people he had written about in a short story, the hardy men who had fought rough land and wild seas for an existence. In the story he addresses an old islander: "'You remember the old days and you were most in the company of those men, do you see men like them walking in this village today? The old man did not turn, he was still looking at the horizon. There was a fresh wind from the north, there would surely be rain. A tear fell. 'I do not,' he said, 'Their like is not to be seen.'"
George Thompson died in Birmingham in 1987. His like will not be seen again.