Jim Phelan (Irish writer)

"'James Leo Phelan was born in Ireland at the close of the 19th century and spent his early years in the village of Inchicore, now a part of the sprawling conurbation that is Dublin. A father who had traveled extensively and a mother who constantly recited fairy stories combined, with a natural wanderlust, to nurture a child with a unique vision of his world; a world where change was the only constant he yearned. This was further fuelled, in no small part, by the romantic sounds, smells and sights of the horse pulled cargo boats that were untethered at the mouth of the Grand Canal and set free to deliver their wares to, according to the young Phelan, exotic places around the world such as Guatemala. From an early age this imagery prompted Jim to escape from home repeatedly, stowing away beneath tarpaulins only to be discovered, disembarked at the nearest convenient point and returned to his despairing parents by equally despairing policemen.

At the age of eighteen, the fear of a ‘shotgun wedding’, had Jim headed out of Cork en route to Galvaston aboard a Texan oil tanker. It was this propensity to walk away at the slightest provocation and from any commitment that led Jim to conclude, in his autobiographical Tramp at Anchor that it was instability that makes a man a tramp and, in doing so, he laid down the philosophy that was to shape the remainder of his life.

Eventually returning to Ireland he pursued various trades but his republican held views soon found him involved with the Irish Revolutionary movement. It was during a robbery at a post office that a murder took place and, although Jim denied that he committed the act, and the judge accepted his story, he was present and therefore culpable and sentenced to be hanged. Whilst waiting at Manchester prison, he had plenty of time to reflect, as he paced the small barred condemn cell, that his dream of the wide white open roads was now over; that the adventure stories told by his mother which always ended happily with the hero winning the beautiful girl and the attendant purse of gold were not to come true for him. On the evening of his execution, word came that the Home Secretary had commuted it to life imprisonment; a commitment which, for once, he could not walk away from. But Jim was nothing if not tenacious and his often repeated maxim - "Rule one; stay alive." - was invoked here as many other occasions during his life. This was 1923 and Jim would not be released for fifteen years during which time he won the respect of the tough prison world and collected the vast array of material on characters that would feature in his many books on prison life the most famous of which is Lifer. He served his time in many prisons from the relatively easy Maidstone to the granite toughness of Dartmoor.

On his release, Jim vowed never to live within four walls again and began a life that would find him wandering the lanes and byways of the country. Like most tramps, Jim had a preferred route which, in his case, was the north bound A1 in England. On this road, as it snaked its way from London to the York and back, he learnt the lore of the road from characters such as Lumpy Red Fox, Dicky Tom Cosgrove, Jimmy Scotland, Stan the Man and Stornoway Slim to name but a few. He learned, from men whose names were as colourful as their pasts, how to write the mysterious hieroglyphics that told fellow travelers whether a single house or entire village was friendly or hostile. He perfected the art of story telling – a line of guff - to ensure that the passer by or house holder would be as generous as possible. It is a generally held belief that his stories were better than those produced by other ‘tramp’ writers such as Jack London mainly because, at this time, tramping was his chosen way of life rather than the occasional source of material for a book. He would write his novels and essays in long hand and send the manuscript off to his publisher from the first post office he encountered as he commenced his days ‘work’.

He was involved in at least two permanent relationships that resulted in children. His first partner and mother of his son Seumas’, Jill Hayes, was a young left wing idealist who visited him in prison and they were married on his release in 1937. Sadly she died following a long series of mental health problems which prompts Seamus to say that she was ‘lost in the war’ although her battle was not against Nazism as the six year old wrote in his short story Naughty Mans in Cyril Connelly’s Horizon magazine but her own demons. Later Jim established a relationship with Kathleen Newton who helped raise the young Seumas and shared and enjoyed Jim’s unusual life style.

He also inhabited the pre and post war literary and creative circles in London and could often be found in the bars and cafes in Soho and Fitzrovia. Seumas, remembers, with affection, Paul Robeson serenading him in a Soho café and of also sitting on the lap of the artist and model Nina Hamnett who, still the belle of Paris and London, would smother him with affection under the gaze of her indulgent Bohemian acquaintances. The glut of pre and post war literary magazines edited by the likes of T S Eliot, John Lehmann and the aforementioned Cyril Connelly gave him an accessible platform to practice his art and earn a crust at the same time and, in 1964, Jim made four programs on the tramping life for BBC Wales and an extract can be seen at http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/walesonair/database/tramps.shtml#content

In his book Tramping the Toby, he says “…….one day Dylan Thomas sat down beside me, to drink black coffee at the Madrid in Soho. Next day I was a scriptwriter in a film company, with Dylan and the rest of the boys. Many of the films were about forestry-work, lorry-drivers, trawler men, and the like. I got out on the road a great deal, collecting material. It was the next thing to being a tramp – I had found the halfway house.”

Jim died in 1966 and his partner Kathleen reportedly left the United Kingdom for the warmer climes of Spain. No writer since has really captured the heart and soul of the drifter and expounded his or her virtues and sins with such openness, honesty and integrity.