Jim Connell is best known as the writer of The Red Flag, but his poem The Old Poacher’s Song, set to music and performed by Francis Devine, harks back to the rural Irish radicalism of his youth, says Mike Mecham.

The Old Poacher’s Song
Francis Devine (Jim Connell, 1900)

Irish socialist Jim Connell (1852-1929) is best known as the writer of The Red Flag, an anthem of international socialism. He was awarded the Red Star Medal by Lenin in 1922. But he wrote other songs and poems. He spent most of his life in England in a variety of jobs, all the while a political activist, poet and songwriter as well an occasional journalist, including with Keir Hardie’s Labour Leader.

Connell was born in Kilskyre, County Meath, and as a teenager became involved in land agitation. He described himself as all the time a poacher. One of his poems was ‘The Old Poacher’s Song’ and was published in Red Flag Rhymes in 1900. It was set to music by labour historian, poet, singer and songwriter, Francis Devine, who says of it that it ‘reflects his rural upbringing, hatred of landlordism, absentee or Irish, and engagement with nature’. Throughout there is anger at the inequalities suffered by the working class but also hope with the last stanza reading:

I longed for a country by nobody owned
I sighed for a state without law
I dreamed all day of a people full grown
And lived for the goal I foresaw.
So grant me an ownerless corner of earth
Or pick me a hillock of stones,
Or gather the wind-wafted leaves of the trees
To cover me socialist bones.

From the poem’s first line, Francis Devine drew the title of his 2020 double-CD collection, ‘An Ownerless Corner of Earth’ (see review on the SSLH website). He has generously allowed a link to the song from his Bandcamp platform where the full lyrics can also be found.

In 1998 a Jim Connell monument was unveiled in Crossakiel, County Meath, close to his birthplace. On it were inscribed the first four lines of ‘The Old Poacher’s Song’.

In the John Boyle archives which I presented to the Irish Labour History Society at the recent Dublin International Labour History Conference was a contemporary photograph of Jim Connell (shown above). The documentary, Jim Connell & the Red Flag’ (Meath Council of Trade Unions) was also shown at the conference.

Dr Mike Mecham is an Honorary Research Fellow at St Mary’s University, London, and representative in Britain of the Irish Labour History Society.