Patrick McGeown, Heat the Furnace Seven Times More

Abstract

Patrick McGeown was born in 1897 in the industrial Scottish town of Craigneuk to immigrant Armagh parents. As the title of his autobiography suggests, his working life was spent in the steel industry, first in Craigneuk, where his father was a furnaceman, and later in Wigan and the Ancoats district of Manchester. He was also a keen student of WEA courses, which led him to the view that every steelworks should have a library, ‘as centrally situated as the work’s canteen, and used as frequently’. The documentary realism of his account of the different phases of his working life makes his memoir a valuable source for the social history of twentieth-century steel production, replete with insights into differential pay grades and occupational hierarchies. However, in contrast to Patrick MacGill and Alice Foley, McGeown does not represent industrial toil as a wholly alienating experience; to him, skilled labour can also empower: ‘To the first-hand melter there was great satisfaction as he watched the metal stream from his furnace into the waiting ladle. He had an awareness of creation; seven or eight hours previously this surging white-hot liquid had been one hundred tons of solid limestone, steel scrap, and hot iron.’

With an introduction by Asa Briggs (London: Hutchinson, 1967). 192pp.; pp. 15–16; 29–32.