Biography of Castlefield native a story of hard work, labour agitation and artistry
ALMOST 180 years after he first saw the light of day in a cottage near Williamstown, an adopted American poet and labour agitator had his life story launched on Saturday night in a place he could hardly have imagined in the town of his youth.
The Puddler Poet is the biography of Michael McGovern, who was famous around the turn of the century as a leading practitioner of the now lost art of the song-poem.
And though the term puddler to modern eyes may seem almost derogatory, in the iron and steel industry of the late 19th and early 20th centuries it denoted a skilled and highly dangerous trade.
The puddler was the man who stirred molten iron until it reached the consistency when it could be passed on to the next phase to become pig iron. The puddler was the aristocrat of the steel workers; at the time no-one had been able to mechanise the process, which depended on the puddler’s hard-won experience.
McGovern (1847-1933) was apprenticed to a shoemaker, but left his master when he failed to teach him the craft and emigrated to Staffordshire in England, where he got into the steel industry and learned his trade.Becoming involved in the IRB (Irish Republican Brotherhood), he became a wanted man and slipped quietly away to the USA, where he ended up in Youngstown, Ohio, a bastion of the US steel industry.
Youngstown’s industrial past is now behind it, but the Mahoning Valley Historical Society preserves the heritage.
It was a happy coincidence that when the late Jim Fahy started to research the life of Michael McGovern, so too did Bill Lawson, Executive Director of the Society, on the other side of the Atlantic.
Bill was at the launch in the Williamstown GAA complex, where he commended the work the Williamstown Heritage Society had done over the 25 years of its existence.
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