A whiff of the Old Country

Hungate was a poor part of town in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The slum housing, unhealthy sanitation and high number of public houses was highlighted in a study of poverty in York by Seebohm Rowntree in 1901. Amongst the Hungate inhabitants was a significant proportion of Irish immigrants who had been coming to the city since the 1840s to work on the canals, railways and in the cultivation of chicory.

One recent find from the excavations at Hungate gives us a glimpse of this Irish community. The decorated bowl of a clay pipe which shows the Irish harp and the words ERIN was found in one of the backyards. Dr Peter Davey of Liverpool University has identified it as the product of the well-established Pollock pipeworks in Manchester, where it was made somewhere between 1901 and 1911. The type, known as Erin Cutty, was particularly popular with Irish immigrants who had settled in Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow.

In Rowntree's report on York he comments that 'it is a common sight to see the women in the Irish quarter sitting on the kerbstones outside their cottages smoking clay pipes'. Was this one of those pipes? Perhaps a quiet smoke from an Erin Cutty pipe helped to evoke old memories of the Emerald Isle. A few shreds of tobacco from the last smoke still survived inside the bowl.