Accidents, Americana, and Automobility: 1950s Irish Car Culture

Abstract

Accidents, Americana, and Automobility:1950s Irish Car Culture Leanne Blaney (bio) The immediate postwar period represents something of a paradox to contemporary historians. J. J. Lee, following the tradition of his peers, uses the term "malaise" to describe postwar Ireland.1 Henry Patterson wrote that "Ireland's postwar history contrasts with that of most Western European states, where the war proved to be a watershed in social, economic, and political terms. Neutrality and the isolation of the war years had served to consolidate a conservative nationalism based on protectionism, a strong Catholic moral community, and an irredentism in relation to Northern Ireland."2 These views correlated with the recollections of powerful contemporaries who lived through the era, including the Irish minister for finance Frank Aiken. Aiken painted a particularly bleak image of Ireland's prospects in the postwar era when he complained that Ireland was "a small country [with] a small population which is dwindling and limited national resources…. Our economic position was relatively stagnant for a long period before the war. It has not since improved."3 The fact that in the decade proceeding 1951 approximately 412,000 people emigrated from the country in search of better opportunities only provides further verification for these views.4 Among others, Mary E. Daly has argued that such judgment fails to recognize the psychological shift that occurred during the Second [End Page 242] World War and Emergency years. As Daly observed, this shift altered the expectations and ambitions of the Irish public, so that conditions that had been deemed satisfactory prior to the war were now no longer considered appropriate. Citing the increasing pressure on the government to provide additional jobs on local-authority road schemes despite "the fact that employment was running at 29,000 or 10,000 above the prewar figures," Daly noted that postwar expectations of what Irish life should entail were now greater than they had ever been, but that they did not reflect the realities of daily life within Ireland.5 Eamon de Valera alluded to this in 1947 when he remarked that farm laborers no longer wished to work on Sundays, instead preferring to "go off to a game; they see other people off every Sunday, and they do not see why they should not be off."6 In Northern Ireland the psychological shift and development in expectations was fueled by the introduction of the National Health Service (NHS), National Insurance, National Assistance, and other social-policy legislation (including the 1947 Education Act) implemented by order of Westminster, which was actively engaged in cultivating a welfare state in postwar Britain. Though the impact of these services was diluted because the Northern Irish government based in Stormont seized "the opportunity to develop a system imbued with a distinctly unionist flavor, reflecting their core values of minimal state intervention, conservatism, and the protection of personal freedoms," it was still apparent that living standards and the acceptance of what was deemed satisfactory had been irrevocably altered.7 Nowhere were these high expectations more visible than on the roads. Since the ignition of the Irish love affair with the motorcar following the importation of John Brown's French Serpollet steam car in 1896, motorization within Ireland had steadily grown.8 In 1906, ten years after the car had first arrived in Ireland and three years after the country had successfully staged its first international motorsport, [End Page 243] the 1903 Gordon Bennett Cup Race, only 2,040 private cars were registered in a country with a population of over 3.2 million.9 This yielded a ratio of one car per 1,579 persons. By the onset of World War II this ratio had decreased to one car per 44 persons as just over 95,000 private cars were now registered among a total population of over 4.2 million.10 While these figures pale in comparison to international counterparts such as the United States, where 23.1 million cars had been registered by 1929; Belgium, where car ownership reached 350,000 by 1939; or the United Kingdom, where over two million cars were registered in 1940, they demonstrate that Irish automobility was already thriving in the prewar period...