Opinion: the singer defined himself against everything the rigid and class-ridden English private school system he experienced stood for
By Bryce Evans, Liverpool Hope University
The death of Shane MacGowan has spawned renewed biographical scrutiny of one of the great characters of the music scene. Much discussion has centred on MacGowan's identity, with many obituary-writers unable to resist the juxtaposition between his birth and youth in Kent – 'the garden of England’ – and the image of the raucous Celt.
The notion that MacGowan's Irishness was an affectation was most famously articulated by fellow punk and second-generation Irishman John Lydon. The Sex Pistols’ Johnny Rotten pointed out that MacGowan would wear union flag garb when on London’s early punk scene, but later traded it for the Irish tricolour. The implication was clear: 'plastic paddy’.
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From RTÉ Archives, the late Shane MacGowan and the late Sinead O'Connor on Kenny Live in 1995
Similarly, for sections of the British tabloid press, MacGowan's life in Pembury in Kent is their 'Gotcha!’ moment, exposing his Irishness as a fabrication. The Daily Mail’s obituary emphasised that the neighbouring and stereotypically upper middle-class Royal Tunbridge Wells is the "spiritual opposite" of Ireland. This point is underlined by the town’s place in British culture, with ‘Disgusted, of Tunbridge Wells’ an established letter-writing pseudonym in satirical publications, denoting a perpetually outraged hardline conservative NIMBY.
Much of the argument that MacGowan's relatively privileged English upbringing renders his Irishness inauthentic rests on clichéd polarities of national identity and the British media fixation on social class. However, the obsession with his English private school past is not confined to the hacks. The latest biography of MacGowan, A Furious Devotion, devotes much myth-busting attention to MacGowan’s elevated class status.
The book notes that "it wasn’t through the gates of a State primary school that he walked on his first day, but the fee-paying Holmewood, set in thirty acres of rolling countryside"; with the MacGowans’ large detached four-bedroom suburban house "a galaxy away" from the rustic Irish Mid West.
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From RTÉ 2fm's Dave Fanning Show in 2021, interview with Richard Balls, author of A Furious Devotion: The Life of Shane MacGowan
After attending the exclusive Holmewood House prep school between the ages of 7 and 13, MacGowan won a place at Westminster School, one of Britain's most prestigious private schools and so 'establishment’ that it boasts 900 former pupils in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. But he was famously expelled from Westminster for possession of drugs, a suitably ‘punk’ act consistent with the later image.
It's his years at Holmewood which fascinate, and which underpin the ‘Gotcha!’ thesis of MacGowan hiding his elite Englishness behind a mask of Irishness. The Pogues' frontman himself was inclined to delete his time at Holmewood from the record. The 2001 autobiography A Drink with Shane MacGowan, fondly recalls Franciscan preschool, where he "didn't feel cut off from Ireland because I was surrounded by nuns and other Catholic kids", but glosses over the more formative years at Holmewood, referring to it as 'boring’ and ‘depressing’.
In an ungenerous light, this is MacGowan deliberately rewriting history in order to accentuate his Irishness, playing up summers spent in rural Tipperary and playing down private school experiences more typical of an Evelyn Waugh novel.
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From RTÉ Archives, Shane MacGowan is joined by his mother Therese for a performance of Fairytale of New York on The Late Late Show in 2000
On the contrary, the Holmewood days were the crucible for the formation of his identity and art. Rather than being absorbed by it and negating his Irishness, MacGowan was able to define himself against everything the rigidities of the English private school system stood for.
In the process, he honed his idiosyncratic Irish 'otherness' in three key regards. The first aspect of the English private school experience he rejected was the cloying atmosphere of class aspiration. While the latest biography asserts that MacGowan's schooldays were not unhappy and stresses his literary precocity under his avuncular English teacher, he detested the essence of the English private school, which is its centrality to the English class system. In his own words, his mother "wanted me to mix with the f*cking English middle class, who were trying to be upper class", a nagging and imitative desire to 'get on’ very different from what he was familiar with in 1960s Ireland.
The second key aspect which MacGowan baulked against was a symbolism foreign to his cultural identity: the Anglican faith, the royal family and the British armed forces. If being a day pupil in a school of predominately boraders was an initial marker of difference, the aspects of Irish identity which he chose to elevate throughout his life and in his music, at times with a boyishly uncritical attitude, all stemmed from his experience of 'otherness' at Holmewood. This included cultural Catholicism, a fondness for the idea of America as contrary to inherited privilege and the IRA (in its various incarnations).
From ITN Archive, The Pogues perform Streets of Sorrow/Birmingham Six at London's Brixton Academy in 1988
But the third and final formative experience at Holmewood was the most significant. Headmaster Bob Bairamian (a former cricketer whose love for the game MacGowan countered by introducing hurling to Holmewood) vigorously recruited West African students. MacGowan's sense of 'otherness’ was intensified by mixing with fellow wild (post) colonial boys, whose blackness, like his Irishness, ensured bullying.
While MacGowan received beatings from English pupils, he earned the admiration of his West African classmates. One of them, Kio Amachree, recalled "the boy who would look out of the window throughout the class and yawn with boredom, but then get perfect grades in every exam while the rest of us struggled". Such was his skill at algebra that his African classmates would give him polo mints in return for help: "Shane of course had solved the questions in just two minutes before going back to sleep during the exam."
While 'myth-busting' can be healthy, its application to MacGowan has at times lapsed into a sneering commentary familiar to many children of immigrants: the dual curse of being ‘othered’ by one’s country of birth and one’s country of cultural origin. The Holmewood years mark an important early realisation of how he would define himself – what he was (Irish) but more importantly what he was not (English, as shorthand for the English class system). To quote Kio Amachree again, "no one should ever be labelled this or that" [what mattered more was] "the ability to tell the world I am Shane, and I know more than you will ever know, so let me be."
Prof Bryce Evans is Professor of Modern World History at Liverpool Hope University
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
