James Leo Phelan was an Irish

Irish people

The Irish people are an ethnic group who originate in Ireland, an island in northwestern Europe. Ireland has been populated for around 9,000 years , with the Irish people's earliest ancestors recorded having legends of being descended from groups such as the Nemedians, Fomorians, Fir Bolg, Tuatha...

 tramp

Tramp

A tramp is a long term homeless person who travels from place to place as a vagrant, traditionally walking or hiking all year round. In British English meanwhile a tramp simply refers to a homeless person, usually not a travelling one....

 who wrote several books on tramp life and prison life.

Childhood

Phelan was born in Ireland in 1895 and spent his early years in the village of Inchicore

Inchicore

-Location and access:Located five kilometres due west of the city centre, Inchicore lies south of the River Liffey, west of Kilmainham, north of Drimnagh and east of Ballyfermot. The majority of Inchicore is in the Dublin 8 postal district...

 in Dublin. He developed a strong wanderlust at a young age, which he attributed to living near a busy port city, and growing up with a father who had traveled extensively and a mother who constantly recited fairy stories

Fairy tale

A fairy tale is a type of short story that typically features such folkloric characters, such as fairies, goblins, elves, trolls, dwarves, giants or gnomes, and usually magic or enchantments. However, only a small number of the stories refer to fairies...

. From an early age Phelan escaped from home repeatedly, attempting to stow away

Stowaway

A stowaway is a person who secretly boards a vehicle, such as an aircraft, bus, ship, cargo truck or train, to travel without paying and without being detected....

 beneath a tarpaulin, only to be discovered, disembarked at the nearest convenient point and returned to his despairing parents by equally despairing policemen.

At eighteen, under the fear of a "shotgun wedding", Phelan left Cork

County Cork

County Cork is a county in Ireland. It is located in the South-West Region and is also part of the province of Munster. It is named after the city of Cork . Cork County Council is the local authority for the county...

 for Galveston, Texas

Galveston, Texas

Galveston is a coastal city located on Galveston Island in the U.S. state of Texas. , the city had a total population of 47,743 within an area of...

 aboard a Texan oil tanker. He later wrote, in his autobiography Tramp at Anchor, that his propensity to walk away at the slightest provocation and from any commitment led him to conclude that instability is what makes a man a tramp and, in doing so, he laid down the philosophy that was to shape the remainder of his life.

Prison

Phelan eventually returned to Ireland and pursued various trades, but his republican

Irish Republicanism

Irish republicanism is an ideology based on the belief that all of Ireland should be an independent republic.In 1801, under the Act of Union, the Kingdom of Great Britain and the Kingdom of Ireland merged to form the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland...

 held views soon found him involved with the Irish Revolutionary movement

Irish War of Independence

The Irish War of Independence , Anglo-Irish War, Black and Tan War, or Tan War was a guerrilla war mounted by the Irish Republican Army against the British government and its forces in Ireland. It began in January 1919, following the Irish Republic's declaration of independence. Both sides agreed...

. During a post office robbery in which Phelan took part, a murder took place; although the judge agreed that Phelan did not commit the act, he was legally culpable simply by virtue of having been involved and present at the robbery. He was sentenced to death by hanging and sent to Manchester Prison

Manchester (HM Prison)

HM Prison Manchester is a high-security male prison situated in Manchester, England operated by Her Majesty's Prison Service. It is a local Prison, holding prisoners remanded into custody from the courts in the Manchester area as well as a number of Category A prisoners.HM Prison Manchester was...

.

On the eve of his execution in 1923, the Home Secretary

Home Secretary

The Secretary of State for the Home Department, commonly known as the Home Secretary, is the minister in charge of the Home Office of the United Kingdom, and one of the country's four Great Offices of State...

 commuted his sentence to life imprisonment. He remained in prison for another 15 years before he was released, serving time in prisons including Maidstone

Maidstone

Maidstone is the county town of Kent, England, south-east of London. The River Medway runs through the centre of the town linking Maidstone to Rochester and the Thames Estuary. Historically, the river was a source and route for much of the town's trade. Maidstone was the centre of the agricultural...

 and Dartmoor

Dartmoor (HM Prison)

HM Prison Dartmoor is a Category C men's prison, located in Princetown, high on Dartmoor in the English county of Devon. Its high granite walls dominate this area of the moor...

. He would later draw on these experiences for his several books on prison life.

Tramping

Upon his release from prison in 1937, Phelan vowed never to live within four walls again and returned to the tramp life. Like most tramps, he had a preferred route; in his case, the northbound A1 in England. On this road, as it snaked its way from London to the York and back, he learnt the lore of the road from characters such as Lumpy Red Fox, Dicky Tom Cosgrove, Jimmy Scotland, Stan the Man and Stornoway Slim. He learned how to write the mysterious hieroglyphics that told fellow travelers whether a single house or entire village was friendly or hostile. He perfected the art of story telling – a line of guff – to ensure that the passerby or house holder would be as generous as possible. It is a generally held belief that his stories were better than those produced by other "tramp" writers such as Jack London

Jack London

John Griffith "Jack" London was an American author, journalist, and social activist. He was a pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction and was one of the first fiction writers to obtain worldwide celebrity and a large fortune from his fiction alone...

 mainly because, at this time, tramping was his chosen way of life rather than the occasional source of material for a book. He would write his novels and essays in longhand and send the manuscript off to his publisher from the first post office he encountered as he commenced his day's "work".

Family

Phelan had children with at least two longtime partners. His first partner, Jill Hayes, was a young left wing idealist who visited him in prison. They were married on his release in 1937 and had a son, Seumas. Hayes died following a long series of mental health problems which prompted Seumas, in his short story "Naughty Mans", to describe her as "lost in the war". Later Phelan established a relationship with Kathleen Newton, who helped raise the young Seumas, and who shared and enjoyed Phelan's unusual lifestyle.

Phelan also inhabited the pre- and post-war literary and creative circles in London and could often be found in the bars and cafés in Soho

Soho

Soho is an area of the City of Westminster and part of the West End of London. Long established as an entertainment district, for much of the 20th century Soho had a reputation for sex shops as well as night life and film industry. Since the early 1980s, the area has undergone considerable...

 and Fitzrovia

Fitzrovia

Fitzrovia is a neighbourhood in central London, near London's West End lying partly in the London Borough of Camden and partly in the City of Westminster ; and situated between Marylebone and Bloomsbury and north of Soho. It is characterised by its mixed-use of residential, business, retail,...

. Seumas Phelan has described Paul Robeson

Paul Robeson

Paul Leroy Robeson was an American concert singer , recording artist, actor, athlete, scholar who was an advocate for the Civil Rights Movement in the first half of the twentieth century...

 serenading him in a Soho café, and has written memories of sitting on the lap of the artist and model Nina Hamnett

Nina Hamnett

Nina Hamnett was a Welsh artist and writer, and an expert on sailors' chanteys, who became known as the Queen of Bohemia.- Early life :...

. The glut of pre- and post-war literary magazines edited by the likes of T. S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot

Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...

, John Lehmann

John Lehmann

Rudolf John Frederick Lehmann was an English poet and man of letters, and one of the foremost literary editors of the twentieth century, founding the periodicals New Writing and The London Magazine.The fourth child of journalist Rudolph Lehmann, and brother of Helen Lehmann, novelist Rosamond...

 and Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly

Cyril Vernon Connolly was an English intellectual, literary critic and writer. He was the editor of the influential literary magazine Horizon and wrote Enemies of Promise , which combined literary criticism with an autobiographical exploration of why he failed to become the successful author of...

 gave him an accessible platform to practice his art and earn a crust at the same time. In 1964, Jim made four programs on the tramping life for BBC Wales

BBC Wales

BBC Cymru Wales is a division of the British Broadcasting Corporation for Wales. Based at Broadcasting House in the Llandaff area of Cardiff, it directly employs over 1200 people, and produces a broad range of television, radio and online services in both the Welsh and English languages.Outside...

.

In his book Tramping the Toby, Phelan wrote, "...one day Dylan Thomas

Dylan Thomas

Dylan Marlais Thomas was a Welsh poet and writer, Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 11 January 2008. who wrote exclusively in English. In addition to poetry, he wrote short stories and scripts for film and radio, which he often performed himself...

sat down beside me, to drink black coffee at the Madrid in Soho. Next day I was a scriptwriter in a film company, with Dylan and the rest of the boys. Many of the films were about forestry-work, lorry-drivers, trawler men, and the like. I got out on the road a great deal, collecting material. It was the next thing to being a tramp – I had found the halfway house."

Phelan died in 1966. His partner Kathleen reportedly left the United Kingdom for Spain.
To check details of Jim Phelan's early life see 'The Name's Phelan'.

Books

• Tramp at Anchor
• Lifer
• Tramping the Toby

"Banshee Harvest"
"Nine Murderers and Me"
"In the Can"
"Moon i8n the River"
etc..