The Amateur Army

Patrick MacGill (1889-1963) was an Irish journalist, poet and novelist, known as "The Navvy Poet" because he had worked as a "navvy" (itinerant labourer) before he began writing. At the age of 19 years he self-published eight thousand copies of a small book (56pp) printed by The Derry Journal which he called Gleanings from a Navvy's Scrapbook (1910). The following year Patrick was working as a journalist for the London Daily Express. Then he published his first novel Children of the Dead End (19