James Pringle (1883-1949): Galway trade unionist
Published as ’Labour lives, no.12' in Saothar: journal of the Irish Labour History Society, vol. 35. 2010, pp. 87-89
James Moffet Pringle was a Dublin-born and Dublin-trained printer who was 25 years of age when he took a job with the newly-established Connacht Tribune in 1909. Quickly adapting to life in the west, he became a pioneer of trade unionism in the town of Galway, was prominent in social and sporting organisations there, and served for a time as a Labour Party councillor. A distinctive figure in his adopted city, he would be the model for ‘Jimser,’ an archetypal ‘Labour man’ in a popular humorous column in the Connacht Sentinel, the Tribune’s sister paper. Pringle was the son of an emigrant Scottish Protestant, who had also been a printer and there were Edinburgh printers in previous generations of the family. But if James followed in his father’s trade – a common career path at the time – it was otherwise with regard to religion, and he and his siblings were raised in the Catholic faith of their Dublin mother.[1]
Pringle’s early years in the west were significant years in the history of Irish labour, but, at the time of his arrival, Galway was almost an untilled field as far as trade unionism was concerned. His earliest public involvement in the city was in the Irish National Foresters, a nationalist benefit society,[2] but it is evident that he had a commitment to trade unionism, for he soon established a Galway branch of the Typographical Association (TA). Prior to that, the few unionised printers in the area were in the Sligo branch. There is no indication that Pringle’s Tribune employers had any objection to the TA – indeed, unionised printing employers enjoyed advantages during those years due to the success of the printing unions in having non-union ‘rat-shops’ excluded from valuable local authority printing contracts.[3]
James Pringle’s trade union commitment extended beyond his own trade, and he was one of those who established a Trades Council in Galway. This initiative was prompted by the meeting of the 1911 Irish Trades Union Congress in the city, which had led to the few scattered trade unionists in the area forming a Congress Reception Committee, and organising their own occupations. The reception committee evolved into the Galway United Trades and Labour Council, initially an artisan-dominated body, and Pringle became its president in 1912.[4]
Trades Council president was an onerous position in these years of social unrest, when marginalised sections of the workforce were asserting themselves in pursuit of improvements in pay and conditions. While employers tended to recognise the unions of skilled male workers, they were less willing to negotiate with labourers and factory girls. There were bitter strikes and lock-outs, including, in Galway, a lock-out of 500 dockworkers and yard labourers in March 1912 and a five week strike by all of the labourers of the city during April-May 1913. In these disputes, a Galway Workers and General Labourers’ Union – formed in July 1911; part of the National Union of Dock Labourers from December 1912 – faced an Employers’ Federation led by the foremost local merchant, Máirtín Mór MacDonogh.[5]
While the Labourers’ Union became affiliated to the Trades Council, that Council was not centrally involved in the conflicts of 1912 and 1913. Its roles, and those of its president Pringle, lay chiefly in fundraising for strikers, and in averting or resolving conflict. In November 1912, intriguingly, there was an acknowledgement in the Tribune that but for the ‘single-handed efforts of Mr James Pringle,’ there would have been another lock-out of labourers.[6]
In January 1914, following the example of equivalent bodies elsewhere, the Trades Council intervened in local politics when it nominated the first slate of Labour candidates for a Galway urban council election. Pringle was among these candidates, and, though polling well for a newcomer to the city, he was unsuccessful.[7] He was elected to the Board of Guardians, however, where he was a vigilant advocate of labour interests, insisting, for example, that the working conditions of the workhouse tailor and shoemaker be made consistent with ‘fair labour’ principles. And when it was proposed that paupers be employed to carry out some improvements in the institution, he argued that ‘the work should be done by legitimate labour – by men who had been trained in their trades, and who paid the rates of the town.’[8]
While pioneering trade unionism and labour politics in Galway, Pringle remained an active nationalist, holding leading positions in city branches of the Irish National Foresters and the United Irish League (UIL).[9] In 1914, he was energetic in establishing an Irish Volunteers branch, and was the only working man who paid for his own Volunteer uniform. This gesture cost him two weeks wages, but perhaps he felt it was expected of him as Trades Council president.[10] The evidence suggests that Pringle’s nationalism, like his trade unionism, was of the moderate variety, Foresters, UIL, and Volunteers all being elements of mainstream nationalism, the very politics that the Tribune was established to promote. And when the Volunteers split, Pringle was one of the labour men who sided with the Redmondite majority.[11] Arguably, in presenting a more moderate face than some of his labour comrades, Pringle was able to win a hearing where they could not. Certainly, the fact that the Tribune during these years reported on labour matters in a more balanced way and in greater detail than its contemporaries may be attributed to his influence.[12]
Pringle found time to court and marry Mary Ussher of Woodquay, the daughter of a shopkeeper and former urban councillor who was active alongside him in the UIL. The family home would be in Woodquay for almost all of the remainder of their lives.[13]
Pringle ceased working for the Tribune around Easter 1916 – it is possible that he was laid off because of the wartime shortage of newsprint that forced the Tribune to reduce its size from eight to four pages during May of that year. Writing to the Board of Guardians from Drumcondra in June 1916, he conveyed his apologies for missing recent meetings. Stating that he had no objections to being disqualified on the grounds of non-attendance, he asked only that ‘a representative from the trades and labour bodies’ be co-opted in his place. ‘It was with no light heart,’ he wrote, ‘that I took my departure from Galway, and at present my chances of returning are remote.’[14]
No references to James Pringle were found in the Tribune for several years following. By early 1920, however, he had returned to Galway, finding employment with local newspapers other than the Tribune.[15] Resuming trade union activism, he was involved in reorganising the Trades Council, which had experienced difficulties in the aftermath of the January 1920 local elections.[16] Pringle took up the reins again as president of the reorganised body which styled itself for a time the Galway Workers Council, reflecting a radicalisation of Irish labour in response the Russian revolution and to revolutionary developments at home. Even moderate individuals were carried along by events, and for two days in April 1920 James Pringle found himself de facto governor of Galway, the circumstances being the Irish Labour Party and Trades Union Congress general strike in support of republican prisoners on hunger strike. For the Manchester Guardian, it was ‘no exaggeration to trace a flavour of proletarian dictatorship about some aspects of this strike’ which saw trade union bodies throughout the country take responsibility for public order and essential services.[17] Addressing a celebratory meeting marking the end of the strike, Pringle urged that militancy now be directed towards labour objectives:
This new [Worker’s] Council is going to make it pretty warm for any man, woman, boy or girl who stopped outside the union. For long enough there have been men and women, boys and girls sitting on the fence, getting the hard won benefits. There was no reason that what they had done in the case of a national crisis they could not do in the case of a crisis in the union. Anybody who kept outside the ranks of organised labour would be treated as a scab and a black-leg, and as everything that was dirty and vile (applause) ... You have to realise that if you have a responsible trades council, there is not going to be any victimisation in Galway.[18]
Through the Truce, the Treaty, and the election of Galway’s first Labour TD (T.J. O’Connell in 1922), James Pringle’s commitment to the working people of his adopted city remained strong. He was an unsuccessful candidate in the Board of Guardians of 1920, but in November 1922, he took a significant step politically, when, following the death of a Labour urban councillor, Patrick Colohan, he was co-opted in his stead. A few months before, after a six year interval, he had returned to work at the Tribune, this time as print foreman.[19] In the following local elections in 1925, Pringle was elected in his own right, so in the critical years following the establishment of the state, his remained a leading Labour voice in Galway.
There were significant changes in Pringle’s life as he reached his mid-forties. He was not a candidate for the 1928 local elections, and he ceased to be print foreman at the Tribune in the following year, though he continued to work there, and he remained active in the TA. He remained something of a public figure during the 1930s, however, through the musings of his fictional alter ego, ‘Jimser,’ in a column written by Tom ‘Cork’ Kenny, the founding editor of the Tribune and a long-time work colleague.[20] It is likely that Pringle relinquished his positions of responsibility for health reasons. Certainly, he suffered from ill-health in his later years, and he retired from the Tribune in 1947 at the age of 63. In the same year, he retired from the presidency of the Commercial Boat Club, a position he had held since 1944. It was during these years of his decline, that his son Jimmy, who had started his working life at the Tribune, achieved international prominence as a war photographer.[21]
In 1949, James and Mary Pringle moved to Dublin to live with their daughter, Mrs Sylvia McDonald. Mrs Pringle died not long afterwards, and, before the end of 1949, James himself was dead. An obituary in the Connacht Tribune testified to his ‘honesty, efficiency and integrity,’ noting that he had been ‘a good worker and a candid speaker [...] a good friend and an enjoyable companion.’[22] Arguably, it was these very qualities that led him to take up the labour cause, and to make a solid contribution to it. While Pringle was never a labour leader of the first rank, his commitment to the movement extended from the period when Home Rule seemed imminent, through the revolutionary era, to the early years of Saorstát Éireann. Like many of his Galway labour comrades of 1911-14 – they included individuals like Walter Macken, father of the novelist, and Luke J. Duffy, later general secretary of the Labour Party – James Moffett Pringle was not a particularly radical individual, but he had a strong commitment to his class and he was able to adapt to circumstance. He was among the unsung stalwarts who initiated and sustained the labour movement in towns and cities throughout the country.
[1] Pringle family tree, courtesy of Ken McDonald (grandson), Dublin; 1901 census return for 19 Leinster Ave., North Dock, Dublin.
[2] Connacht Tribune, 24 July, 2 October 1909.
[3] ibid., 18 March 11 November, 1911, 6 January 1912, John Cunningham, Labour in the west of Ireland: working life and struggle, Belfast 1995, pp.63-64, 156; John W. Boyle, The Irish labor movement in the nineteenth century, Washington 1988, pp.97-98.
[4] Cunningham, Labour in the west, pp.65-66; Connacht Tribune, 2 March 1912.
[5] Cunningham, Labour in the west, pp.152-56, 164-69; Peadar O’Dowd, In from the west: the McDonogh dynasty, Galway 2002, pp.24-44.
[6] Connacht Tribune, 9 November 1912; Cunningham, Labour in the west, pp.155, 168.
[7] Connacht Tribune, 6 December 1913, 3, 17 January 1914,
[8] Ibid., 19 June 1915, 1 April 1916
[9] Ibid., 10 January, 18 April, 23 May, 11 July 1914.
[10] Ibid., 25 July 1914.
[11] Ibid., 10 October 1914.
[12] From 4 November 1911, for example, the Tribune published an occasional ‘World of Labour’ column
[13] Information from Ken MacDonald, Joe Cunningham (family friend), Moycullen, and Jim Pringle (grandson), Dundalk..
[14] Information from Connacht Tribune Ltd employment records, courtesy of Dave Hickey; information from Ken MacDonald; Connacht Tribune, 15 June 1916.
[15] Connacht Tribune, 18 September 1920
[16] See Conor McCabe, ‘The Irish Labour Party and the 1920 local elections,’ in this issue.
[17] Emmet O’Connor, ‘The Waterford Soviet: fact or fancy?,’ History Ireland, vol. 8, no. 1, Spring 2000, pp. 10-12
[18] Connacht Tribune, 17 April 1920.
[19] Ibid., 5 June 1920, 11 November 1922; Connacht Tribune Ltd employment records. Pringle’s profile in the local papers was much lower than formerly during the second half of 1927 and the first half of 1928.
[20] Connacht Tribune, 27 June 1925, 30 June 1928; Connacht Sentinel, 20 December 1949; Connacht Tribune employment records; information from Tom Kenny (grandson of Tom ‘Cork’) and Joe Cunningham. The Sentinel was published from 1926; the first appearance of ‘Jimser’ was in 1931.
[21] Commercial Boat Club records; Connacht Tribune Ltd employment records. Jimmy Pringle (1919-1970) joined the Tribune in the mid-1930s as an apprentice compositor, but soon decided that his real interest was photography. Leaving the Tribune in 1940, he secured a position with Associated Press. Reputedly, he was the first press photographer to take pictures at Belsen concentration camp. He accompanied General McArthur in Japan, and later worked in Korea, Vietnam, and the Middle East.
[22] Connacht Tribune, 24 July, 2 October 1909; Connacht Sentinel, 20 December 1949.
Published as ’Labour lives, no.12' in Saothar: journal of the Irish Labour History Society, vol. 35. 2010, pp. 87-89
James Moffet Pringle was a Dublin-born and Dublin-trained printer who was 25 years of age when he took a job with the newly-established Connacht Tribune in 1909. Quickly adapting to life in the west, he became a pioneer of trade unionism in the town of Galway, was prominent in social and sporting organisations there, and served for a time as a Labour Party councillor. A distinctive figure in his adopted city, he would be the model for ‘Jimser,’ an archetypal ‘Labour man’ in a popular humorous column in the Connacht Sentinel, the Tribune’s sister paper. Pringle was the son of an emigrant Scottish Protestant, who had also been a printer and there were Edinburgh printers in previous generations of the family. But if James followed in his father’s trade – a common career path at the time – it was otherwise with regard to religion, and he and his siblings were raised in the Catholic faith of their Dublin mother.[1]
Pringle’s early years in the west were significant years in the history of Irish labour, but, at the time of his arrival, Galway was almost an untilled field as far as trade unionism was concerned. His earliest public involvement in the city was in the Irish National Foresters, a nationalist benefit society,[2] but it is evident that he had a commitment to trade unionism, for he soon established a Galway branch of the Typographical Association (TA). Prior to that, the few unionised printers in the area were in the Sligo branch. There is no indication that Pringle’s Tribune employers had any objection to the TA – indeed, unionised printing employers enjoyed advantages during those years due to the success of the printing unions in having non-union ‘rat-shops’ excluded from valuable local authority printing contracts.[3]
James Pringle’s trade union commitment extended beyond his own trade, and he was one of those who established a Trades Council in Galway. This initiative was prompted by the meeting of the 1911 Irish Trades Union Congress in the city, which had led to the few scattered trade unionists in the area forming a Congress Reception Committee, and organising their own occupations. The reception committee evolved into the Galway United Trades and Labour Council, initially an artisan-dominated body, and Pringle became its president in 1912.[4]
Trades Council president was an onerous position in these years of social unrest, when marginalised sections of the workforce were asserting themselves in pursuit of improvements in pay and conditions. While employers tended to recognise the unions of skilled male workers, they were less willing to negotiate with labourers and factory girls. There were bitter strikes and lock-outs, including, in Galway, a lock-out of 500 dockworkers and yard labourers in March 1912 and a five week strike by all of the labourers of the city during April-May 1913. In these disputes, a Galway Workers and General Labourers’ Union – formed in July 1911; part of the National Union of Dock Labourers from December 1912 – faced an Employers’ Federation led by the foremost local merchant, Máirtín Mór MacDonogh.[5]
While the Labourers’ Union became affiliated to the Trades Council, that Council was not centrally involved in the conflicts of 1912 and 1913. Its roles, and those of its president Pringle, lay chiefly in fundraising for strikers, and in averting or resolving conflict. In November 1912, intriguingly, there was an acknowledgement in the Tribune that but for the ‘single-handed efforts of Mr James Pringle,’ there would have been another lock-out of labourers.[6]
In January 1914, following the example of equivalent bodies elsewhere, the Trades Council intervened in local politics when it nominated the first slate of Labour candidates for a Galway urban council election. Pringle was among these candidates, and, though polling well for a newcomer to the city, he was unsuccessful.[7] He was elected to the Board of Guardians, however, where he was a vigilant advocate of labour interests, insisting, for example, that the working conditions of the workhouse tailor and shoemaker be made consistent with ‘fair labour’ principles. And when it was proposed that paupers be employed to carry out some improvements in the institution, he argued that ‘the work should be done by legitimate labour – by men who had been trained in their trades, and who paid the rates of the town.’[8]
While pioneering trade unionism and labour politics in Galway, Pringle remained an active nationalist, holding leading positions in city branches of the Irish National Foresters and the United Irish League (UIL).[9] In 1914, he was energetic in establishing an Irish Volunteers branch, and was the only working man who paid for his own Volunteer uniform. This gesture cost him two weeks wages, but perhaps he felt it was expected of him as Trades Council president.[10] The evidence suggests that Pringle’s nationalism, like his trade unionism, was of the moderate variety, Foresters, UIL, and Volunteers all being elements of mainstream nationalism, the very politics that the Tribune was established to promote. And when the Volunteers split, Pringle was one of the labour men who sided with the Redmondite majority.[11] Arguably, in presenting a more moderate face than some of his labour comrades, Pringle was able to win a hearing where they could not. Certainly, the fact that the Tribune during these years reported on labour matters in a more balanced way and in greater detail than its contemporaries may be attributed to his influence.[12]
Pringle found time to court and marry Mary Ussher of Woodquay, the daughter of a shopkeeper and former urban councillor who was active alongside him in the UIL. The family home would be in Woodquay for almost all of the remainder of their lives.[13]
Pringle ceased working for the Tribune around Easter 1916 – it is possible that he was laid off because of the wartime shortage of newsprint that forced the Tribune to reduce its size from eight to four pages during May of that year. Writing to the Board of Guardians from Drumcondra in June 1916, he conveyed his apologies for missing recent meetings. Stating that he had no objections to being disqualified on the grounds of non-attendance, he asked only that ‘a representative from the trades and labour bodies’ be co-opted in his place. ‘It was with no light heart,’ he wrote, ‘that I took my departure from Galway, and at present my chances of returning are remote.’[14]
No references to James Pringle were found in the Tribune for several years following. By early 1920, however, he had returned to Galway, finding employment with local newspapers other than the Tribune.[15] Resuming trade union activism, he was involved in reorganising the Trades Council, which had experienced difficulties in the aftermath of the January 1920 local elections.[16] Pringle took up the reins again as president of the reorganised body which styled itself for a time the Galway Workers Council, reflecting a radicalisation of Irish labour in response the Russian revolution and to revolutionary developments at home. Even moderate individuals were carried along by events, and for two days in April 1920 James Pringle found himself de facto governor of Galway, the circumstances being the Irish Labour Party and Trades Union Congress general strike in support of republican prisoners on hunger strike. For the Manchester Guardian, it was ‘no exaggeration to trace a flavour of proletarian dictatorship about some aspects of this strike’ which saw trade union bodies throughout the country take responsibility for public order and essential services.[17] Addressing a celebratory meeting marking the end of the strike, Pringle urged that militancy now be directed towards labour objectives:
This new [Worker’s] Council is going to make it pretty warm for any man, woman, boy or girl who stopped outside the union. For long enough there have been men and women, boys and girls sitting on the fence, getting the hard won benefits. There was no reason that what they had done in the case of a national crisis they could not do in the case of a crisis in the union. Anybody who kept outside the ranks of organised labour would be treated as a scab and a black-leg, and as everything that was dirty and vile (applause) ... You have to realise that if you have a responsible trades council, there is not going to be any victimisation in Galway.[18]
Through the Truce, the Treaty, and the election of Galway’s first Labour TD (T.J. O’Connell in 1922), James Pringle’s commitment to the working people of his adopted city remained strong. He was an unsuccessful candidate in the Board of Guardians of 1920, but in November 1922, he took a significant step politically, when, following the death of a Labour urban councillor, Patrick Colohan, he was co-opted in his stead. A few months before, after a six year interval, he had returned to work at the Tribune, this time as print foreman.[19] In the following local elections in 1925, Pringle was elected in his own right, so in the critical years following the establishment of the state, his remained a leading Labour voice in Galway.
There were significant changes in Pringle’s life as he reached his mid-forties. He was not a candidate for the 1928 local elections, and he ceased to be print foreman at the Tribune in the following year, though he continued to work there, and he remained active in the TA. He remained something of a public figure during the 1930s, however, through the musings of his fictional alter ego, ‘Jimser,’ in a column written by Tom ‘Cork’ Kenny, the founding editor of the Tribune and a long-time work colleague.[20] It is likely that Pringle relinquished his positions of responsibility for health reasons. Certainly, he suffered from ill-health in his later years, and he retired from the Tribune in 1947 at the age of 63. In the same year, he retired from the presidency of the Commercial Boat Club, a position he had held since 1944. It was during these years of his decline, that his son Jimmy, who had started his working life at the Tribune, achieved international prominence as a war photographer.[21]
In 1949, James and Mary Pringle moved to Dublin to live with their daughter, Mrs Sylvia McDonald. Mrs Pringle died not long afterwards, and, before the end of 1949, James himself was dead. An obituary in the Connacht Tribune testified to his ‘honesty, efficiency and integrity,’ noting that he had been ‘a good worker and a candid speaker [...] a good friend and an enjoyable companion.’[22] Arguably, it was these very qualities that led him to take up the labour cause, and to make a solid contribution to it. While Pringle was never a labour leader of the first rank, his commitment to the movement extended from the period when Home Rule seemed imminent, through the revolutionary era, to the early years of Saorstát Éireann. Like many of his Galway labour comrades of 1911-14 – they included individuals like Walter Macken, father of the novelist, and Luke J. Duffy, later general secretary of the Labour Party – James Moffett Pringle was not a particularly radical individual, but he had a strong commitment to his class and he was able to adapt to circumstance. He was among the unsung stalwarts who initiated and sustained the labour movement in towns and cities throughout the country.
[1] Pringle family tree, courtesy of Ken McDonald (grandson), Dublin; 1901 census return for 19 Leinster Ave., North Dock, Dublin.
[2] Connacht Tribune, 24 July, 2 October 1909.
[3] ibid., 18 March 11 November, 1911, 6 January 1912, John Cunningham, Labour in the west of Ireland: working life and struggle, Belfast 1995, pp.63-64, 156; John W. Boyle, The Irish labor movement in the nineteenth century, Washington 1988, pp.97-98.
[4] Cunningham, Labour in the west, pp.65-66; Connacht Tribune, 2 March 1912.
[5] Cunningham, Labour in the west, pp.152-56, 164-69; Peadar O’Dowd, In from the west: the McDonogh dynasty, Galway 2002, pp.24-44.
[6] Connacht Tribune, 9 November 1912; Cunningham, Labour in the west, pp.155, 168.
[7] Connacht Tribune, 6 December 1913, 3, 17 January 1914,
[8] Ibid., 19 June 1915, 1 April 1916
[9] Ibid., 10 January, 18 April, 23 May, 11 July 1914.
[10] Ibid., 25 July 1914.
[11] Ibid., 10 October 1914.
[12] From 4 November 1911, for example, the Tribune published an occasional ‘World of Labour’ column
[13] Information from Ken MacDonald, Joe Cunningham (family friend), Moycullen, and Jim Pringle (grandson), Dundalk..
[14] Information from Connacht Tribune Ltd employment records, courtesy of Dave Hickey; information from Ken MacDonald; Connacht Tribune, 15 June 1916.
[15] Connacht Tribune, 18 September 1920
[16] See Conor McCabe, ‘The Irish Labour Party and the 1920 local elections,’ in this issue.
[17] Emmet O’Connor, ‘The Waterford Soviet: fact or fancy?,’ History Ireland, vol. 8, no. 1, Spring 2000, pp. 10-12
[18] Connacht Tribune, 17 April 1920.
[19] Ibid., 5 June 1920, 11 November 1922; Connacht Tribune Ltd employment records. Pringle’s profile in the local papers was much lower than formerly during the second half of 1927 and the first half of 1928.
[20] Connacht Tribune, 27 June 1925, 30 June 1928; Connacht Sentinel, 20 December 1949; Connacht Tribune employment records; information from Tom Kenny (grandson of Tom ‘Cork’) and Joe Cunningham. The Sentinel was published from 1926; the first appearance of ‘Jimser’ was in 1931.
[21] Commercial Boat Club records; Connacht Tribune Ltd employment records. Jimmy Pringle (1919-1970) joined the Tribune in the mid-1930s as an apprentice compositor, but soon decided that his real interest was photography. Leaving the Tribune in 1940, he secured a position with Associated Press. Reputedly, he was the first press photographer to take pictures at Belsen concentration camp. He accompanied General McArthur in Japan, and later worked in Korea, Vietnam, and the Middle East.
[22] Connacht Tribune, 24 July, 2 October 1909; Connacht Sentinel, 20 December 1949.