Series 5 - Ernest Acheson memoir

47pp

Typed transcription and descriptive information by Professor Kerby Miller. Citation for memoir transcript from a published source: Ernest Acheson (1991). Memoirs of a Motorman. Alex Acheson, ed. London: Print House.

Materials pertaining to the memoir of Ernest J. Acheson. Acheson was born in 1882 near Enniskillen, County Fermanagh into a Church of Ireland family on an impoverished, small-farm. He emigrated first to Britain in 1897 and then onto New York City in 1904, where he worked for several years before returning to England. Per Kerby A. Miller: 'This memoir is superb in several respects. First, it provides an example of late 19th-century Ulster Protestant poverty that is quite graphic and that gives the lie to much Ulster Unionist mythology. In that sense, Acheson's west Ulster rural Anglican background complements (or could substitute for) Alexander Irvine's even more bleak (because compounded by his mother's alcoholism) description of his east Ulster urban Anglican family. Second, it provides an equally stark picture of Irish immigrant labor on the New York City streetcars-which in theory provided very desirable employment, but, according to Acheson, in reality was characterized by exploitive corporations, unsafe conditions, and fellow workers (many of them Irish) who had become brutalized by their socioeconomic environment. Third, Acheson not only describes his working and living conditions. He also responds to them, intellectually and emotionally.' Acheson wrote his memoir, Memoirs of a Motorman, in 1910 and died in 1937 at the age of 55. The series contains: Miller's typed transcripts of Acheson's memoir; a photocopy of the 1991 published memoir; a copy of an Irish census record from 1901; and Miller's correspondence with colleagues.