Galway legend’s colourful story captures life for the Irish in London

A COLOURFUL literary snapshot of life in London for a generation of ‘young Irish’ through the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s is due to hit the bookshelves next month when Killimor native, Ambrose Gordon, looks back on a lifetime in exile.

The title of the book – ‘Sex, Flights and Videotapes’ – is aimed at capturing the struggles, sojourns and successes of a teenager who took flight from an almost jobless Ireland as the 1960s dawned, ‘to make his way in the world’ on the streets of London.

By his own admission, life’s wheel of fortune didn’t work out too badly for him at all, whether it be in business, sport, romance or indeed in the more practical level of helping thousands of young Irish to ‘get the start’ in the UK work ladder.

He remembers that in one of their earlier jobs – building a prison on the Isle of Wight – there was practically a local hurling team working alongside him. “It was nearly all Irish in so many of the building sites across London and other parts of the UK at the time,” he says.

Ambrose Gordon ‘moved well’ in the building industry, establishing a highly successful business from his London base, but in the early 1980s he switched his focus to the pub trade when he took over The Half Moon on the Holloway Road, a move that was to start an unusual business and social adventure for him.

These were pre-satellite and pre-Setanta days when thousands of Irish emigrants longed for a taste of home, and especially so, in the form of their GAA roots during the championship months of the summer.

Every Sunday morning for the best part of ten summers in the 1980s, Ambrose would fly into Dublin; get a couple of video recordings of the Sunday Game that night; fly back to London early on Monday; get hundreds of copies of the videos made; and then distribute them to Irish pubs across the city via motorbike couriers.

Read the full interview with Ambrose Gordon in this week’s Connacht Tribune, on sale in shops now – or you can download our digital edition from www.connachttribune.ie