Description

Bluecoat Press no date
4to paperback 221pp, minor wear+ creasing to covers o/w VG++
575 gms
(Order reference 11836).

The Autobiography of  a Liverpool Slummy is a fascinating picture of Liverpool life in the early years of this century.

Born in abject poverty in one of the city's worst slums, Pat O'Mara chronicles a tough childhood dominated by a brutal, alcoholic father. Survival is paramount but there is no room for sentimentality in this remarkable account of one man's fight to escape the drabness and poverty that surrounds him.

The Autobiography of a Liverpool Slummy is essential reading for anyone interested in social history and the lives of those born without privilege and opportunity. Pat O'Mara's dramatic account of his childhood and adolescence is particularly valuable in its revelation of the techniques of survival (the money~lenders and pawnbrokers, the false compensation claims, the tricks and frauds perpetrated against foreign seamen) and its eye~witness account of major incidents (particularly the Lusitania riots and the Police Strike). Above all, however, it is the claustrophobia of slum life that captures the attention and makes the book so indispensable.