molten metal into horseshoes. By the age of fourteen, the young Arthur had gained a rudimentary knowledge of reading and writing from his weekly visits to the Working Men’s Evening Institute in nearby Meadows Street. The eldest of five children, Arthur, by now a strapping youth, was determined not to spend his life in the poverty of a city slum. In the hot summer of 1855, a gang of Irish diggers working on the Grand Union Canal became involved in a serious disturbance in the pub two doors from his parents’ house. One of them, known to both his comrades and the police alike as ‘Flynn’ was locked up in the local Station House on a charge of grievously injuring a Constable, and left to await trial at the next Sessions. Arthur had replaced him on the gang, and since that day had been a canal man. First a ‘navvy’, then a foreman and later, due to his literacy, combined with a facility for reading plans and working with figures, as an Agent for the Company.
At forty-six Arthur Cufflin was still a powerful man, just beginning to show the signs of heavy muscle turning to fat where his broad chest and belly pushed against a tightly buttoned waistcoat. He was no stranger to the situation in which he now found himself. During his years as a ganger running a team of navvies, he had to be able to convince men such as these to do his bidding. These were hard-working, hard living labourers, some from the bog lands of Ireland, having come to this country to find work to support a family back home. Others, second and third generation Irish, originated in the slums and
