Murphy, John

by Terry Clavin

Murphy, John (1913–2009), businessman, is believed to have been born James Murphy on 5 October 1913 in Oghermong, near Cahirciveen, Co. Kerry, one of four sons and one daughter of John Murphy, farmer, and his wife Bridget (née Sullivan). A fluent Irish speaker, he received a rudimentary local schooling and fished mackerel before working from 1927 in a livery stable in Killorglin and later in a wrought-iron business in Tralee, both Co. Kerry.

He emigrated to England in the 1930s, gaining employment as a labourer in London Airport. Recognising his ability, the airport manager arranged tuition for him, as he could barely read or write, and in 1939 obtained Murphy's exemption from conscription on the grounds that he could make a greater wartime contribution in airport construction. Changing his name to John, apparently so that his father could access his bank account were he killed in an air raid, he set up as a sub-contractor in the early 1940s, supplying Irish workers for building RAF airfields and repairing bomb-damaged runways.

Like other members of the first generation of British-based Irish building entrepreneurs, he filled a labour gap caused by war and the heightened job aspirations of the indigenous working classes. Trading as J. Murphy and Company, he cleared bombsites after the war and was assisted by his brothers Paddy and John, the latter changing his name to Joseph (qv) to avoid confusion. He leased a yard in Kentish Town, north London, and participated in the reconstruction of the sewage, water and electrical infrastructure and the development of the telephone cable network. By 1951 he had two sons with his wife Christina and renamed his company J. Murphy and Sons Ltd.

With Britain emerging from post-war austerity, Murphy was poised to exploit a prolonged construction frenzy that drew a flood of Irish migrants. The public utilities and local authorities needed to build fast and could not afford directly to employ workers on union terms so they contracted the likes of Murphy to supply casual Irish labour hired under assumed names and paid in untaxed cash. Transients shuttling between Ireland and England were better able to elude the tax authorities and happy to engage in unskilled manual labour, mostly trench digging, on a flexible basis. Once Joe established his own company in 1956, the brothers, otherwise hostile towards Irish competitors, adopted distinct spheres and were distinguished by the colour of their vans: John, known as the green Murphy, worked above ground, and Joe, known as the grey Murphy, worked below.

Every morning Irishmen gathered in certain north London streets for selection by contractors, 'the green and the grey' foremost amongst them. Although the Murphys returned home infrequently – almost all their family had emigrated – they favoured candidates from west Munster, and south Kerry especially. Their men were well paid, but had to tolerate verbal and physical abuse from foremen, primitive and unsafe conditions, and the lack of any holiday, sickness, employment or pension benefits. A destructive drinking culture, which kept workers financially dependent, was encouraged, latterly by paying them in cheques only cashable in practice in pubs owned by Murphy associates, invariably after a long wait. Murphy workers were notorious brawlers and drunkards.

Lacking machinery, Murphy based his operations on raw muscle with his clients providing the know-how. His foremen ('gangers') were ferocious taskmasters, unceremoniously dismissing without pay workers failing to keep pace. After losing a small army of agents who realised they could earn more working for themselves, Murphy had learned to favour domineering brutes without the wit to succeed on their own. Over forty-five years of devoted service, his right-hand man and fellow Cahirciveen native 'Elephant' John O'Donoghue (1934–99) was celebrated as the strongest ganger in London. He was also the most feared and hated.

During lean times in Ireland, Murphy employed more Irishmen than any other private individual, but was decried for exploiting vulnerable compatriots, some of whom had better options in a prospering Britain. Liable to be prematurely broken in body, if not killed or maimed in accidents, many of his employees later suffered from bronchitis, rheumatism and arthritis, and regretted their short-sighted participation in the black labour market for precluding them and their dependants from receiving social security payments. Yet hardened hands took pride in their renegade reputation and in being able to withstand such a harsh system. While Murphy's authority was absolute, loyalty was reciprocated and a clannish meritocracy prevailed. His managers generally joined as labourers and longstanding employees were frequently followed into the company by their children.

In the 1960s Murphy expanded into working on the burgeoning motorway system, Post Office cable installation, and especially gas mains work, as the changeover from town gas to natural gas proceeded from the 1960s. Specialising in pipe-laying for water and gas utilities, by 1971 his was one of Britain's leading public-works contracting companies, boasting a 4,000-strong workforce and £1.27 million profits on a £20 million yearly turnover. In March 1972 he sold 75 per cent of J. Murphy and Sons for £6.28 million to the publicly quoted London and Northern Securities (LNS) conglomerate. He continued to manage the company and sat on the LNS board.

In 1974 J. Murphy and Sons was targeted in a crackdown against the widespread tax evasion practised in construction, and eighteen employees, not including Murphy, were charged. Further controversy arose in February 1975 when his managing director was fined for bribing a gas-board official. Once the tax fraud case opened in January 1976, the prosecution maintained that, to avoid deducting income tax at source, the J. Murphy group had disguised employees as registered sub-contractors through a network of fabricated companies, and had also deducted 5 per cent from certain unwitting workers for its own benefit.

Following a three-month trial, the J. Murphy company was found guilty, fined £575,000 and ordered to pay £900,000 in taxes, while its managing director, company secretary and financial director were imprisoned for three years, and other employees given lesser or suspended sentences. The company provided for the families of those jailed. After J. Murphy lost its final appeal against the decision in April 1977, Murphy's family interests bought back LNS's 75 per cent stake for £5 million. Murphy shrugged off this reverse, and also some union difficulties, as his public-sector clients stood by him.

In the 1970s the increased use of machinery and stricter regulation of the building trade doomed the large labour-only contractor. Murphy invested more in equipment and in managerial resources while sharply curtailing direct hires, relying on a profusion of small sub-contractors to provide him with undocumented Irish labour and bear responsibility for taxing workers' salaries (or not). He developed his company's technical capabilities by hiring qualified civil engineers, principally from UCC. In 1977 he established at UCC the John Murphy postgraduate research fellowship in civil engineering, also funding the John Murphy Laboratory of Civil Engineering, which opened in 1996. UCC awarded him an honorary doctorate in civil engineering in 2001.

Opportunities beckoned in the 1980s, as the privatised utilities contracted out more work and a thriving construction sector prompted a further surge in Irish immigration. The bringing ashore of North Sea gas from the late 1970s was a boon for Murphy, who became a major player in laying the national gas pipeline grid, showing an uncanny facility for outwitting ostensibly more sophisticated operators. In 1989 he was elected a fellow by the Institution of Gas Engineers for his services to the British gas industry.

Meanwhile, Murphy moved into tunnelling, landing prestigious contracts in 1985 for the Channel Tunnel and in 1989 for the Stansted Airport rail link, and spread beyond the London region to the extent that half his turnover was in the north of England; he also contracted in the Middle East, France and Ireland. J. Murphy's development into a broadly based civil engineering group was further demonstrated in the 1990s by its installation of cable television networks across Britain and much-praised construction of two of the main shafts rising from the London Water Ring main tunnel. It was, however, fined a record £160,000 for safety breaches following the death of a worker on the London Water Ring in February 1991.

Due to his obsessive secretiveness, much of Murphy's life is obscured in silence and contradiction, remarkably so given that his dark-green vans and lorries were a ubiquitous feature of London's streetscape. The few available photographs bear out descriptions of him as hard-bitten and imposing. He pursued a modest and unobtrusive lifestyle, yet was hardly a recluse, immersing himself and his family in London's Irish community. (Giving generously to the London Irish Centre, which acted as his firm's employment bureau, and to the Irish Club in Eaton Square, he also supported medical research, charities and sporting activities.) Flitting between worksites, he mixed easily with workers, often sitting down with them for breakfast, soliciting their opinions and instructing them on how best to wield a shovel. He kept a tight grip on his commercial interests and signified his unrelenting work ethic by placing two beehives in the courtyard of his unpretentious Kentish Town headquarters. Such was his reputation that when an IRA bomb devastated London's financial centre in 1992, the British prime minister John Major called Murphy upon being told he was the only man capable of speedily repairing the damage.

Despite an erratic profit performance, J. Murphy grew rapidly in Murphy's final decade through recourse to partnership arrangements, winning lucrative contracts such as for the construction of cable tunnels for the London Olympics. Reverting to directly hiring its labourers in an altered regulatory climate, J. Murphy and Sons latterly employed 3,500 workers (mostly Irish) and achieved yearly profits of over £50 million on a £500 million turnover, placing it firmly in the second tier of the British construction industry and among Britain's largest non-quoted companies. Diversifying into property ventures, concrete and demolition firms, Greek shipping, and investments in Irish hotels and in Kerry Airport (Farranfore), Murphy amassed an estimated £200 million personal fortune, capping the most spectacular social ascent of any Irish navvy.

From the 1960s this wealth was secreted for tax reasons in various offshore trusts, which became the focus of litigation with his estranged eldest son John. Having been stripped of his Murphy directorships in 1987, John junior infuriated his publicity-averse father by taking court action in 1994 over his refusal to name the trustees to his various settlements. The courts obliged Murphy in 1998 to disclose this information to his son on the grounds that he was a probable beneficiary of these trusts. In 2001 Murphy senior refused to be interviewed by Irish government inspectors investigating the evasion of taxes through the use of Cayman Island bank accounts, known as Ansbacher accounts. He admitted in writing that his trusts had done business with the Ansbacher bank. Unable to establish whether he was an Ansbacher client, the inspectors unavailingly recommended his prosecution for not cooperating.

Before dying in the early 1980s, his first wife was nursed by an Irishwoman, Kathleen, whom Murphy subsequently married. She bore him a son and daughter. Heartened by his daughter Caroline's work experience on non-Murphy building sites and civil engineer qualifications, he disregarded both her youth and the building sector's gender norms by designating her as his corporate successor in 2006. He managed his company until about a year before his death, which occurred on 7 May 2009 at his London flat in Westminster. In accordance with his wishes that he be buried near 'Elephant' John, he was interred at Killovarnogue near Cahirciveen.

Caroline took over J. Murphy but reduced her involvement in 2010 due to professional and personal stresses. Subsequently expressing public support for trade unions, improved building-site safety standards, and gay rights, she quit the business in 2014 after her family prevented her from transforming it into a workers' cooperative.