Wednesday, August 1, 2018

A Story For Today - Ulster Biography And Memoir

Derek Dougan, Northern Ireland, Wolverhampton Wanderers

Have just finished Fergal Keane's excellent Wounds history of his family's involvement in the Irish Revolution in County Kerry - so reflective of the bloody price the whole island paid over the 20th Century in the name of belonging, ownership and non-negotiable lines in the sand. A highly recommended work and looking forward to reading three other autobiographical and biographical pieces over the rest of the summer - Marianne Elliott's Hearthlands recollections of her Fifties and early Sixties childhood in the White City estate which was situated on the northern outskirts of Belfast, Alliance Party veteran Anna Lo's story of her life in Ulster after leaving Hong Kong in 1974 and Oliver Kay's acclaimed study of Manchester United youth footballer Adrian Doherty from Strabane who tragically died in the year 2000 at the age of only 26.

Just as two earlier posts have looked at fictional accounts of the Ulster Troubles and general Northern Irish history I want to bring together here some volumes of regional biography and memoir that I have particularly enjoyed over the years.

Of the massive raft of books on George Best the 2014 official biography Immortal by Duncan Hamilton stands head and shoulders above everything else without equivocation - deeply informative and very moving alike it keeps the wearyingly passe tabloid details to a minimum and instead throws up fascinating insights into the pathways Best's football career could have taken in Britain, Europe and North America. In terms of serious football writing this work is the equal of Hamilton's fantastic Brian Clough memoir and Eamon Dunphy's classic autobiography of a Seventies second-tier jobbing footballer in England Only a Game?

Four other superb sports works also spring to mind. In particular there is David Tossell's In Sunshine Or In Shadow biography of the Wolverhampton Wanderers legend Derek Dougan.  The Doog's football career started at Belfast's Distillery whose Grosvenor Road ground was situated in an inner city district which was unusually both working class and religiously mixed in complexion up to the late Sixties- he would play internationally for Northern Ireland 43 times between 1958 and 1973 including the World Cup finals in Sweden.

Like George Best he was an intelligent thoughtful man who was a great believer in the sporting and cross-cultural benefits of a united Ireland football side. Indeed he was one of the six Northern Ireland internationals to play in the Shamrock Rovers XI exhibition match against Brazil in 1973 which has been discussed in detail in an earlier post  as the sole modern performance by a de-facto all-Ireland team. He also once claimed during the early part of the Troubles that he and Georgie Best alone could fix Ulster's bitter fractures more than any feuding sectarian politicians could and that they should go over and sort it all out - he was clearly correct here on so many fronts that there is neither time nor space in this posting to even begin to analyse it properly.

Only last week I read a story about Dougan on an online forum which gathers together memories of Seventies First Division football culture. The poster remembered seeing the Ulsterman turn out for West Bromwich Albion at Jeff Astle's tesitmonial. After missing a proverbial sitter of a goal opportunity Dougan received some jeers from the home fans including chants of "Dougan IRA" to which the big East Belfast Prod went down on one knee and mimed shooting at the locals to ground-wide jocularity. In turn I have seen an early Seventies football magazine question-and-answer profile of Dougan where he claims his biggest thrill was meeting Ian Paisley and the person in the world he would most want to meet is Bernadette Devlin! The Doog was also the subject of a great April Fool's Day prank by The Guardian which recalled his days in the London and West Coast acid-rock counter culture.

Dougan, who carried Best's coffin and died in 2007, wrote an interesting autobiography The Sash He Never Wore in 1972 that is well worth investigating and also an overview of the questionable aspects of sports administration in the early Eighties called How Not To Run Football which featured a crucified Seventies Pop Bestie on the cover.

There are several accessible works available on the snooker player Alex Higgins - both Bill Burrows' The Hurricane and Tony Francis' Who Was Hurricane Higgins? are well researched and often outrageously funny reads - but it is the 2007 autobiography From the Eye of the Hurricane that opens up radically different insights into his personality in a frank revealing fashion.

The Munich Olympian Mary Peters' own story Mary P is an interesting volume juxtaposing her rolling global sporting success with blanket societal collapse back home in Ulster including the murder of several British soldiers in a literally neighbouring Belfast house  - it was published in January 1974 and is sadly long out of print. Finally Whose Side Are You On? is a massively overlooked work from 2011 by Teddie Jamieson which considers the full strata of Northern Ireland sporting success - including Joey Dunlop, Barry McGuigan and Dennis Taylor - against the background of his young adulthood during the Troubles in Coleraine.

Going back to biographical works from earlier in the last century and one of the most well-recalled works would be Robin Harbinson's No Surrender account of his Belfast childhood - the first of four such memoirs from the early Sixties. He also wrote a priceless travelogue of Northern Ireland shortly before the start of the Troubles in 1962 under his real name Robin Bryans - Ulster: A Journey Through The Six Counties.

The Belfast writer and broadcaster Sam McAughtrey is mostly associated with The Sinking of the Kenbane Head which centred around his early family life in Belfast's Tiger's Bay and the death of his merchant seaman brother Mart on the Atlantic convoys. His own autobiography On The Outside Looking In from 2003 is  highly readable and incorporates his association with the cross-border Peace Train Organisation of the late Eighties and his accession to the Irish Senate.

Brian Moore's The Emperor of Ice Cream novel from 1965 is directly based on his experience as an ARP warden during the 1941 Luftwaffe blitz on Belfast and remains an essential piece of Irish social history. Another important work relating to the Second World War is Martin Dillon and Roy Bradford's Rogue Warrior of the SAS biography of Blair Mayne. This traces his extraordinary life story from the Irish and British Lions international rugby squads to staggering military endeavour in the Western desert and Occupied Europe including the liberation of Bergen-Belsen. Mayne died in a car crash at the age of only 40 on a December 1955 morning in Newtownards County Down.

James Young has been mentioned many times on this blog - two biographies exist about the fondly-remembered Ulster comic actor. His partner Jack Hudson wrote a general career overview for Blackstaff Press shortly after Young's death in 1974 and then Andrew McKinney produced a compact celebration of his life in 2003. Certainly matching Our Jimmy in terms of personal and creative flamboyance was Brian Desmond Hurst - The Empress of Ireland work by Christopher Robbins regarding his personal relationship in London with the Belfast-born director of Scrooge and Malta Story is an utter joy of a read.

In my previous post I mentioned the sole print of Mark J Prendergast's Irish Rock: Roots, Personalities, Directions as containing some excellent content on Horslips' career. An entire chapter of this book also covers Van Morrison's musical odyssey from Ireland to America and back again while Johnny Rogan's No Surrender emplaces the deep soul of the singer's work against long lost Belfast streetscapes and the timeless pastoral appeal of rural Ulster. I consider this one of the best rock biographies ever produced alongside Jerry Hopkins, Paolo Hewitt and Tony Fletcher's works on Elvis, Steve Marriott and Keith Moon respectively. In terms of the still healthy interest in the Seventies  Ulster punk scene both Terri Hooley's Hooleygan and Micky Bradley of The Undertones' Teenage Kicks are hugely entertaining memoirs.

As for Northern Ireland's modern troubled times -and going beyond the obvious default of Gerry Conlon and Paddy Joe Hill's hellish revelations - the Voices From The Grave:Two Men's War in Ireland testimonies of David Ervine and Brendan Hughes provide an extraordinary insight into how human agency interfaces with political critical mass. In terms of the separate sides of the nationalism divide I would strongly recommend the Straight Left autobiography of the Northern Ireland Labour Party and later Social Democratic and Labour Party figure Paddy Devlin and Derek Lundy's insightful Men That God Made Mad: A Journey Through Truth, Myth and Terror in Northern Ireland about three of his Protestant forebears from the Siege of Derry to the 1798 United Irishmen rebellion through to the Ulster Covenant. Although cogniscent of Kevin Myer's ability to deeply divide public opinion I remain hugely impressed with his Watching the Door Troubles memoirs as indeed with the A Single Headstrong Heart prequel regarding his strained relationship with his father.

Some final volumes to mention in his brief overview would be Geoffrey Beattie's We Are The People and Protestant Boy autobiographies of his youth growing up in the same troubled North Belfast locale I myself lived in during the Seventies and Eighties and the incredibly exhaustive biography of Ulster playwright Stewart Parker by Marilynn Richtarik. Lastly a flag for the former Beirut hostage Brian Keenan's extremely touching I'll Tell Me Ma memoir of his childhood in a Belfast district near the Antrim Road waterworks that would be so brutally degraded by Troubles violence that Fergal Keane noted in Wounds how it left his own father physically dumbstruck on seeing it for the first time since the Sixties when he had stayed there in a local boarding house for theatricals.


Christopher Robbins, Northern Ireland, Scrooge, Brian Desmond Hurst