tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21064336622896942472024-03-18T03:02:11.870+00:00The Back Road Home - Ireland in Memory and TransitionSaturday Buddhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04976717497499457595noreply@blogger.comBlogger44125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2106433662289694247.post-8475999667965304512019-09-12T09:25:00.001+01:002020-01-23T21:30:54.028+00:00Ulster August 69 - The Other Side of Summer<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Well I travel at the speed of a reborn man...</i></div>
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Last month I finally managed to track down a replacement for a long-lost late Seventies copy of <i>The Rolling Stone Record Guide</i>. There were several editions published of this extraordinarily comprehensive and well-written overview which never pulled its punches by way of qualitative shortfalls it perceived in major musical careers - up to and including John Lennon and Bob Dylan. Other famous performers - anchored in both the commercial and the underground markets alike - could be savagely dismissed from Billy Joel to the Grateful Dead. Conversely no artist was held in higher regard within this definitive reference source as Van Morrison.<br />
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Some posts ago I mentioned <a href="https://backroadhome.blogspot.com/2013/05/van-morrison.html">Morrison's Seventies back catalogue</a> which followed upon 1969's <i>Astral Weeks</i>. Any random investigation of the nine albums from <i>Moondance</i> through to <i>Into the Music</i> will reveal such an extraordinary sweep of lesser-known tracks of outstanding and timeless quality - <i>Redwood Tree </i>from <i>Saint Dominic's Preview</i>, <i>Linden Arden Stole the Highlight</i>s off <i>Veedon Fleece</i> and the <i>Hard Nose the Highway </i>opener <i>Snow in San Anselmo </i>are just three.<br />
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Another wonderful track in this remit is <i>Old Old Woodstock</i> from <i>Tupelo Honey</i> which one must assume is a rumination on the utter bliss of married life in upstate New York as opposed to recollections of one of East Belfast's major arterial routes close to Morrison's own childhood home off the Beersbridge Road.<br />
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Over the course of this summer there has been a large raft of retrospective media analyses of both the 50th anniversary of the Woodstock Festival and that of the outbreak of major civil disorder in Derry and Belfast in 1969 which constitute for many historical observers the de facto commencement of the Ulster Troubles. This beyond the three loyalist paramilitary murders of 1966 and the heavy October 1968 Royal Ulster Constabulary response to a civil rights march in Derry.<br />
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Although the presence of Grease Band guitarist Henry McCullough from Portstewart at Woodstock has been flagged up several times as the sole Irish connection with the most famous rock festival in history - and an interesting <i>Belfast Telegraph</i> article recalled Marmalade at<a href="https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/life/features/pop-for-peace-remembered-how-concert-was-scuppered-by-a-riot-38363542.html"> <i>Pop for Peace</i></a> at Minnowburn Beeches in South Belfast on August 2nd - the exact linear overlap of these events on both sides of the Atlantic that summer are worth further consideration.<br />
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The violent mayhem in Belfast which left seven dead played out over four days and nights - Wednesday 13th, Thursday 14th, Friday 15th and Saturday 16th August. The long weekend of the Woodstock Festival took place through Friday 15th, Saturday 16th, Sunday 17th and Monday 18th.<br />
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The civil disorder in Belfast in August 1969 was triggered by the aftermath of the Apprentice Boys' march on Derry's city walls on Tuesday 12th which resulted in rioting in the Bogside between nationalist youths and the RUC. The geographical transference of trouble to Northern Ireland's capital however would see bloody conflict erupt directly between the two religious communities across three urban interfaces in working class Belfast - Clonard, Ardoyne and Divis Street.<br />
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On Wednesday 13th August Belfast republicans organised demonstrations in the west of the city to draw police attention from Derry - over 500 attending a rally at Springfield Road RUC station. The police station at Hastings Street was later attacked by a crowd and serious trouble ensued in the Falls district with stones and petrol bombs being directed at RUC vehicles. Barricades were thrown up at residential interfaces and many civilians living in these areas fled their homes - the IRA were involved in the disturbances of the evening but no direct fighting took place between republicans and loyalists.<br />
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The course of Thursday and Friday morning however would see circumstances spiral out of all public control and civil restraint. In this period Hastings Street police station was attacked again and groups of loyalists faced off against nationalist crowds at Dover Street and Percy Street before burning Catholic properties there, in Divis Street in the Lower Falls and at Conway Street near Clonard Monastery. Meanwhile petrol bombs rained down on police from the Divis Flats complex.<br />
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An IRA unit at Divis Street shot dead a Protestant civilian while rounds from RUC Shorland armoured cars killed a nine-year-old Catholic youth and a British soldier home on leave in Divis Flats. With rioting between loyalists and republicans spreading to the Crumlin Road/Ardoyne in North Belfast over the course of the evening, the IRA and the RUC exchanged fire - two Catholic civilians were shot dead by police. On this day too a Catholic civilian was killed in Armagh by auxilary policemen and units of the British Army deployed in Derry.<br />
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Thus Friday 15th August - the opening day of the Woodstock Festival one million miles away in Ulster County, New York state - dawned in Belfast. For older residents of the city - who could recall the troubled times of the Twenties during the Irish Revolution or indeed the savage riots of 1935 as times of unprecedented and surely unrepeatable terror - mortifying waves of violence would return to shadow all the rest of their days. Similarly the lives of all adults and children in Northern Ireland would thereafter be fogged by anger, suspicion and the lottery of three decades of murder.<br />
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On yet another extraordinary day in Belfast's history, families in interface areas continued to flee to safer locales while British troops arrived at the Falls/Shankill shatterzones that evening at 2135 following a 0430 request from the police commissioner for military aid and a Northern Ireland cabinet appeal to the London Home Office at 1225. Prior to the military intervention violence had continued in West Belfast with loyalist incursions down Cupar Street leading to the burning of Catholic properties here and in Kashmir Road and Bombay Street. A loyalist sniper shot dead a volunteer from the IRA youth wing at the latter flashpoint. The British soldiers from the Royal Regiment of Wales had initially arrived in the Falls area at 1830. Violence also raged at Ardoyne over the course of Friday with another Protestant civilian fatality caused by IRA gunfire.<br />
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Day one of the Woodstock "Aquarian Exposition" meanwhile commenced at 1707 with Ritchie Havens and then other folk performers taking the stage including Ravi Shankar, Tim Hardin, Melanie and Arlo Guthrie. It ended at 0200 Saturday morning with Joan Baez singing <i>We Shall Overcome </i>- a song heard frequently at Northern Ireland civil rights demonstrations and marches.<br />
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Assuming a standard five hour time difference between the east coast of America and the old soil of Ireland as then directly applying, the opening sets at Woodstock would have overlapped with the real Ulster passion play in terms of a 2200 to 0700 framework on the British Isles - hence the Army "peacekeeping force" set foot on Belfast's mean streets around 30 minutes before Ritchie Havens'<i> From the Prison</i> acoustic opener.<br />
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Over Saturday 16th August unrest died down across Belfast city with British Army coverage extending onto the troubled Crumlin Road in turn. At 1820 that night and as a devastated Belfast came to terms with the eruption of sectarian hatreds long considered as organically diffused into history, the second day of the Woodstock Festival commenced with Quill, Country Joe McDonald and Santana.<br />
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Performances would continue on through until 1110 on Monday 18th August - including Creedance Clearwater Revival, Sly and the Family Stone, Janis Joplin, The Who and Jefferson Airplane. It finished with a two-hour Jimi Hendrix set which began with his mesmeric and driving <i>Message to Love</i>.<br />
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The August violence in Ulster beyond Belfast and Derry incorporated disturbances in Dungannon, Dungiven, Coalisland, Strabane and Newry. Aside from the eight fatalities outlined above, there were 750 injuries , over 150 Catholic domestic residences and 275 businesses destroyed while 1800 civilians fled their homes. The political, constitutional and security repercussions would be immense and the ramifications for civil society in Ulster would be devastating.<br />
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Fifty years on from Ulster's alternative Endless Summer and the millenium peace appears to be radically deconstructing as catalysed by both the political stasis at Stormont and Westminster's Brexit implosion. The latter's extraordinary complexity now fuelled by a parliamentary prorogation atop the explosive trigger of a democratic mandate - this being not dissimilar to the March 1972 and February 1974 milestones in Northern Ireland's earlier descent from blanket chaos to complete anarchy to eventually the very living room lights going off.Saturday Buddhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04976717497499457595noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2106433662289694247.post-90465366984629045932019-07-07T11:28:00.000+01:002019-08-13T18:27:41.445+01:00Strangers To Our Strange Land: The Vietnamese Boat People in Ulster<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Some posts ago I considered the lifepaths of two professional West German businessmen - <a href="https://backroadhome.blogspot.com/2018/09/niedermayer-and-heubeck.html">Thomas Niedermeyer and Werner Heubeck</a> - whose careers brought them to the North East corner of Ireland in the Seventies during years of unrelenting violence and unrestrained madness. The fate of the former - along with his wife and children - casting a pall of dark shame over the entire island to this day.<br />
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Another small group of people who shared Ulster's soil in the depths of our very very troubled times were the Vietnamese boat people refugees. Between 1979 and 1981 approximately 60 families were resettled in Northern Ireland - many of whom came to Craigavon in Country Armagh.<br />
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Recently I have finished reading Max Hastings' lengthy 2018 history of the Vietnam War and also watched the acclaimed Ken Burns PBS documentary series on the conflict that was produced the previous year. A decade ago I visited that country myself and saw many of the associated historical sites not only in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi but also at Hue, My Lai and in the former Demilitarised Zone. Approximately 800,000 fled Vietnam by sea in the two decades following the 1975 fall of Saigon - over 11,000 would come to Britain from Hong Kong camps.<br />
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In hindsight the destination of Craigavon for some of the boat people appears extraordinarily strange with regard to the acute town planning and infrastructural difficulties affecting all British New Towns in the period let alone the sole Ulster model. This was analysed in depth in Newton Emerson's superb 2012 BBC documentary<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKw-T-47oqo"> <i>Lost City of Craigavon</i></a>. Even the choice of name for the new modernist conurbation between Portadown and Lurgan - that of Northern Ireland's first Prime Minister and the earlier organisational genius behind the original Ulster Volunteer Force of 1912 - had garnered as much sectarian controversy in the late Sixties as Stormont's decision to site a new university at Coleraine instead of Derry City.<br />
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The story of the boat people in Northern Ireland was recalled in a <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-26434981">BBC news feature </a>in 2014 on the 35th anniversary of their arrival. It references the culture shock awaiting all by way of the local carb-heavy folk cuisine, inclement weather patterns and heavy British military footfall. Language barriers and the regional unemployment problem were major drawbacks to ease of settlement.<br />
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There was also the juxtaposition of a warm civic and community welcome in Craigavon with their being made targets of lowlife hood activity. In fact an article on the <a href="https://www.agendani.com/from-vietnam-to-northern-ireland/">AgendaNI website </a>notes original government plans to place the refugees in a part of North Belfast where the author himself grew up. I can readily confirm that it was then an exceptionally volatile district by way of paramilitarism and interface tension. Many of the families placed in Northern Ireland would leave within the next two decades - the extremely talented Dungannon photographer <a href="http://www.victorsloan.com/2010/01/return-to-works-vietnamese-boat-people.html">Victor Sloan </a>capturing some wonderful images of the Vietnamese community in Craigavon at the time.<br />
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Over the past few months in Ulster the deaths of two leading Republican paramilitary commanders from the Seventies, a veteran Sixties civil rights leader and a victims campaigner has underscored - by way of the digital trail of public commentaries - just how deep the psychological transition in the North is now running on historical legacy issues despite the stagnant political culture. Thus in similarly reinvigorated regard, the arrival of those Vietnamese families in Ulster may be recalled in disparate respects within the complex social history of Northern Ireland and as set against that three-decade battle for contested and shared space.<br />
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Firstly the Vietnamese arrival marked a very rare demographic influx within what was still in the Seventies and Eighties an overwhelmingly monocultural society bar the Chinese community in Greater Belfast, a dwindling Jewish population and small numbers of South Asians.<br />
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In turn, for all the horrendous murder and carnage that was wrought on the civilian population of Ulster for thirty years - let alone across the county of Armagh - the Vietnamese who came to Ireland's shores were escaping unimaginable levels of sustained industrial horror and were victims of a political betrayal that dwarfed anything the Protestants and Catholics perceived to have been inflicted upon them by the policy dictates of Stormont, Westminster or Dublin. Hence even in the context of Ulster, their suffering was sobering and unfathomable.<br />
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Lastly, the refugees experienced both sides of the archetypal Northern Irish life experience in terms of a genuinely friendly and empathetic welcome and alas an unfortunate interface with the anti-social goon behaviour that the country excelled at for so long as European market leaders.<br />
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Vanguard politician Bill Craig once reflected in 1975 that fundamentally the conflict was due to an accident of history beyond the complex catalysts and solutions rendered. The same base essential relates to the position of the South Vietnamese within Indochinese geopolitics in the third quarter of the 20th Century.<br />
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Just a few hundred of them were to make their way from their beautiful yet troubled country in the tropics to an Atlantic island where bloody historical payback played out across a landscape of extraordinary physical grace. Whether they stayed or passed through Northern Ireland I hope life has been very kind to all of them.Saturday Buddhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04976717497499457595noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2106433662289694247.post-35871663047077684542019-06-06T06:30:00.000+01:002019-07-04T11:04:16.434+01:00The Liberation of Europe: Ulstermen on the Rhine and the Weser <div>
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During the latter part of 2018 I spent an extended period of time back in County Down in Northern Ireland. Just before Christmas I visited Movilla Abbey in Newtownards to see the grave of the Special Air Services legend Colonel Robert Blair Mayne. He had died in a drink-driving car accident in his hometown on 14th December 1955 at the age of only 40 after military service in both the North African Desert War and the liberation of Nazi-occupied Western Europe.<br />
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Little remains of the famous abbey itself which was founded by St Finnian in 540 upon a site of pagan worship and was one of Ireland's most famous monasteries along with that located five miles away on the coast at Bangor. St Columba studied at this Movilla centre of learning and craftsmanship which was sacked by Danish Vikings in 823 and dissolved by Henry VIII in 1542.<br />
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While there I noticed a small mossy memorial on the ground in front of Mayne's gravestone underscoring that <i>In heaven is rest and endless peace</i>. Such a blessed landscape of celestial calm of course tends to sit in somewhat stark juxtaposition to the wild life of high adventure the great Irish warrior lived professionally and personally over his four explosive decades on earth. Yet the seven redemptive words remain thought-provoking, poetic and elegiac in their own beautifully understated spiritual right.<br />
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The 1987 <i>Rogue Warrior of the SAS </i>biography of Blair Mayne by Martin Dillon and the former Unionist Party politician Roy Bradford includes details of his presence at Lower Saxony's Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in April 1945 when British and Canadian forces arrived. The Seventies and Eighties Ulster Unionist leader James Molyneaux from Crumlin in County Antrim was also in attendance as a Royal Air Force officer and returned to the site in later years for <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/northern_ireland/7804278.stm">a BBC feature </a>- he remembered a priest conducting a Catholic mass in the corner of the camp with a fellow clergyman dead at his feet. In turn an old North Belfast schoolfriend who lives in Australia told me how his father was also involved in the early days of the KZ liberation because of his knowledge of German and was so deeply traumatised upon what he witnessed that he cried for several days.<br />
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The three infantry regiments of Ulster in the British Army (the Royal Irish Fusiliers, Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers and Royal Ulster Rifles) were engaged in the conflict between 1939-45 along with the Irish Guards. The six great regiments of Southern Ireland had been dissolved upon the partition of the island in 1921 and the constitution of the Irish Free State the following year - the Royal Irish Regiment, Royal Dublin Fusiliers, Leinster Regiment, Connaught Rangers, Royal Munster Fusiliers and the South Irish Horse. However a great many Irishmen from Eire served in the war against the Axis powers - <a href="https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/health-family/number-of-irish-in-both-wars-unknown-1.1825013">over 70,000 across several estimates</a>. In turn approximately 52,000 servicemen originated from Northern Ireland and the total Irish dead in the conflict may have reached over 9,000.<br />
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The Royal Irish Fusiliers historically had recruited across Counties Armagh, Cavan and Monaghan; the Royal Inniskillings in Fermanagh, Tyrone and Donegal and the Royal Irish Rifles throughout Antrim, Down and Louth - thus including four counties that would fall within the Southern jurisdiction after the island's divison. As noted in an earlier post, two of the most globally famous photographs from the Great War are of 36th Ulster Division soldiers - some men from the Royal Irish Rifles tensely reposed together within their trench confines and then a literally electrifying image of a grouping of Royal Irish Fusiliers going over the top on a raid. The RIR were renamed as the Royal Ulster Rifles on 1st January 1921.<br />
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During the Second World War itself, the First Battalion of the Royal Irish Fusiliers and the Second Battalion of the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers were part of the initial British Expeditionary Force of 1940 and evacuated from Dunkirk. Both battalions - along with the Sixth Inniskillings and the Second Battalion London Irish Rifles - were to fight as part of the 38th (Irish) Brigade of the Sixth Armoured Division and later 78th Battleaxe Division. Battle was engaged by these divisions in Tunisia, Sicily and then on the Italian mainland including at Monte Cassino. The Second Battalion of the Fusiliers served on Malta between 1940 and 1943 while the First Battalion of the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers fought in Burma throughout World War Two.<br />
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75 years ago today the Royal Ulster Rifles were the only British Army regiment on D-Day 6th June 1944 to have forces in the airspace over Normandy - First Battalion glider infantry units within the 6th Airborne Division - and on the landing beaches too during Overlord. The Second Battalion had been evacuated from Dunkirk four years previously and both the First and the Second fought through the Battle of Normandy - the latter amongst the first Allied troops to enter Caen. The First Battalion were later to play a small role in combating the Winter 1944 German offensive in the Ardennes before final airborne missions crossing the Rhine in March 1945. Second Battalion fought during Operation Bremen which opened on April 13th and was accomplished with the fall of that great Hanseatic city on the 27th April. An Eighth Battalion of the Royal Ulster Rifles would also see action in North Africa and Italy.<br />
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The Irish Guards meanwhile fought in the Norway campaign and through the fall of France in 1940, the end of the Desert War in Tunisia and then in Italy including the Anzio landings. Following D-Day the Second and Third Battalions were engaged as part of the Guards Armoured Division in France, Belgium, Holland and Germany - thus incorporating Operations Goodwood and Market Garden at Arnhem. The division liberated Brussels on 4th September 1944 alongside Free Belgian forces. The Siegfried Line was breached in early 1945 and the division then pushed on to Bremen on the River Weser too. During the Second World War the fourth Northern Ireland Prime Minister Terence O'Neill, Grand Duke Jean of Luxembourg, writer Patrick Leigh-Fermor and early James Bond film director Terence Young served in Ireland's Foot Guards regiment.<br />
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The outstanding and comprehensive <a href="https://wartimeni.com/">Wartime NI website</a> recently located the three Northern Ireland infantry regiments across both theatres of war on VE Day 1945. The First Battalion of the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers were at Dehra Dun in India. The Second Battalion was at Udine in Italy while the First Battalion Royal Irish Fusiliers were also in that country at Cividale. Within Germany, the First Battalion Royal Ulster Rifles were positioned at Niendorf near Hamburg and the Second at Bremen and Delmenshorst in Lower Saxony.<br />
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As for the fighting men of Ulster - Protestant and Catholic alike - who helped liberate the future capital of the European Union and one of the two Nazi "Capitals of German Shipping", there would be no rest and endless peace in the long run. As unkind, unsympathetic and unfair a future lay ahead as had done so for all the Irish soldiers of the Great War who returned beforehand.<br />
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The blood-soaked quarter-century provincewide conflict which erupted in the summer of 1969 in Northern Ireland would not just bring down the Stormont polity - and indeed terminate the gathering dilution of religious animosities in a riptide of desperate historical payback - but also sow toxic seeds into the very bedrock of Irish society through the outplay of that terror war into self-perpetuating legacy conflicts.<br />
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Today of course the Protestant Unionists are regularly vilified and ridiculed across swathes of modern cosmopolitan British and Irish society for the electoral underpinnings one particular Northern Ireland party provided for the sustenance of Conservative rule in the United Kingdom as the European project radically deconstructed in 2016. Conversely there is little public discourse on the raging bull elephant of historical revisionism which dynamised that same Ulster party's electoral reach in the first place. Indeed subtle complexities of Irish history are rarely diffused with accuracy through modern multimedia platforms gauged to momentary 21st Century hand-held attention spans. Starting with the galling comparison between the <a href="https://backroadhome.blogspot.com/2013/05/northern-ireland-labour-party.html">Fifties and Sixties NILP vote (</a>garnered in the main from the Protestant worker) with the criminal failure of British Labour to organise in Ulster, they all spin dizzily into time and space as day follows idiot day.<br />
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As the United Kingdom's natural party of government now faces up to a similar electoral collapse as affected Northern Ireland's default party of government during its fifty year existence as a separate state, let us hope that the local and European election results of May 2019 will cast new morning light over Ulster's landscape of beauty and soulfulness, ghosts and curses. Anything now to move on from the soul-destroying political morass and economic stagnation engendered by the shotgun marriage of two fundamentally myopic, painfully parochial and clearly played-out sectarian agendas.<br />
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The three Ulster regiments who served in the Second World War amalgamated as the Royal Irish Rangers in 1968. Twenty four years later a new Royal Ulster Regiment was formed from the Rangers and the home Ulster Defence Regiment which was on continuous active service for 22 years during the Northern Ireland Troubles.<br />
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Regimental museums for the Royal Ulster Rifles, Royal Irish Fusiliers and the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers can be visited in central Belfast, The Mall in Armagh and Enniskillen Castle respectively. In London there is a Guards museum in Wellington Barracks near St James Park and one commemorating the London Irish Rifles at Connaught House in Camberwell south of the Thames. Located geographically between the two in Victoria Street there is also a chapel in the Catholic Westminster Cathedral dedicated to the regimental soldiers of Leinster, Connaught and Munster.<br />
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Saturday Buddhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04976717497499457595noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2106433662289694247.post-64571802355687702512019-05-23T14:21:00.000+01:002019-09-01T12:56:44.535+01:00Fields of Fire - Two Wednesday Nights Up The Lisburn Road <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Some days will stay a thousand years.</i></div>
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<i>Some pass like the flash of a spark.</i></div>
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<i>Who knows where all our days go?</i></div>
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It is generally accepted by the people of Ireland of all cultural backgrounds (and indeed the broader international diaspora across Europe, North America and Australasia) that our island home is a uniquely blessed land of deep soulfulness, rich character and staggering physical beauty - albeit just a wee bit mad in all sorts of happily benign and violently malign respects.<br />
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This was encapsulated for me around five years ago when I was living in North London. One night on the way home from another miserable day of work - dealing yet again with overinflated egos and general drudgery for a relative pittance - I left the Overground train for the local bus service. As I sat there during the painfully slow journey up a steep winding hill of Ponzi-driven multi-million pound properties towards residual domestic sanity- and with my eyes glazed over with physical tiredness and world weariness - I noticed some graffiti written on the plastic backing of the seat in front of me. It boldly proclaimed <i>Jimmy From Belfast</i>.<br />
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Having recently endured a fruitless six month search for employment upon the deeply stagnant economic landscape of Northern Ireland - and thus being exiled for the second time around from the Emerald Isle in pure post-modern fashion - I would probably hesitate from embracing the sentiments expressed in that song by Derry's Phil Coulter <i>Thank God That This Was My Life</i>. In fact whereas in more cynical days I would consider the lyrics of Planxty's Irish folk classic <i>Emigrant's Farewell to Ireland</i> to be a wee bit hackneyed to the point of snigger-inducing parody, the fact remains that the diabolical collapse of social mobility and financial security today across the British Isles makes it sound like nothing more than highly incisive journalistic reportage.<br />
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At the same time however I can definitely relate to some of the moving commentaries towards the end of the political crime writer Martin Dillon's 2017 autobiography <i>Crossing The Line</i> regarding the strange hold that Ireland has on the memories of those long departed from its soil. These being very deeply fused together on an emotional plane, complicated in their makeup because of the national political conflict and associated with a myriad of historical touch points relating to family and community life.<br />
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<span class="s1">Following on from my last post on <a href="https://backroadhome.blogspot.com/2019/05/starjets-shiraleo-power-pop.html">The Starjets and their classic Power Pop single <i>Shiraleo</i></a>, I have been giving some thought lately to some of the most memorable times that particularly stand out from my youth in Ulster. Two events sprung to mind immediately - strangely enough both from Wednesday nights in winter during the Eighties and both emplaced along the Lisburn Road in South Belfast. </span><br />
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<span class="s1">This roughly two mile long thoroughfare stretches from the fervently Unionist Sandy Row district - as namechecked in Van Morrison's 1968 <i>Madame George - </i>and up to the now-closed King's Hall in Balmoral where many famous artists performed at the acoustically-challenged venue including Mario Lanza, The Beatles, Bruce Springsteen and Nirvana. On the way the road passes Windsor Park international football stadium where George Best played eighteen times for his country. The Lisburn Road was the actual route that King William III took through Belfast in 1690 following his landing on the Carrickfergus shore and on towards</span> battle at the River Boyne in Meath.<br />
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<span class="s1">On Wednesday 17th November in 1982 I attended Windsor with a handful of mates - and of course 25,000 others - to watch Northern Ireland surely be thrashed by holders West Germany in the European Championship qualifiers. With regard to Billy Bingham's glorious period in charge of the overperforming Eighties international squad this set of fixtures sits between the 1982 and 1986 World Cup Final appearances in Spain and Mexico. The seven year light flight of football glory had commenced with the the 1979-80 British Home International victory and would incorporate winning the final tournament for the same trophy in 1983-84.</span><br />
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<span class="s1">Throughout the bitterness and violence of the Troubles years the international team were mixed in religious persuasion though the crowd back in the Eighties was fiercely partisan in a very militant and vocal Loyalist respect. </span><span class="s1">Whatever ethical jarring this dichotomy clearly represents in hindsight within Irish sporting history, </span>the atmosphere at Windsor back in those days as a rule was highly animated and engaged to say the least. When Billy Bingham later recalled the events of that cold winter night he noted how the German stars on their preliminary pitch inspection - players of the sophisticated gilt-edged ilk of Rummenigge, Littbarski and Matthaeus - were immediately disconcerted by the downpour over bitter oul Belfast and the then-dilapidated condition of the stadium.<br />
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As to what I can remember of that night ...well I definitely recall the miserable marrow-chilling rainfall on the Spion Kop as a given, some deeply nasty scatological chants from the crowd directed towards the <i>Bundesrepublik Deutschland </i>goalkeeper Harold Schumacher and of course the earthquake roar upon Ian Stewart's 18th minute goal which won the match. Even though blurry footage of the game is available online I still think back to a sound file of the goal on an old unsophisticated Northern Ireland football website which captured the supporters' reaction to crystal clear perfection against Jackie Fullerton's BBC commentary. I used to share it with workmates in London just for the Wall of Sound audio sensation alone and to let them know I was actually there. Although little of the football action on the night itself remains in my memory I can never forget the crowd response of demented release and utter disbelief as the moon pinballed back and forth overhead, black crows fell dead from the Belfast sky and logic and perception shifted tectonically across time and space.<br />
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Northern Ireland alas did not reach the 1984 finals of the European Championships despite winning in turn against West Germany the following November - one of the most extraordinary achievements in modern British international football history. They ended Group 6 runners-up on goal difference with an earlier scoreless draw against mighty Albania in Tirana providing their statistical downfall. The players capped in the two German ties included goalkeeping legend Pat Jennings, 1982 World Cup heroes Gerry Armstrong and Billy Hamilton, future Republic of Ireland manager Martin O'Neill, Sammy McIlroy the last Busby Babe, Manchester United icon Norman Whiteside who scored in Hamburg and the late Noel Brotherston of Spurs and Blackburn Rovers, The latter is still remembered with much affection today by the fanbase for both his moments of sizzling Brazilian craftsmanship on the wing, scoring the winning goal against Wales to take the British Championship trophy back to Ireland for the first time since 1914 and for that legendary Ulster receding ginger hairline.</div>
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Two years after watching what still remains Northern Ireland's greatest home victory I attended an incredible performance by Big Country at the King's Hall on Wednesday 19th December 1984.<br />
The Celtic rock group were formed by Scottish guitarist Stuart Adamson following his departure from The Skids whose own incredible creative output from 1978 to 1981 is still held in awe today - from <i>Open Sound</i> through to <i>Fields,</i> across four albums and with three singles reaching the UK Top Twenty. Big Country would in turn release eight albums between 1983 and 1999 not including the <i>Restless Natives </i>soundtrack - they never featured any Skids material in their concert sets.</div>
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The existent appeal towards the music produced by Big Country is qualified to an extent by the questionable fashion styling and fundamentally naff marketing of the Eighties and some terrible misproduction affecting their mid-period releases. Yet in the earlier stages of their career with <i>The Crossing </i>and <i>Steeltown</i> albums they received similar critical appreciation as that devolving to Simple Minds, U2 and Echo and the Bunnymen. These two albums reached number 3 and number 1 on the album charts in Britain. Their 1993 <i>The Buffalo Skinners</i> is also a fantastic collection of engaging guitar rock and certainly their third great album.<br />
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Big Country's music at its best touched upon genuinely universal themes of maintaining self-respect and hope in the middle of struggle and deflation. Likewise Adamson's lyrics stand as a vital contemporary commentary on the violent and brutal death of industrial Britain - surely the single most important historical factor underpinning the self-perpetuating social meltdown of today and the staggering disconnectivity with the recent past we can now sense constantly.<br />
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The December 1984 concert in Belfast was the first time I had seen the group - I subsequently saw them again at Belfast's Avoniel leisure centre on <i>The Seer </i>tour (they played the previous night at the Templemore sports complex in Derry), supporting David Bowie at Slane in the Irish Republic (some miles directly west of the Boyne battle site) and then at London's Hammersmith Odeon and Town and Country Club.<br />
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From what I can gather online the group had played at Queens University Belfast in July 1983 and then a further nine times in Northern Ireland in their original lineup after the two concerts I attended - Derry and Belfast in January 1989, Cookstown and the Belfast Mandela Hall in November 1991, Belfast again in April 1993, Belfast Limelight in May 1994, the Ulster Hall in Belfast in September 1995, the Limelight again in August 1996 and lastly the Belfast Waterfront in May 2000 during the Final Fling tour. The group's wonderful off-the-cuff electric rendition of the Scottish folk song <i>KIlliekrankie </i>was recorded during a soundcheck by Ulster Television prior to that 1991 Mandela Hall gig. They also played many concerts in the Irish Republic during this period in Dublin, Cork, Galway, Dundalk, Tralee, Waterford, Limerick and the Thurles Festival in Tipperary.<br />
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The King's Hall concert during their <i>Steeltown </i>tour was an extraordinary night of pure passion, soul and exhilaration that was further dynamised by the absolutely wild reaction they received from the crowd. I have read online comments in the past from their former manager that staff at the venue claimed the crowd noise that night surpassed even the regular world boxing championship bouts that were held there. The Big Country set included their raft of four consecutive hit singles in <i>Fields of Fire (</i>with throws within their extended live working to The Jam's <i>Boy About Town, </i>Aerosmith's <i>Walk This Way </i>and The Clash's<i> Should I Stay Or Should I Go?), In A Big Country, Chance</i> and <i>Wonderland</i>. It also included the extraordinary <i>Just A Shadow</i> - a song which in its content prefigured the horrendous epidemic of male mental illness which would affect so many in the fractured and misfiring century ahead.<br />
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I always remember one point during the concert when the hall lights came up during the instrumental military-style guitar-and-drum passage in the middle of <i>Where The Rose Is Sown. </i>Even at this career point where the group were leading commercial players in British rock, I still recall the look on Adamson's face as he gazed out at a literal sea of unrestrained human joy with what seemed like total amazement. Over the years I got to see some wonderful concert performances including Prince, Tom Petty, The Clash, Rush and The Rolling Stones but I will never but ever forget that night in Belfast. It remains for me the greatest concert I ever saw - let alone the most ecstatic crowd reaction - though the memory is always tinged with sadness as to the outplay of Adamson's life. This also casts a terrible gloss of melancholy over some of his later songs such as <i>You Dreamer, Alone, Dive Into Me </i>and particularly <i>My Only Crime</i>.</div>
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Stuart Adamson - who was born to Scottish parents in Manchester and grew up in the Kingdom of Fife - certainly had huge pride in his own roots within both the Celtic littoral of the United Kingdom and industrial Britain alike. Hence when The Skids were asked by a record company at one point for the title for a forthcoming compilation he replied “There's no argument over what it's called. It'll be called Dunfermline - or it won't be released “. Such words of faith, passion and a true belonging have all but disappeared now from our British and Irish folk memory.<br />
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Now one of the most complex bearings embedded within the mature spiritual condition is the acceptance that every minute of every hour a person of profound intelligence, wit, warmth, talent, fun and compassion passes from this earth. The life and soul of our human footprint is in a perpetual cycle of loss and (now extraordinary strained and malfunctioning) regeneration. The same without doubt applies to all sentient creatures - a piece of bloody roadkill that makes one instantly shudder may well once have been a vehicle for some extraordinary physical strength, functional ability or unique character. This sobering awareness of life as it is actually lived underscores how many unforgettable moments are often so fleeting in time and a combination of very unique circumstances and settings.They also most certainly lie outside the remit of extravagant financial engagement.</div>
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All three factors certainly constitute the background to those memories I have from what is now three and a half decades ago. Of both the night Northern Ireland equalled Linfield's 1970 trumping of Manchester City at Windsor to become the greatest football team on earth and when a few hundred very lucky souls got to see one of the greatest live rock acts in history literally blow the roof off the Forbidden Planet of Eighties Ulster.<br />
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Belfast may not have the architectural glory, temperate climate or effortless panache of other American or European capitals - and I personally have huge bloody reservations on the 21st Century rebranding of the city and the Ulster Troubles alike. Yet I remain cognisant that I was blessed to see and experience those moments of magic on the Lisburn Road. Many people have not been that lucky as to how the timeframes of their life coalesced while in turn others were cut short on the opportunity - as was the case for thirty wasted years in Northern Ireland because of direct human agency. One particular Stuart Adamson lyric that was often quoted after his December 2001 suicide in Hawaii reflecting: </div>
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<i>There are only seconds of your life </i></div>
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<i>that really count for anything. </i></div>
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<i>All the rest is killing time.</i></div>
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<i>Waiting for a train.</i></div>
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<br />Saturday Buddhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04976717497499457595noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2106433662289694247.post-26575731641896017962019-05-03T20:29:00.001+01:002024-03-05T10:35:52.430+00:00Shiraleo - Belfast City's Power Pop Classic <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRA-xCrH5F5QS__Bg6GFr6H4Nzsn7Hc1CSMd7eAG2uXJRGrwuFa5jGivm41vCQlgT3bP0REVnaalJEe9_iTs2PG9kjTrY7V2O3YmGQ7FfzPc_uiu0-Luhn2Wl_hGAr1kI0pzFlCH9WwOe2/s1600/sj.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="The Starjets, Ulster Punk Rock, Irish Rock, Power Pop" border="0" data-original-height="339" data-original-width="500" height="216" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRA-xCrH5F5QS__Bg6GFr6H4Nzsn7Hc1CSMd7eAG2uXJRGrwuFa5jGivm41vCQlgT3bP0REVnaalJEe9_iTs2PG9kjTrY7V2O3YmGQ7FfzPc_uiu0-Luhn2Wl_hGAr1kI0pzFlCH9WwOe2/s320/sj.jpg" title="" width="320" /></a></div>
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My enthusiasm for association football and popular music alike did not long survive the fading out of the 20th Century. It terminated essentially with Matthew Le Tissier of Southampton FC, Blackwood's Manic Street Preachers and Therapy? from Larne in Northern Ireland (or <i>Ulfreksfjordr</i> in its appropriately dark and menacing Old Norse).<br />
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Some posts ago I referenced Mark J Prendergast's <i>Irish Rock: Roots, Personalities, Directions</i><br />
from The O'Brien Press which remains for me the definitive overview of Ireland's rock music history. There are excellent narratives here on the careers of Rory Gallagher, Thin Lizzy, Horslips, Van Morrison and U2 though with no further editions following upon from its 1987 publication the coverage missed out on globally successful Nineties artists such as The Cranberries, Ash and The Divine Comedy.<br />
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The book was released at a point where the careers of Ireland's main punk and New Wave acts had drawn to apparent closure. Northern Ireland's Stiff Little Fingers and The Undertones fell apart in 1982 and 1983 respectively after the release of their fourth albums <i>Now Then</i> and <i>The Sin of Pride </i>respectively. In the Irish Republic The Radiators From Space disbanded in 1981 having produced two albums in the late Seventies while fellow Dublin act The Blades broke up in 1986 after <i>The Last Man in Europe</i> and <i>Raytown Revisited</i> releases of the previous year.<br />
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However I can clearly recall some other Northern acts from the time who put out material that has dated fundamentally well in the main. In particular there was The Moondogs of Derry who had a great run of single releases from <i>She's 19/Ya Don't Do Ya</i> on the Good Vibrations label onwards and who eventually were gifted their own 1981 seven-part music show on Granada TV - this without even releasing an album or having well-connected parents in showbusiness for that matter. Guest artists included The Boomtown Rats, David Bowie and The Police.<br />
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There was also Bankrobbers who were the support act I saw on the SLF <i>Now Then </i>gig in Belfast. They opened for The Kinks at one point in their career and their incredibly catchy <i>Jenny</i> single in 1983 was performed on a special Belfast edition of Tyne Tees' <i>The Tube </i>on Channel 4. That Petrol Emotion in turn had an impressive creative run through from their debut <i>Manic Pop Thrill</i> album in 1986 right up to the fantastic <i>Hey Venus</i> single at the start of the next decade which I remember hearing on crackling early hours London wavelengths as Radio Luxembourg's <i>Power Play</i> of the week. Then there was the equally wonderfully named Ghost Of An American Airman whose debut <i>I Hear Voices</i> single in 1987 remains a smart and melodic pop record alas buried in some questionable production values of the period.<br />
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Every edition of <i>Moondogs Matinee</i> commenced with a rendition of the artist's <i>Power Pop</i>. The other Northern Irish band long associated with this particular rock genre - of the stylistic ilk of Badfinger, The Raspberries, Flamin' Groovies, Big Star or The Knack - was The Starjets from West Belfast's Falls district who were formed in the Summer of 76.<br />
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Unlike other gritty and aggressive punk sounds produced on the city's very mean streets, earlier concert material performed by The Starjets included The Archies' <i>Sugar Sugar</i> and The Beatles' <i>Please Please Me</i>. Their harmonious sound and clean-cut look had them labelled as The Bay City Rollers of Punk in some clearly spiteful quarters as their career started to roll. Having moved to London and signed to Epic Records they released several singles and one long player <i>God Bless The Starjets</i> in 1979 - the only commercial success coming from the <i>War Stories</i> 7" which reached Number 51 in the UK charts and rewarded them with a performance on the BBC <i>Top of the Pops</i>.<br />
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<i>War Stories </i>namechecks several Sixties and Seventies British comic book legends from back in the day when the only safe space a teenage boy needed was throwing himself headlong into a World War Two dream landscape after his own da had finished reading the travails of Captain Hurricane, Johnny Red and Sgt Fury himself in <i>Victor, Battle, Valiant</i> and the wee ubiquitous <i>Commando</i> magazines. All good healthy preparation for the Sven Hassel and Leo Kessler Wehrmacht pulp to come of course. The <i>Johnny Red</i> story title I now realise was wordplay based on the Johnny Reb nickname bestowed by Yankee soldiers on the Confederacy rank and file in the American Civil War - a large section of which were of Scots-Irish descent as indeed was Ulysses S Grant whose family hailed from the beautiful county of Tyrone.<br />
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The Starjets released a final single <i>Shiraleo </i>in March 1980, changed their name to Tango Brigade for a final release called <i>Donegal</i> and split up. Singer Terry Sharpe then cultivatied more public appreciation with The Adventures - this including a Top 20 single <i>Broken Land</i> and Top 30 album <i>The Sea of Love</i>.<br />
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And thus the Belfast post-punk group's story would reside in the dusty and scratched vinyl annals of British and Irish chart rock history were it not for the fact that <i>Shiraleo</i> happens to sound today as effective, sunny and engaged a piece of Power Pop as anything released by the international artists named above - up there with <i>No Matter What</i>, <i>Tonight, Shake Some Action, Back of My Car</i> and <i>Good Girls Don't</i>.<br />
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Several public comments on Youtube seem to clearly concur with that appreciation alongside disbelief as to how The Starjets final single commercially flatlined on the musical radar screen:<br />
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<i>It must be heartbreaking to write a killer song such as this only to see it fail...</i></div>
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<i>If I had written this, and released it, and it hadn't made the charts, I would have gone mad with frustration. I don't know how The Starjets stood it....</i></div>
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<i>I was baffled at the time, thought it had all the right ingredients to be a big hit - shame.</i></div>
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<i>Powerpop Punktastik...why wasn't this anything like a hit?</i></div>
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Now having listened to the song a lot over the past few weeks - and even with the twin qualifications on board that I cannot fathom the meaning of the lyrics and that the group did not play that often in Belfast during their very fleeting brush with chart fame - it has nonetheless brought back a raft of memories of teenage years in Northern Ireland in the Eighties.<br />
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Granted these stand a long metaphorical distance away from how John Luke's previously discussed portraits of Ulster life can instill measured melancholic reflection upon vanished urban landscapes and rural idylls from the Fifties. Nonetheless the music does concentrate the mind on a strangely disjointed and still little analysed decade that played out under considerable strain and darkness in a troubled Ulster.<br />
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The levels of political discord and violence in the North were underpinned by the ramifications of the 1980-81 Maze Prison hunger strikes upon Sinn Fein electoral support and how the imposition of the Anglo-Irish Agreement in the middle of the decade lead to loyalist paramilitary revival. Yet I remember other sustained features of life from the time that were to undergo staggering transformations ahead.<br />
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These include the absence of alienating (and now literally transhuman) behavior patterns gauged to the digital revolution, a world of employment and recruitment yet to be totally wankered into total checkmated oblivion, an existent connectivity with the afterglow of the Seventies Golden Age of cinematic and televisual excellence, the sustenance of genuine creative spaces as directly linked to potential financial remuneration, heavily animated downtown landscapes full of financially sustainable commercial footprints, a generation gap still grounded on some residual deferential respect and a time when the past still felt close in comparison to this century's engineered drift and lack of focus.<br />
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So whereas on a personal level <i>Shiraleo </i>tends to engender somewhat bittersweet recall by way of the Ulster people and the places who have passed on from those days it is still tied fast to memories which are fundamentally positive of a time when the nightmarish socio-economic and political shifts around us today were still to globally engage and seal fast.<br />
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An intelligent and empowering piece of Irish popular music in itself but also one that has yet excavated some long buried thoughts and feelings about the certainly unique, frequently edgy, often crazy and yet still wonderful place we either call or once called home.<br />
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<br />Saturday Buddhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04976717497499457595noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2106433662289694247.post-28534204854840103682019-04-23T12:40:00.000+01:002019-06-09T20:03:48.622+01:00Ulster Zen - The Deep Past Within The Fractured Present<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Without doubt one of the most beloved artifacts residing within the Irish heritage sector today is the mummified remains of Takbuti at the Ulster Museum on Belfast's Stranmillis Road.<br />
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Like many thousands of children who grew up amid the violent social transformations affecting the city in the Seventies, a trip to see the genuinely unsettling black-skulled mummy - alongside visits to the Palm House, Tropical Ravine and indeed the Ulster 71 exhibition in the adjoining Botanic Gardens - is lodged with deep affection in the memory of our communally shared lost youth.<br />
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Takabuti was brought from Egypt to Ireland in 1834 by Thomas Greg of Holywood in County Down. She has thus been resident in East Ulster through famine and economic depression, industrialisation surges and deindustrialisation waves and two bloody civil wars involving various triangulations of bad guys and good guys. Also Northern Ireland's national engagement in a global military conflict which incorporated significant aerial bombardment of central and suburban Belfast by the German Luftwaffe that left over 900 Protestant and Catholic civilians murdered.<br />
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Last week I visited the museum again with my Scandinavian partner to have a look at their display on the historic Viking footprint in Ireland following upon the initial attack against Rathlin Island monastery in the Straits of Moyle in 795. Perhaps because of the regional strength of the Irish kings this was much less engaged by way of physical settlement in the North of Ireland in comparison to other quarters of the country where the Vikings from Denmark and Norway founded major coastal towns and cities such as Wexford, Limerick and Dublin.<br />
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Within Ulster itself Viking encampments were situated at Strangford and Carlingford on the beautiful County Down coastline as well as on Lough Neagh near the site of Shane's Castle and up upon the western shore of Lough Foyle. The great abbeys at Movilla and Bangor were destroyed in Viking raids and violent assaults were also set fast against churches on Fermanagh's Lough Erne and the ecclesiastical capital of Armagh.<br />
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I found it especially interesting to discover how the original name for Country Antrim's Larne Lough was <i>Ulfreksfjordr</i> since I had reread only last month in Jonathan Bardon's wonderful 1992 Ulster history how the name of the province itself came from the Norse <i>Uladztir </i>which in turn was based on the Irish words <i>Ulaidh </i>and <i>Tir.</i><br />
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Just beside the small display of Viking ephemera at the museum is a section on the Irish Bronze Age and a wonderful installation piece where one can look through a square hole in the white wall and see delightfully crafted models of human figures across the ages and as positioned around the same sobering burial pit.<br />
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At first we see a family from our ancient kindred gathered mournfully around the graveside at sunset and with the grandfather's corpse placed in a foetal position for his journey into Celtic or Pictish eternity. Suddenly the lights extinguish across the landscape and having travelled through a mysterious otherworldly prism of time and space we are now watching a modern archaeological dig on a sunny day. Two late 20th Century alpha male researchers living the career dream are looking down into the Ulster soil at the skeletal remains of the long-interred farmer or craftsman.<br />
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When I was at university in the late Eighties I used to spend a lot of time in the museum but cannot actually recall seeing this particular display or furthermore if it would have been there even during my childhood visits in the previous decade. It is a wonderful encapsulation of not only the fleetingness of human existence and family life but also the sheer density of Irish folk culture as transfused every day from this island's complex, ethnically heterogeneous and fraught past into the equally volatile present.<br />
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Over the past few months I have visited some extraordinary passage grave, standing stone and holy well sites across counties Down, Tyrone and Fermanagh. The emotional connectivity with our shared folk past that one can experience at these coastal, forest or moorland locations has never felt stronger in many ways - so untrammeled and unsullied in this world of avarice, lack of direction and blanket idiocy.<br />
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Thomas Sheridan’s intriguing fourth book <i>The Druid Code </i>is an extraordinary deconstruction of ancient British and Irish history as relating to the complexity of such megalithic remains across the British Archipelago, Northern Europe and the Mediterranean. It also traces the passage of druidic ritual into witchcraft and specifically Irish freemasonry - it is hugely recommended. Most interestingly, and prefiguring the selection of Northern Ireland for the location shooting of <i>Game of Thrones</i>, there was in fact an <a href="http://tomgallen.com/2015/02/ulster-history-park/">outdoor heritage park </a>based on early Ulster history located near Omagh during the Nineties. Resembling a physical manifestation of a Horslips Celtic Rock concept album it is long defunct.<br />
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The sense of continuity and timelessness in Ulster life that the museum tableau represents was discussed here in an earlier blogpost on the <a href="https://backroadhome.blogspot.com/2018/07/john-luke-eternal-now.html">Belfast artist John Luke</a><a href="https://backroadhome.blogspot.com/2018/07/john-luke-eternal-now.html">.</a><i> </i>Whether the degrading excesses of selective historical amnesia in Ireland is broadly cancelled out by the continual warmth and welcome of the native people and the staggering beauty of the landscape of course remains impossible to conclusively configure.<br />
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Alas in contemporary Northern Ireland the fudging of Troubles legacy issues has fundamentally overwritten the consociational higher mathematics of the 1998 settlement which provided the solitary political fix available this lifetime around for the province following the trumping of Bill Craig's voluntary coalition proposal at the 1975 Constitutional Convention in Belfast.<br />
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In turn the deeply strange economic makeup of the Northern state with its grotesque private and public sector imbalance atop desperately low salaries throws up deeper questions about the long-term logic of Irish partition in a financially globalised world and the very competence of Westminster central government in managing post-industrial UK regional economies.<br />
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In any case, and as society forges towards a point where the only employment left very soon will be programming or polishing robots, I genuinely hope that when the Irish museum sector clears out its content on some futuristic commercial purchasing platform that I can perhaps pick up the Ulster Museum's <i>From Past To Present </i>masterpiece for my own personal Irish archive and watch it again and again and again to the end of my mortal days.<br />
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A cold eye on life and death and no finer concentration of earth magick to be seen since <i>Catweazle </i>walked the soil of Albion across the ITV/UTV network in the first two years of the Nineteen Seventies. The six wee figures underscoring the core human conundrum of getting up in the morning and either living your life fully as a unique transitory soul or just surviving the end of everything good like all the rest.<br />
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Saturday Buddhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04976717497499457595noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2106433662289694247.post-86819979542139996152019-02-14T20:29:00.000+00:002019-04-20T22:04:21.100+01:00The Waxie's Dargle of Irishtown <div style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; background-color: white; border: 0px; font-family: Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 12pt; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
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In the middle of last month I caught up with an old schoolfriend in Belfast. We got talking about what was the first concert we would have both seen together back in the day. We settled on a gig The Clash performed at the Ulster Hall in February 1984. This was towards the end of their career when guitarist Mick Jones had left the group.<br />
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I can't remember much about the evening to be honest apart from the video backdrop they used that night for the <i>Police On My Back</i> cover and the fact that singer Joe Strummer played most of the set with a towel held at arms-length from his face as a barrier against the rich volume of spit and phlegm directed towards him from the fans at the front. I read years ago that at one point Strummer had contracted heptatitis from one particularly potent discharge of vintage sputum which made the perfect rock n roll trajectory all the way down his throat during a punk gig.<br />
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Some months after this Clash concert another friend told me about a Belfast gig he attended at the same venue where the artistes performed with a similarly strange onstage accoutrement - this being a tin beer tray which one member of the support act smashed against his head in time to the music. This of course was Spider Stacey the tin whistle player of The Pogues who were opening for Elvis Costello and the Attractions.<br />
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The first of The Pogues' seven albums was <i>Red Roses For Me</i> and was released in October of 1984 on the Stiff label. It contains some great breezy instrumentals in <i>The Battle of Brisbane </i>and <i>Dingle Regatta</i> as well as the first of the group's paeans to the now long lost soul of the British capital in <i>Transmetropolitan </i>and <i>Dark Streets of London - </i>that city of dreams, struggle, nightmares and epiphany.<i> </i><br />
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The album title is taken from a 1943 Sean O'Casey play and the thirteen tracks include their impressive reading of Brendan Behan's <i>The Auld Triangle</i>. The best song of the album in my opinion - <i>Sea Shanty</i> - also lifts a vintage line from Behan's <i>Borstal Boy</i> in "Compliments pass when the quality meet<i>"</i>. This being a wonderful aside from one personage to another when having overheard examples of verbal vulgarity in public that have surpassed all boundaries of social acceptability and redemption.<br />
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Track four is the extraordinarily ribald roar of <i>Waxie's Dargle</i> which I suspect was the main song in their early repertoire to incorporate the beer tray headbanging thing. Covered by several artists over the years including Sweeney's Men, the first time I ever heard the song was in a long-forgotten<br />
13-part Canadian Broadcasting Corporation series <i>Cities</i> which transmitted a few times on the ITV network in the early Eighties. The Dublin documentary in the series was presented by director John Huston and<i> Waxie's Dargle </i>was duly performed by a talented and hirsute duo called The Jacobites.<br />
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The title is such a strange combination of disparate wordage - especially as placed alongside the namechecking of working class Dublin quarters as Monto and Capel Street - that in essence it could almost be the recollection of a regularly underperforming racehorse at Leopardstown in the Fifties or a physically vanished pub in The Liberties. The actual historical background needless to say - Ireland being Ireland - is both genuinely fascinating and just a wee bit bloody glorious.<br />
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Hence the legendary Waxie's Dargle - as mentioned in James Joyce's <i>Ulysses</i> - was a jolly excursion for the cobblers of Dublin in plebeian imitation of the gentry's own annual society picnic jaunt to the banks of the River Dargle near Bray and Enniskerry which lies south of the Irish capital. The cobblers were known as "Waxies" because of their use of candlewax to preserve the thread which stitched the shoes and "going to the Dargle" had long become a part of Dublin vocabulary for an annual day out.<br />
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The cobblers trip on loaded-up flat dray carts or jaunting cars was at Easter and with the original Waxies Dargle having been part of Donnybrook Fair until it closed in the mid-1850s due to riotous behaviour. Subsequently the annual procession - which extended by default to workers from all sectoral backgrounds - went nowhere near as far as Bray but only to a grass-covered triangle of land at Irishtown between coastal Ringsend and Sandymount in the south of the city. Irishtown had been the location of the main Gaelic settlements outside Dublin following upon the native population expulsions of 1454 from the city by the English authorities.<br />
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Therefore this classic and indeed globally renowned folk song is essentially a discursive consideration between two male friends in a pub on how their wives aim to fund familial attendance for this day of merriment, drinking and music- Monto was Dublin's large red light district while many pawnbrokers' shops were located in the old Jewish quarter of Capel Street.<br />
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A similar Easter-time public excursion within Ulster social history is captured in Glenn Patterson's 2012 novel <i>The Mill For Grinding Old People Young</i>. The narrative of the story follows the course of the 19th Century in Belfast from the aftermath of the United Irishmen rising through to the societal surges of the industrial revolution - the narrator Gilbert Rice at one stage walking with hundreds of other young people up to the environs of the Cave Hill in the north of the city.<br />
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Indeed many of the older generation in Northern Ireland to this day will recall Sunday afternoon and evening walks to the Belfast hills - up from Woodvale Park on the Shankill Road to the Horseshoe Bend at Ligoniel in my own parents' case - when the roads were crowded with people taking the weekend air. And of course in the north of Ireland too there was a rich vernacular associated with trades, professions and labour. The most famous by far relates to the "millies" or mill girls of the many linen factories in North and West Belfast.<br />
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Returning to Irishtown and according to some online resources an engraved stone near a pub in the area commemorates the actual location of the Waxie's Dargle. I haven't been able to find any confirmation of whether it still stands there but, should it do so, it represents a wonderfully understated memorial to the toils and trials and concomitant warmth and community of the Dublin working people.<br />
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In turn, back in 2010, a magnificent city council-funded statue to the mill girls was erected at the corner of the Crumlin Road and Cambrai Street in West Belfast. This was in close proximity to the former Ewart's, Brookfield, Flax Street and Edenderry linen mills that provided such a dynamic for the city's initial wealth and industrial expansion. The tens of thousands of millies - both Catholic and Protestant - would work long hours for minimal pay (or "buttons" in Belfast slang) while under threat of horrendous industrial injury and a raft of appalling lung and chest conditions. <br />
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When I saw the statue some years back around teatime, the surrounding streets - which would have once been black with hundreds upon hundreds of workers leaving the factories at that time of day in the earlier half of the last century - were completely and utterly deserted. And there the wee Belfast millie stands all alone by herself this very night - waiting for her mates who are now in the main all long departed this earthly life and its associated joys and pains. <br />
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The inextinguishable respect the Irish still have for their forebears and the hard lives they lead so clearly unites people on both sides of the border and - along with a love for the staggering physical beauty of the island - remains one of the most important underpinnings of the deep living soul of Ireland.<br />
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Saturday Buddhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04976717497499457595noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2106433662289694247.post-71882232567044801792018-12-06T20:48:00.003+00:002023-11-25T11:12:33.430+00:00The Last Walk of the Sixties High King - Belfast 1970<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIPSmrbH9iWYJYBAPNmaISAboDtBxaNiCvWvQuyIDy9Ob3r9O-lfRSyog0zD6sOI5suJurgWPC1pwEwQ0JNm2UxqXsje13EYQxj1zqT_TNzhqUYbNb0Uc3D_a7-6I5VL4vZddY28p7ryGB/s1600/gb.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="George Best, Northern Ireland, Scotland, British Home International Championship" border="0" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="720" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIPSmrbH9iWYJYBAPNmaISAboDtBxaNiCvWvQuyIDy9Ob3r9O-lfRSyog0zD6sOI5suJurgWPC1pwEwQ0JNm2UxqXsje13EYQxj1zqT_TNzhqUYbNb0Uc3D_a7-6I5VL4vZddY28p7ryGB/s400/gb.jpg" title="" width="400" /></a></div>
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Some months back on a social media page about George Best's career in Britain and the USA a public commentator drew attention to a particularly quirky aspect of a contemporary Seventies press photograph. The picture is of Best walking past the wire mesh frontage of a stand packed with supporters at a football ground clearly somewhere in the British Isles by all downbeat and gritty aesthetic appearance.<br />
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It is hard to clarify whether the match is still in play or if it was a domestic or international tie. Either way the footballer as ever carries off his rugged bearing with effortless charismatic ease - he appears lost in thought about the game with his hand covering his mouth and a white jersey draped over his bare shoulders as he passes the ranks of male attendees on the terraces.<br />
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Many of these appear to be still watching other activity on the football field though some follow the path of his exit. None however can match the attention of two teenage girls at the extreme bottom right hand corner of the photograph whose utterly besotted love for the Northern Irish star is clearly observable to an almost hypnotic degree - their smitten eyes and rapt smiles are affectionately focused on him and him alone across the universe and in utter dazed adoration. It is a wonderful hidden pictorial detail.<br />
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Another classic Best image worth retrospective consideration is from the 18th April 1970 British Home International Championship match in Belfast against Scotland - a game long recalled for his sending off by the referee after he threw mud in the direction of the official following a contretemps. The black and white picture captures his return up the players' entrance at the corner of the ground following the dismissal. Another oft-published photograph from the same match - used generically on many occasions to symbolise his stormy lifepath as a celtic hellraiser - is of an angry Best being restrained previously on the pitch by Wolverhampton Wanderers' Derek Dougan.<br />
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This was the 23-year-old George Best's twentieth international appearance for Northern Ireland and his thirteenth at Windsor Park in the south of the city. Northern Ireland lost all three ties in this 1969-70 Championship. His footballing career at Manchester United by this stage of proceedings - alike his equally high profile and media-engaged personal life - was already highly problematic, becoming more volatile by the day and clearly spiralling out of control.<br />
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In terms of the three groupings of human actors composing the photograph - and as arraigned around the seething departing sportsman - we see several policemen whose facial expressions range across a wide spectrum of sternness and with one in particular bordering on rank supercilious contempt. Interestingly, an equally well known picture of Best taking a corner kick at Swansea's Vetch Field on the British mainland seven days later also sees him surrounded by officers of much more benign hue in Wales than here at home at Windsor off the Lisburn Road. There are also two middle-aged or elderly members of the groundstaff clad in the ubiquitous flat cap of Belfast sartorial vintage - the gentleman on the right physically emanating the generational bewilderment that would track Best's entire career path as a metaphorical headshaking shadow. Finally we have teenage boys draped over the barriers who are either dead excited at the turn of events or just struck dumb by proximity to such heightened, grown up and anarchic bad boy behaviour.<br />
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It is such a strange and brooding image in so many respects - let alone the fact that the player appears to be physically floating his way up the concrete incline - and with the even more melancholy backdrop that Best would only play in the international stadium five times again for Northern Ireland between then and 1977. In turn 1970 represented a complex political interregnum for the country itself as heightened civil disorder gradually gave way to the arrival of concrete terrorist onslaughts and concomitant mass murder. The violence in Ulster would continue on for another 28 years. Best would only outlive the qualified political consolidation in 1998 by a further seven.<br />
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Forging deeper into the dynamics behind this famous sports photograph again and there is clearly a sad forlorn atmosphere pervading it without question. Desperate times ahead for all parties concerned as the mood of the late Sixties quickly dissipated and much more complicated and fractious times arrived on Ireland's northern shores - for Best, the working classes, the cops and the kids. Everything was about to go very very wrong and just perhaps something reflective of this discordant fall is captured in the photo's composition and tone.<br />
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Indeed this international fixture which saw Best sent off in April 1970 took place just three months after the Irish Republican Army split into Official and Provisional paramilitary wings and only weeks after massive civil disturbances erupted between the British Army and Republicans in the Springfield Road area of West Belfast following an Orange Order parade. At the end of June major disorder erupted again across the capital between the IRA and Loyalists with six fatalities on the Crumlin Road in the north of the city and in Best's native East Belfast.<br />
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So George Best took his long deflated walk back up the player's entrance in just the first third of the first year of the decade. By the time he walked down again for the four springtime Home International and World Cup qualifying fixtures in 1971 Ulster would be on the brink of utter disaster and catastrophe. The escalation of violence after the introduction of internment without trial in August that year would burn all remaining intercommunal bridges and herald barely contained civil war against a gargantuan military infusion. Hence the great port city of Belfast around and about the thousands of fans packed together on that sunny Saturday 15th May afternoon to watch Bestie outmanoeuvre the great goalkeeper Gordon Banks and tease the English defenders to take the ball from him would in many fundamental respects soon be gone forever in substantial form and spirit.<br />
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Needless to say the British Home International Championships are long defunct and unlikely to reappear in the game's currently demented commercial constitution. In the 1976-77 season Northern Ireland would compete under that specific national title as opposed to "Ireland" for the first time, in 1980-81 the entire competition was cancelled off the back of unrest in Ulster associated with the IRA hunger strikes at The Maze prison and the last ever tournament in 1983-84 was won by Billy Bingham's legendary squad. Northern Ireland thus remain the reigning British champions alongside being victors in 1979-80 and joint-winners with England in 1957-58 and 1958-59. (Prior to the national partition Ireland won in 1913-14 and jointly with England and Scotland in 1902-03).<br />
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Ironically the picture under discussion also perfectly compliments the artistic representation of a literally crucified Georgie Best Superstar which graced the cover of his friend Derek Dougan's own study of the changing face of the game from 1981 - <i>How Not To Run Football</i>. Whether or not that professional martyrdom was essentially self-inflicted in the main or not, the photograph from Windsor Park that day is a truly fascinating encapsulation of the rise and fall of one of Ireland's greatest sons. <br />
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Saturday Buddhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04976717497499457595noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2106433662289694247.post-27916028545945522112018-10-06T20:04:00.000+01:002018-12-17T22:41:54.073+00:00Heart Of The City - Bombs, Bullets And Bunion <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The dark nature of the Troubles in Ulster would be of such mortifying scope as to quite effortlessly infuse itself into the already grim black humour that characterises hard industrial working class life by default. Little would be ethically off-limits in this regard such as the naming of loyalist interrogation locales after a globally-franchised children's television programme <i>Romper Room </i>for example. The author once appeared on Ulster Television's own presentation of this broadcast brand around 1970.<br />
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While the aforesaid generic wordplay was clearly constructed with considerable native wit and ribald urban savvy the dynamics of the usage itself remains yet so puerile and crass in historical context and consideration- let alone shockingly malign and utterly bloody depressing.<br />
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Another strange interplay of humour with the unrelenting political conflict in Ireland would be the presence in the second half of <i>Belfast Telegraph</i> editions during the worst years of the Troubles of a particular cartoon strip that also appeared contemporaneously across the world in different press outlets.<br />
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Whereas Rowel Friers' renowned cartoon commentaries on sectarian violence and constitutional collapse in the same journal were so unique and insightful as to warrant compilation at the time into no less than four volumes of Blackstaff Press publications between 1971 and 1974 - <i>Pig in the Parlour, Riotous Living, The Book of Friers or The Book of Yells </i>and <i>The Revolting Irish </i>- by comparison <i>Fun with Bunion </i>seems to have been lost to time and space. This despite I assume having been seen by the vast majority of the Northern Ireland population at some point due to the newspaper's national reach across the River Bann.<br />
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There is little information about the cartoon character online but the artist who drew the two-to-four panel Bunion strip in the Sixties and Seventies was George Martin and it was also a regular feature of other newspapers in Britain, Northern Europe and North America - such as apparently the <i>Bath Evening Chronicle, Birmingham Daily Mail</i> and Stockholm's <i>Aftonbladet</i>. Martin produced other children's strips for the classic DC Thomson British comics <i>The Dandy, The Topper </i>and <i>The Beezer</i> from the Fifties through to the Eighties. I gather from some public commentary on websites that Martin is now deceased.<br />
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Bunion was a small rotund middle-aged man and the strip basically recounts events in his married life at home, in various work scenarios and at play on the ubiquitous golf course for example. The wife is a typical angry harridan figure of vintage comedy presentation, his extraordinarily impressive CV ranged from vicar to trawlerman to astronomer to liontamer and there are also some fantasy scenarios where the character is shipwrecked on an island, engaged in nefarious criminal endeavour, riding an Indian elephant or getting lost in the desert.<br />
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On a <a href="https://www.flickr.com/search/?user_id=127401923%40N05&view_all=1&text=Bunion">Flickr compilation of strips</a> I found there seems to be no suggestion that Bunion was ever physically resident in Belfast when I saw his japes and pranks in my youth there - this bar launching a ship, employment as a prison officer, fixing a broken window, tossing a coin in despair in a voting booth and briefly watching a UFO land and leave as soon as possible.<br />
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There appears to be nothing sidesplittingly funny about Bunion and in hindsight it is not even touched by any particular wry charm or unique spin beyond perhaps the fact it is dialogue-free in modernist style and of course there is some residual analogy to the BBC childrens' TV classic <i>Mr Benn</i>. Yet like the Ulster Television transmission start-up music discussed in <a href="https://backroadhome.blogspot.com/2012/05/back-up-the-antrim-road.html">an earlier post</a>, <i>Fun With Bunion</i> definitely triggers deep memories of both happy and tragic times alike - let alone some of the strangest days ever yet lived by any group of people anywhere in post-war Europe.Saturday Buddhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04976717497499457595noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2106433662289694247.post-16915263201268135712018-10-03T15:16:00.000+01:002019-01-30T22:50:08.871+00:00Tragedy In East Ulster January 1953 - The Sinking Of The MV Princess Victoria And The Lord St Vincent Plane Crash<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgj1UbIrrCayzQakRredQYQB1BSJsclqAfnATWaVlBtoWXwAhhND6CE7cdBpgHJvK7Xhepj_zcyEN6TPiEP-3UoYY2Fg8YoaAp5NqoQ757RsbCLC-YYbtbWMbxduMrhR5IiTXn4BfpX_Y_K/s1600/7723931512_aae7d0faa8_b.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Ulster TT Disaster, Princess Victoria Ship Disaster, Nutts Corner Plane Disaster" border="0" data-original-height="1024" data-original-width="768" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgj1UbIrrCayzQakRredQYQB1BSJsclqAfnATWaVlBtoWXwAhhND6CE7cdBpgHJvK7Xhepj_zcyEN6TPiEP-3UoYY2Fg8YoaAp5NqoQ757RsbCLC-YYbtbWMbxduMrhR5IiTXn4BfpX_Y_K/s320/7723931512_aae7d0faa8_b.jpg" title="" width="240" /></a></div>
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In the fifty-one year history of the Northern Ireland state between 1921 and 1972 - and as standing outside civilian and security force fatalities caused by engagement in global conflict, domestic civil disorder and terrorism - the biggest death toll resulting from an accident was the sinking of the <i>MV Princess Victoria </i>in the Irish Sea on 31st January 1953.<br />
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Off the back of some research recently I was surprised to note how another major incident in Northern Ireland involving air traffic was so confluent in time to that major maritime disaster and indeed of a significant tragedy at a major sporting occasion back in the Thirties. These two events - in Country Antrim and County Down respectively - are very rarely referenced within Irish social history compared to the <i>MV Princess Victoria</i>'s fatal last voyage from Stranraer to Larne.<br />
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To provide some historical background to the period of the early Fifties, the post-war decade running up to the commencement of the IRA Border Campaign on 12th December 1956 saw Northern Ireland's constitutional position within the United Kingdom in a state of considerable security and anchorage. This following the state's belligerent status during the six year global conflict against the Axis powers and then the passing of the Ireland Act at Westminster in 1949 upon the declaration of a Republic by Eire the previous year.<br />
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The Stormont elections of 19th February 1949 had thus taken place in a tense atmosphere against the backdrop of southern political and public support for the Nationalist Party in the North. It is also remembered in the main for the fundamental undermining of the Labour vote in Ulster for the next nine years - as discussed in an <a href="https://backroadhome.blogspot.com/2013/05/northern-ireland-labour-party.html">earlier post on the NILP.</a><br />
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The Unionist Party won 37 seats in the election to the Nationalists nine - there were also two Independent Unionists, two Independents, one Independent Labour and a Socialist Republican elected. Compared to the 1945 election therefore one Nationalist seat had been lost along with two Labour and one Independent Labour. The October 1953 election - this the year of the <i>MV Princess Victoria </i>and Nutts Corner disasters - saw another substantial victory for the Unionist Party. The party took 38 seats to the Nationalists seven while the other representatives elected would be two anti-partition candidates, one Independent Unionist, one Independent and three others from an extraordinary multiplicity of Labour political brands standing for office.<br />
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Some of the more well recalled Members of Parliament sitting at Stormont from the 1949 election as 1953 dawned included Prime Minister Basil Brooke, the Belfast Socialist Republican Harry Diamond, South Fermanagh's Cahir Healey, the Shankill Independent Unionist Tommy Henderson, William McCoy of East Tyrone who had pushed for Dominion Status for Northern Ireland as the prime guarantee against future Westminster ambivalence toward the Union, the former Commonwealth Labour figure Harry Midgeley, Dehra Parker the first female MP in Northern Ireland, Eddie McAteer of Derry and two future Prime Ministers in Terence O'Neill and Brian Faulkner. The Member of Parliament for Cromac Ward in Belfast in this parliament was Major Maynard Sinclair who had been Stormont Minister of Finance for a decade, was serving as Deputy Prime Minister in January 1953 and seen as a potential successor to Brooke.<br />
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The horrendous loss of the roll-on/roll-off <i>MV Princess Victoria</i> ferry has been analysed in considerable depth over the years. On the last day of the month - a Saturday - it set sail from Scotland in the morning as an extraordinarily severe storm gathered pace across Northern Europe. Spray broke over the stern doors and an emergency guillotine door was not lowered. On leaving Loch Ryan conditions worsened and waves further damaged the rear doors allowing water to flood on board the car deck. Unable to return to Scotland the captain attempted to reach Northern Ireland by a course that would minimise more damage to the stern. At 0906 the ship messaged Portpatrick Radio Station for urgent assistance from tugs - a SOS transmission followed at 1032. The final morse message at 1358 from five miles east of the Copeland Islands near Donaghadee in County Down reported that engines had stopped.<br />
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Multiple rescue attempts were made - neither <i>HMS</i> <i>Launceston Castle</i> nor <i>HMS Contest</i> could initially locate the ship. Portpatrick Lifeboat <i>Jeannie Spears</i> was also dispatched in the search. An RAF Hastings aircraft did not reach the scene of the disaster in time due to other rescue work in Scotland. As the location of the ship clarified in Northern Ireland itself the emergency services put to sea in appalling conditions - four merchant vessels also attempted to save lives. Finally the Donaghadee lifeboat the <i>Sir Samuel Kelly </i>arrived to bring survivors on board - <i>Jeannie Spears</i> and <i>HMS Contest </i>were also there in support.<br />
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The ship sunk in the North Channel with the loss of 133 lives including all women and children on board - their lifeboat having been dashed against the hull. 100 bodies were recovered and 44 people survived. Fatalities included Northern Ireland Deputy Prime Minister Sinclair - who assisted many women and children during the incident - and also the North Down MP Sir Walter Smiles whose home was at Orlock so close to the sinking site. Both men had military records from the Great War. Lists of those onboard show that the crew incorporated residents of Northern Ireland and Scotland while the passengers came from both countries, England, Wales and the Republic of Ireland. A maternal relative of my own from Carrickfergus in County Antrim was also numbered among the dead. He was returning to Ulster from training in Scotland for a new job.<br />
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An interesting article by <a href="http://historyhubulster.co.uk/tag/maynard-sinclair/">History Hub Ulster</a> traces the historical footprint of the disaster with all survivors having today now passed on - the graves of the crew and the passengers visited by the author of the piece includes Sinclair's at Drumbeg Parish Church near Lisburn and Smiles at Belfast City Cemetery on the Falls Road. Two senior officers of <i>HMS Contest</i> were awarded the George Medal for diving into the seas during the rescue, <i>MV Princess Victoria</i> Radio Officer David Broadfoot was posthumously given the George Cross for remaining at his post to allow passengers and fellow crew to escape and the captains of the merchant ships were made OBEs. Captain Ferguson was witnessed at the moment of sinking on the bridgehead giving instructions and saluting. From what I can gather online Sinclair's mother-in-law died of a heart attack on receiving news of the tragedy while one of the merchant captains also died prematurely in light of the stress of involvement in the incident.<br />
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Memorials to the disaster were erected in Larne (which lost 27 town residents in the sinking), Stranraer, Portpatrick and Donaghadee where a civic campaign to preserve the <i>Sir Samuel Kelly</i> is ongoing. An annual memorial service is held to the present day to commemorate the victims and rescuers. A sports pavilion on the Stormont estate and a children's ward at the Ulster Hospital in Dundonald were named in memory of Maynard Sinclair.<br />
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The sinking of the <i>MV Princess Victoria</i> remains the worst United Kingdom maritime disaster in peacetime. On 10th October 1918 a German U-Boat had sunk the <i>RMS Leinster </i>from the City of Dublin Steam Packet Company outside Dublin Bay leading to 501 deaths - the greatest single loss of life in the Irish Sea. The biggest disaster in Ulster resulting from an accident prior to 1953 was the eighty killed and 260 injured in a June 1889 rail accident between Armagh and Hamiltons Bawn stations - to this day it remains the worst rail accident in Irish history and the fourth worst in the United Kingdom.<br />
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Of the two other tragic events mentioned earlier the aircrash occurred only twenty five days before the <i>MV Princess Victoria </i>sinking - on Monday 5th January 1953. A British European Airways Vickers Viking plane <i>Lord St Vincent</i> flying from Northholt airport in London to Belfast's Nutts Corner crashed on approach. On board were 31 passengers and four crew - 24 passengers were included in the list of 27 fatalities including four medical students from Queens University and an eighteen-month old boy who was killed with his mother. Another fatality was Captain Thomas Haughton who was married to Lady Moyola - the future wife of the fifth and penultimate Northern Ireland Prime Minister James Chichester-Clark. She herself survived the crash though was seriously injured.<br />
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The board of inquiry concluded that the cause of the crash was pilot error - the aircraft had lost height too suddenly on approach to the runway and hit a pole which supported an approach light near the aerodrome. Further collisions followed with more poles and a van before it finally impacted against an equipment store.<br />
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The automobile accident in 1936 which involved the general public happened during the running of the International Tourist Trophy for motorcar road racing which was then a massively popular event in Northern Ireland due to the legal slack pertaining in the province to closing off roads. In 1928 a triangular course was constructed between Dundonald, Newtownards, and Comber under the sponsorship of Harry Ferguson and Wallace McLeod. By the mid-thirties cars had become faster and faster on the circuit and it was during the 1936 event that a Riley car lost control on Church Street in Newtownards and crashed into the crowd on the pavement after hitting a lampost. Eight spectators were killed including two fifteen-year-old boys, 40 were injured and a decision was made to end racing on the course. Several of the victims are buried in Moville Cemetery in the town while two of the dead came from Worcester and Hull in England.<br />
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TT motor racing on public roads famously returned to Ulster at Dundrod County Antrim in 1950 - the track was half the size of its predecessor though the event still attracted such famous racing names as Juan Manuel Fangio and equally huge crowds. The September 1955 event in rainy conditions lead to the deaths of three drivers - Jim Mayers, William Smith and Richard Mainwaring. The race was won by Stirling Moss but it was then decided that the Northern Irish roads were too dangerous for the sport. <br />
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No memorial exists to the Nutts Corner disaster and a very sad <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-20805870">BBC article</a> on the incident notes that even the specific site of the crash would appear unknown today to the general public - the airport closed a decade after the deaths there and with the field being used in the main for car boot sales thereafter. A piece of propeller from the plane is kept in the Ulster Aviation Society Museum at Langford Lodge near Lough Neagh- the organisation campaigns for a permanent memorial and held a sixtieth anniversary service in 2013.<br />
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In turn a memorial on Conway Square in Newtownards honours the original racing circuit in County Down - both the winners and those who lost their lives in general at the event. There is furthermore a plaque in Comber at the famous Butchers Shop corner on Castle Street and another marking the start of the race beside the Quarry Inn pub near the Ulster Hospital. An online <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/northernireland/yourplaceandmine/down/A1066286.shtml">forum discussion </a>from 2003 notes how chipped masonry from the event could still be seen at that time on the approach to Conway Square close to the accident site.<br />
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The disasters outlined above cast such deeply sobering reflections on how random factors of time and place can have such fateful consequences for the human condition. This is not dissimilar to the Isle of Man's 1974 Summerland disaster which affected so many holidaymakers from Ireland - a good friend from secondary school was inside the building when the fire broke out while I can myself recall to this day several trips to the complex in the summers beforehand.<br />
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Historical focus of course dissipates through time in truly uncategorisable fashion - one tragedy is overwritten by another in the public consciousness and therefore even something as unprecedented as the 1953 Great Storm's repercussions in the North Channel, Eastern England and Holland would appear to be relatively unknown to so many people today in Britain and Ireland. In the case of the <i>MV Princess Victoria</i> - and also the air disaster which preceded it -the waves of madness and division which hit Ulster's shores sixteen and half years after that day of abject horror in the Irish Sea certainly compounded this instance of strange historical distancing even further.Saturday Buddhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04976717497499457595noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2106433662289694247.post-8118543667550947232018-09-14T23:05:00.001+01:002022-01-15T12:24:01.046+00:00The Belfast Bank Buildings - Reflection And Revelation<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdRMQSyZiqIqaDDtsi7UlmrNclYx5aIuwk2i2gNtqZnccNrD3pg-fpr4H02F7h5ShFskt5e-cibhde7BX77K-fpLvikmLn97fJeMwVeaVRyaybs9sKQUotRxGReXgC6Aj5y8HjS4xww_H5/s1600/bb.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Bank Buildings, Belfast, Bank Buildings Fire" border="0" data-original-height="371" data-original-width="660" height="223" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdRMQSyZiqIqaDDtsi7UlmrNclYx5aIuwk2i2gNtqZnccNrD3pg-fpr4H02F7h5ShFskt5e-cibhde7BX77K-fpLvikmLn97fJeMwVeaVRyaybs9sKQUotRxGReXgC6Aj5y8HjS4xww_H5/s400/bb.jpeg" title="" width="400" /></a></div>
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In the local Belfast press over the past few weeks there have been some very interesting <a href="https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/archive/belfast-primark-building-was-a-grand-old-lady-whod-seen-and-survived-horror-and-history-a-landmark-in-our-daily-lives-37264577.html">nostalgic </a>and <a href="https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/life/features/why-its-in-all-our-interests-to-save-bank-buildings-and-other-architecture-of-note-37294248.html">analytical</a> opinion pieces alike regarding the destruction by fire of the Bank Buildings on Castle Junction - both as to where this event sits in the linear narrative of our metropolitan history or amidst the ongoing architectural deconstruction of the city.<br />
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As was the case for tens of thousands of other people at home and abroad the Bank Buildings fire - and the near loss of the Kelly's Cellars pub below with its priceless human heritage of late 18th Century European liberalism and non-sectarian republicanism - brought back many memories for myself of not just years of bitterness and waste but also a deeper lost Belfast. From the North Street Arcade to the Elephant Bar near Smithfield Market, the Group and Arts theatres, disappeared bookshops such as Harry Halls and Just Books and Mullans, Gresham Street's pet shop, the Curzon and ABC cinemas, the Grand Central Hotel and GPO on Royal Avenue or even the long derelict Garfield Street where Caroline Music traded in the Eighties.<br />
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I remember walking into the latter one late afternoon in 1981 for a few minutes as an earnest sixteen-year-old to buy a cool Jimi Hendrix compilation double album and seeing loads of Stiff Little Fingers fans hanging around in the half-light for a signing session of <a href="https://hangingaroundbooks.com/products/stiff-little-fingers">the <i>Go For It </i>album</a> - the fantastic and empowering instrumental title track blaring out ahead of their arrival. Over thirty years later and I tend to listen to North Belfast's finest a lot more than the Seattle guitarist if truth be known - I should have gotten real and stayed for a while longer that day until they came along.<br />
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Even though there has been long-term engaged public attention focused on the future of the Art Deco Bank of Ireland at the once thriving junction of North Street and Royal Avenue - a part of the city which looks so fundamentally North American and modernist in some photographs from the Fifties and Sixties - the scale of what has gone before is deeply sobering. You can see this when looking at old images of the Queens Elms Halls of Residence houses facing the university (as below) or the stunning Northern Bank premises on Donegall Square West. Both of their brutalist replacements being aesthetically questionable <i>in extremis</i>. Only last week I heard in turn that the Masonic Hall on Rosemary Street which contained a mural by the extraordinarily talented Belfast artist John Luke has been sold for commercial development.<br />
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In particular there are two moments from Belfast history linked in my mind with the Bank Buildings. There is an interior photograph taken of an upper floor window on Victory in Europe Day on 8th May 1945 with BBC commentator Lt Commander Harry McMulllan broadcasting his observations on the crowd scenes below: "Belfast is letting itself go, that's plain fact - below me the
population of this city, laughing cheering and dancing is surging past
in great waves of colour and sound in brilliant sunshine." Then from not even a decade later on 27th February 1954 the bittersweet images captured as the last electric trams were seen off by a huge amount of spectators on their final journey from Castle Junction in front of the department store up to Ardoyne depot in North Belfast.<br />
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The loss of such cultural cornerstones and social points of reference as a building which has stood on the same site since 1765 - and existed in its modern form since 1900 - is understandably headspinning and certainly reinforces the insecurity which defines our own deeply uninspiring times. Sometimes approximating a daily battle to survive the end of everything good no less. Of similar emotional content to the historical shadowlands above I recently read some reflections on an internet forum of the cross-channel Belfast Steamship Company services across the Irish Sea to Scotland, the Isle of Man and the North West of England<i>:</i><br />
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<i>At the time I lived in Holywood, and could watch the nightly procession
of cross-channel steamers going down Belfast Lough. The Liverpool
service was first, leaving Belfast at around 8.30. Then came the Glasgow
service about 30 minutes later, and finally the British Rail service to
Heysham about an hour after that (it had a much shorter journey, as it
had no river or locks to negotiate at the other end). And during the
summer there were daytime sailings to Ardrossan and the Isle of Man as
well.</i><br />
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<i>I travelled often in the post-war years. I liked the Ulster
Prince best, she seemed bigger than the Monarch. The Ulster Duke looked
as if she had been refloated from somewhere. You could see what looked
like tide marks on her walls. The first class in these ships was wonderful: all panelled walls, linen
table cloths, soft lights and respectful stewards. The steerage was
dreadful: a semi-circle of seats around a broad bare floor stinking of
stale Guiness and piss. There was always a sense of travel, especially of departure. An older
generation ( before the first war) could remember when a man used to go
round the decks with a bell, shouting 'any more for the shore?' It was above all very pleasant to get up early, go on deck, and watch the Ulster coast slowly emerge out of the dawn.</i><br />
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<i>Did you know that although most of the captains who sailed on
the Belfast / Liverpool route were not not from Northern Ireland and
would take the long way round the Copeland Islands. Those with local
knowledge of the waters would take the shorter route between the Islands
and the Mainland during the better weather. On its last voyage to
Liverpool the Captain of the vessel, a local man whose name i have
forgotten, sailed between the Copeland Islands and the Mainland to allow
a last view of the ship and people on shore flashed their lights to say
farewell.</i><br />
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So on August 28th 2018 a chapter in Belfast civic history came to closure in a matter of hours over the course of a working weekday - the tragic incident at Castle Junction clearly providing a tipping point for public consciousness into all that the city has physically lost to commercial development and urban regeneration outside the parallel context of international conflict and violent domestic discord. It also elicited an outpouring of genuine heartfelt communal love for a great European port that has had way more than its fair share of heartbreak and hardship.<br />
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Back in 1981 as Thin Lizzy's hard rock music morphed gradually into generic heavy metal, the album <i>Renegade </i>would yet conclude with the wonderful and still utterly overlooked <i>It's Getting Dangerous</i>. Alike Van Morrison's <i>Madame George</i> the lyrics are obscure but clearly point to the patterns of change, growth and transition we have all experienced. The song also talks about the dangers constantly arraigned around us in life - be that personal corruption or by default immersion in societies guaged to venality.<br />
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The Bank Buildings fire opened up rare and fleeting space for reflection about past days of momentous industrial flux and political fraction, of who we are today as a community still beset by cultural division and where tomorrow will take us in a period of highly credible short-term risk. As interfacing with Northern Ireland's grotesque institutional political stasis - and against the background of a still stagnant economic landscape in the North - the public reaction clearly was redolent of deep respect and affection for an old friend who we suddenly realise is not going to be around forever if things progress the way they are going. Indeed neither may the political frameworks that put our now "branded" troubled times into their albeit qualified and edgy endgame.<br />
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Saturday Buddhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04976717497499457595noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2106433662289694247.post-57452267811575834312018-09-01T10:32:00.000+01:002019-11-20T20:34:01.722+00:00Strangers Abroad In An Ulster At War - Niedermayer And Heubeck<br />
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Consideration of the historical associations between the island of Ireland and Germany tend to devolve to the two global conflicts of the 20th Century - the 36th Ulster and 16th Irish Divisions on the Western Front, Sir Roger Casement's attempt to forge a revolutionary Irish Brigade from prisoners-of-war on the continent prior to the Easter Rising, Abwehr spying missions in Eire, County Down's working farm for the children of the <i>Kindertransport</i> at Millisle, the Luftwaffe triple blitz of Belfast and the Glencree German War Cemetery in the Wicklow Mountains.<br />
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From what I can garner from the order of battle my maternal great-grandfather was
in the second wave of Ulstermen attacking the Schwaben Redoubt on 1st
July 1916 at the Somme - all the Irish soldiers of a then British Ireland would return to a deeply unsympathetic future. Twenty five years later both of my grandparents' houses in the Oldpark and Woodvale districts of North and West Belfast would be destroyed in the Easter 1941 air raids. <br />
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However as outlined here by the Goethe Institut, <a href="https://www.goethe.de/ins/ie/en/kul/sup/dsi.html">the cultural links </a>between the two countries do extend well beyond this particular adversarial remit. They include Franconian patron saint Kilian being born in County Cavan, the decisive role of King William's Commander-in-Chief Frederick Schomberg at the Battle of the Boyne, the emigration of German Protestants from the Rhenish Palatinate to southern Ireland at the start of the 18th Century and the premiere of Handel's <i>The Messiah</i> in Dublin in 1742. There was also the permanent residency in Ireland of Twenties cabaret singer and Allied black propagandist Agnes Bernelle while the country left huge cultural impressions on writers Friedrich Engels and Heinrich Boell.<br />
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In the historical context of Belfast there would also be the enormous contributions made to the civic and industrial life of the city in the Victorian and Edwardian eras by Otto Jaffe and Gustav Wolff of Hamburg. The lives of two West German businessmen meanwhile - Thomas Niedermayer and Werner Heubeck - fall within the long grim narrative of the modern Ulster Troubles and both are well recalled to this day by very many Northern Irish people for very different and deeply unsettling reasons.<br />
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Niedermayer was the 45-year-old managing director of the Nuremburg-founded Grundig electronics factory in Dunmurry on the outskirts of West Belfast and honorary West German counsel for Northern Ireland. He came to live in the province in the late Sixties and resided in the Glengoland district. The industrialist was kidnapped on 27th December 1973 by two members of the IRA. The abduction was witnessed by his daughters and it is believed the rationale behind the operation was to bargain for the release of Republican prisoners jailed after a mainland bombing campaign.<br />
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Although the choreography of events remains unclear Niedermeyer was murdered soon after by his captors - possibly in the context of an escape attempt - and buried in an illegal rubbish dump near Colin Glen which was a short distance from the family home. His body was found only seven years later - face down, bound and gagged. The degrading nature of Niedermayer's killing was compounded by the suicide of his wife in the sea off County Wicklow in the Irish Republic an exact decade following his funeral and then that of both his daughters in the Nineties. His eldest daughter's husband also killed himself subsequently.<br />
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Niedermeyer's grave to my knowledge is at Christ Church in Derriaghy south west of Belfast. The shame of his murder and its mortifying repercussions - alike the French, Italian and Spanish fatalities of the 1974 Dublin and 1998 Omagh bombings - remains a deep stain on the honour of Ireland and the life affirming folk soul it embodies for so many people around the world.<br />
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Five years after the end of the Great War Werner Heubeck was born in
Nuremburg. During the Thirties he was a member of the Hitler Jugend and
during the Second World War served in the Hermann Goering division of the Luftwaffe
and the Afrika Korps. After a period as a prisoner-of-war in the USA he worked as a proofreader at the war crimes trials in his home city where he met his Welsh wife who was a translator. They moved to the United Kingdom and Heubeck became a British citizen. In 1965 he came over to Northern Ireland to manage the Ulster Transport Authority buses - this the year before the first three political murders of the conflict were carried out in West Belfast by Loyalist paramilitaries.<br />
<br />
The running of the rebranded rural Ulsterbus and then the metropolitan Belfast Citybus services from 1973 were to be transformed during his 23 years of management. Heubeck remains an especial figure in the social history of the Troubles with respect to his actions in personally boarding hijacked buses during the worst years of the conflict to singlehandedly remove bombs planted by terrorists. Also for driving along routes that the company staff had been intimidated from, taking the first service run of the day along roads that had experienced overnight disorder, moving vehicles with explosive devices still on board or returning burning buses to depots for salvage. Heubeck was on first-name terms with the full raft of his company staff and counselled colleagues who had been affected by security incidents.<br />
<br />
When I think of this kind of vintage stoicism I often recall the headmaster of my old Belfast primary David Russell who previously had worked at another school situated at a notorious and literally deadly flashpoint in the north of the city very near my paternal grandparents' home. He had been in a Japanese Prisoner of War camp and underscored to Anthony Bailey - who
authored the 1980 <i>Acts of Union</i> - that after his
experiences in the Far East that "it's hardly likely that anything that
happens on the Oldpark Road is going to worry me". Shortly before he
died Mr Russell revisited Japan to meet a former miner who
had treated him kindly during a serious bout of illness while imprisoned
there.<br />
<br />
Despite the widespread targeting of buses during the years of civil disorder Heubeck's leadership
and belief in keeping services running to schedule represented a
fundamental toehold on normality for a country spiralling on the brink of blanket societal collapse. Estimates suggest that over 800 of the 1300 fleet were destroyed during the Troubles while several staff lost their lives including the horrific murders of Sydney Agnew in 1972 as a witness to a republican hijacking, four Ulsterbus workers at Oxford Street station on Belfast's Bloody Friday IRA blitz and Harry Bradshaw in 1977 for simply working a shift in public service during a Loyalist strike. In Lagan bus station in Belfast's Marlborough Street there is a memorial
dedicated to all the victims of bombs on buses during the Ulster
conflict while the Ulster Transport Museum at Cultra houses an original
Daimler Fleetline Citybus in honour of the murdered drivers.<br />
<br />
Werner Heubeck was awarded the OBE (like Niedermayer) and then the CBE for his services to civic life in a Northern Ireland at war with itself. He retired in 1988, moved to the Shetland Islands and died of cancer in 2009 at the age of 85. With his heavy accent, thick glasses, raincoat, trilby and fastidious Northern European fitness regimes in a nation not then particularly renowned for any form of holistic life management, Heubeck remains an unforgettable and truly charismatic figure from very dark times in Ireland. <br />
<br />
In old Celtic and Hibernian parlance the term "blow in" is used to describe a person or group of people with no deep roots to either the physical locality or generic neighbourhood culture. It can be used in a dismissive or bantering fashion and overrides any quantitative length of actual settlement in an area. It is intriguing to consider the fateful course of life that brought such highly competent North West European professionals as Niedermayer and Huebeck to Ireland's shores in the late sixties - let alone to the political fragility of pre-Troubles Ulster with its potentially explosive ethnic makeup. Both men would experience the same daily tribulations which affected all the working people of the North for an unforgivable period of time - glowering tension, stark danger, rank strangeness and often utter insanity.<br />
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Ireland must never ever forget these two men and the lives they lead.Saturday Buddhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04976717497499457595noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2106433662289694247.post-54618839903748664282018-08-01T08:34:00.000+01:002018-12-14T22:30:03.580+00:00A Story For Today - Ulster Biography And Memoir <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
Have just finished Fergal Keane's excellent <i>Wounds </i>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 <i>Hearthlands </i>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.<br />
<br />
Just as two earlier posts have looked at<a href="http://backroadhome.blogspot.com/2014/11/1971-days-of-last-ditch.html"> fictional accounts of the Ulster Troubles</a> and <a href="http://backroadhome.blogspot.com/2015/01/burning-sky-writings-on-ulster-history.html">general Northern Irish history</a> I want to bring together here some volumes of regional biography and memoir that I have particularly enjoyed over the years.<br />
<br />
Of the massive raft of books on George Best the 2014 official biography <i>Immortal</i> 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 <i>Only a Game?</i><br />
<br />
Four other superb sports works also spring to mind. In particular there is David Tossell's <i>In Sunshine Or In Shadow</i> 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.<br />
<br />
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 <a href="http://backroadhome.blogspot.com/2012/06/patriot-brothers-day-that-irish.html">detail in an earlier post </a> 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. <br />
<br />
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 <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2011/apr/01/derek-dougan-psychedelic"><i>The Guardian </i></a>which recalled his days in the London and West Coast acid-rock counter culture.<br />
<br />
Dougan, who carried Best's coffin and died in 2007, wrote an interesting autobiography <i>The Sash He Never Wore</i>
in 1972 that is well worth investigating and also an overview of the questionable
aspects of sports administration in the early Eighties called <i>How Not To Run Football</i> which featured a crucified Seventies Pop Bestie on the cover.<br />
<br />
There are several accessible works available on the snooker player Alex Higgins - both Bill Burrows' <i>The Hurricane </i>and Tony Francis' <i>Who Was Hurricane Higgins?</i> are well researched and often outrageously funny reads - but it is the 2007 autobiography <i>From the Eye of the Hurricane</i> that opens up radically different insights into his personality in a frank revealing fashion. <br />
<br />
The Munich Olympian Mary Peters' own story <i>Mary P </i>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 <i>Whose Side Are You On?</i> 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.<br />
<br />
Going back to biographical works from earlier in the last century and one of the most well-recalled works would be Robin Harbinson's <i>No Surrender</i> 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 - <i>Ulster: A Journey Through The Six Counties</i>.<br />
<br />
The Belfast writer and broadcaster Sam McAughtrey is mostly associated with <i>The Sinking of the Kenbane Head</i> 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 <i>On The Outside Looking In</i> 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.<br />
<br />
Brian Moore's <i>The Emperor of Ice Cream </i>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 <i>Rogue Warrior of the SAS</i>
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.<br />
<br />
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 - <i>The Empress of Ireland</i> work by Christopher Robbins regarding his personal relationship in London with the Belfast-born director of <i>Scrooge</i> and <i>Malta Story</i> is an utter joy of a read.<br />
<br />
In my previous post I mentioned the sole print of Mark J Prendergast's <i>Irish Rock: Roots, Personalities, Directions </i>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 <i>No Surrender </i>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 <i>Hooleygan </i>and Micky Bradley of The Undertones' <i>Teenage Kicks</i> are hugely entertaining memoirs.<br />
<br />
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 <i>Voices From The Grave:Two Men's War in Ireland </i>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 <i>Straight Left </i>autobiography of the Northern Ireland Labour Party and later Social Democratic and Labour Party figure Paddy Devlin and Derek Lundy's insightful <i>Men That God Made Mad: A Journey Through Truth, Myth and Terror in Northern Ireland </i>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 <i>Watching the Door </i>Troubles<i> </i>memoirs as indeed with the <i>A Single Headstrong Heart</i> prequel regarding his strained relationship with his father.<br />
<br />
Some final volumes to mention in his brief overview would be Geoffrey Beattie's <i>We Are The People</i> and <i>Protestant Boy </i>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>I'll Tell Me Ma</i> 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 <i>Wounds</i> 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.<br />
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Saturday Buddhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04976717497499457595noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2106433662289694247.post-8004345344249916952018-07-21T10:20:00.000+01:002019-05-19T11:27:57.454+01:00Horslips - Deconstructing Ireland In The Seventies <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
The incendiary, unrelenting and ribald
nature of Irish folk wit and banter at its level best is an awesome beast to
behold. Some years ago I was walking around the Cathedral Quarter of
Belfast and across Writer's Square facing The John Hewitt Bar on Donegall Street. Amongst the literary wordage enshrined on the ground
there is Joseph Tomelty's scathing observation on life, fate and drudgery - <i>What a bloody awful place for a man of imagination</i>.<br />
<br />
Tomelty was a Northern Irish actor born in Portaferry on County Down's Strangford Lough shore who starred in the movies <i>Moby Dick</i> and <i>A Kid For Two Farthings. </i>He was also the author of many works including the novel <i>Red Is The Port Light</i>, the prototype folk horror play <i>All Soul's Night</i> and the classic Ulster radio comedy <i>The McCooeys</i> which provided the comic actor James Young with his commercial breakthrough. He was also the former father-in-law of Sting. <br />
<br />
I was reading about Tomelty this weekend with regard to Carol Reed's classic <i>Odd Man Out </i>film
of 1947 in which he had a minor role. This feature starred James Mason as an IRA man on the run in Belfast after a robbery at a linen mill and included location shots from the Crumlin Road and the Ligoniel district in the north of the city. It garnered attention from
contemporary censors because of the violent content but was certainly a
brave attempt at that time to analyse the complex dynamics of bloody political conflict in Ireland.<br />
<br />
Another example of wonderfully surreal Hibernian word association that stopped me in my tracks in the past were the comments of writer Declan Lynch in the 2014 <i>Return of the Dancehall Sweethearts</i> documentary about Irish folk rock legends Horslips. Lynch noting how the five-piece group "took the constituent parts of what it meant to be Irish and they put them back together in a way that wasn't crap".<br />
<br />
Everything you ever want to know about Horslips can be found in the 2013 official biography <i>Tall Tales</i> by Mark Cunningham (and also Mark J Prendergast's long out-of-print <i>Irish Rock: Roots, Personalities, Directions</i>) but it is worth reiterating here the truly unique role they played within the cultural life of Seventies Ireland. This not only in regard to their native Irish Republic as a national musical act that had the capacity and talent to have been one of the biggest commercial draws on the globe but as one of the few major rock artists to continue to play in Ulster during the Troubles. In fact Horslips' last ever live performance was at the Whitla Hall at Queens University Belfast in May 1980. <br />
<br />
Of the nine studio albums released between 1972 and 1979 the two most well-recalled after their groundbreaking <i>Happy To Meet, Sorry To Part</i> debut would be the fusion of hard rock, traditional folk and Celtic mythological narrative on <i>The Tain</i> (1973) and <i>The Book of Invasions </i>(1976) - these based respectively on Ulster's tenth century Cattle Raid of Cooley legend and a twelfth century chronicle of pre-Christian colonisations of Ireland.<i> </i><br />
<br />
<i>Dancehall Sweethearts (1975) </i>and <i>The Unfortunate Cup of Tea </i>(1976) have some leanings towards more prog and poppier material alike but the former in particular has dated very well. Two later albums based on Ireland's experience of emigration to the New World - <i>Aliens (1977) </i>and <i>The Man Who Built America </i>(1978) - successfully pulled off a harder American rock approach which (like Big Country's <i>The Buffalo Skinners</i>) really warranted a much bigger and appreciative audience. However in light of the distance this took them from the folk base, the final album <i>Short Stories, Tall Tales</i> was to be the weakest of the studio albums though does contain the utterly sublime <i>Rescue Me</i>.<br />
<br />
The Seventies discography is rounded off by the massively underrated <i>Drive The Cold Winter Away</i> acoustic folk collection from 1975, two live albums and an early compilation of rarities<i> </i>including two quirky Beatles tributes from "Lipstick"and the brilliant <i>Motorway Madness</i>. Horslips reformed for an unplugged live recording <i>Roll Back </i>in 2004 and in 2010 and 2011 further live albums were lifted from concerts at the O2 Arena Dublin and the Ulster Hall in Belfast.<br />
<br />
The five individual members of the group were born in Dublin, Limerick,
Kells County Meath, Ardboe by Lough Neagh in Northern Ireland and
Middlesborough on Tyne and Wear. All their original albums were released in Ireland on their own Oats label
with artwork designed by the group themselves - they also
remained domestically resident in Ireland throughout the Seventies. <br />
<br />
Horslips' commercial success may have been overshadowed by Thin Lizzy on an international scale but it is important to remember that the first LP release was the fastest selling album in Ireland in eight years, <i>Dearg Doom</i> from <i>The Tain </i>was a German number one single and <i>The Book of Invasions </i>reached number 39 on the UK album charts in the middle of a mainland IRA bombing campaign which may have possibly muddied some very clever people's marketing strategies. The passion and fire of their live performances in the British Isles, mainland Europe and North America are still talked about today with awe, respect and deep appreciation.<br />
<br />
<i>The King of the Fairies, Dearg Doom</i> (as performed on the BBC <i>Old Grey Whistle Test</i>) and <i>Trouble With a Capital T </i>remain fairly well known to informed fans of classic rock music today but do take time to forge around Horslips back catalogue if you can. Go beyond the generic Celtic rock categorising and the draining bloody Jethro Tull comparisons to their fantastic second single <i>Green Gravel</i>, the wonderful instrumentals <i>Ace and Deuce</i> and <i>We Bring the Summer With Us</i>, to the great lost Seventies rock classic <i>Sunburst</i>, <i>Self Defence </i>from<i> The Unfortunate Cup of Tea, </i>the b-sides<i> The High Reel </i>and <i>When The Night Comes, </i>to<i> New York Wakes</i> off <i>Aliens</i>, <i>The</i> <i>Man Who Built America's </i>title track and particularly the entirety of the winter folk collection.<br />
<br />
Without exaggeration Horslips stand alongside George Best in modern Irish social history as utterly unique creative talents who embodied so much of the soul and pride of the country during days of grim political turmoil, economic stagnation and shameful cultural division.<br />
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Saturday Buddhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04976717497499457595noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2106433662289694247.post-11145405147399027382018-07-19T17:25:00.002+01:002021-02-20T13:11:10.419+00:00John Luke And The Eternal Now<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The
artist John Luke was born in East Belfast in 1906 and died in spartan circumstances in the city
at the age of 69 in 1975. Luke worked at York Street Flax Spinning
Company and the Workman Clark shipyard before winning a scholarship to
study at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. He returned to Northern Ireland
in the early Thirties and lived both in Belfast and County Armagh.<br />
<br />
Although some of Luke's better known paintings such as <i>The Road To The West, Landscape With Figures </i>and <i>The Three Dancers</i> are suffused with a deeply mystical and Celtic otherness certain other works such as <i>The Old Callan Bridge </i>and <i>The Lock at Edenderry</i> are said to capture "the eternal now". According to Rory Fitzpatrick's <i>God's Frontiersmen</i> which accompanied the Channel Four series of the same name on Scots-Irish history "<i>it
is always Sunday in Luke's work, families walking their dogs through
the green, drumlin country in the warm afternoon, or evening after work
as a father comes home to a white Ulster farmhouse set in formal idyllic
landscape."</i><br />
<br />
Similar themes regarding the
timelessness of the Ulster countryside were captured in the 1972
BBC Northern Ireland documentary <i>Loughsiders</i> with the poet
Seamus Heaney exploring the County Fermanagh waterways and visiting the strange Janus figure on Boa Island - <i>the first god of the first people</i>. Likewise several Van Morrison songs touch upon contemplative elements of the urban and rural landscape such as <i>And It Stoned Me, Got to Go Back, On Hyndford Street, Take Me Back</i> and in particular <i>Country Fair </i>from the 1974 <i>Veedon Fleece</i> album.<br />
<br />
Several weeks ago I was reading some moving recollections of old
Belfast on the main internet forum from various expats around the world
and what they missed from a long lost time and place:<br />
<br />
<i>I
miss the smell of freshly baked bread when I walk past the sites of the
old Kennedy's and Hughes' bakeries. I miss the days when neighbours
could leave their front doors open without the fear of being robbed. I
miss the sound of the horn at Mackies that you could set your clocks or
watches by. I miss the old Smithfield and Variety markets that could
have a child's senses buzzing. I miss the lovely inexpensive fresh fish
sold from handcarts. But most of all I miss members of my family and my
friends who have passed on who walked the streets of Belfast with me...<br /><br />In
the 60s when we were kids we used to go into town on a Friday night and
stare endlessly into S S Moores sport shop window in Arthur street,
dreaming of one day being able to afford a new football strip. Walking
around town on a Friday night there was always the sound of music coming
from the `Boom Boom Rooms` or some other dance venue. We would then go
round to the Queens bridge and watch the cross channel steamers sailing
from Belfast. The Glasgow boat left at 8-30pm, the Liverpool boat at
9-30pm and the Heysham boat at 9-40pm, then it was time to go home. On a
Saturday morning it was the Stadium picture house for the kids morning
matinee and then in the afternoon it was a dander down the Shankill to
Smithfield market. Smithfield was fascinating for a young lad as it
contained almost everything you could ever dream of. Unfortunately
Smithfield has gone and so have the boats, but I guess nothings for
ever. If only one could turn the clock back and relive those days...<br /><br />I
miss the old department stores with the grand stair cases and lots of
nooks and crannys for different departments. I miss watching the birds
gathering on the electric wires in the winter in donegal place when you
were waiting for the bus. I miss the old double deckers with the big
silver knobs on the end of the seats. I miss the brilliant santa
experience in robbs going on a trip on santas sleigh before you ever saw
him, it actually felt like you were moving. I miss the old buildings
that are daily disappearing. I miss knowing who your next door neighbor
is, the milkman coming and waking you up in the morning, the bread van
coming round the streets. I miss so much sometimes it feels like it
never really existed...</i><br />
<br />
The last sentiment is
something so many British and Irish people can relate to in light of the uncharted
waters we now find ourselves in as societies - the shock of the new
encompassing<br />
the Ponzi property scam, the cultural
denigration of the Old Labour working class communities, seismic demographic shifts, imbecilic
celebrity worship, selective historical
amnesia buried within the Northern Ireland peace process, the
deconstruction of London as a national capital city, the deep placement of political dogma into advertising and mainstream broadcast media content and the obliteration of all pathways for social
progression through permanent austerity.<br />
<br />
The island of Ireland in particular has weathered the most extraordinarily grim raft of geopolitical circumstances imaginable which would copperfasten the partition of the land and the people alike - twin state building failures in the Twenties and Thirties, opposed neutrality and belligerence during World War Two and a sectarian explosion in Seventies Ulster which ran in parallel to grotesque political miscalculations by all engaged parties and actors across the British Archipelago.<br />
<br />
Yet the warmth and wit engrained in daily social interaction and a genuine welcome to strangers never faltered on both sides of the Irish border. And despite the existing peace today being fractured and imperfect - what with the complex interplay of Stormont's governmental and legacy logjams with the reverberations of Brexit - profound change for the better is unimpeachable. This could be seen even in the past few weeks with outreach in working class South Belfast between the Orange and GAA communities or the support given to the Fountain enclave on Derry's West Bank from the Bogside residents after sustained hooligan disorder.<br />
<br />
So although the physical and ethical world of Fifties Ireland captured in Luke's restful works are inconceivably and indeed painfully distant today, "the eternal now" can still be felt as a tangible presence in Ireland with little effort. Indeed only last month during a walk along the sunny Lagan banks from Shaw's Bridge with my partner we watched a heron on a log in the middle of the river near a weir for ten minutes - when I returned home I realised it was exactly at the location of Luke's painting at Edenderry.<br />
<br />
In Northern Ireland itself, the staggering beauty of the landscape mixed with a buoyant folk culture overlies desperate social, political and economic vulnerabilities and insecurities. Only by honoring the lives lost to conflict with true reflective contrition can society keep defying the fiendish political geometry of whoever's dam creation that kept the working people at each other's throats for so long.<br />
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Saturday Buddhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04976717497499457595noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2106433662289694247.post-76859059315148028862018-03-03T11:11:00.000+00:002019-05-17T20:04:35.130+01:00Look Out (Here Comes Tomorrow) - Davy Jones' Car <br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiv5S3KE38QBc9dWPZMTIHpX_rCQFwdxW0w6Jv5zmV61-WLR56eOl5oz6Lw2gssGukNoLszFCi816Igc_mnqW4eRWqS_HK5MTeqHcXRmWX3OvtxUpgMlg6SxlMGirudR_Ohr9mFpWglHnw/s1600/davy1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Davy Jones, David Bowie, The Monkees, Lisburn, Northern Ireland" border="0" data-original-height="438" data-original-width="333" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiv5S3KE38QBc9dWPZMTIHpX_rCQFwdxW0w6Jv5zmV61-WLR56eOl5oz6Lw2gssGukNoLszFCi816Igc_mnqW4eRWqS_HK5MTeqHcXRmWX3OvtxUpgMlg6SxlMGirudR_Ohr9mFpWglHnw/s320/davy1.jpg" title="" width="243" /></a></div>
<br />
The social and cultural disconnect that many British and Irish people in their forties and fifties now feel when looking back at the past - and even the recent past at that up to the late Eighties and early Nineties - is grounded on a confluence of factors.<br />
<br />
These incorporate at the very least headspinning technological surges, grotesque geopolitical tensions, the brutal deconstruction of vintage pathways to social mobility, firestorm Ponzi economics, the unrelenting psychotic force-feeding of on-message political dogma and the transformation of employment into a low-paid and fundamentally insecure world of fawning and jargon-spouting. So not much really.<br />
<br />
The consequences of this inflammable combination now gather pace by the very day it seems as so many emotional cornerstones gather spatial distance from each other within our memory banks - lost people, places and communities where respect and dignity mattered. Yet in the middle of such melancholic reflection this week - here in a Europe laid so sullen and dull by the heavy snows of winter - I felt some fleeting residual warmth and hope afoot from reading the story of Davy Jones.<br />
<br />
Not Ena Sharples' grandson down on <i>Coronation Street </i>who later sung The Monkees' classics <i>Daydream Believer, Look Out, Daddy's Song </i>and<i> A Little Bit Me A Little Bit You</i><i> </i>in his wonderfully unaffected Mancunian accent mind. Nor the Brixton South London artiste who prior to his 1967 debut album of music hall whimsy changed his surname to that of the Scots-Irish Kentuckian hero Jim Bowie who died at The Alamo.<br />
<br />
No, my spirits this week have been uplifted by reading for the first time ever about <a href="http://lisburn.com/history/digger/Digger-2010/digger-07-05-2010.html" target="_blank">Davy Jones the 24-inch high resident of Lisburn in Northern Ireland</a> who in the Sixties drove around the town in cars specially modified to his size limitations. This despite heavy vehicular traffic around him on the public roads like lorries and buses that must constitute to this day an historically unprecedented urban health and safety nightmare.<br />
<br />
Jones, who displayed at fairgrounds in both Britain and America and took on acting roles as officially one of the world's shortest living men, would also sit on the bars of local Lisburn pubs such as The Smithfield House and The Corner House atop a pint glass. Archive film footage from <a href="https://digitalfilmarchive.net/media/landmarks-of-lisburn-2118" target="_blank">1960 </a>and <a href="https://digitalfilmarchive.net/media/davy-jones-2100" target="_blank">1965</a> of him driving his cars can be found at Northern Ireland Screen's Digital Film Archive.<br />
<br />
The car in the mid-Sixties footage resembled an E-type Jaguar and was made by Watsonian of Birmingham who were sidecar manufacturers. This fibreglass vehicle had a maximum speed of 14 mph from its 75cc four stroke engine.<br />
<br />
Davy Jones died in March 1970 and is buried in the town - his wee sports car was (and possibly still is) on display at the wonderful Ulster Folk and Transport Museum, Cultra, County Down. Lisburn of course became globally famous as the main headquarters base of the British Army in Troubles era-Ulster. In June 1972 a bomb attack destroyed the town's Top Room ballroom venue where artists such as The Who, Sonny and Cher and The Bee Gees had appeared the previous decade.<br />
<br />
Now it is quite clear from reading through various internet postings on this particularly unforgettable local celebrity that Mr Jones was a character in all vernacular respects - jolly japes like running through squaddies' legs to win bets that he could do something that they couldn't do through to memories of his particularly rich lexicon of curse words. Nevertheless when seeing the footage yesterday I was reminded of the sheer eccentricity of much of our native folk history - planted so deeply in beds of both rich humour and total unpretentiousness.<br />
<br />
So even in these desperate times as so many nation-destroying issues grimly coalesce in unforeseen fashion it is important to remember how totally unique is the social culture of the British Isles. Maybe that as epitomised none moreso than with that tiny yet energising symbol of Sixties spark, cheek, nerve and gall that ended up as a museum piece just eight train stops from Belfast - a city founded upon an ethnic frontier and that survived everything that bad bad history could throw at it.<br />
<br />
For sure the soul of Davy Jones' car is right this moment roaring across a dream landscape of sunshine, fun and adventure alongside Elvis's iconic mustard-coloured buggy - which in turn once zoomed through the Californian surf at the start of 1968's <i>Live a Little Love a Little </i>towards beautiful Michele Carey's boho Malibu beach house. Back when tomorrow still meant something beyond the next bloody rubbish haul after today.<br />
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Saturday Buddhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04976717497499457595noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2106433662289694247.post-35713555842736131482017-11-26T21:50:00.000+00:002019-06-16T10:48:17.681+01:00Perfect Days - Laurel And Hardy In Fifties Ireland<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj786BhTRpb98JEXZNCkdhHglxayf3er4WkMYIJ9yskBNIVj2PZwME8AE9Au_vkfzrbXTvJYVhlCyNJT41vtTzaQxaq6UuDbnPObdW-yLHTYB7VgEXkzSsNHmVBmFbcYVWjSqQVJEA5X1U/s1600/559421_435247699856092_1551986495_n.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Laurel and Hardy, Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Belfast, 1952, Midland Hotel" border="0" data-original-height="535" data-original-width="475" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj786BhTRpb98JEXZNCkdhHglxayf3er4WkMYIJ9yskBNIVj2PZwME8AE9Au_vkfzrbXTvJYVhlCyNJT41vtTzaQxaq6UuDbnPObdW-yLHTYB7VgEXkzSsNHmVBmFbcYVWjSqQVJEA5X1U/s320/559421_435247699856092_1551986495_n.jpg" title="" width="284" /></a></div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>The Irish village of Trenchcoat. Another quiet, peaceful day - the residents had run out of bricks to throw at each other.</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
Opening caption of Stan Laurel 1924 short <i>Near Dublin</i></div>
<br />
I remember once reading a thread on the "Exiles" section of the main Belfast history internet forum where a lady in her sixties from Canada wistfully recalled the good old days and the friends she left behind. She mentioned three of them by name in the hope that the possibility may arise in the scary new digital age that somebody would know them and there might be a way to re-establish contact. The first reply from a jet black Ulster cyber-comedian simply noted: "They're all dead".<br />
<br />
My first interface with the fateful circularity of life came as a child when I was watching one of those old compendium of clips from Laurel and Hardy movies - I sense it was 1967's <i>The Crazy World of Laurel and Hardy</i> as it concluded with the famous <i>Way Out West</i> sequence of their charming soft-shoe shuffle outside a saloon bar. On asking my mother about their whereabouts thereafter I was informed that alas they were gone in body and spirit. A crushing and literally tearful blow I recall to this day.<br />
<br />
For many people in their forties and fifties Laurel and Hardy were a mainstay of television viewing in their youth. In hindsight, and while cross-referencing their filmography, I can distinctly recall seeing the entireity of their 1929-1935 talking shorts output on the small screen. These were often transmitted around the 6pm slot on BBC2 in the late Seventies and early Eighties. Likewise for all thirteen of their Hal Roach- directed feature films made between 1931 and 1940. I also remember that Channel 4 showed some of the later Twentieth Century Fox and RKO features during the Nineties - <i>A-Haunting We Will Go, Air Raid Wardens, The Big Noise </i>etc - though these were essentially of interest to movie buffs only by virtue of their status as some of the worst films ever made (albeit through no fault of the artists' doing).<br />
<br />
One of the final Laurel and Hardy features to be generally well regarded - and which I have recently revisited - was 1940's <i>A Chump At Oxford</i>. In this film Stan and Ollie are a pair of total witless eejits in America who manage to foil a bank raid. The kindly and decent bank manager subsequently offers them a reward of their own choosing. Being conscious of being complete morons they decide upon "an education". They are subsequently dispatched to Oxford University England while dressed as Eton schoolboys - as fifty year olds.<br />
<br />
On arriving in Oxford the world's most beloved comedy duo are mercilessly harried and bullied by the resident sneering and well-heeled students including a particularly young Peter Cushing. They are directed to their digs by way of a maze and - while lost therein - are practically scared to death by a genuinely terrifying apparition of a ghost-demon which of course is nothing more than a merciless prank by the resident privelaged rotters. Their accomodation also turns out to be the Dean's residence and he is well furious at the turn of events in his cosy academic ivory tower.<br />
<br />
This of course is trumped by Stan Laurel bashing his head and transforming into Lord Paddington - the ultimate upper-class arrogant braggard imaginable. Ear-wiggling and monocoled Paddington physically thrashes the student body ranged against him before turning on his erstwhile buddy Ollie and tormenting him mercilessly. Calling him "Fatty" every minute and denigrating his physical bearing, it is truly painful to watch even seven decades later. Stan finally snaps out of his reverie but not before directly inducing Oliver Hardy's nervous breakdown.<br />
<br />
This ten minute segment alone - as an extraordinary prefiguring of modern British political and social culture - is a priceless moment of magnificent comedy and arguably one of the highlights in the entire career of Ulverston's finest son Arthur Stanley Jefferson. The rock group Mott The Hoople once reflected upon the light-year distance between the Liverpool docks and the Hollywood Bowl. Cumbria to Culver City in the early 20th Century was certainly no mean feat either let's face it. Take some time and watch it through.<br />
<br />
Time has been very kind to a lot of Laurel and Hardy material. Even the introduction to the RKO <i>Dancing Masters</i> feature is quite hilarious with Oliver Hardy's toddler clowning on the dancefloor with some Gil Elvgrenesque beauties while his lapses into folksy down home Southern patter as at the end of <i>Way Out West </i>never fails to raise a warm smile. <br />
<br />
After their movie careers ended with the dispiriting mess of <i>Atoll K</i>, Messrs Laurel and Hardy performed on stage in many UK and European theatrical venues in the late Forties and early Fifties. In June 1952 they appeared for a fortnight at The Grand Opera House in downtown Belfast. During their visit they stayed in a fan-besieged Midland Hotel near York Road station in the north of the city. The pair had their hair cut in James Mulgrew's local Whitla Street barbers - a fact subsequently advertised prominently by the business - and some recollections of the visit gathered online talk of the couple walking with their wives in the nearby Sailortown district and tipping a busker outside the Great Victoria Street venue they played at.<br />
<br />
One individual remembered how their West Belfast grandmother saw the couple on the Dublin train and how Oliver Norvell Hardy responded to a compliment from the lady by wiggling his tie and saying "Thank you ma'am". The late Belfast comedian Frank Carson also would recollect shaking their hands at the Midland Hotel entrance. A feature on the visit produced by the Belfast online movie review website <a href="https://vimeo.com/147306927" target="_blank">Banterflix </a>references a possible meeting the pair had with the legendary lion-wrestling Belfast hardman extraordinaire Buck Alec and a seaside visit to Bangor's Tonic cinema to judge a singing competition.<br />
<br />
The show that Laurel and Hardy performed in Belfast was named <i>A Spot of Trouble </i>and was based on their 1930 short <i>Night Owls</i>. During the time in Northern Ireland Stan Laurel was taken ill and spent a brief period in either the Royal Victoria Hospital on the Falls Road or Musgrave Park in South Belfast - online information differs. The Stan Laurel Correspondence Archive includes <a href="http://www.lettersfromstan.com/stan-1952-06.html" target="_blank">a letter </a>sent from the Midland Hotel dated the 24th June that references his pending hospital stay and the scale of the welcome in Ireland:<br />
<br />
<i>Haven't had much chance to get down to personal correspondence due to the exciting visit to Ireland. Being our first time here, they went ALL OUT to give us a true Irish Welcome and didn't miss a thing. Bus(iness). as you can imagine was enormous - broke house record here (57 years). </i><br />
<br />
Prior to the Grand Opera House dates the comedians had performed in Dublin's Olympia Theatre on Dame Street and stayed at the Gresham Hotel on O'Connell Street. In the following year of<br />
1953 Laurel and Hardy resided for 33 nights at Dun Laoghaire's Royal Marine Hotel (as pictured above) and pending a one-night performance at The Olympia for a polio charity. A return visit to Belfast on this trip to the British Isles had to be cancelled because of Hardy's visa problems. This was also the Irish visit so often mentioned because of the resounding harbour welcome the people of Cork gave the actors on the 9th September which they would remember for the rest of their lives - Stan Laurel recalling:<br />
<br />
<i>It's a strange, a strange thing, our popularity has lasted so long. Our last good pictures were made in the thirties, and you'd think people would forget, but they don't. The love and affection we found that day at Cobh was simply unbelievable. There were hundreds of boats blowing whistles and mobs and mobs of people screaming on the docks. We just couldn't understand what is was all about. And then something happened that I can never forget. All the church bells in Cobh started to ring out our theme song, and Babe looked at me, and we cried. Maybe people loved us and our pictures because we put so much love in them. I don't know. I'll never forget that day. Never.</i><br />
<br />
It is sixty five years now since Laurel and Hardy visited my home town. The once grand Midland finished long ago as a hotel business and was finally torn down this month, York Road Railway Station is demolished and much of residential York Street and Sailortown long gone. The Grand Opera House and the Europa Hotel next door however survived the thirty years of grotesque terror that came to pass and of which the Royal Victoria Hospital and the Musgrave saw much of the bloody consequences.<br />
<br />
A certain seven-year-old boy resident in Belfast at the time of the comedians' visit grew up to change the world of football and pop culture forever while an eight-year-old Donegal kid who arrived to live in Cork just three years after the famous appearance of the Hollywood stars in Cobh Harbour went on to produce some the most timeless electric blues rock ever on vinyl and stage. George Best and Rory Gallagher never forgot Belfast City - it would appear that Belfast and Ireland too left its mark on the greatest comics in history. All four beautiful souls long gone from this world but still casting an extraordinary light into our dark and utterly desperate times.<br />
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Saturday Buddhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04976717497499457595noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2106433662289694247.post-31688752587518248522017-09-01T22:49:00.000+01:002019-04-14T12:25:10.732+01:00The Northern Ireland Labour Party - Labour And Loyalty In Ulster<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span id="goog_109433383"></span><span id="goog_109433384"></span><br />
<br />
One of the most pressing matters regarding political equilibrium in Northern Ireland off the back of the Belfast flag protests at the start of this year has been the future electoral viability of the Alliance Party - an organisation whose existence and relative electoral success since 1970 has been one of the few determiners of normality in the province during the Troubles and afterwards.<br />
<br />
Prior to the outbreak of violence in 1969 another group in the history of Ulster who briefly represented a bi-confessional and an albeit highly qualified political alternative to ethnic-orientated party politics was the Northern Ireland Labour Party.<br />
<br />
Ten elections took place between 1921 and 1969 in the half century life of the Northern Ireland parliament - in 1921, 1925, 1929, 1933, 1938, 1945, 1949, 1953, 1958, 1962, 1965 and 1969. The story of the political face of Labour in Ulster in this period is one of political survival against schism, vilification and even physical danger.<br />
<br />
Although the subject was analysed some years ago in a genuinely comprehensive and accessible study, it was alas published through a British academic print and thus priced way beyond the means of the decent and kindly post-Orgreave working man. The electoral fortunes of Labour in Ulster however are well worth reflecting upon again and especially so in light of their representation at both Stormont and Westminster.<br />
<br />
Following the partition of Ireland, and during the 1920 local government elections in the North, the use of a proportional representation system had increased non-unionist representation in Northern Ireland. Abolition of PR by Stormont strengthened the unionist position while also placing restrictions upon matters of economic concern ever taking priority over the national question by way of local electoral consolidation for Independent Labour Party candidates.<br />
<br />
In the first election for the 52-seat Northern Ireland parliament in May 1921 all three anti-partitionist Labour candidates were Protestants - Councillor James Baird, John Hanna and Harry Midgeley. The first two had been expelled from the Belfast shipyards during the Troubles of the period and their campaigning took place under both intimidation and threat from loyalists. Compared to the 1920 local elections they fared disastrously and only mustered a joint total of 1,877 votes. Conversely three members of the Ulster Unionist Labour Association - umbilically linked to the main Unionist Party and often the source of extreme political invective and rhetoric in itself - did win seats. These were taken by Sam McGuffin, Thompson Donald and William Grant while three Westminister Ulster Unionist seats were also given over to UULA members in the 1918 General Election.<br />
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In 1924 the Labour Party was formed and attempted to maintain a neutral stance on the border issue. The 1925 election in Ulster - strategically used to strengthen Premier James Craig's hand against the the Boundary Commission considering changes to the Irish border at this point - saw the governing Unionist Party lose five seats to independent unionists and a tenants’ candidate. Labour in turn won three seats - Jack Beattie in East Belfast, leader Sam Kyle in North Belfast and William McMullen in West Belfast. All three again were Protestants and Labour became the official opposition at Stormont as nationalists slowly returned.<br />
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The Unionist Party itself viewed the independent unionist victories in particular as a divisive development which could fundamentally undermine the Protestant working class support base and was a direct factor in the abolition of proportional representation for Stormont elections in 1929 - Labour and the nationalists uniting unsuccessfully against the proposal. <br />
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With the Protestant electorate now facing the realisation that a split vote could potentially hand victory to an anti-partition candidate, the status of the Union was underscored as the central political factor for consideration in the unionist-nationalist battleground. The 1929 Stormont election would thus see the Unionist Party winning six more seats than four years previously. The Labour threat had been turned back with Jack Beattie alone retaining his seat in Belfast Pottinger though Kyle lost only narrowly in Oldpark and the cumulative Labour total was still a respectable 20,516.<br />
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Large scale civil unrest in Belfast - and indeed across the religious divide - accompanied both the Outdoor Relief and railway strikes of 1932. During an emergency Stormont sitting in September to discuss unemployment the then Labour leader Beattie had memorably thrown the mace at the Speaker with the stirring admonition "I absolutely refuse to sit in this House and indulge in hypocrisy while the people are starving outside."<br />
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Labour representation doubled in the 1933 election with Harry Midgely winning in the Catholic Dock ward - the partnership between their two MPs would not last long however with Beattie being expelled from the party for refusing to move the writ on the Belfast Central election following the death of Nationalist leader Joe Devlin. This in light of his earlier close work with the Nationalists and in respect of his small majority in Pottinger ward which included the Catholic Short Strand. Beattie was readmitted to the party in 1942.<br />
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During the last election before the Second World War in 1938, the millionaire WJ Stewart and his Progressive Unionists played a populist card with stress on the unemployment issue and the need for agricultural reform and a housebuilding programme. Predictably all 12 candidates – branded as “wreckers” by the Unionist Party leadership and unrepresentative as mainly liberal-minded businessmen and professionals - were to fail. In this election Midgely lost his seat in Dock as directly linked to public discord in the constituency over his support for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War as opposed to Catholic clerical support for Franco. Midgely would certainly not forget the especial circumstances of his exit. Beattie on the other hand was relected as an independent Labour candidate while sometime future NILP leader Paddy Agnew became the first Catholic official Labour MP winning the nationalist-boycotted South Armagh seat.<br />
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During the course of the Second World War itself in 1943 the Northern Ireland Prime Minister Basil Brooke brought the labour figures Harry Midgley and William Grant into the cabinet as Minister of Public Security and Minister of Labour respectively. Former NILP leader Midgley had left the party in December 1942 over the vexed partition issue to form his own pro-Unionist Commonwealth Labour Party. He had returned to Stormont as an MP again following a by-election win in December 1941 in the Protestant Willowfield ward of East Belfast though tensions with Beattie in the three-man parliamentary team had arisen again.<br />
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Jack Beattie himself won the West Belfast seat at Westminister in February 1943 providing the Labour Party with its highest profile success in a period where it would stand to the left of even the Communist Party in refusing to press for an emergency wartime coalition government during the political crisis within unionism that saw Brooke take over the premiership from J M Andrews. Instead they called for a general election which would certainly have seen the Ulster Unionist Party lose several seats to Labour. Beattie was to be expelled from the Labour Party yet again in 1944 and for similar reasons to his earlier expulsion - he refused to press for a Senate by-election when a nationalist senator died. He would hold the West Belfast seat on two occasions - 1943-50 and<br />
1951-55.<br />
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Harry Midgley meanwhile – certainly the most long recalled labour figure in Northern Ireland history and a genuinely vociferous critic of the unionist leadership as Labour MP for the religiously-mixed Dock ward during the 1930s – formally joined the Unionist Party in 1947. Midgley the "Unionist Evangelist" served as Minister of Labour and Minister of Education from 1949 and would in the latter part of his life join the Orange Order and become a director of Linfield Football Club. The Commonwealth Labour Party expired with his departure.<br />
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The June 1945 Stormont election saw the Unionist Party campaign on a broadly anti-socialist platform of opposition to Labour’s plans for nationalisation and planning while at the same time promising to introduce any social reforms passed at Westminster into Northern Ireland. In this election Robert Getgood and then party leader Hugh Downey won seats at Stormont for Labour in the Belfast constituencies of Oldpark and Dock though Agnew lost his in South Armagh. The following year official Labour Party representation at Stormont rose to three again with the election of Frank Hanna in a Belfast Central by-election. At this stage the Labour Party had still failed to win in a fully Protestant electoral ward. Former Labour Party members Midgely and Beattie retained their seats in Willowfield and Pottinger - the pair had come to blows in Stormont in 1945 leading to the former's suspension.<br />
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With the south formally declaring full republic status in late 1948 another election was called in Northern Ireland the following year in an atmosphere of extreme tension. The “Chapel Gates” election, so called because of the Mansion House conference decision in Dublin to collect voluntary donations outside southern churches for anti-partition candidates in the north, solidified the unionist bloc. Campaigning took place against a background of fierce intimidation towards the labour candidates not dissimilar to 1921. Getgood and Downey lost their seats while Hanna retained his but only as an independent labour candidate.<br />
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The party organisation then splintered over the partition issue with a now firmly pro-Union Northern Ireland Labour Party emerging and as opposed to an anti-partitionist Irish Labour Party which still included a substantial Protestant membership including Beattie who had lost his Pottinger seat. The opposition in Stormont now became fully Catholic and the British government reaffirmed Northern Ireland’s constitutional status in the 1949 Ireland Act.<br />
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In the 1953 Stormont election no less than five variations of Labour stood for election - the Irish Labour Party won a seat in Dock alongside a Socialist Republican in Falls though the party itself would have faded away by the late Fifties.<br />
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A major period of sustained Republican violence took place between December 1956 and February 1962 in Northern Ireland with eight IRA volunteers, six members of the RUC and two B Specials being killed. During the Border campaign in 1958 the NILP made a major electoral breakthrough by winning four Stormont seats in Belfast – leader Tom Boyd in Pottinger, Vivien Simpson in Oldpark and Billy Boyd and David Bleakley in the staunchly Protestant Woodvale and Victoria . The latter two victories, as won by ex-shipyard workers and lay preachers, were with small majorities. Being unequivocally pro-partition since 1949 - and constantly firm on law and order issues - they would focus on the recession problems affecting agriculture, shipbuilding and the textiles industry. The NILP became the official opposition and in the 1962 election in Northern Ireland they doubled their Belfast vote to over 76,000 votes and held onto their four seats with increased majorities. This however would prove the limit of their electoral viability as a protest vote.<br />
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The NILP had theoretically represented a new Protestant and Catholic working class alliance to tackle socio-economic problems within the Stormont system. However in reality its gathering support since the late 1940s was mainly founded on Protestant working class voters who viewed its unionist credentials as essentially sound. Its gathering Catholic support over the unemployment issue from the late Fifties onwards had in turn attracted liberal Protestants of all classes in terms of its non-sectarian appeal. It is certainly important to underscore the fealty of all the NILP MPs at this time to the Northern Ireland state, the Union and stern security measures to defend both as opposed to any full frontal assault on sectarianism, discrimination or partition.<br />
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In the early 1960s economic recovery proved elusive and indeed Brookeborough’s successor in 1963, Terence O’Neill, would utilise many of the NILP’s policies about combating unemployment and the contraction and collapse of the three core industries.<br />
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The Labour vote was still holding strong at this time with 103,000 votes but no seats at the October 1964 Westminster election. However the November 1965 Stormont election which O’Neill called to consolidate his position, which was already attracting undue negative reaction from some unionist quarters, saw the NILP vote plummet. Only Boyd and Simpson's Pottinger and Oldpark seats would be retained as the Labour vote fell by 10,000 from its 1962 performance. Bleakly lost his seat by only 423 votes.<br />
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O’Neill’s focus on economic recovery for the moribund northern economy - and especially his desire for co-operation with the trade unions and Sean Lemass’ Republic of Ireland - placed him almost to the left of the NILP. Within the party a distancing was also gradually occurring between the more left-wing members and the pro-unionist MPs David Bleakley and Billy Boyd who seemed to embody a Belfast-orientated and sabbatarian Protestant image inimical to broadening the support base. <br />
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This came to a head over the “Sunday swings” controversy of late 1964 where Woodvale NILP representatives were expelled and then readmitted to the party. Divisions also took place within the NILP over the election of former IRA member Paddy Devlin to the party executive, the decision to contest seats in majority nationalist areas and a NILP proposed private members bill in Stormont in 1964 to outlaw religious discrimination.<br />
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Hence even before the slide to civil unrest and terrorism began in 1968, the fall in unemployment in Northern Ireland and the appeal of O'Neill's qualified rapprochment with the nationalist community undercut support for the NILP from both working class "extreme" unionism and middle class "liberal" unionism alike. The leftward swing within the NILP towards civil rights issues would continue to gain pace in the latter half of the 1960s. In the final Stormont election in February 1969 then leader Vivien Simpson once again held Oldpark though the Pottinger seat in East Belfast was lost to the Unionist Party. Former IRA member Paddy Devlin also won a seat for the NILP in the Catholic Falls constituency.<br />
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With the arrival of alternative political choices such as the Social Democratic and Labour Party, Alliance and the Democratic Unionist Party at the start of the 1970s the political voice of Labour in Ulster would thus gradually fade into history. There would however be one worthy electoral postcript in the June 1970 Westminister election when - even with Republican violence mounting and communal cleavage widening - the NILP won no less than 98,194 votes or 12.6% of the vote. In the final Northern Ireland government headed by Brian Faulkner a Minister of Community Relations role was created and given to David Bleakley. Bleakley would also be elected to the Northern Ireland Assembly in June 1973 - where Paddy Devlin served as SDLP Minister of Health and Social Services in the power-sharing Executive - and to the Constitutional Convention in May 1975. These were both for the East Belfast constituency and with 4,425 and 3,998 first preference votes respectively.<br />
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Today the NILP are rarely mentioned beyond some spurious politcal analogies with the Ulster Volunteer Force-linked Progressive Unionist Party. Although the highpoint of their political imprint in Northern Ireland in 1925 and 1958 was based on only three and four MPs respectively in Stormont, their performance at Westminister elections during the span of the Forties, Fifties and Sixties was also impressive. This in light of the first-past-the-post electoral system and aside from Beattie's election victories in West Belfast. Strong returns could be noted throughout these years in the North and East Belfast constituencies with around 35-40% of the vote and a peak at the 1945 and 1966 elections. In 1945 Tom Boyd won 43% in East Belfast and the NILP 44% in North Belfast - in 1966 when the first political assassinations took place in Belfast the Labour vote in East Belfast for the General Election was 45% and 42% in North Belfast.<br />
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The politicians who represented Labour and the Northern Ireland Labour Party in the late Stormont parliament are long deceased. Harry Midgely died in 1957, Paddy Agnew in 1958, Jack Beattie in 1960, Sam Kyle in 1962, Robert Getgood in 1964, Vivien Simpson in 1977, William McMullen in 1982, Frank Hanna in 1987, Tom Boyd in 1991, Paddy Devlin in 1999 and David Bleakley in 2017. I am unable to confirm biographical details for either Billy Boyd or Hugh Downey who was an uncle of Provisional Sinn Fein leader Danny Morrison.<br />
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The NILP folded as a political organisation in 1987 while in the entire history of the Northern Ireland state, and indeed thereafter, the British Labour Party refused to organise or stand for elections in this part of the United Kingdom.<br />
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The Northern Ireland Labour Party thus remaining a sobering memory of a genuine class-based political alternative for a country fractured upon religion, ethnicity and nationality. Likewise another melancholy reflection of a period of British social history when concern for the well-being of labour and the working man was a fundamental priority both for any government aspiring to societal equilibrium and most certainly for any party of labour seeking office.<br />
<br />Saturday Buddhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04976717497499457595noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2106433662289694247.post-25520097081942065762017-05-12T10:31:00.000+01:002018-08-16T13:42:25.223+01:00Stewart Parker - High Pop<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsjEXwPAHiZUInelV51Pg99VyW2O8GcTcSnQuaWWr9s4hlhg-wORbRzHzf52y7qfRiK48a7nby9FZ7nr_pSiAB6gAenmGn7DIpPc9SYVw179doA9N4grSY-RPDBjITvwdCwqQTzZb9XrY/s1600/41HABPYZJtL.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Stewart Parker, Belfast, Northern Ireland, Playwright, Irish Times" border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsjEXwPAHiZUInelV51Pg99VyW2O8GcTcSnQuaWWr9s4hlhg-wORbRzHzf52y7qfRiK48a7nby9FZ7nr_pSiAB6gAenmGn7DIpPc9SYVw179doA9N4grSY-RPDBjITvwdCwqQTzZb9XrY/s320/41HABPYZJtL.jpg" title="" width="198" /></a></div>
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This month sees the release of <i><a href="http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/stewart-parker-s-life-story-gets-one-last-act-1.3080941" target="_blank">Hopdance</a> </i>from Ireland's Lilliput Press - the Ulster playwright Stewart Parker's autobiographical novel that he had worked upon in the Seventies and Eighties but was uncompleted at the time of his death from cancer in 1988. It centers on his experiences of having a leg amputated from the same disease while at Queen's University in Belfast.<br />
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The book is edited by Marylinn Richtarik whose long comprehensive overview of the artist's life I have just finished reading this evening. Alike Johnny Rogan's biography of Van Morrison the work is grounded on genuinely fascinating narratives of Irish social history alongside the profound changes affecting the commercial constructs of stage performance, broadcast media and cinema production during his lifetime.<br />
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I was very lucky to have caught Parker's final play <i>Pentecost</i> at the Lyric Theatre in London's Hammersmith in 1989 - it remains for me the finest piece of drama I have seen on stage in my life. The eleventh hour political detente witnessed in Ulster following the death of Sinn Fein's Martin McGuinness certainly resonates with the religous undertones of the play's melancholy denouement. Set during the 1974 Ulster Workers' Council strike - yet the most successful industrial stoppage of the European working class since the Second World War - it in turn reflected the desperate zero-sum game political turmoil in Northern Ireland in the wake of the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement. <br />
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Parker is remembered in the main for his stage plays <i>Spokesong </i>and <i>Catchpenny Twist,</i> the BBC <i>Play for Today </i>productions of <i>Iris in the Traffic Ruby in the Rain </i>and <i>The Kamikaze Ground Staff Reunion Dinner,</i> the award-winning <i>ITV Playhouse</i> feature <i>I'm A Dreamer </i><i>Montreal, </i>London Weekend Television's <i>Blue Money </i>with Tim Curry, the Channel 4 series <i>Lost Belongings </i>and his extraordinary <i>Northern Star </i>telling of the 1798 United Irishmen rebellion leader Henry Joy McCracken's life and execution. Further to his work being so heavily grounded in Irish history - and the perennial cultural fractures that impinged so strongly on community and personal relationships - Richtarik's biography also noted further projects that never saw dramatic fruition including works on the 19th Century Land League campaign and the internment of Allied and Axis servicemen in Eire during the 1939-45 Emergency.<br />
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Ironically the civil disorder of the Northern Ireland conflict would remain much in the background of the two best-remembered <i>Play for Today</i> works set there - Parker's <i>Iris In The Traffic, Ruby In the Rain</i> in 1981 and <i>Too Late To Talk To Billy</i> by Graham Reid in 1982.<br />
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The former drama is set on one winter's day in Belfast and followed the parallel lifepaths of the two eponymous women. Belfast punk group Stiff Little Fingers provided the soundtrack with singer Jake Burns in a supporting dramatic role himself. In 1977 Parker's first contribution to <i>Play For Today</i> was a version of <i>The Catchpenny Twist</i> which covered the songwriting career of two ex-teachers against the political vagaries of Seventies Ireland. The magnificently titled <i>The Kamikaze Groundstaff Reunion Dinner</i> was shown in 1981 in the series and had white British actors playing Japanese war veterans.<br />
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Graham Reid's play regarded the familial travails of a young working class Protestant in South Belfast portrayed by Kenneth Branagh and with three further plays to follow as based around the character of Billy Martin. Branagh also starred in Reid's <i>Easter 1916</i> contribution to the <i>Play For Tomorrow</i> mini-series of 1982 which looked at tensions at a Northern Ireland teacher training college on the centenary of the Dublin rising.<br />
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Seven other productions over the course of <i>Play For Today'</i>s run touched upon the Ulster conflict.<br />
Dominic Behan's 1972 <i>Carson Country</i> - starring Harry Towb and Sam Kydd - looked at Protestant working class life around the period of the Home Rule crisis and the creation of the Northern Ireland state. It was transmitted in October of that year instead of the planned May in order as not to provoke trouble during the marching season. The following month Behan's <i>The Folk Singer</i> for <i>Armchair Theatre</i> on ITV - about the visit of a Liverpool musician to Belfast - was given a later scheduled transmission slot on the instructions of the Independent Broadcasting Authority. Three months later in turn ATV chairman Sir Lew Grade banned entirely the transmission of Kenneth Griffith's <i>Hang Up Your Brightest Colours:The Life and Death of Michael Collins</i> and this would not be shown at all until 1993.<br />
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Over the remainder of the Seventies<i> Taking Leave</i> (1974) was the story of a British soldier who returned to Ulster after six years of service and considered his parents' wish for him to terminate his service; Colin Welland's <i>Yer Man From Six Counties</i> (1976) focused upon a young boy's move to the West of Ireland after the death of his father in an IRA bomb; <i>The Legion Hall Bombing</i> (1976) looked at the Diplock court system then operational in Northern Ireland and whose transmission was also delayed by further BBC concern over editorial content while <i>The Last Window Cleaner</i> (1979) followed the transfer of a policeman to Ulster and his experiences in wartorn Belfast at The Crumlin View boarding house.<br />
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During the Eighties Jennifer Johnston's <i>Shadows On Our Skin</i> (1980) viewed the Troubles through the eyes of an 11-year-old boy in Derry's Bogside - and with Horslip's <i>Time To Kill</i> used in the soundtrack - while <i>Fire At Magilligan</i> (1984) followed upon the consequences of a driver picking up a hitchhiker on the motorway out of Belfast and the two gradually realised they were not unknown to each other after all.<br />
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Returning to Parker again and a massive personal recommendation for his <i>High Pop</i> rock and folk album reviews for the <i>Irish Times </i>which were compiled some time ago by Belfast's Lagan Press. This is an utterly exceptional collection of vintage music journalism - Parker's reviews being tight, funny, enthusiastic and highly informed. It includes many albums recorded by Parker's personal favorites which clearly included Steely Dan, The Band and Joni Mitchell but the critiques cover a huge amount of artists and styles in the 1970-76 period from The Incredible String Band to Dr Feelgood. His reviews of Lennon's <i>Some Time in New York City </i>and Dylan's <i>Self-Portrait</i> in particular are utterly unreserved. This is an incredibly warm, interesting and witty book in itself and merits many a return reference - do find a space for this on your bookshelf if you are a music fan of the period.<br />
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Parker grew up in Sydenham in Protestant East Belfast across the dual carriageway and railway line from the modern day George Best Airport. His funeral took place there too though he had lived the latter part of his life in South West London and previously in Edinburgh. Parker's ashes were to be scattered from the Larne-Stranraer ferry in the middle of the Irish Sea - an irreverent yet deeply symbolic farewell to the restless natives of Britain and Ireland from a true radical and a man of profound intelligence and heart.Saturday Buddhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04976717497499457595noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2106433662289694247.post-88947664107725773862017-03-03T10:11:00.000+00:002019-08-30T08:50:04.554+01:00A Night In September - Linfield And Manchester City 1970<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6NuwteU_gg7mPzZtRsVLT-zotoBEFIP8g8dIG1a5QCBvdz_CtEqalia-7LWzGm6C1PurGOtPA50k7mdCjnxh7RmzJuw-3vLEHskzdOjA9A7S1kR-bYMBFaM0252KsEHBVZenDZSLGQa0/s1600/b89rfq.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Linfield, Manchester City, 1970, Windsor Park, Ulster Troubles, Northern Ireland" border="0" height="260" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6NuwteU_gg7mPzZtRsVLT-zotoBEFIP8g8dIG1a5QCBvdz_CtEqalia-7LWzGm6C1PurGOtPA50k7mdCjnxh7RmzJuw-3vLEHskzdOjA9A7S1kR-bYMBFaM0252KsEHBVZenDZSLGQa0/s400/b89rfq.jpg" title="" width="400" /></a></div>
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I caught the recently released documentary about George Best last Saturday at the cinema in London. In general a fairly pedestrian haul through the usual milestones and recollections though the section on his time in the North American Soccer League was put together in an engaging way and there was some news footage I had never seen before. However the actual sporting archive clips were all well-worn choices yet oddly left out the two most famous of all his Seventies goals which were scored in the sunshine and (floodlight) shadow against Sheffield United and Chelsea respectively.<br />
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There was also little Northern Ireland international footage despite rare film being available on youtube for quite some time of the November 1970 game against Spain and the February 1971 match against Cyprus - also his final international performance against Holland in October 1977. In fact on the day I uploaded this post I came across further material from the 1971 and 1977 away matches against the USSR and West Germany. The ongoing absence in the public domain of material from the famous Rotterdam game against the Dutch in 1976 - his last truly great performance for his country - remains utterly inexplicable.<br />
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In general the documentary was something of an opportunity lost on this occasion. There was no social contextualisation about Northern Ireland and the Troubles in the new documentary - a particular failing in light of the success of Irish rugby union in bridging vintage national division around a broadly generic cultural calling without any noticeable rancour or controversy. The use of subtitles on various pieces of footage was odd in the extreme too in light of Best's highly attractive, warm, rich and distinctly crystal-clear Ulster brogue.<br />
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The last word on George Best still remains the Duncan Hamilton biography <i>Immortal - </i>overall the story of his fall from grace becomes more desperately sad and terribly futile with the passing of each year.<br />
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As discussed in an earlier blog post, George Best played only 37 times for Northern Ireland between 1964 and 1977. Eighteen of these matches were at Windsor Park in Belfast. The onset of civil war in Ulster in the Seventies meant that several Northern Ireland home matches were played at English grounds - hence the February 1972 home tie against Spain being played at Boothferry Park in Hull.<br />
Best's matches at Windsor were played out against Uruguay, England and Switzerland in 1964; Holland, Albania and Scotland in 1965; England in 1966; Scotland in 1967; Turkey in 1968; England, Wales and the USSR in 1969; Scotland in 1970; Cyprus, England and Wales in 1971 and then Iceland and Holland in 1977.<br />
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The 1966 match was England's first game since their World Cup victory - they would parade the trophy around the Windsor Park ground beforehand. The 1967 Scotland tie is generally accepted as Best's finest international performance while the World Cup qualifier two years later against the USSR is the source of the oft-repeated slow-motion action clips under Windsor's unreserved stand's public health advice to smoke <i>Gallaher's - Northern Ireland's First Name in Tobacco. </i>These originated from the 1970 documentary <i>The World of Georgie Best </i>as narrated by Hugh McIlvanney<i>.</i><br />
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Best was sent off in the 1970 match against Scotland for throwing mud at the referee while the 1971 England Home International included the globally famous Gordon Banks incident - youtube contains other footage of this match with him openly taunting English players to take the ball off him to the crowd's raucous delight. The Welsh match in the same year I assume is where another famous clip originates - Best cockily pretending to kick his football with extreme force, prejudice and intent into a shirking defender's bollocks. The BBC managed to destroy all footage of Best's 1971 hat trick in Belfast against Cyprus. Incidentally, the iconic footage of Best passing the ball to a colleague while holding his boot in one hand is possibly from a Home International tie against Scotland at Hampden Park - 1969 or 1971.<br />
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Northern Ireland's national stadium is of course the home ground of Linfield football club in south Belfast - I attended several matches here with my maternal grandfather in the mid-Seventies when I was a kid. In terms of the players I particularly remember - Peter "Bald Eagle" Rafferty, the Malone brothers, Eric Magee, Billy Millen, Ken Barclay, Davy Nixon, Ivan McAllister etc - this may well have been the 1975-76 season. The first match I saw there was a 6-1 victory over Cliftonville - Ireland's oldest football club.<br />
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In an earlier post I mentioned Gareth Mulvenna's recent study of the teenage loyalist Tartan Gangs of the early Seventies and how a particularly voracious element in West Belfast who were Linfield supporters were regularly engaged in significant acts of civil disorder with the police constabulary, army squaddies and the Catholic community at particular city interfaces. A recent <a href="http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/opinion/news-analysis/why-psni-should-look-to-summer-of-69-if-they-hope-to-beat-dissidents-35435242.html" target="_blank"><i>Belfast Telegraph</i> article </a>by Malachi O'Doherty made interesting reference in turn to an earlier pre-Troubles riot in the Falls Road as linked to Linfield supporters returning from a match against Distillery in 1964 that I was not aware of.<br />
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Last month I also flicked through the centenary history of Linfield written in 1985 by the late Malcolm Brodie. The work doesn't shirk from the political back story associated with the club over the years - alike mirrored sectarian football divisions across from the Lagan on Clydeside - and the outplay of the same in crowd disorder. This as notably associated with historic Belfast Celtic and Derry City ties and with a particular battle royale engaged at an away match against Dundalk in the Irish Republic in August 1979. Belfast Celtic, Derry City and Distillery (in its Belfast incarnation) are all - albeit in different respects - long gone from modern day Irish League football in the North. The exit of Belfast Celtic was directly related to trouble at a December 1948 Windsor Park match and a serious crowd attack on one of their (Protestant) players.<br />
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More argy bargy would follow against Glentoran in 1983 and Donegal Celtic in 1990 at The Oval and Windsor respectively - bad blood with <a href="http://www.irishtimes.com/sport/the-future-is-uncertain-for-a-club-exploited-by-bigots-1.99899" target="_blank">Cliftonville </a>has a heritage stretching back to 1913 when the players were welcomed onto the Solitude pitch by the firing of revolvers by some visiting Linfield fans. For many years in the modern period ALL Cliftonville home matches against Linfield were played at Windsor Park for security reasons.<br />
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Linfield Football Club's contribution to European football history is threefold. Firstly, in the 1921-22 and 1961-62 seasons, they won the entire raft of seven domestic trophies in Northern Ireland. Then there was a highly successful period in the late Fifties and early Sixties when Newcastle United legend Jackie Milburn joined Linfield as player-manager. Finally there was a match in September 1970 when the same Billy Millen I saw at Windsor Park in the mid-Seventies played the central role in a truly extraordinary Wednesday evening of European cup football in a politically charged and very troubled Belfast City.<br />
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(That second seven-trophy winning run by the way - under the captaincy of the ultimate Linfield icon Tommy "The Duke of Windsor" Dickson - was completed at the Solitude ground in North Belfast. I can only imagine the scale and reverberation of the crowd cheers to be heard that night at full time in my own paternal grandparents' road in the Oldpark district a few streets away. This was the very same urban location I mentioned in my Tartan Gang post - at the opposite end of the street from the Solitude-direction on internment day in August 1971 the Catholic and Protestant proletariat were of course firing away with total abandon across the main road at each other.)<br />
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Linfield had regularly appeared in European cup competition since the 1959-60 season - a first round appearance in the European Champions Cup against Sweden's Kamraterna (victory in Belfast and defeat in Gothenburg) followed by ties against East Germany's Vorwaerts in 1960-61 (defeat in East Berlin and the opposition denied visas for a return leg) and Esjberg of Denmark in 1961-62 (defeat in Belfast and a draw in Esjberg). In the 1963-64 season they entered the European Cup Winner's Cup and were again knocked out at the first round by Turkey's Fenerbache - defeat in Istanbul and a win in Belfast. Linfield however reached the 1966/67 European Champions Cup Quarter Final. An away draw and a home victory over Luxembourg's Aras and an away victory and a home draw against Norway's Valeregen before being knocked out by Bulgaria's CSKA Sofia - a defeat in the Balkans following a 2-2 draw in Belfast.<br />
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Linfield ended the Sixties with three more first round appearances - in the European Fairs Cup in 1967/68 against Leipzig of East Germany (defeat in Leipzig and victory in Belfast), Setubal of Portugal in 1968/69 in the same competition (both defeats) and Red Star Belgrade in the European Champions Cup in 1969/70. The Yugoslavian team - which had its own infamous hooligan following that proceeded to a particularly dark future as paramilitaries in the Nineties civil war in Bosnia - won in Belgrade and Belfast.<br />
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For the 1970/71 season part-time Linfield - then managed by Billy Bingham who would later be the Northern Ireland manager at the 1982 and 1986 World Cup Finals - were drawn in the first round of the European Cup-Winners Cup against holders Manchester City. A guaranteed healthy pay day for the Belfast club lieing ahead though another early tournament exit being surely foregone.<br />
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City were of course one of the major top flight English soccer teams of the period with a line-up that included Colin Bell, Tony Book, George Best's close friend Mike Summerbee, Mike Doyle, folk rock legend Neil Young and Francis Lee amongst others. They had won the League in 1968 and the FA Cup in 1969 - indeed my collection of six cool <i>Wembley Soccer Stars </i>figurines in my childhood bedroom consisted of their forward Lee, Bestie, Charlie George of Arsenal, West Ham's Bobby Moore, Martin Chivers of Spurs and Super Leeds' Billy Bremner.<br />
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A supremely fit Linfield produced a superb performance in Manchester on Wednesday 16th September under the drive and encouragement of Bingham. Goalkeeper Derek Humphries and sweeper Issac Andrews excelled and only a very late goal from Colin Bell deflated an otherwise incredible team effort. Bingham himself held to the firm belief that Linfield could yet pull off a victory back in Belfast. <br />
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The latter half of 1970 had seen a rapid and dismal deterioration in the security situation in Belfast with a significant hike in bombing incidents - including a pipebomb on the doorstep of the author's family home in July of that year. The countdown to barely contained civil war the following year was starting to gain pace. The 100th explosion of the year in Northern Ireland exploded the day before Linfield played at Maine Road.<br />
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In the run up to the return fixture serious disorder had taken place between Linfield fans and the residents of the Catholic Unity Flats at the junction of the Lower Shankill Road with the city centre's North Street on Saturday 26th September. 300 people were injured and many cars and buses were burnt. The day after the fighting continued in the Shankill district between loyalists and the security forces - an Army post was besieged and CS gas was deployed. It would continue into the Monday albeit on a reduced level.<br />
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On Wednesday 30th September 1970 Billy Millen moved from midfielder to striker for the game and hit two goals in front of a 25,000 crowd in Linfield's most unforgettable match. He had scored after only four minutes when intercepting a backpass to the City goalkeeper to raise the roof at Windsor Park though Lee equalised shortly afterwards. Millen then put Linfield ahead again at the 56th minute from a direct free kick but the Manchester side went through on the away goals rule - City manager Joe Mercer emplacing the epilogue on the tie's drama that "if this is one of the so-called easier draws give me a difficult one every time".<br />
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There is little information on the internet about these matches but from what I can gather the Linfield line-up was the same for both matches - Derek Humphries, Alan Fraser, Jackie Patterson, Issac Andrews, Ivan McAllister, Eric Bowyer, Billy Millen, Eric Magee, Bryan Hamilton, the Scot Billy Sinclair and Dessie Cathcart. Hamilton of course later became a well known player for Ipswich Town and Everton and won many international caps before managing Northern Ireland. McAllister was a serving policeman and goalkeeper Humphries - who also joined the force shortly after this historic match- was killed in a car crash the following year on the way from the police college to another European tie in Belfast against Standard Liege.<br />
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Reports from the matches speak highly of the contributions of McAllister and Fraser alongside Andrews, Humphries and Millen. The latter actually missed out on a Northern Ireland international cap against Spain in the month following the City game - in a team which included George Best - because of injury on the morning of the fixture.<br />
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A posting on a Glasgow Rangers fan forum made note of an aggressive crowd atmosphere at Maine Road in the first leg. For the return match the kick-off was scheduled early at 6.30 because of the political situation in the city regarding the loyalist disorder on both the Shankill Road and in East Belfast. A few bottles were thrown at City goalkeeper Joe Corrigan at the start of the game but otherwise there was no serious disturbance. Corrigan was conscious of Linfield's status as the "Rangers of Belfast" and recalled the incident in his biography and how manager Bingham had appealed to the crowd to halt the abuse of Corrigan to stop the match being abandoned. He also remembered the size of the crowd and the genuinely electric atmosphere, the military escort back to the airport after the match and how Linfield as an amateur team got nothing like the credit they deserved for the victory.<br />
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I also found the match discussed on one thread of a Belfast forum with particular commentary on how a certain senior member of the Manchester City staff executed a tactical volte-face at the prospect of a first round eviction from the lowly competition:<br />
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<i>Man. City were very close to being knocked out of that game. Malcolm Allison their coach had been on TV saying a rule should be put in place to stop the passback to the goalkeeeper deliberately wasting time. That night against The Blues I watched him from the touchline yelling at his players to pass the ball back to the keeper. I'm sure he must have been doing it for the last fifteen minutes or more. Billy Millen was tremendous that night. He scored two and ran the Man City defence ragged. Issac Andrews was a close second for man of the match he was certainly first division material that night. Why he wasn't picked up by an English club I'll never know.</i><br />
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From the perspective of 2017 the Linfield victory that night stands as a truly amazing achievement for amateur football in Europe and for Irish sport alike - this without diminishing earlier Irish League achievements by both Glentoran and Distillery in the Sixties in holding mighty Benfica to score draws in Belfast. I also remain cogniscent that clearly it doesn't equate to the purely non-confessional nature of later Northern Irish sporting success relating to snooker, boxing, athletics, golf and international football.<br />
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The timing and location of the match of course is enshrouded with a genuine strangeness and fatefulness in ways that are not dissimilar to the aforementioned footage of George Best in his power pop glory playing against the USSR. This was some mere weeks after the 1969 civil disorder in Belfast and Derry which lead to the introduction of British troops on Ulster's mean streets. The same can be said for the 1-0 Northern Ireland victory over England at Wembley on 23rd May 1972 - the middle of the worst year of the entire Troubles. On that Tuesday alone a British soldier was shot dead by a sniper, a Catholic civilian died after being injured in an earlier loyalist car bomb attack and four no-warning explosions took place in Belfast injuring seven people and damaging property.<br />
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On the night of 29th September 1971 meanwhile - one year exactly after the City match at Windsor - Linfield supporters were gathered at the Four Step Inn on West Belfast's Shankill Road following the European Cup tie against Standard Liege as mentioned above. They were caught up in a Provisional IRA bomb against the premises which killed two and injured 27. Approximately 50,000 people attended the funerals of the murdered men, one of whom was a relative of Linfield's Issac Andrews who carried his coffin.<br />
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Even though I knew of the significance of this Linfield-Manchester City game for many years I always assumed it had taken place in the late Sixties and not at the start of the Troubles itself. As far as I can remember my maternal grandfather was there to see the victory over City since he mentioned it to me many times. The night - at the eleventh hour of war and peace in Ulster - that Linfield became the Pride of Ireland and the greatest football team in the world. <br />
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In light of some seriously hysterical wailing and keening emanating from one particular terrestrial broadcaster's 7pm national news bulletins in the past few months I would not hold my breath for any mainstream media reappraisal of the scale of Linfield's incomprehensible achievement at any point soon in documentary or theatrical form. Or indeed the true dynamics underpinning certain political earthquakes of late.<br />
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<i>Audecas Fortuna Juvat </i>1970.<br />
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Saturday Buddhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04976717497499457595noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2106433662289694247.post-47062556914902125552017-01-20T11:49:00.000+00:002019-06-12T22:23:22.563+01:00Move Like A Downtown Dancer - George Best And Chelsea<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Been watching quite a few retro football dvds in the past few weeks to tide myself over a freezing January - here in the post-Brexit ghostscape of dumbstruck silence. One of these has been the Leeds United edition of ITV's <i>The Big Match </i>series of the late Sixties, Seventies and Eighties - endlessly entertaining fare.<br />
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Leeds of course were re-embedded in public consciousness off the back of the David Peace book on Brian Clough's short tenure as manager in 1974 and the subsequent movie <i>The Damned United. </i>The performances that that iconic squad of international players left behind to British social history of the Seventies are still breathtaking to witness. Between promotion from the old Second Division in the 1963-64 season and being cheated out of a European Cup final win over Bayern Munich in 1975 the team won the League Championship in 1968-69 and 1973-74, the FA Cup in 1972 against Arsenal and the League Cup in 1968 against the same opposition. To this day the Leeds fans hail their team as European Champions at games with reference to the 1975 controversy and their martyrdom at the hands of EEC bogeyman referee Monsieur Michel Kitabdjian.<br />
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Extraordinarily enough they were were runners-up in the League in 1964-65 to Manchester United, 1965-66 to Liverpool, 1969-70 to Everton, 1970-71 to Arsenal and 1971-72 to Derby County. Also FA Cup runners-up in 1965, 1970 and 1973 to Liverpool, Chelsea and Sunderland. In Europe they won the Inter-Cities Fairs Cup (precursor of the UEFA Cup) in 1968 against Hungary's Ferencvaros and then Juventus in 1971 - they were also were runners-up in the competition in 1967 against Yugoslavia's Dinamo Zagreb and likewise runners-up in the 1973 European Cup Winner's Cup to AC Milan. Players of such calibre and metal as Eire's Johnny Giles, England's Terry Cooper and Paul Madeley, the extraordinarily uncapped Duncan McKenzie and Scotland's Billy Bremner, Eddie Gray and Peter Lorimer insure that the legend of Don Revie and Super Leeds will run and run.<br />
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One of the best matches on the collection was a 1973 away game at Stamford Bridge in London against the equally renowned Chelsea squad of the time - John Hollins, Charlie Cooke, Peter Osgood, Ron Harris, Peter Bonnetti, Alan Hudson et al. Leeds won 2-1. That most famous of all Chelsea squads is also interesting in terms of a particularly thought-provoking piece of counterfactual football history. This alike the possibility of Best, Law and Charlton having been joined in the Manchester United front line by a retained Johnny Giles and Celtic's Jimmy Johnstone and as with regard to the possibility that a troubled Belfast Boy could have ended up here in what could and should have been the literal mid-point of his career.<br />
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Following the early Sixties decision of East Belfast's Glentoran to let the apparently questionable talents of a teenage George Best go by the board- as did scouts from Wolverhampton Wanderers who Best actually supported as a boy and Manchester City - his ten year stint at United was followed by a light flight of golden top end appearances with the Johannesburg Jewish Guild, Dunstable Town, Stockport County, Cork Celtic, Los Angeles Aztecs, Fulham, Fort Lauderdale Strikers, Hibernian of Edinburgh, San Jose Earthquakes, Sea Bee (of Hong Kong), Hong Kong Rangers, Bournemouth, Brisbane Lions and Osborne Park Galeb in Australia, Warwickshire's Nuneaton Borough and finally Tobermore United who are based to the north of Magherafelt in County Londonderry in Northern Ireland. Yes, that wee town on the road from Desertmartin to Maghera.<br />
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However, despite the general car crash nature of Best's career following the 1968 European Cup final and the decline of the ageing United squad, several teams were yet interested in him according to an historical haul through the rich Best bibliography on the shelves - of which the most impressive by a long way remains Duncan Hamilton's 2013 <i>Immortal. </i>These included Real Madrid and Juventus at the beginning of the Seventies, Chelsea and Manchester City and also Brian Clough's Derby County in the fall-out from the 1973 sacking of Best and manager Frank O'Farrell, a particularly keen New York Cosmos at the very launch of the North American Soccer League in clear preference to even Pele as the lodestar of the revolution, Real Madrid again in the period when Tommy Docherty came to manage United, Birmingham's Aston Villa in the same time frame and several Italian and Spanish clubs following his performance for Northern Ireland in the 1976 World Cup qualifier against Holland in Rotterdam.<br />
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The possibility of a move to Chelsea in particular is truly fascinating in light of the panache of their team performances, general individual flair and timely location in Western cultural history on the King's Road which was exemplified by the visit of the regal Raquel Welch to Stamford Bridge for a 1972 home game against Leicester City. Welch yelled enthusiastically to striker Peter Osgood from the touchlines during the match - he later recalling "She probably figured as I was standing there on the pitch doing nothing it was okay to interrupt. If I had been George Best I would have slipped her my number but then again if I was George Best she would have slipped me hers". Welch was photographed previously by Terry O'Neill wearing a Chelsea strip on the set of her western movie <i>Hannie Caulder </i>- the team was also watched by Steve McQueen and Clint Eastwood in this period. Chelsea won the League Cup in 1965, the FA Cup in 1970 and the UEFA Cup in 1971.<br />
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Hamilton's biography notes the especial frisson that playing against Chelsea in London gave to Best:<br />
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<i>It is said that man responds to those landscapes in which he instinctively feels he belongs. Best had never played at Stamford Bridge before; but he knew he belonged there. The architecture was unimpressive. There was rickedly-looking double-decker seating on stilts beside the modest main stand, its footballers weather-vane twisting atop a white-fronted pediment. There were wide, open spaces behind each uncovered goal and 20-floor high-rises could be seen in the middle and far distance. But something indefinable in regard to the ambience of the ground and the atmosphere inside it never failed to in inspire Best. He was roused whenever he went to Chelsea, which became one of his spiritual homes. </i><br />
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In the eleven seasons that George Best played for Manchester United he took part in 17 matches against that classic Chelsea squad of the Sixties and Seventies - four victories, six draws and seven defeats for United in a batch of 16 First Division ties and one League Cup match.<br />
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1963-64: 23rd March 1964 - 1-1 draw at Old Trafford.<br />
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1964-65: 30th September 1964 - Manchester United's 2-0 away victory at Stamford Bridge which would be the game to bring Best firmly to public attention across Britain. Best himself always saw it as the day the trajectory of his career left an earthly gravity - 21 players and the stadium having applauded him off the pitch at the end. He scored in this game as did Dennis Law. In the return League fixture on 13th March 1965 in Manchester Best scored again in a 4-0 victory - another<br />
oft- transmitted piece of footballing genius with Best outwitting Eddie McCreadie on the top left wing before looping the ball over Bonnetti from a ludicrous angle. United went on to win the Championship in this season.<br />
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1965-66: 12th March 1966 - Three days after Manchester United's famous 5-1 victory against Benfica in the European Cup Quarter-Final Chelsea defeated them 2-0 in West London - the home fans applauding the significance of the Lisbon victory enthusiastically before kick-off.<br />
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1966-67: 15th October 1966 - 1-1 draw at Old Trafford the week before Best played in Northern Ireland's 2-0 defeat by England in Belfast in the European Championship Qualifier. The Jules Rimet Trophy being paraded before the Windsor Park crowd - including my father and grandfather - beforehand. Manchester United won the League Championship in this season again.<br />
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1967-68: 25th November 1967 - 1-1 draw at Stamford Bridge with Best carrying an injury. The<br />
2nd March 1968 return at Old Trafford saw an on-form Best miss a penalty in a 3-1 defeat for the home team. Chelsea's Ron Harris succeeded in both matches in fundamentally limiting George Best's scope. A borderline apocryphal story of the time relates how a fashion photographer was assigned to take action shots of Best against Chelsea to juxtapose with trendy clothing shots already obtained - the photographer subsequently observing how a ubiquitous blue-shirted, square-jawed and mean-faced hard man seemed to be in every solitary captured image.<br />
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1968-69: 24th August 1968 - 4-0 defeat for the European Champions at Old Trafford with Harris reassuming his defensive watch. The 15th March 1969 return at Stamford Bridge saw Best out-perform Harris though relegation-threatened United again lost 3-2.<br />
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1969-70: 6th December 1969 - Manchester United defeated 2-0 at Old Trafford with Harris again neutralising Best on the wings. Chelsea also won the 21st March 1970 return at Stamford Bridge - Ian Hutchinson scoring twice in Manchester and the same again in London. The season would end with Chelsea's first FA Cup final victory over Revie's Leeds. (Alan Hudson's comments on these two matches and further reflection on Best's relationship with Chelsea are contained in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJvfizYlqQs" target="_blank">a 2013 interview available on youtube</a>. The footballer underlines his firm belief in the chat that manager Dave Sexton was the main factor hindering the prospect of Best moving to Stamford Bridge - a decision he feels had a sobering if not disastrous impact on Chelsea's prospects for domestic and international success in the Seventies).<br />
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1970-71: 19th August 1970 - A scoreless draw at Old Trafford in the League. Best also played in a League Cup 4th Round game against Chelsea on 28th October 1970 - this was the game where Best outwitted a hammering Harris challenge in the Manchester downpour to score one of his most famous ever goals in a 2-1 victory. The Stamford Bridge return tie in 1971 in the League saw Best suspended for missing training and spending the weekend in an Islington flat with actress Sinead Cusack - United won 2-1 without him.<br />
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1971-72: 18th August 1971 - Best was sent off for arguing with the referee following Chelsea's opening goal - the press photograph of his exit from the pitch beside a placating Bobby Charlton and Tony Dunne has been reproduced many times. United however won the game in London 3-2. The 22nd January 1972 return at Old Trafford saw Chelsea's Osgood score the only goal of the match.<br />
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1972-73: 30th August 1972 - Another scoreless draw in Manchester. Best did not play in the Manchester United team between 25th November 1972 and 20th October April 1973. <br />
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1973-74: 3rd November 1973 - 2-2 draw in Manchester during what would be Best's final 12-game bow for United under Tommy Doherty.<br />
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As an appendum to the above, on 27th December 1976 at Stamford Bridge, Chelsea defeated Fulham 2-0 in the Second Division tie. Fulham's team included Best and Bobby Moore. The two players were also in the Fulham squad on 8th April 1977 at Craven Cottage where the home team won 3-1 - Best scored one of the goals. <br />
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As discussed in an earlier post on <a href="https://backroadhome.blogspot.com/2015/11/shooting-star-george-best-and-northern.html">George Best and Northern Ireland</a>, his footballing career ran in parallel to the worst years of the civil war in Ulster. The 18th August 1971 and 22nd January 1972 ties mentioned above came only nine days after the introduction of internment and one week before Bloody Sunday respectively - these being the two events which pushed months of sustained radical civil disorder into a full-blown guerrilla insurgency with an accompanying sectarian carnage that shamed the name of Ireland across the world for many years. <br />
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Both Duncan Hamilton's defining work on the footballer - and indeed many other studies of his extraordinary lifepath - reference how Best's deep-seated love for United may well have been the core reason for the radical downfall of his career in the mid-Seventies. This of course standing alongside the sobering fate of being lodged deep within a mediocre Northern Ireland international squad that was linearly placed between highly successful and passion-driven World Cup final appearances in the Fifties and Eighties.<br />
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An elongation of George Best's British football career at this point may well indeed have seen him alive today - let alone within the context of the commercial multi-billion pound invigoration of the sport he alone single-handedly revolutionised alike Belfast's Alex Higgins with the game of snooker.<br />
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Granted George Best at Chelsea may not be as tangible a sporting counterfactual as the prospect of the star in his glorious prime at the Mexico World Cup of 1970 - where Northern Ireland would have been arraigned against first round opponents of Belgium, the host country and mighty El Salvador had they topped the qualifying group above the USSR. Nonetheless the thought of a blue-clad mid-Seventies Best at Chelsea remains fascinating - looming there between the overweight and heavily bearded player working through his demons for a brace of uninspiring fixtures under Tommy Docherty in 1973 and 1974 and the night that the Gods of Dutch Total Football fought for his shirt at the end of the 1977 Northern Ireland match in Rotterdam. That would end in a 2-2 draw and was the 33rd of only 37 international appearances.<br />
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George Best was of course a long term resident of the King's Road for many years and in fact did appear in a Chelsea side once for Peter Osgood's 1975 testimonial. However the thought of Belfast BT6's finest son playing with a top flight Chelsea team in the mid-Seventies for a half-decade or so remains such an incredible piece of historical reflection. It certainly would have made the utterly surreal - and perhaps unparalleled - collapse of London as a great city even more harrowing to consider today.<br />
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<br />Saturday Buddhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04976717497499457595noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2106433662289694247.post-83017458612567480112016-12-22T21:41:00.000+00:002019-04-14T21:51:46.501+01:00Such A Little Time - Remembering Ulster's James Young<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The Ulster comic actor and theatrical solo performer James Young has been referenced many times on this blog in the past - this will be the third and final main post about him. He remains such an interesting character in Irish social history, gay culture and in the day-to-day back story of an Ulster at war in the Sixties and Seventies.<br />
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Young is remembered in the main for his connection with the Ulster Group Theatre on Belfast's Bedford Street, his bestselling vinyl records that were produced by the Emerald label and for the BBC Northern Ireland <i>Saturday Night</i> television shows in 1973 and 1974. On both record and stage he combined fast witted urban humour - particularly hysterical in the rambling main show introductions - with reflective monologues on life, hardship and death in working class communities.<br />
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The two most famous - and indeed saddest - of his monologues in the latter context are arguably <i>I Loved a Papist</i> and <i>Slum Clearance. </i>The first centers around a fateful love affair set fast against the tide of history and the second about how eviction from a condemned house appeared to the elderly resident concerned as threatening to terminate a spiritual connectivity with his own family past. <br />
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Young's catalogue of work is so rich and varied in content. There is <i>The Feud </i>- arguably his finest dramatic performance - about how a sectarian grudge between two tough Belfast youths ended in both tragedy and revelation many miles away from Ireland's bitter shores. <i>We Emigrated </i>is another wonderful piece which recalls the experience of emigrants from Ulster in North America. It is somewhat hammy in delivery but at the same time terribly moving when he notes how within transplanted communities in the New World the Catholic-Protestant Christian divide stood as naught and how only distance can sometimes make one retrospectively embrace the positivities of Irish life - <i>the rain, bigotry and everything. </i>Indeed <i>The Feud </i>also references the garnering awareness of a Belfast father of his son's loneliness in New York - <i>more and more he talked of Ireland and the people that he knew, but the letters sounded lonely, and they made me lonely too -</i> which Young delivers to perfection.<br />
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The four monologues I have always found particularly interesting with Young are those that closed the live shows - they can be found on the Group Theatre performances captured on the albums <i>Young at Heart, Young and Foolish, James Young's 4th</i> and <i>The Young Ulsterman.</i> To put these into context - the first political murders of the Troubles took place in 1966, civil disorder escalated from late 1968 through into 1969, full scale terrorist activity coalesced from late 1970 onwards and mid-1971 saw Northern Ireland teeter on the brink of civil war. The Young albums referenced were released in 1966, 1967, 1969 and 1973.<br />
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<i>Why I Am Here </i>from <i>Young at Heart </i>has the actor answering a question from a pedestrian on a Belfast street as to why he had not attempted to broaden his artistic horizons upon the West End or Broadway stage. Young talks about the physical beauty of the countryside, the community and warmth of the Belfast people underneath the perennial political passions and the homesickness that so many emigrants have felt over the years. The piece ends with Young's wish to end his days in Belfast and his faith in how his talent can perhaps help Northern Ireland people weigh up the questionable rationale underpinning their religious animosities.<br />
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<i>Salute to Belfast</i> from <i>Young and Foolish </i>returns to this call of home when Young overhears a passenger on an airbus smugly allude to how easy Belfast is to get away from. In his reply he talks about the meetings he has had over the years with exiles from Belfast resident abroad, the memories they shared with him of places and characters from the past and how the light seemed to fade from their eyes when the conversation drew to an evening's close.<br />
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<i>This is Us </i>from <i>James Young's 4th </i>discusses the onset of civil disorder and how the British media selectively ignored the everyday warmth and common sense of the Ulster people and their industrial heritage in their blanket focus on extremism, violence and the foregone collapse of what they presented as a grotesquely constructed and politically fallible Northern statelet.<br />
<i><br /></i><i>We're Here For Such a Little Time</i> from <i>The Young Ulsterman</i> has been discussed in an earlier post. Here Young juxtaposes the physical beauty of Ulster with the communal loathing now engrained in society to such a degree that it has turned his earlier faith in an intertwining folk memory - based on a shared experience of backbreaking rural routine and merciless industrial labour - into a literal sick joke.<br />
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Young's work is well worth tracking down to this day. In the midst of terrible human butchery he shone a light onto the existent bonds in Ulster society and the bridges that were yet to be burnt. At the same time he provided an extraordinary narrative of a society enduring years of confusion, brutality, disorder and rank strangeness. He thus helps us to recall the people of those times with an extraordinary focus - to a communal backbone and a capacity for emotional endurance that will never be seen again on these islands.<br />
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Also, for all the smug arrogance of the metropolitan British elites in living memory, the Ulster Troubles actually do as an historical fact throw up endless examples of political intelligence that are going to be needed sorely over the course of the next calendar year. This to both resolve governmental and party political mistakes of biblical consequence and to heal societal breaches that now appear beyond the influence of God or man alike.<br />
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<br />Saturday Buddhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04976717497499457595noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2106433662289694247.post-22302998297236790542016-12-13T17:04:00.000+00:002019-03-19T23:03:58.611+00:00The Day Of The Tartan - A New Ulster History<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Just a brief year-end flag-up to one of the most interesting books I have read on Irish history for quite some time that was published earlier in 2016.<br />
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Gareth Mulvenna's work on the loyalist Tartan gangs of the early Seventies is a genuinely revelatory study of both the development of the Northern Ireland conflict and the significant role that working class loyalist youth played in Belfast's urban disorder in the very early days. The book clearly emplaces the Tartan phenomena against wider British teenage culture of the period - by way of glam rock, Richard Allen's scary <i>Skinhead </i>pulp novels and football hooliganism etc - and the road to subsequent paramilitary involvement.<br />
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Since the qualified peace in Ulster took hold in the Nineties there has been nowhere near enough left-field material of this quality coming on board. This aside from research firewalled behind expensive academic press prints that by all rights and all commercial logic should be widely accessible. I am thinking of the extraordinary <i>Black Magic and Bogeymen: Fear, Rumour and Popular Belief in Northern Ireland 1972-1974</i> by Richard Jenkins to that end in particular. I read this slack-jawed at the British Library in acknowledgement of the fact that this fantastic book was going to have to be a very expensive Christmas present to myself.<br />
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One other recent study of paramilitary loyalism in this context is retailing for a mere 82 pounds sterling on every digital bookselling outlet. Even though Mulvenna's work references a full-scale firefight in my own granny's street off the Cliftonville Road in North Belfast in 1971 I would not have paid that much money to read about it.<br />
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<i>Tartan Gangs and Paramilitaries </i>is complemented by Geoffrey Beattie's autobiographical <i>We Are The People </i>and <i>Protestant Boy </i>memoirs about my own childhood locale (1992 and 2004) and the fascinating posts on the <a href="http://belfaststories.blogspot.co.uk/">Belfast Stories </a>blog - both offer highly recommended insights into barely contained Irish civil war, class fractures in Protestant Ulster, the long violent outplay of the British in Ireland and now decimated Northern British industrial communities.Saturday Buddhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04976717497499457595noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2106433662289694247.post-42102092091318638582016-05-05T20:51:00.000+01:002019-05-05T21:53:13.410+01:00Belfast Burning - The Luftwaffe Blitz Of April And May 1941<div style="text-align: center;">
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<i>I watched this city burning with a bitter scarlet flame</i></div>
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<i> And I heard the banshee sirens when those big black bombers came</i></div>
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<i> But we kept the sea lanes open under Churchill's mighty plan</i></div>
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<i> Till the victory day when you danced away round the Ould Black Man</i></div>
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<i>The Ould Black Man</i> was a monologue performed by the Ulster comic actor James Young at the Group Theatre in Belfast's Bedford Street in the late Sixties - it can be heard on his third album <i>It's Great To Be Young</i> which was released in 1968. The eponymous subject is the statue of the 19th Century Presbyterian leader Henry Cooke on Great Victoria Street and his musings on the city's changing social complexion - from the heavily populated and industrialised early part of the 20th century through to the swinging youth culture of the time.<br />
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The lines quoted above refer to the four Luftwaffe attacks on Belfast in April and May 1941- the second of the raids on Easter Tuesday caused the single highest death toll for any aerial bombardment during the Blitz on Britain outside of London. 900 men, women and children were murdered in one of the least protected cities in the United Kingdom. This particular raid also left 1,500 people injured and 50,000 homes destroyed - fatalities were also caused in Derry City and both Bangor and Newtownards in County Down on that 15th of April 1941 night.<br />
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An ecumenical service of commemoration was held last month in Belfast on the 75th anniversary for the dead of the Belfast Blitz - alongside the unveiling of plaques at the Falls Road Public Swimming Baths and the central St George's Market which would both be used as temporary morgues. Other plaques have been erected near the scenes of significant death tolls around the city such as Percy Street on the Shankill Road where thirty died when a landmine struck an air raid shelter. Percy Street lay on the Protestant-Catholic interface in West Belfast and that night many Shankill Protestants sheltered in the Clonard Monastery on the Falls Road.<br />
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A BBC microsite on the Belfast Blitz includes <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03m42wt/episodes/player">four incredibly well made five minute-animations </a>which reference many of the events now enshrined in the folk memory of the city. These include the possibility that Luftwaffe bombing patterns were focused on residential areas because of the misidentification of the Belfast waterworks as the docks, the destruction of many potentially dangerous animals at Belfast zoo (although a baby elephant was secretly looked after each night in one female keeper's own home), the aid given by the east coast fire services of Eire to their fellow Irishmen and the independent Unionist MP Tommy Henderson's assurance to the Stormont establishment that the sectarian mixing going on in the Ulster countryside between the working classes who had fled the city had clearly lead to a firm conclusion by all that "the government is no good."<br />
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My parents were in Belfast on the night of the Easter Tuesday raid as children and both grandparents' homes suffered serious structural damage in the north and west of the city, My father recalls being brought to the basement of his local primary school in the Oldpark district from where he could see the local church burning and that the end terrace house on his street was completely destroyed with the death of an entire family group. The four raids destroyed eleven churches, two hospitals and two schools across the city in general as well as severe damage to industrial infrastructure. <br />
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The story of the Belfast blitz is covered in great detail in a definitive study by Brian Barton from 1989. It was was also discussed in a full chapter - <i>Many Fires Were Started </i>- of Robert Fisk's 1985 classic history of the respective neutral and belligerent statuses of a politically divided Ireland <i>In Time Of War.</i><br />
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The Blitz would provide the background for the author Brian Moore's superb novel <i>The Emperor of Ice Cream </i>in 1965 - Moore having served in the air raid warden services in North Belfast at the time and with the book juxtaposing militant Republican glee at Britain's geopolitical misfortunes with the mass murder that ensued in 1941 on the streets of proletarian Belfast. The late Moore is little discussed now though I remember well listening to an interesting lecture he gave in the early Nineties at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts on his Ulster Troubles thriller <i>Lies of Silence.</i><br />
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Philip Orr's moving history of the 36th Ulster Division - <i>The Road to the Somme</i> - references a Shankill Road family who refused to leave the area after 1916 off the back of two family members who were reported "missing believed killed" in Picardy and their wish to remain in the house in hope of their physical return. On the anniversary of the first day of the battle on 1st July the family always flew the Union Flag from their house in memory of the fallen - as indeed did my own great-grandfather for that one day alone in respect of his comrades from the 15th Battalion Royal Irish Rifles and as fundamentally detached from the parallel celebrations of the Boyne victory. Orr references how their house was destroyed during the 1941 blitz but on the first day of July a neighbour organised some local teenagers to emplace the flag on top of the rubble in order to maintain the continuity of the tradition.<i> </i><br />
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As the BBC animations show, one of the main aerial routes the German planes took on their way to attack the great port city of Belfast was northbound along the coast of the beautiful Ards Peninsula by Strangford Lough - one of the most idyllic parts of the British Isles to this day. Architectural destruction of central Belfast over the course of the attacks was extremely severe on the third of the major raids in particular - the "Fire Raid" on the night of the 3rd of May.<br />
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Less than thirty years later an unprecedented European sectarian conflict was to continue the destruction of the city centre and bring it to the point of societal collapse. A conflict whose outplay is today epitomised by the common sense, warmth and humanity of the working people who healed the breach as opposed to party political stalemate in the North and a broader Troubles legacy now apparently owned by dry academic and sociological verbiage. This denying human agency or the misreading of history at all costs.<br />
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Much is yet to be gleaned in future from the course and consequences of the Spring 1941 German air raids on Belfast as to how a life or death struggle engendered class solidarity across Belfast's religious divide and one unforgettable gesture towards national reconciliation. This as sadly opposed to how the fossilisation of cultural identity in Ireland by the Forties would irrevocably steer society into sterile cross-border relations and eventually towards bloody conflict in Ulster.<br />
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<br />Saturday Buddhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04976717497499457595noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2106433662289694247.post-8039462163378930082016-02-21T22:09:00.000+00:002018-08-16T13:30:46.670+01:00Ricky Warwick - Tank McCullough Saturdays<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Northern Ireland musician Ricky Warwick is shortly due to release two solo albums - one acoustic and one electric - seven years after 2009's <i>Belfast Confetti</i>. Just heard this incredible song from the forthcoming <i>Hearts On Trees </i>about a long disappeared industrial Belfast and the old Saturday heroes. Saturday Buddhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04976717497499457595noreply@blogger.com0