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An Antiphony of Voices: Sam Hanna Bell in Northern Ireland
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2.4 An Antiphony of Voices: Sam Hanna Bell in Northern IrelandMore than any other individual, Sam Bell established the cultural values of BBC Northern Ireland. I believe he helped the community to begin to understand itself (Loughrey 1996: 69). Whilst Denis Mitchell was circumventing the “stale second-hand influences of script and studio” (Clery 1964) by seeking out ‘the drifting sort’ in the cities of the urban North of England, Sam Hanna Bell was blazing trails across all the counties of Ulster with recording equipment in tow, seeking out experiences and tales from those rooted deeply within their rural communities. Bell was a published poet when he joined the BBC Northern Ireland, and later became famous for writing the classic novel December Bride. However, he spent most of his working life as a (prolific and talented) radio producer, delving into the rich folklore of the Ulster region in which he worked, and recording a great deal of oral history and folksong.73 He succeeded in nurturing local culture, in a divided community that was often ravaged by an intemperate political and cultural climate (Loughrey 1996: 67). That he had the freedom to achieve this can partly be ascribed to a more permissive attitude to the inclusion of regional voices in post-war British broadcasting: During the years after World War II, power began to shift from the highbrow commentators of the London studio to local Belfast producers, men who carried their recording equipment over the back roads of Northern Ireland to interview farmers, storytellers, and housewives. This shift from centralization to regionalization at the BBC was not specific to Northern Ireland - indeed all British provinces benefited from this post-war policy (Clark 2003).74 What this chapter attempts to show is that during the post-war era the BBC Regions proved their capacity to serve a vital purpose not specified or anticipated in the BBC Charter – the aural ‘reflection’ of British society in sound, which was given its chief impetus from the extensive use of mobile recording apparatus. If the post-war trend was towards a diversification of output and the attempts to identify, reach and address demographic or class lineaments (highbrow, middlebrow, lowbrow) through streamed programming, then the Regions had - even if only by default – found their own raison d’etre and place in the broadcasting structure. Namely this was the refinement of the techniques of actuality ‘collection’ pioneered by the North Region in the 1930s and by the BBC’s wartime correspondents, to document regional culture ‘on the ground’. In the late 1940s BBC Northern Ireland, which had long been shackled to the tripartite domination of ‘studio, London and RP’ (not to mention the influence of the Stormont Government) (Cranston 1996: 39), underwent an overhaul which was more radical and truly liberating in terms of output, than any of the other BBC Regions had ever experienced. The changes in output can largely be attributed to the appointment of Sam Hanna Bell as Features Producer (in Autumn 1945), John Boyd as Talks Producer (at roughly the same time),75 and the arrival of the new Controller Andrew Stewart in 1948, a boss who gave these men encouragement and ordered up-to-date equipment. With Stewart as Controller, the Northern Ireland Region began to work towards fostering dialogue across the divided communities, and developing consensus. This represented a radical departure from previous Station Director George Marshall’s determination that the station should remain “above every aspect of the sectarian division in Northern Ireland” (Cathcart 1984: 3). Marshall had systematically imposed a policy of non-controversial broadcasting, for example, ensuring that the 1935 riots were reported without analysis or even explanation of the facts (ibid, p. 3) Consensus was certainly not easy to achieve, however. Andrew Stewart was faced with an insoluble dilemma – contradictions arose at BBC Northern Ireland between regional and public service obligations. Should attempts be made to encourage or construct a (national, British) consensus in a community where nationality is highly problematic, or instead to reflect divergent traditions with their exclusive political and cultural attitudes? Here we can return briefly to the point raised earlier in this chapter, that national memory is the most contested form of social memory. This is illustrated by the difficulties engendered when the BBC Northern Ireland Region was asked to accept National programmes, such as the eyewitness account Titanic Survivor from the series I Was There. J. T. Sutthery of BBC Northern Ireland was induced to explain in a letter to the Programme Director at Head Office that: The ‘Titanic’, and everything to do with it, is an exceedingly sore point in Belfast history, as not only were some 40 Belfast people drowned – mostly rather important people – but also it was a very grave set-back to civic pride when this much-vaunted ship went out from Harland and Wolff’s yard to sink on its maiden voyage (BBC WAC R51/356/1. Quoted in McIntosh 1999: 79). By contrast, royal visits and state occasions helped to foster a sense of shared experience with the rest of the United Kingdom. Attempts to conciliate divergent traditions within Ulster were, for the most part, not attempted, for fear of provoking the ire of the unionist majority, which meant that “the positive aspects of community relations were emphasised and the negative aspects of community relations underplayed” (Cathcart 1984: 263). The danger here was that the concept of community was ultimately being used in an ideological fashion, to divert attention away from the social and political forces that control people’s lives, as the consensus that emerged had an illusory basis. That the possibility of reaching ‘across the divide’ could be realised was suggested by the Irish News’ preview of Denis Johnston’s Lillibulero, back in 1938: Whether our forefathers were on the side of those that defended Derry or those who besieged it, and whether we think that the version does or does not do justice to the besiegers, we must in the first place applaud the directors of the Northern Ireland Stations for giving us in good radio-dramatic form an interpretation of one of the outstanding events in Irish history (quoted in Bardon 2000: 60-1). Yet the success of this historical feature helped to promote what was to be something of a trend in the post-war programming of BBC Northern Ireland – the prevalence in the schedules of Ulster history rather than contemporary issues and concerns, and of “nostalgia for a pre-war lyricism; for an imagined Northern Ireland not for the real one” (Cranston 1996: 40): W. R. Rodgers’ The Return Room, read by Denys Hawthorne, was a romantic recall of the 1930’s: ‘Spring. The one time in the year when the stranger was welcome within our gates.’…Nellie Wheller remembered acting with the Ulster Literary theatre in the ‘20s…The series This is Northern Ireland surely had the verb in the wrong tense (ibid, p. 40). But in contrast to what Cranston refers to as “Elysian memories”, the recording of memories in the field by Sam Hanna Bell had a directness and acuity which cut through the haze of reminiscence: David Bleakeley and Sam Hanna Bell rediscovered people who had been involved in the 1907 strike, when [trade unionist James] Larkin came to the Belfast docks. Their description of the ruthlessness and poverty of their lives, and a country voice remembering the hedge schools, showed what good features could do (ibid, p. 40). The development of outside broadcasts and actuality-led features to reflect the cultural and physical contours of Northern Ireland was contiguous with a process of regionalization that inevitably meant greater autonomy from London. Stewart was determined to achieve the complete regionalization of programmes, and regionalism thus became something of an “officially sanctioned ideology” (Clark 2003) in Belfast at that time, which saw the BBC Region employ the talents of a group of predominantly working-class writers (Bell and Boyd pre-eminent amongst them) who were often at odds with the establishment, in a marriage of convenience which surprised some in the local management.76 This was symptomatic of a wider trend, as the post-war BBC did not explicitly set out to recruit working-class writers, but its regionalism sometimes led it in that direction, since the ‘distinctive’ aspects of a regional culture were often associated most closely with its working-class population.77 Stewart realized that many Ulster listeners, with their distinctive mix of Irish, English, and Scottish idioms, felt alienated from the cadences of the BBC. On those rare occasions when working-class voices were used, they often proved impenetrable – Cockney humour, Stewart noted, was generally not well understood due to difficulties in cross-dialect intelligibility (Briggs 1995: 308). Sam Hanna Bell recognized at the time that “the voices of men and women describing their daily work, their recreations, their hopes and troubles, are the life and breath of regional broadcasting.” “Up to this time,” Bell observed, “the working-class voice had never been heard in Broadcasting House, Belfast…We now had a marvellous opportunity to go out into Queen’s Island [Harland & Wolff’s vast estate], to go down into the streets and have people talk…real people talking” (Bell 1949: 155). Bell would later capture the voices of the Belfast shipyards in the programme The Islandmen (broadcast 28 January 1953), for which he made over 200 recordings.78 We can better understand the revolution in diction which Bell and Boyd initiated in the fields of radio features and talks by examining the statement of intent contained in the editorial of the first issue of Lagan, the literary magazine they founded together in 1943: An Ulster literary tradition that is capable of developing and enriching itself must spring out of the life and speech of the province; and an Ulster writer cannot evade his problems by adopting either a superimposed English or a sentimental Gaelic outlook. He must, therefore, train his ears to catch the unique swing of our speech… (quoted in McMahon 1999: 28). As his biographer Sean McMahon has attested, “these attitudes were deeply imbedded in Bell’s psyche and become the composite lodestar of his broadcasting career” (ibid, p. 28). In the production of his first programme, an examination of life in the Antrim port of Larne in the Provincial Journey series, Bell was appalled at the effect that the artificial and intimidating environment of the studio wrought on the Larne contributors in Broadcasting House. From then on he pursued his objective of taking to the countryside to gather actuality for series’ such as Country Window and It’s a Brave Step.79 Yet there were inevitable difficulties in broadcasting about folklore and popular culture in a politically and religiously divided community (Vance 2004), especially as Bell’s instinct to document working class life ran counter to what is sometimes known as ‘Malone Road unionism’.80 The role of the BBC Region to give expression to everyday life and diversity in the region was incompatible with the ethos of unionism during the period, which was uncomfortable with the diversity of the state, fearing that it would make it unstable (McIntosh 1999: 79). Like his friend the Ulster poet John Hewitt, Bell believed that the best artistic course to consensus was to focus on the idea of shared geography and folk traditions, rather than a divided religious heritage. One of the most successful features written and produced by Sam Hanna Bell was This is Northern Ireland (1949), which set out to do exactly this. Written to commemorate BBC Northern Ireland’s ‘silver jubilee’, it took the form of “a journey…where the symbols on the map are occupation, speech and custom, and the contours show the overflowing and mingling of tradition” (Bell). An impression of a tour around Ulster is conveyed not just by Bell’s poetic narration but also by testimony provided by some Ulster folk along the way. At Downpatrick we hear the voices of the traders in the market town; at Queen’s Island shipyard a fitter talks about the changes in the profession since he was an apprentice; at Portavogie fisherman Harry Donnan of the ‘Bonny Ann’ talks about Scottish boats and the lean years when herring catches were small; a brick works manager at Dungannon talks about how shale is extracted for use as material in bricks, and about agriculture and mechanisation; and a woman working in the Derry shirt manufacturing industry talks about working conditions and changing fashions. By contemporary standards the dialogue sounds carefully rehearsed and scripted but no doubt it was unusual and enriching to hear those authentic accents at the time of broadcast. The feature unquestionably benefited from the use of ‘real people’ rather than actors: the occasional presence of ‘occupational’ words such as ‘cran’ (a unit capacity of fish); ‘creel’ (a fisherman’s basket); and the “Tudor phrase that glints in the bargaining of the Tyrone farmer as sudden and delightful as a silver coin in a handful of coppers” (Bell), anticipate the rich vernacular of the (BBC) Radio Ballads (1958-1964, see Chapters 4 and 5). These patches of testimony are weaved together by Bell’s eloquent poetic narration. Like W. R. Rodger’s feature Bare Stones of Aran, which I will discuss in Chapter 4, This is Northern Ireland represents an interstitial point in a transition that the radio feature was undergoing during this period. The classic model of the radio feature, a ‘written piece’ depending on the nuances of the written word as interpreted by actors, was beginning to be supplanted by forms of extempore speech recorded on acetate discs, the culmination of the wish to hear ordinary people speak in their own words. This was a movement from the ‘invented’ to the ‘actual’. However, recording technology was cumbersome at this time, in comparison with the later use of the portable tape-recorder by Mitchell. The microphone could not stray far from the recording machine which held the large shellac discs, and all the equipment took up most of the back of the sturdy Humber car which Bell drove to “every loanen, boreen and casán in Northern Ireland” (McMahon 1999: 51). On hill slopes it was sometimes necessary to transport the equipment by horse and cart. In “The Microphone in the Countryside”, written for the BBC 1949 Jubilee publication, Bell gave a fascinating and informative account of the way in which he would build up a sound portrait of a rural community, which is worth quoting at length: Some months ago, I went with a recording unit to the remote and lovely country west of the village of Killeter in County Tyrone. Houses were scattered on the braeside and men and women were out working at the corn harvest, but, apart from passing the time of day with us, they weren’t anxious to stop their work and talk. I climbed up to a tall grey house at the side of the glen and knocked at the door. It was opened by a man in his shirt-sleeves with a flat iron in his hand. I’m not quite sure how I explained my predicament to Denis (that was his name) apart from the tentative suggestion that he should introduce me to the progressive farmers, the blacksmiths, the coopers, the surfacemen, the ballad singers, the old men who told tales. Anyway, Denis laid down his iron (he was a tailor), pulled on his jacket, and for the next three days gave the BBC every spare minute of his time. He introduced us to men and women who, when the work was done, told us of bygone days in the district, sang songs, and explained the difficulties peculiar to farming in the Derg valley. During those three days as we tramped the loanens and fields from house to house, I listened to Denis, followed his pointing finger, and built up a picture of the district that I would never have got otherwise (Bell 1949). This account illustrates how Bell’s documentation of traditions and folkways in different communities within Northern Ireland was facilitated by close-cooperation with local people. An excellent example of this was The Fairy Faith, a series of six programmes broadcast in 1952, which explored the then prevalent strain of fairy folklore in rural Northern Ireland. During the production process Bell took advantage of counsel and correspondence from unofficial ‘field officers’, who wrote back with information about local practices and beliefs. This was the first major series to explore oral tradition within the region. The original impetus for the series can be attributed to a remark by Cahir Healy, the Nationalist MP for Fermanagh, made during a meeting of the Northern Ireland Advisory Council, whose purpose was to give the local BBC management the benefit of a range of Northern Ireland opinion from ‘the great and the good’. Healy objected to the fact that a BBC team (consisting of Bell’s friend and fellow Ulsterman W. R. Rodgers, as well as producers David Thomson and Charles Ladbrooke) was being sent to record the folklore and music of the twenty-six counties (see Chapter 5 for a discussion of the BBC’s activities in the collection of dialect and folk song), and were neglecting the six of Ulster (McMahon 1999). Bell recalled to Rex Cathcart the positive response to Healey’s suggestion made by Andrew Stewart, the Controller of BBC Northern Ireland:
In June 1951 the BBC commissioned Michael J. Murphy to carry out a preliminary survey. The amount of material that came in from Murphy as he combed the countryside surpassed all expectation, but from the ages of the respondents it was evident that the project had started none too early (Bell 1956: 70). In November, when Murphy had finished his report, Bell, Murphy and a small production team set out with recording equipment to retrace Murphy’s journey: We worked over Northern Ireland district by district, the Mournes, the Sperrins, South Armagh, the Glens of Antrim with sallies to the Braid Valley, the Fintona district, the shores of Strangford and Lough Erne. Although such a short time had passed since Michael J. Murphy’s first visit we were met here and there by a padlocked door or a slow shake of the head. Some old man or woman had taken a grandfather’s stories to the graveyard (ibid, p. 70).82 The diverse stories showcased in The Fairy Faith demonstrated that there was a corpus of fairy lore deeply woven into the social fabric of rural communities, but also that each example or strain was individualised. A wide variety of stories abounded of accident, misfortune or death attributed to damaging or uprooting skeaghs or fairy (whitethorn) bushes (“every generation hung a story on its branches” ibid, p. 79); abductions, miraculous reappearances and substitutions of infants or adults for ‘changelings’; or the deceptive allure of fairy gold “with its alloy of malice” (ibid, p. 82). While the stories would occasionally detail instances in which the fairies aided or rewarded people, the overriding impression was of a threat to human power and agency, the stories perhaps functioning as a way of coming to terms with mortality. Here is an extract from a woman from Mourne: That same bush that I’m telling you about, my grandfather one day had a big load of corn coming up and the corn catched on this branch, and says my grandfather, ‘I’ll cut that branch, fairy or no fairy’. And he took a billhook and he cut the branch and the branch fell and his arm fell and he never lifted it to his head till the day he died (Bell 1956: 79). The tales broadcast in the series were distilled from an archive of folklore collected by Bell and Murphy. Professor Seamus Delargy (1899-1980), who had founded the Irish Folklore Commission in Dublin in 1935, regarded this archive as “the most important work in Irish folklore in modern times” (quoted in McMahon 1999: 53).83 The arrival of the tape recorder in the mid 1950s reinforced the independence of producers like Bell who were engaged in a steady exploration of their region’s cultural resources and folkways. Whereas previously programmes were prepared in the studio using expert testimony, now ‘lay’ people could be recorded in their own familiar surroundings. Robert Coulter, who joined the BBC in 1953 as an agricultural talks producer, recalled that… Farmers were inhibited by the studio environment. With the coming of the Midget tape-recorder, one could go to their place, their farm, their byre, to their pigs, where the broadcaster was the intruder, and they were at home and therefore talked freely and easily, being on their own spot, in their own way of life, their own things around them…not only the farmer felt better but the broadcaster himself got deeper into the way of life of the people rather than just the technicalities (Cathcart 1984; Muldoon 1984: 184). Coulter observed that this had an extraordinary effect, which anticipates my discussion in the following chapter of the wide appeal of the Newfoundland programme the Fisheries Broadcast for those whose work is not related to the fishery. People who had no particular interest or experience in farming nonetheless found themselves engaged by people talking in such a vital way directly from their own experience, and this meant that broadcasting on farming became widely appreciated. The tape-recorder made increasingly possible the determination of the broadcaster to reveal the community to itself.84 It is appropriate that we end this chapter with a consideration of the preservation and promotion of folklore through radio broadcasting and the popularity and importance of radio programming on occupational topics (i.e. farming and fishing) for community self-definition, for these represent the central themes in my discussion of Newfoundland radio in the following chapter. Even before Marconi demonstrated the space-binding potential of radio by directing the first trans-marine radio signal across the Atlantic from Cornwall to Newfoundland (in 1901), radio communications have been utilized in Newfoundland as a survival mechanism, rather than being considered as an optional entertainment or consumer luxury. The vital use of radio to save lives and organize shipping through accurate weather forecasting and the warnings of ships in distress in marine communications became ‘instilled’ in the consciousness of Newfoundlanders some time before the model of commercial broadcast entertainment vied for their attentions (Webb 2007). The practical character of Newfoundland radio broadcasting has been evident ever since; locally and occupationally relevant news (The Gerald S. Doyle News Bulletin, Chapter section 3.2) and current affairs (Fisheries Broadcast, Chapter section 3.3) programming has been characterized by phenomenal durability and popularity, as we will see. Historically, radio has served the function of binding together Newfoundland’s geographically disparate communities, and has often been utilised to negotiate or promote forms of (national) self-definition. This has been especially evident when seen against the backdrop of the tensions resulting from Newfoundland’s confederation with Canada (in 1949), or the previous constitutional alternations between self-governance and British rule. For example, Joseph Smallwood, who presented the popular Barrelman programme (which I will discuss in Chapter section 3.1) between 1937 and 1943, aimed to inculcate a sense of cultural pride (or cultural nationalism) in his listeners at a time when Newfoundland was experiencing economic depression and was governed by a predominantly British ‘Commission of Government’. The fact that Smallwood broadcast a great deal of folklore in the Barrelman to achieve this aim, much of which was contributed by listeners themselves, signals the particularly pragmatic approach to oral traditions which is characteristic of Newfoundland. Newfoundland has always been rich in folklore and oral traditions (much of which can be traced back to its original West Country English and Irish settlers), and these have often found an outlet in radio broadcasting. Indeed, it is believed that Newfoundland has developed a sense of identity through oral culture (folk tales and ballads) to a greater degree than through literate culture, and the radio programmes that I will discuss in Chapter 3 have upheld this tendency. In attempting to assess how these radio programmes have incorporated, revived, modified or adapted existing oral traditions, the following chapter will continue to develop, apply and test the theoretical framework developed in Chapter 1. It will also investigate the concentric circulation and validation of local, regional and national ‘identity symbols’, particularly through discussion of Newfoundland’s contributions to the networked (nationally broadcast) CBC series Between Ourselves (Chapter section 3.5) and the convergence of national subsidy and local activism that resulted in the Fogo Process (Chapter sections 3.6 and 3.7). Notes
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