Belfast-born explorer

Today the Irish Times column, An Irishman's Diary, recalled the explorer and naturalist Dr David Walker, who was born in Belfast in 1837.  He was educated at Befast Academical Institution and at Queen's College Belfast and then became a licentaite of the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin.

Dr Walker was the surgeon, naturalist and photographer on an expedition which left Aberdeen on 1 July 1857 to search for Sir John Franklin, who had disappeared while trying to discover the North West Passage.  The expedition was led by Captain F L McClintock and it returned to London on 23 September 1859, after two years away, including 250 days trapped in the ice.  During the journey he collected flora, fauna and geological specimens and carried out scientific observations and experiments.  On his return he presented papers of his findings to both academic and public meetings.

Walker was elected a member of the Royal Irish Academy, a fellow of the Royal Georgraphical Society and a fellow of the Linnean Society.  He also received the Arctic medal.

In the 1860s he went on an expedition to British Columbia and then crossed the border in the United States of America.  He served with the American army for fourteen years on the northwest frontier and then from 1883 to 1887 he was the resident doctor in a gold mining town in California.  Walker moved to Portland, Oregon, in 1889 and died there on 11 May 1917.  His death was reported in the New York Times but there was no mention in any papers in the United Kingdom.

Some years ago when Belfast City Council published a volume on Celebrated Citizens of Belfast, Walker did not even make it into the book, a regrettable omission.  I have not yet had the chance to check in the new Dictionary of Irish Biography but hopefully he is included there.

The Return Room

On a more positive note with BBC Northern Ireland they broadcast an excellent old radio programme tonight.  It was entitled  The Return Room and was written by W R Rodgers.  The programme was produced by Sam Hanna Bell and was first broadcast back in 1955. 

William Robert Rodgers was born in the Mountpottinger area of East Belfast in 1909 and so this year was the centenary of his birth.  His father Robert Skelly Rodgers was originally from Dromara and his mother Jane Ferris McCarey was originally from Dundonald.  His background was thoroughly Presbyterian and thoroughly Ulster-Scots.

After studying at Queen's University and the Presbyterian Theological College he was ordained in 1935 and spent the next decade as minister of Cloveneden Presbyterian Church at Loughgall.  After that he left the ministry and joined the BBC in 1946.  For the next twenty years he was a writer, poet, radio broadcaster, script-writer and book reviewer.  He died in Los Angeles in 1969 and was buried at Loughgall.

The radio programme was a delightful portrait of life in Belfast back in the early part of the 20th century.  It provides us with a glimpse of his childhood and is an evocative portrait of a world that is gone.  Belfast was a busy, industrious city, with the Lagan and the shipyards and with little streets full of children at play.  The family of which Rodgers wrote was a devout Presbyterian family, immersed in metrical psalms, gospel meetings and Sabbath observance.

I was amused to hear the older generation of his family speak of Belfast as Bilfawst, with the stress on  the second syllable, not the first.  That traditional Ulster-Scots version of the name was widely used in the city at one time, even just a couple of generations ago, but has now almost disappeared.

A missed opportunity for BBC

Tonight at 6.25 in Scotland BBC2 broadcast Auld Lang Syne, a half-hour programme by Artworks Scotland investigating the origins of Robert Burns's most famous song.  Here in Northern Ireland in the same slot we had a repeat of a very old edition of Are You Being Served? 

This was another missed opportunity for BBC Northern Ireland to share a programme with BBC Scotland.  There has always been a strong interest in Burns in Ulster and even those who are not Burns enthusiasts are familiar with the old song.  I  recall being in the Waterfront Hall a few months ago at a concert organised by an East Belfast flute band and it was sung enthisastically by a packed audience.

Is it too much to ask BBC Northern Ireland to consider broadcasting the programme Auld Lang Syne at a future date?  Certainly it is time for BBC Northern Ireland to take a more positive and proactive approach to co-operation with BBC Scotland.

George McWhirter

This year Sir James Galway, Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley all celebrated their 70th birthday but as far as I know the local arts sector did not pick up on the fact that another Ulster-born poet was 70 years old.

George McWhirter was born in Belfast on 26 September 1939 and grew up in a large extended family on the Shankill Road.  His father James McWhirter was a shipyard worker and his mother Margaret (McConnell) was a shopkeeper.

He was educated at Queen's University and Stranmillis College and then taught in schools in Kilkeel and Bangor.  After that he taught in Spain and then in 1966 he moved to British Columbia, where he taught at Port Alberni before studying for an MA at the University of British Columbia.  McWhirter stayed on at the university and was appointed professor in 1982 and then head of the creative writing department from 1983 to 1993.

He writes both poetry and fiction and some of his later work deals with Northern Ireland.  The Listeners (1991) explores the lives of a group of musicians in Protestant Belfast and A Bad Day to be Winning (1991)  is a series of short stories set in Protestant Ulster.  In March 2007 the city of Vancouver named him as its inaugural poet laureate for a two-year term.

It seems to me that too often we forget those who have left these shores and made their mark elsewhere.  George McWhirter is just one example and there are many more. 

For example, how many books on Ulster or Irish artists mention Henry McArdle (1836-1908), who was born in Belfast but eventually settled in Texas.  There he painted a number of important people and events in the history of Texas, including Dawn at the Alamo and The Battle of San Jacinto, which hang in the Senate chamber in the Texas Capitol, and The Settlement of Austin's Colony, which hangs in the hall of the House of Representatives in the Texas Capitol.

Those who are tasked with preserving and promoting our cultural wealth have a responsibility to raise awareness of these artists, whose work is part of that cultural wealth.

In Search of Ulster-Scots Land

In recent years there has been an increase in interest in the contribution of the Ulster-Scots to the making of America and in 2008 Barry Aron Vann, associate professor of geography at Lincoln Memorial University in Tennessee, published a new volume entitled In Search of  Ulster-Scots Land: The Birth and Geotheological Imaginings of a Transatlantic People 1603-1703.

The book deals with both the movement of Scots to Ulster and then the movement of Ulster-Scots to America.  Five of the book's six chapters deal with the seventeenth-century formation of an Ulster-Scots cultural community and the author examines population statistics and geographical features to argue  that the sea between Ulster and Scotland served as a bridge rather than a barrier. 

According to David P King, who reviewed the book for the Journal of Southern Religion:

Vann's interest goes beyond genealogy and geography. He argues that it is the religious thinking of the Ulster-Scots that shapes their unique culture. Diffused through their immigration to America, these beliefs have also left a significant cultural imprint on the South. Vann declares that the conservative belief system, political ideology, and landscapes of the Ulster-Scots are mirrored in the contemporary culture of the "Bible Belt."

This is a major contribution to the academic study of the Ulster-Scots and one that should be on the bookshelves of Ulster-Scots enthusiasts as well as libraries in Northern Ireland.

Country roots are Scotch-Irish

Back in 1973 Wayne Erbsen moved to Charlotte in North Carolina to dig deep into the roots of Southern Appalachian music.  Today he lives in Asheville and teaches music, as well as publishing books on traditional country music.  He also has his own weekly radio programme Country Roots.

In 2003, thirty years after he settled in North Carolina, Erbsen published Rural Roots of Bluegrass: Songs, Stories and History and this was his conclusion about the roots of such music:

It was clearly the Scots-Irish immigrants who contributed most to what would be called Appalachian or old-time music.                                   [Rural Roots of Bluegrass  p 126]

Today some people say that it was the Irish who contributed most to Appalachian music and yes it was people who came from Ireland but they were Scotch-Irish, the descendants of the Ulster-Scots who crossed the Atlantic in search of a new life in a new land.

The book is available for purchase on the internet, along with a CD containing 14 songs from the book, and it is a great source of information about many traditional songs.  In 2006 Erbsen also published The Bluegrass Gospel Songbook, with more than 100 favourite gospel songs.

Alexander Knox MD (2)

In his History of the County of Down, published in 1875, Alexander Knox MD (1802-1877) made the following observation about the state of the Scotch language in county Down at that time:

The Scottish idiom is most observable in the baronies of Ards and Castlereagh, and their confines, although extending as far as Hillsborough and Dromore. Until recently it was spoken as broadly as in Ayr or Wigtonshire, but it is gradually dying out, although innumerable words imported from Scotland are in daily use in the northern part of the county.

[History of the County of Down  p  48]

Comments such as this help us to develop a picture of the survival and decline of Ulster-Scots across the province.