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Thomas Carnduff ‘The Shipyard Poet’

Thomas was born in 13 Kensington Street, off Sandy Row, Belfast, on 30 January 1886

Thomas Carnduff was born in 13 Kensington Street, off Sandy Row, Belfast, on 30 January 1886, His parents were, James Graham Carnduff an army Corporal and Jane Bollard, his second wife.Thomas the youngest of 7 children,and had a half brother and sister He spent his early childhood in Dublin, where he was educated at the Royal Hibernian School and the Royal Military College. He worked as a butcher's boy, in a thread and needle factory, in a printing house, as a drover in a linen factory, and in the Belfast shipyards.

While working in the Belfast Steam Print Company from 1906 to 1914 he revelled in the camaraderie of his well-versed, articulate co-workers. He read widely in order to contribute to their stimulating levels of daily debate on the social issues of the time. In 1914 he started work as a plater's helper at Workman, Clarke and Co.He joined the Young Citizens' Volunteers and in 1916 enlisted in the Royal Engineers, serving at Ypres and Messines.

On leaving the army in 1919 he was re-employed at Workman's, remaining there until the firm was wound up in 1935. It was hard, dangerous work, which often involved working at heights - the fear of which Carnduff never entirely overcame. Accidents were a daily occurrence in the yard, and on one occasion he was taken to hospital after suffering injuries from a heavy spanner which had been dropped from 40 feet. Carnduff was involved in the Labour and trade union movements and active in the Independent Orange Order. He was a friend of Peadar O'Donnell and supported the Connolly Association

The Orangeman's Handshake. Written by Billy Mitchell

Peadar O'Donnell

He had just recovered his strength after enduring forty-one days on hunger strike and was confident of an early release from prison. However, he still believed that he had a duty to try to escape. And so, with some help from friendly guards, slipped out of the Curragh Prison Camp and started out for his beloved Donegal.

O'Donnell chose a rather long and circuitous route home. Stowing away on a boat for Liverpool, he then boarded a second boat for Belfast before catching a train to Londonderry and then walking over the mountains to his home in West Donegal. When his boat docked at Belfast the veteran republican was met by Thomas Carnduff, Master of Sandy Row Independent Orange Lodge. "This is the one time that an Orangeman's handshake is better than a papal blessing", remarked O' Donnell. Not that O'Donnell was ever in line for a papal blessing. The only pronouncements likely to come O'Donnell's way from the Catholic hierarchy at the time would have been denunciations rather than blessings.

Thomas Carnduff and Peadar O'Donnell were political enemies. Indeed, when we consider that Carnduff was a RUC Reservist and O'Donnell was a member of the anti-treaty IRA, it could be said that they were military enemies as well. Yet for all their enmity, O'Donnell and Carnduff were kindred spirits. Both were writer's who used their literary skills to depict the harsh realities of life in their respective home environments.

O'Donnell, the republican and socialist, wrote with passion about the struggle for survival endured by the people of West Donegal against the ravages of poverty, civil conflict and nature. Carnduff, the Protestant who regarded himself as both an Irishman and an Orangeman, wrote with equal passion about the concerns of Belfast's working classes as well as about culture and politics.

While O'Donnell's contribution to Irish literature has been well documented and applauded, the writings of Carnduff have largely been neglected. A self-taught manual worker, Carnduff wrote about a dozen plays for both radio and theatre as well as several books of poetry and numerous essays. His play "Workers" received rapturous applause when staged at Dublin's Abbey Theatre in 1932, yet the same play was abandoned in his native Belfast when the Opera House objected to its working class ethos. As Sarah Ferris has pointed out, by 1970 the literary reputation of Thomas Carnduff "had sunk without trace"

O'Donnell's reputation as a writer has been adequately recognised, yet his reputation as a republican and a socialist has been dismissed as irrelevant by all but a handful of republicans who steadfastly refuse to equate republicanism with Catholic Nationalism or Green Toryism. The Donegal Democrat, which owed its establishment to the advice given by O'Donnell to three print workers during a labour dispute in 1918, concluded that O'Donnell was merely an agitator "who never achieved anything good for his country".That is something else the two writers had in common, they were prophets without honour amongst their own people.

Carnduff, the Belfast Orangeman, was a regular visitor to the home of the O'Donnell's in Dublin. During one of these visits he presented the veteran republican with his Orange Sash. O'Donnell promptly placed this in a glass case and exhibited it with pride to all who entered his abode. Political differences they may have had, but O'Donnell had no problem with Carnduff's "orange feet" crossing the threshold of his home; nor did he find the Sandy Row mans Orange regalia to be a source of offence. Men and women of integrity are not easily offended by the beliefs, emblems and culture of their opponents.

Before he died O'Donnell made arrangements with Belfast republican, Jack Mulvenna, to ensure that the Sash was returned to Carnduff's family. In 1991, some five years after O'Donnell's death, the Sunday News carried a report of the Sash being handed over by Mulvenna to Carnduff's sons

The friendship between O'Donnell and Carnduff reminds us that political adversaries need not dehumanise one another. On the contrary, they should have the capacity to respect each others political integrity and dedication to a cause. It reminds us too that those who have worn the uniform of opposing forces need not live in a state of perpetual hatred, base recrimination and ongoing demonisation. As in the case of Carnduff and O'Donnell, dedicated political opponents are very often kindred spirits who share similar passions and, but for an accident of birth, could have been on "the same side".

Writing from a loyalist perspective, I am saddened by the fact that working class Protestants such as Thomas Carnduff have been relegated to the margins of politics, culture and literature. Misunderstood by those of us who for so long swallowed the bitter pill of anti-Catholic sectarianism, and rejected by others whose bitter anti-Protestant sectarianism refused to acknowledge that anything good could be said or be written by an Orangeman, Carnduff has much to say to us today as we prepare to write an obituary for the Good Friday Agreement

"...am I to blame if [my ancestors] looked on the land with approval and stayed"? (Thomas Carnduff, 'I have faith in Ireland')

All his life he had written poetry, and in 1936 he formed the Young Ulster Literary Society and was a member of the Irish Pen Club.He wrote for several newspapers, including the Bell and published books of poems,His poetry is collected as Songs from the Shipyard and other Poems (Belfast, E.H. Thornton, 1924); and Song of an Out of Work (Belfast, Quota Press, 1932). These volumes were posthumously republished as Poverty Street and Other Poems (Belfast, Lapwing Press, 1993). He wrote many plays for radio.: The First Warrant (1930); Workers (Dublin, The Abbey Theatre, 1932) he succumbed to an unholy joy as he, an unemployed shipyard man, became a playwright. Belfast's Ulster Theatre had previously rehearsed but abandoned the play when the Opera House objected to its working-class tendencies. Machinery (The Abbey Theatre, 1933);Traitors (Belfast, The Empire Theatre, 1934); Castlereagh (The Empire Theatre,1935); Birth of a Giant (1937); The Stars Foretell (1938) and Murder at Stranmillis. The Birth of a Giant was a play written for radio. His later years were spent working as a caretaker in the Linen Hall Library, where his portrait now hangs.

In all, Carnduff wrote more than a dozen plays, including radio drama. He published two books of poetry, and was a prolific essayist on Ulster drama, Ulster workingmen poets, and Belfast's politics and cultures. In l936, he founded the Young Ulster Society. These achievements were extraordinary in a context widely dismissed as a cultural desert. Yet, by l970 when five extracts of Carnduff's unpublished autobiography surfaced in the Linen Hall Library, Belfast, his reputation had almost sunk without trace. Twenty-four years passed before his edited autobiography was published in John Gray, ed., Carnduff: Life & Writings, Belfast: Lagan (l994).

A founding member of Belfast P.E.N.,. Carnduff's manuscript plays and other material, including Carnduff's diary correspondence, Letters to Mary, remain unpublished.He worked at a variety of jobs, at the Belfast shipyards and elsewhere, and also served as a sapper in the Royal Engineers during the First World War. He later served in the Ulster Special Constabulary. an Independent Orangeman, a poet, a dramatist, and a prolific essayist on local cultural politics. Observing of his home city that, "tragedy simply cried out from the streets for expression", he uniquely rejected stage Irish dialogue and farce to voice the realist accents and desperate concerns of its working people. Carnduff was painfully aware that regarding Belfast's educational institutions he remained a looker-on from the outside all his life. Carnduff successfully launched plays such as Castlereagh and Traitors in the home city that constantly exasperated him, but of which he never tired.Thomas Carnduff died on 17 April 1956 leaving behind a legacy of exceptional writing and social commentary. He had used his writings to highlight the plight of the under-privileged and to inspire them to realise their higher potential. He strove to demonstrate that the working classes merited a valued place in modern society. He is buried in Carnmoney Old Cemetery, Co. Antrim.

Click on this link to see a short BBC video called "In the Shadow of the Shipyard" on Thomas Carnduff.

My Ancestry lies buried under the shadow of an ancient round tower within the grounds of Drumbo Presbyterian Meeting house "Thomas Carnduff,Belfast" c1938.

He was named afrer his Grandfather Thomas Carnduff who was born in 1810 in Ballyauglis Drumbo, and died 1882. Thomas`s father James Graham Carnduff was an army Corporal and Jane Bollard, his second wife.Thomas the youngest of 7 children,and had a half brother and sister He spent his early childhood in Dublin, where he was educated at the Royal Hibernian School and the Royal Military College. He worked as a butcher's boy, in a thread and needle factory, in a printing house, as a drover in a linen factory, and in the Belfast shipyards.

born 1844 in Drumbo Co Down. He was an army

nd Jane Bollard, his second wife.Thomas the youngest of 7 children,and had a half brother and sister He spent his early childhood in Dublin, where he was educated at the Royal Hibernian School and the Royal Military College. He worked as a butcher's boy, in a thread and needle factory, in a printing house, as a drover in a linen factory, and in the Belfast shipyards.

Thomas Carnduff died on 16 April 1956, but he left behind a legacy of exceptional writing and social commentary. He had used his writings to highlight the plight of the under-privileged and to inspire them to realise their higher potential. He strove to demonstrate that the working classes merited a valued place in modern society.
On 26 January 1960, in a struggling Belfast theatre, a bomb shell of a play was performed – one that would shatter for all time the cosy, elitist world of serious Ulster drama. The performance ran for six weeks to full houses, and was a huge success for its author and producers.
The play, Over the Bridge, by Harland & Wolff painter Sam Thompson, raised profound questions about religious tensions and prejudices within Northern Ireland society and, in tackling such a taboo subject, it challenged local theatrical tradition, which tended to steer clear of such controversial matters.
Over the Bridge was based on shipyard incidents of the 1930s and was performed during the ongoing IRA campaign of 1956 – 61. For some, Thompson’s play was an overdue exposure of sectarian prejudices against Catholics; others disagreed vehemently. Many were also shocked by the coarseness of the dialogue and the passion exhibited in public, albeit on a stage. If the author had intended to stimulate discussion about Ulster political attitudes, he certainly achieved his objectives, and more.
Sam Thompson, born in 1916, was the seventh in a family of eight children, born and raised in Montrose Street, off Newtownards Road, Belfast. His father, a lamplighter with the City Corporation, eked out his meagre wages with a part-time sexton’s job at the nearby St Clement’s Church.
When Sam entered Harland & Wolff in 1932 as apprentice painter, he was concerned that, like his brother, he would be sacked as soon as he served his time. At the time shipbuilding nationwide was at its lowest ebb – there were few orders, empty slipways and thousands out of work.
He became a member of the Painter’s Union, and eventually a shop steward, and there he found a platform where he could campaign for social reform. Regular meetings of interested workers took place in the shipyard toilets to debate the urgent issues of the day and to discuss possible means of resolving them.
His first tentative steps into the theatrical world were inspired by friendships made at that [the Elbow Room pub] and he was soon obtaining minor acting and directing roles with the Rosemary Players and other amateur societies. Other acting parts in the Group Theatre followed.
After an encounter with Sam Hanna Bell, a progressive BBC producer, Thompson began writing for radio, producing shows such as A Brush in Hand, about an apprentice shipyard painter, a documentary, Tommy Baxter, Shop Steward, and a weekly serial, The Fairmans.
Apart from his now busy writing career, Thompson was volubly promoting the ideals of socialism and had become an active member of the Northern Ireland Labour Party (NILP) which, in the mid-1950s, was beginning to make serious inroads into the traditional Belfast Unionist vote.
Paddy Devlin, an NILP member and later founder member of the SDLP, described a meeting he had with Thompson. ‘I liked him instantly. He was an uncomplicated straight shooter who always appeared to be smouldering on the edge of explosion into flames at the sight and sound of injustice. Everyone within earshot knew where Sam stood on every issue. If they did not, it never took Sam long to tell them.’
Thompson meanwhile, ever the ardent socialist, had ambitions of more substantial writing than documentaries or stories for radio audiences – he had an overwhelming desire to expose some of the sectarianism he had seen or heard about in the shipyard.
In 1958, after two years of intensive writing, he completed what became his seminal, dramatic work, Over the Bridge. The ‘bridge’ in question was a matter of debate. Was it the Queen’s Bridge over the Lagan, or Fraser Street Bridge, off Newtownards Road, which led directly into the shipyard?
At the time, actor James Ellis was artistic director of the Group Theatre, Belfast. He was always keen to promote fresh local writing talent, so when Sam Thompson approached him with the challenge, ‘I’ve got a play you wouldn’t touch with a barge pole,’ Ellis was intrigued. He took on the challenge, knowing that the play would be controversial.
However, two weeks before the public performance, the Group’s board Chairman, Ritchie McKee, requested substantial cuts to the script. He informed the Belfast Telegraph: ‘The play is full of grossly vicious phrases and situations which would offend every section of the public. It is the policy of the Ulster Group Theatre to keep political and religious controversies off our stage.’
Ellis and Thompson refused to meet McKee’s request to cut the text, and they, along with other prominent Group actors, resigned. They formed their own theatre group, Ulster Bridge Productions and eventually found an alternative venue. The Empire Theatre in Belfast was spacious and opulent, and was a high-risk, expensive venue to launch a controversial drama. But the confidence of Ellis and Thompson was vindicated.
Over the Bridge, played with a well-known Ulster cast (including Thompson in a minor role), was a resounding overnight success. Audiences of forty-two thousand attended its six-week run – a record for a play performed in Belfast. The profitable Belfast premiere was followed by performances in Dublin, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Brighton.
The success of Over the Bridge launched Thompson into a relentless, bruising writing routine, and three other plays followed. The Evangelist, about the nineteenth-century religious revival in Ireland, was successfully played in the Opera House, Belfast, in 1963.
Cemented with Love, which had a theme of political corruption, was intended for broadcast in 1964, but was postponed due to a pending election. It was eventually performed in May 1965. Sadly, Thompson did not see it. He had died on 15 February 1965 from a heart attack. His last play, Masquerade, still in draft stage and set in London, was never completed or performed.
Sam Thompson’s passing at the early age of forty-nine was a serious loss to Ulster’s theatrical society as well as to Belfast’s close-knit socialist fraternity, which was in need of popular figures to promote its cause.
Wilson John Haire’s early background, neither urban nor industrial, was vastly different to the other shipyard writers. He was born in 1932 on the Shankill Road, Belfast. His mother, a Roman Catholic, came from a landowning family in Omagh, County Tyrone, while his father, a Presbyterian, was a tradesman joiner. When Haire was still young, his family moved to Carryduff, County Down – a rural setting that was still a reasonable distance from Belfast, where most available jobs were located.
Haire’s recorded memories of early life in Carryduff are vague – his writings take the format of biographical fiction. But it does appear that, despite the difficult economic climate of the 1930s, hardship was not a feature of life in the Haire family, although poverty was widespread in their local community.
Wilson, against his parents’ wishes, left school at fourteen years of age to obtain a job as office boy at Harland & Wolff. The transition from a rural way of life to the heavily industrialised world of shipbuilding must have been an emotional and cultural shock for young Haire.
Two years later, he paid his five pounds deposit – a hefty sum in those days – and became an indentured apprentice joiner. He was a colleague of mine in the Joiners’ Shop and his memories of that period – when fact and fiction can be separated – are recorded in his book, The Yard, which describes a way of working life now long gone.
On completion of his five-year apprenticeship in the cavernous Joiners’ Shop – in which his father had also worked during the war years when it was used for building Stirling bomber fuselages – Haire became restless. He wanted a change from the constraints of his family life and his work routine.
He had just begun to earn full wages as a tradesman, but he handed in his board for the last time and resigned from Harland & Wolff, despite having no other job to go to. It was a typically impetuous act which undoubtedly earned his parents disapproval.
At only twenty-two years of age, he became impatient for change and fresh challenges once again. As a trained joiner – at a time when a joiner, especially a shipyard one, was considered to be one of the elite, and more skilled than a regular carpenter – Haire had no difficulty obtaining a carpenter’s job in London. Around 1960, after several years in London, a disposition towards and latent talent for writing began to emerge.
Three stories, ‘Refuge from the Tickman’, ‘The Beg’, and ‘The Screening’ were published in the Irish Democrat, a London weekly newspaper. A subsequent foray into drama writing produced two one-act plays – The Clockwork Orange, centred around a controversial Belfast protest by the Reverend Ian Paisley; and Divil Era, about the B-Specials – both of which were performed and well-received at Hampstead Theatre, London.
Although he lived for a relatively short time in his native Ulster, his early writings are coloured by a Catholic perspective, and most of his dramatic output was inspired by the political and religious complexities of life in Northern Ireland. In his later career – as indicated by plays such as Lost Worlds, performed at the Academy of Dramatic Art, London, in 1984 – he has moved away from exploring Ulster’s political themes, and instead covers the wider global arena of social justice.
He has received drama awards from various British arts councils and theatres, and in 1974, the London Evening Standard acclaimed him as ‘the most outstanding playwright’. In recognition of his commercial and artistic success, he became resident dramatist at the Royal Court Theatre, London. A year later, he spent a brief period in Belfast as resident dramatist at the Lyric.
Regrettably his national (and, later, international) recognition as a serious playwright has not been matched by similar acclaim in his native country, where he remains largely unknown. Though this may be partly his own fault. Unlike Thomas Carnduff and Sam Thompson, who unashamedly displayed a passion and affection for their birthplace, Haire’s works seem to portray only the negative aspects of his homeland, and, since he left Northern Ireland for good, there has been little evidence of any deep affinity or affection for it.
The above is an abridged version of 'The Yard Playwrights', a chapter from Tom Thompson's book Auld Hands: The Men Who Made Belfast's Shipyards Great, which is out now, published by Blackstaff Press.