Episode 2 The Travelling Picture Show

The Travelling Picture Show is giving four Northern Irish towns

the chance to celebrate their past, their stories and their characters,

as captured by local amateur filmmakers and television crews.

Some of the films have lain hidden in attics and archives for decades.

But now we're bringing them back to the heart of the community they came from.

We're going to meet some of the people who made the films, those who appear in them,

and those with a story to tell.

We've invited them to come and see the past flicker into life on the silver screen

and get a rare glimpse of their town and its people in days gone by.

Today we're pitching our Travelling Picture Show tent in Ballymoney.

We'll see films that reveal the town's love affair with all things cinematic,

the legacy of amateur filmmaker Charlie McAfee...

Jump in and I'll take you around some of the suburbs.

..The good old days of CB radio...

and Ireland's only camera factory.

I'm here at the Riverside Park in Ballymoney,

a town very affectionately known as Cow Town,

a town absolutely steeped in history.

At one point it had the largest cattle market in Ireland,

it has the oldest drama festival

and it's got the highest life expectancy in Ulster.

That's a very good reason for living here!

# ..Ballymoney, I'm longing for you... #

During my years in Ballymoney I have seen some things,

some for the good and some for the worse.

I find Ballymoney people, the nicest people in the whole of Northern Ireland.

They are very agreeable. That's the reason why I have never left to go home.

I would certainly recommend anyone who's thinking of moving out of a city

to come and live in North Antrim somewhere within range of Ballymoney.

Everything taken into account, Ballymoney is not a bad place to live in.

# ..Ballymoney, I'm longing for you... #

In 1961, the Government made a film promoting Northern Ireland

as a place to live and do business in.

And they filmed it just outside Ballymoney.

The Ulster countryside owes much of its famed lush green colouring to a generous annual rainfall.

This rarely seen film captures Northern Irish life at a crossroads between the old and new.

Doreen, the only daughter in the family, works away from the farm.

She has an important job as secretary to the manager of one of the new American factories.

New plants manufacturing in Ulster are increasing rapidly.

My uncle, William McKubre, was the postman.

And it gave you a great insight into farming activities

and also, of course, in the background, if you look behind the people who were in the shots,

you could get a world of information out of the film

as opposed to just listening to what the main thrust of the film was about.

It's a rose-tinted view of Ulster life,

but promotional films like this one did have an impact on the Northern Irish economy,

and one new industry that set up in Ballymoney was the Corfield Camera Factory.

Originally a Wolverhampton-based company,

the Corfields took advantage of brand-new factory premises and Government grants

when it relocated to Ballymoney in 1959.

There wasn't a lot of work in Ballymoney and what work there was was poorly paid.

So when Corfields came, their wages were better

and people, obviously, wanted to find work that was better paid

and there were quite a few people looking for work, both men and women.

Sheena McCartney was secretary to John Corfield.

When this corporate film was made,

Corfields was the UK's leading manufacturer of 35mm cameras,

thanks mainly to the Ballymoney workforce.

They had skills where they were used to machines

and I think that they had a dexterity that helped them to work on the cameras.

My first reaction would be, well, I was so young.

School-leaver Bertie McAffattray got his first rung on the career ladder at Corfields.

The shot of me in that film there would actually be

a shot of the shutter speed of the camera being set or adjusted.

There were different people at each stage and they done their bit,

passed it on to the next stage and someone else done their part.

Here and there along the line there would be quality checks to see that the thing was going OK.

The Corfield Company closed in 1971,

but many of the people featured in this film still live in Ballymoney

and have very, very fond memories of their time there.

Very often in the canteen after lunch

the chairs were pushed back and there was dancing and all sorts of things went on.

There was a young workforce and quite a few weddings emerged from it as well, including my own.

You could say it wasn't all work!

It was a happy place to work and the Corfields were great to work for, and I loved it.

So, Margaret, how did you feel when you watched all the old films today?

It was brilliant!

I really did... I didn't realise I was in that film, Gloria.

-So it's a real sense of history in a way, isn't it?

-Oh, it is, yes.

Do you remember what your actual job was working at the factory?

Well, I was one of the girls who was on the assembly line.

We did 40 shutters a day.

Why do you think it was so much fun?

We used to bring in the record player at dinner time and have a wee dance.

I think it was the twist was the new dance then.

-So what did you do, push the tables back?

-No, it was the ladies' toilets, actually.

Well, we used to dance at school in our lunch break,

but I've never heard of women dancing in the toilets!

Oh, you have to admit it, the girls from Corfields knew exactly how to enjoy themselves!

The Antrim coast was always a favourite destination on a sunny weekend.

Amateur filmmaker William Campbell captured the crowds at the Giant's Causeway in the early '60s.

My first interest in photography came from going to the local cinema and seeing the movies.

And I decided there and then that it would be nice if I maybe got a camera

and was able to do something like that.

So I bought a camera and everywhere I went I took the camera with me.

With Ballycastle just up the road and a glamorous girlfriend,

William had the ideal setting and subject for practising his filming technique.

There was only one thing missing from these films in William's opinion

and that was sound.

The fact that the cameras of the day didn't have sound recorders didn't deter him one bit.

I decided I would have to build a recorder,

and the building of this recorder must be powered so that it can power the camera as well,

and that would keep the two locked in sync.

It meant that for every frame I took on movie, I had a frame matching it in sound.

And when I edited the two side by side, the two went through together.

Now, the 8mm recorder took me two years at least to build,

because I was experimenting all the way through it.

The whole thing just tied up beautiful!

Keen to try out his brand-new sound recorder, William enlisted the help of his friend Charlie McAfee.

The stallholders have been up all night

and today the town is absolutely packed to capacity.

But why listen to me? Come with our cameras and see for yourselves

some of the highlights of this, the Ould Lammas Fair.

# ..At the Ould Lammas Fair, boys, were you ever there...? #

I was talking to Charlie, you see, and I asked Charlie

would he consider doing interviews, you know, for me. Would he interview the people?

And Charlie says. "Oh, yes..." He says, "I'd be scared, mind you, to do it,

"but I'm willing to take a chance."

Do you come to this fair every year?

The microphone lead between the microphone and the camera

was always a problem. I mean, going to the Lammas Fair was hell!

People tripping over the microphone lead.

The went to the Lammas Fair and interviewed different people

at the Lammas Fair.

Unfortunately, Charlie had a stock of about three or four questions

which he asked to each person that came up,

and, you know, maybe just weren't totally truthful with the people that they interviewed,

because, obviously, it was easier to pick people that you knew that you could ask,

"Would you mind appearing in front of the camera and answering a few questions about the Lammas Fair?"

This gentleman with me now is all the way from Canada.

-What part of Canada are you from, sir?

-Montreal, sir.

Charlie interviewed this person who certainly was portrayed as a visitor to Northern Ireland

from a far-flung part of the world,

and was asked questions about why he was at the Lammas Fair, etc, etc,

but locals afterwards were able to work out

that Charlie was in actual fact interviewing his brother who was home on holiday.

Might I ask you, sir, have you brought your wife with you?

That I haven't got, but I've seen a lot of pretty girls in Ballycastle. I might take one back with me.

Well, just be careful, sir, because with all these girls around you never know what might happen!

William, I know you shot a lot of that footage.

I can't tell you how much I enjoyed it, it was wonderful.

But take me back, as a real enthusiast, to the day when you got your first camera.

Well, the day when I got the first camera, I had to think about it for a day, you know,

but I decided the best thing to do was take Margo and her sister out to the Agivey Bridge

where nobody would interfere with us,

and I could photograph them walking across the bridge,

and I wouldn't be asked questions and I wouldn't have to answer any, etc, etc.

What do you remember of that early filming?

-It probably was a nuisance for her.

-Yeah, well...

Every time she wanted to go somewhere, I had some other idea about going somewhere to film!

-So it became a pain from that point of view?

-Well, not really...

We just to be prepared for the unexpected.

William's front man at the Ould Lammas Fair became a prolific filmmaker in his own right.

He and his brother were well-known businessmen in Ballymoney.

Their shop was a local landmark.

We sold everything from Dinky toys to batteries

to Timex watches, beekeeping equipment,

sets of china...

it was just an Aladdin's Cave, really, it just sold everything.

Charlie often roped the staff and customers into his films.

You know, quite often you'd be standing serving a customer and you'd look round

and Charlie would have the camera in his hand, and you just accepted that was just Charlie,

he always had the camera out and at the ready.

We got quite a crowd gathered round us,

and the bank opposite, we had all the boys from the bank hanging out the windows and wolf-whistling,

and so it was rather embarrassing for a young 16-year-old!

But good fun at the same time, you know.

And you could never say no to Charlie.

If Charlie said, "Would you do this?" you couldn't say no to him, you just said OK.

It's lovely to have that part of your youth captured in such a nice way,

and it's lovely because my memories of working for Charlie and James are incredibly happy memories.

# ..Rock and roll that hula hoop

# If you love me and I love you... #

This is Ballymoney Town Hall and Museum.

Now, I've been many times to Ballymoney as a journalist,

but the very, very first time I ever came was when I was nine as a child singer.

Now, I don't quite remember whether it was the town hall where we did the concert...

I do remember the money, though, it was seven shillings and sixpence! Old money, obviously.

In fact, the town hall is where Charlie indulged in his other big passion, magic.

Now, he may not have been paid much more than me for his act,

but then he was able to conjure money right out of thin air!

All you need to do is to straighten up the piece of tissue paper,

fold it over like that, and blow on it.

And you'll find if you're using the right kind of toothpaste, you'll have the ring of confidence

and you'll finish up with a handful of nice brand-new one-pound notes.

It was the one with the ball that caught my eye.

I was so engrossed with it

and this piece of cloth, and the ball used to go up and around it,

and he used to take it away from it, and it was marvellous to see it.

Before long, Rosemary Dunn went from being an audience member at Charlie's shows

to being part of the act.

Charlie would have come into the newsagent's shop where I worked

and he would have put his hand up and said, "Can I borrow you tonight, Rosemary?"

So I knew what it was for.

Two chairs put back to back,

a young lady out over the top of the chairs,

and then the magic piece was, everybody was holding their breath,

he pulled the two chairs out and there she was suspended in midair.

And, of course, I'm not going to tell you how he done that,

but I happened to be one of the young ladies that was suspended on the chair.

I was nervous, but he was nervous too.

It was marvellous whenever you were there.

One...two...three.

This was the scene at Ballymoney Diamond when the popular Day By Day radio programme featuring Walter Love

visited Ballymoney during Festival Week 1983.

Throughout the 1970s and '80s,

Charlie and his camera were a regular feature at any event in the town.

Charlie was there in all his glory.

He was directing proceedings much more than Walter was!

You had to stand for Charlie in the right direction and so on and so forth...

and Walter Love really took second fiddle

because Walter was just interviewing us for a radio programme,

so he didn't care what way we stood or where we were.

Willie John McBride, we look upon you more as a Ballymoney man than a Ballymena man!

It really was an all-pervading hobby which took over his life.

His brother James said the shop wasn't important. If there was something on, Charlie was away,

and James was left to look after the shop.

People didn't always understand what Charlie was doing at the time,

but he was laying down on film the most comprehensive archive of how Ballymoney was changing

in his lifetime.

Some of the films Charlie made too were about characters in the town.

The price of progress is not cheap, at least not for Rosie Higgins.

Charlie took time to go and film a pub which was well known,

had many well-known customers and characters just as it was closing down,

as the last customer was about to be put out... and the key turned in the door.

When all this is levelled out and rebuilt with new roads and modern houses,

the old will be only a memory to people like Rosie

and just history to others.

Like so many Ulster towns, Ballymoney lost family-run businesses

as the new chain stores arrived.

McKirdy-Hamiltons, established for over 100 years

and known as the fashion store of North Antrim.

When renovated it will resemble little of the past store,

but progress must take its course, regardless of sentiment.

Even McAfee's wasn't able to keep pace with changing times.

These pictures capture the last days of the shop

which had been a much-loved fixture in the town centre since 1898.

It's sad when those sort of family-owned firms that are really part and parcel of the community,

when they finally go...

If I close my eyes I can still walk through upstairs and know exactly where you'd going to get everything,

You know the dogs that sit either side of the fire with the cross eyes,

I remember the room that you went in to get those...

I never liked those dogs!

But I can still remember which room you went into upstairs to get those.

A dentist and his patient had a sudden escape from serious injury

when the gable wall of his surgery collapsed during demolition operations

at the proposed new car park next door.

Fortunately no-one was injured

and although the dentist and his patient had to make a quick exit

you could say that, in the end, it was a painless extraction.

As well as recording the passing of the old,

Charlie also used his camera to celebrate the new.

But progress could be a mixed blessing.

If the motoring public would obey the lines and the signs in the street,

they've nothing to fear from the traffic wardens.

We are here to ensure that the traffic is flowing freely and help in any way we can.

Well, there you are, ladies and gentlemen!

Maybe that'll teach me to park in the proper place in future!

During the Troubles, Charlie was often the first cameraman on the scene

to film those events that were making the news headlines.

Nine buses were destroyed and several others damaged

in an incendiary attack on the Ulster Bus Depot in Ballymoney

in the early hours of Saturday morning.

I can remember going into the shop of a Saturday morning

and having to go round and make sure there were no incendiary devices.

You'd check for incendiary devices and then you went and washed the windows and swept the floor.

I remember the time when the security barriers were taken away

and they showed the men coming round to dismantle the barrels which were full of cement

and the poles that joined these together,

and, you know, you thought to yourself, you know, "Why, Charlie, did you waste 3-and-a-half minutes

"of 8mm film on something like that?"

But really and truthfully he was probably far ahead of his time,

that he saw that this was something which in 50 years' time,

people would be saying, "Oh! Did things like that there happen?"

That was really very significant and clever of Charlie to think

that was significant enough to film,

because those barrels being taken away was a very positive thing,

because that was meaning that the towns were being opened up again, and that a lot of the fear was going,

and that you could maybe start and have more normality

than we had lived with for very many years.

There was a time when almost every small town in Northern Ireland had a cinema.

In the days before television, it provided the means of escape into a Hollywood world

of high glamour, horror and, of course, the Wild West!

Picture houses today are lying derelict and forgotten,

like this one in Ballymoney,

once a lovely cinema but now the equipment is rotting and rusting away

and is only of scrap value.

Well, it's very sad when you look at the state of the building

but this is all that remains of the Palladium Cinema.

Now, I'm told that in its heyday people would have queued all along the footpath

and around the corner to see the latest John Wayne movies.

Apparently, cowboy films did very well in Ballymoney.

Ballymoney had the nickname of Cow Town

because of the number of westerns that were shown in Ballymoney.

Any other form of film didn't really work in Ballymoney too well, but the western did.

And you had the John Waynes and you had all those types of films which the audience loved actually.

At one showing the sight of the wily Indians sneaking up behind the cowboys

was just too much for one audience member.

Somebody in the stalls gets up and shouts,

"Watch out! They're behind you!"

you know...

That's just how real the film actually was to those particular people.

It was special to me in lots of ways because it's where I got my first job

and where I first saw the projectors.

The Palladium Cinema in Ballymoney, the gents' toilets were down off the left of the screen,

so if you went there and on the way back up, if you walked up the aisle fairly slow,

you could take a look up to the projection ports and you could see what was actually going on.

I was in Ballymoney one morning

and I came up past the cinema

and I plucked up my courage and asked if I could see the projectors,

I said I was particularly interested in projectors...

..and, to my amazement, they actually took me upstairs

and took me into the projection room and they let me see the two large projectors.

That started my career in the cinema.

The curtain finally came down on the Palladium in 1969.

I think that led me to decide to put up my own cinema.

I started with a small shed in the garden.

Frank's repertoire of films was as up-to-date as anything you'd see in the mainstream cinemas.

The Super 8 versions he showed may have been considerably shorter than the originals,

but there again you might argue that 20 minutes of Ben-Hur was just about long enough!

You would have the organ music as everybody arrived.

You would have the dimming lights, you had the curtains...

So it was friends, family...

it was far from being a commercial operation!

But it seemed to work OK.

In the late '70s on a summer's afternoon

this street was absolutely thronged with demonstrators.

They had a message for the politicians, but it wasn't political,

and it certainly had nothing whatsoever to do with the Troubles.

# Yeah, that's a big 10-4 there, Big Ben

# Yeah, we definitely got the front door, good buddy

# Mercy sakes alive, looks like we got us a convoy

# It was the dark of the moon on the 6th of June... #

About 1977, I think, was probably when it all started...

and within, I would say,

a year,

most people had a CB radio, either in the car

or in the house.

And that was a wonderful time. People were chatting to each other and the whole thing was harmless,

and it was great fun.

# ..We got a little old convoy Ain't she a beautiful sight...? #

That little black box under the dash can give you the power

to communicate with thousands of people.

It can take away the boredom of driving your car,

give you security while out late at night

and, if you have to call for assistance, there will be many good buddies there to help.

People who had seen the Dukes Of Hazzard, Smokey And The Bandit and Convoy

became interested in the old CB,

and that gave CB more publicity than anything.

It was illegal, of course, there were no licences to be got for it,

and the sets that were coming in, they came in below the counter,

because there could be no income tax, I suppose, paid on them,

and from that point of view everybody needed a handle.

My handle on the local scene was the Lonesome Cowboy.

It wouldn't have taken, I suppose, the head man in Scotland Yard to find out who we were.

# ..Across the USA, convoy

# Give me a 10-9 on that, Big Ben

# Negatory, Big Ben, you're still... #

We were very privileged of course in Ballymoney, in Cow Town,

that the first citizen, the mayor, Molly Holmes was actually on the CB.

Her handle was the Fur Collar, I think it was,

and Molly came to club meetings as well which gave the whole thing a bit of respectability.

A very memorable day for CB radio was a big rally that was staged at Stormont.

We were illegal and we were looking for licences.

I think there were maybe three if not four buses travelled away that day from Ballymoney.

I'd never been to Stormont before and it was a lovely place, I thought,

and I could remember when we arrived there before the rally started,

there were big trees just in off the road there,

and we lay in the trees and we chatted and we got to know people from other places.

# ..You wanna put that micro-bus in behind that suicide jockey?

# Yeah, he's hauling dynamite and he needs all the help he can get... #

There were speakers and of course CB-ers weren't all that good listeners,

and I'm not so sure whether they were all listening to what was going on,

but we enjoyed ourselves and whatever they were saying we were backing it anyway,

regardless of whether we knew what they were talking about or not!

# So we crashed the gate doing 98 I says, "Let them truckers roll!" #

For Masie McMullen who came along to The Travelling Picture Show today,

William's CB radio film brings back happy memories.

I remember it was a really, really warm day,

and the crowds were terrible, and it was so warm,

I had to take my shoes off and walk the whole way up the hill

and walk down again when it was all over.

But we had many, many good chats on this CB.

Like all good CB radio enthusiasts, Masie had her own unique handle.

I was the Wee Woodpecker because my husband had the timber yard, you see.

# ..I say, "Big Ben, this here's the Rubber Duck.

# "We just ain't a-gonna pay no toll"

# So we crashed the gate doing 98 I says, "Let them truckers roll!" #

Just for the record, my handle was Honeybun! What else could it be?

Well, I'm sorry to say that the good buddies of Ballymoney never did get what they wanted,

but just like all the films, William's record of that particular day brought back so many memories,

I think, memories that our audience had long forgotten.

Well, at this point, it's time for The Travelling Picture Show to say over and out

as we pack up our tent and leave Ballymoney.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd