Episode 1 The Travelling Picture Show

The travelling picture show was out on the road again,

visiting towns and villages across Northern Ireland

and reliving our past through home movies.

I remember this man standing at the bridge corner and saying,

"What is that silly man doing photographing Glenarm main street?"

And it is now history.

We were the first village to have a festival.

I thought it needed to be recorded.

It needed to be preserved in some way.

Today, we're going to meet the people who took the films,

those who appeared in them and anyone with a story to tell.

We don't forget those who have gone before us, those who have walked

the streets of Glenarm, those who have looked over the bay in Glenarm.

It all comes back to us.

And in that way, the past is still very much alive.

Hello and welcome to the Glens of Antrim.

Today, we're in Glenarm and, as you can see,

I have parked my rather modest little bell tent

in the grounds of this magnificent

and quite romantic castle, which is home to Lord and Lady Dunluce.

And we've also gathered together a group of very enthusiastic

people from Glenarm and from nearby Carnlough.

And they're all set to enjoy a cinematic screening

of their past flicker into life.

Glenarm, the "valley of the army", takes its name from the glen

in which it lies, the first of the nine Glens of Antrim.

This area has been praised by poets and artists in words and colour.

And now, we're going to celebrate it in moving pictures.

The real joy of this old footage is that every small detail

reveals a whole different world.

Glenarm is about the oldest village in Ulster.

1216, Belfast was not even a dot on the map,

to 1600 and something.

So we're 400 years ahead of Belfast.

We haven't maybe kept up with them as well,

but we were way ahead of the game at that time.

It was the loveliest wee village

and the most prosperous village in the Glens of Antrim.

You know, we had everything.

And we used to have three excellent grocer's shops about, maybe,

five, and celery shops that would have sold sweets.

The lady would have sold you a gallon of paraffin oil and,

at the same time as she sold you the gallon of paraffin oil,

you'd have said, "I'll take two soda farls."

And without washing her hands, she'd just lift two soda farls

and put them in a bag.

And none of us had any of these diseases that's running about today.

And no antibiotics.

Glenarm, the place and its people were filmed in the 1940s

by Dr Hugh Morris, a native of the village,

and relative of Jimmy and Iain Bradley.

The films were sent to me

because I was the nearest relative to the Morrises living in Glenarm.

The bungalow that I live in was the holiday home of Hugh Morris.

That was where he came for his summer holidays every summer.

He was born in Glenarm here, in 1898,

just at the end of that century.

He went to the local primary school - his father was the headmaster -

and then went to Queen's.

And he graduated in 1921 with a degree in medicine.

And then eventually, he went to Manchester.

In Manchester, he was very much associated not only,

obviously, in the medical profession,

but he was associated professionally with Manchester United.

He was the consultant radiologist to the club.

When the War started, he was commissioned into the Army

and joined the Royal Medical Corps and he was sent out to India.

And it was when out there, he met his wife, Helen Cateaux.

She was commonly known as Bunt. That was the family name for her.

And they had three sons.

And they came back then after the War,

back to England, and bought the bungalow in Glenarm.

This was when the film started, just after the War.

So every summer, he came over to his summer home from Manchester

and he did the films.

He would have started, more or less,

as soon as he arrived at Larne Harbour.

And very often, Bunt, his wife,

she would have been driving the car,

Hugh would have been in the passenger seat

and the film would have been moving from Larne through the Black Arch

through Ballykelly right into Glenarm.

And sometimes, instead of stopping at the house,

he went on, right through to Carnlough, because he was on a roll.

There are shots, in the film, of Hugh and his wife, Bunt,

and the three boys, playing on the beach, playing in the front garden,

working in the back garden.

There are scenes, in the film, where you see the humour of Hugh

and Bunt.

There's one where, I think, Bunt is covered with the grass

and then she sits up, she rises from the dead.

That was how they spent their summer holidays, back where Hugh

seemed to be very, very happy in Glenarm, where he had come from.

As a three or four-year-old,

I appear in the street, I think in the shot by myself.

And they tell me that I'm showing my bad temper by stamping my feet.

My big brother, he does appear in it.

And no, I don't, but I have cousins who were in the film,

I have an aunt, my father's in the film.

My grandfather, who I did not know, is also in the film.

You know, there's a lot of people in them besides their immediate family.

They're pictures of the people in the village.

And when Hugh came home, in the early '50s,

he would have shown the films in the village.

And remember, people were talking about him

showing it against a wall, outside,

and even in the summer.

And he was showing bits of the films.

And, of course, it was for the people of the village.

And he had quite a wicked sense of humour.

There was one shot I remember him

talking about of the Minister riding over the bridge on a bicycle.

And what he would do then, he'd play it through,

and then he'd run the film backwards and had him

going backwards over the bridge on the bicycle, and things like this.

'I know nearly every one of them.'

Well, there's Bottle Bell, there's Willie Cart,

there's Shoot Me Now, there's Orange Charlie.

I'm driving a wee Ferguson tractor, just gone past the house,

and he's behead of me. You can only see the legs.

And I think it's the attitude of me in a tractor,

but I cannae bet on that, but I think it is.

It's the wee garden Fergie.

My wife's in the film as a wee girl playing with her

dog at the side of the garage.

And the first time I seen her, I was sitting in the picture house,

they were travelling pictures in them days,

and it was in the Seaview Hall.

And I was sitting with another girl, who's since married in Canada,

and there was a wee girl down at the front, knocking nine bells

out of a wee boy, and she had 20 Gallagher blues in her hand.

And I said to Ellen, "Ellen, who's that?"

And she says, "Oh, that's a wee young one of Clem McAllister's,

"but they cannae do anything with her."

And little did I know that I married her a good number of years,

and I still cannae do anything with her!

LAUGHTER

Jackie, you are one of the bravest men I've ever met, to tell that

story today, in the middle of the film, about how you met your wife.

And you know what, it got the best laugh of the day.

I think I'll get in trouble when I get home!

-I think you might.

-And here's the lovely Frances.

So do you remember seeing him, then, for the first time?

Yes, I do, on the tennis court.

And what was your impression of him,

seeing he gave us a very graphic impression of you?

Well, I probably thought he was going with somebody

else at the time.

SHE LAUGHS

-That's all!

-So when did the pair of you get together?

-'57.

-No!

-There you are.

-'53!

We were in the castle gardens.

My father was head gardener there for 21 years.

It was a marvellous growing-up period

because it was during the War, and the whole estate was taken over by

the Army, so you were sailing about on Bren Gun carriers and wee tanks.

And it was just fascinating. You weren't allowed to take photographs.

I don't think I had a camera anyway, but you couldn't photograph

anything during the War but it was marvellous.

And I was lucky enough to grow up with him

-that owns the big house now, Lord Antrim.

-He was your pal, was he?

And he was called Alexander,

-but I couldn't say it when I was wee, so it was just Lordy.

-Lordy?

-So he's still Lordy.

-Lordy, Lordy!

-He's 78, the same as me.

And we're still pally.

And Alexander's younger brother, the acclaimed artist Hector,

still lives and paints in Glenarm

and can remember being filmed by Hugh Morris.

Now, as we're standing in front of this blissful castle,

I've got to give you your correct title.

So it's the Right Honourable Hector MacDonald, so...

-Got to do the correct thing.

-Yes. Yes, yes indeed.

Hector, how did you enjoy seeing yourself in the kilt?

Oh, it was deeply embarrassing!

My parents are so embarrassed because I insisted on wearing that kilt.

I remember it well. I was only four or something. I said, "I'm going to put on.

"I'm going to have that big sporran, too, that you've got in the dress-up box."

So how many years did you wear that particular kilt?

About five years, I think. Yes. It did me well.

-Fitted you for a long time.

-It fitted me... Yes.

It had plenty of growth room in it.

I mean, anybody who comes here adores the castle.

In terms of being born here and growing up here as a child,

-what was that like in terms of freedom?

-Well, it was wonderful.

I mean, of course, I didn't know anything else, but it meant that

I had the run of the whole place and lots of people in the castle then.

So it was great, great fun

and my best friend was the son of the butler, and still is!

HE LAUGHS

So it was a lovely environment, really.

And this lovely place brought Hugh and his family

and his camera back year after year.

He came in the summer holidays and the weather seemed to be

so gorgeous.

And we would all think back to our childhood

and the weather was always good then.

It was really an idyllic time.

I think the most important thing is that this is ordinary people.

There's plenty of films of those of the '30s and '40s

and earlier of the nobility and all this and important people.

This is people, ordinary people, in the village.

And I think that's the most important part, to preserve them.

He obviously loved Glenarm.

Dr Hugh Morris sadly died in 1959, but his family really

treasure his home movies,

'and that's a fitting legacy.'

There are shots coming back to me

of children playing in the streets, children sitting on the bridges.

The girls coming out of the factory that is more or less derelict now.

The bell in the Eglinton Yard that used to call the men to work.

The bread man coming around the street, doing deliveries.

These are things of the past that children today want to have experienced.

And the terrible thing is, you know, when you live in a village,

there are changes and events that happen, and you ignore them.

And it's only when you look at an old film, you look back

and say, "Oh, where's that gone?"

You know, "I don't ever remember seeing that before."

I remember I didn't even know him at that time as Hugh Morris,

but this man, standing at the bridge corner.

And whenever you're small, you're rather clever.

And when you get older, you think you're not nearly as clever,

and saying, "What is that silly man doing

"photographing Glenarm main street?"

And it is now history, which we should be doing today.

We've a lot easier equipment than Hugh Morris had.

Travelling north, along the coast road, we come to Carnlough.

The village nestles quietly at the foot of Glencloy.

It has a very picturesque harbour and small, neat streets.

Local man Alexander Black recorded on cine good times with his family.

The film that my father took in the early '60s from the front

garden just out the bay, you'll notice very few cars and things.

So it was a pretty quiet place.

The people were very nice. It was a very friendly place to live.

Most people knew everybody.

The village was an exciting, actually exciting, place for a kid

because it was full of shops.

We'd no supermarkets or anything like that.

I think, at one stage, I can remember we had three butcher's shops

and a greengrocer and a shoe shop and all those kinds of things.

So you could actually walk down the street, down to the harbour

from the bay, and pass maybe 20 different shops.

My recollections of growing up in Carnlough are that it was

always summer, it was always sunny, we were always on holidays,

we were always on the beach or we were playing tennis in the front garden.

We lived in a semidetached.

The house next door had a garden identical to ours

in front with a hedge down the middle.

And every summer, that became one building.

My husband took them in the early '60s,

so I would say '61, '62, round about that time,

some of them with the children just running up and down in the garden.

My father was an amateur photographer and...

So he took stills photographs.

I still have one of his original cameras and

when cine cameras came in, he got quite interested in that as well.

We actually had a dark room in the house, in one of the bedrooms,

but by the time there were four kids, the dark room was...

became a bedroom.

They were lying just in the old camera in the attic,

and somebody discovered them and thought it would be a good idea then

to put them onto a film where you could see them, you know?

I think he probably thought it was very important,

some kind of record of the kids growing up.

I do remember my father taking some of the films.

I don't remember taking a particular interest in the films themselves

other than the fact that he told us what to do.

So although I think most of them maybe look natural,

I can remember him saying, "Right,

"now you run up the garden towards the front door,

"past my right-hand side," or,

"Here's the order in which you run out of the tent."

And, you know, he filmed us coming out of the tent.

So some of it was actually directed.

The highlight of the year was always the Civic Festival

in the summer which started in 1962,

properly in 1963, with things like donkey derbies.

Boat races.

A fancy dress parade.

Sand castle competitions. Loads and loads of stuff for children to do.

So I think it was actually quite progressive of our parents

and adults generally, who formed the committee at the time, to be doing

something like that and running the Civic Festival.

It's also fantastic that there's a record of some of the events,

even to this day.

I don't think Carnlough was the first village to introduce fancy

dress parades, but we were the first village to have a festival.

And I thought it needed to be recorded.

It needed to be preserved in some way.

And taking the festival from 1969 up until the present day,

I was using an old camera,

an ex-government, 16mm film.

It was all outdated.

And the camera, you had to focus it manually

and take light readings and wind up the camera.

It wasn't like camcorders now. And it took for ever to set up a shot.

There wasn't any instructions with it or anything.

It was just sort of seat of the pants.

You kind of started off filming and you could see,

when you got the results back, what worked and what didn't work.

I sort of graduated onto another more advanced camera

and I took a lot of film between '69 and '73.

Started again in 1982.

And I was using a Super 8 Sound then.

And that was more expensive.

'And a very good morning to you and welcome from me, John Bennett,

'welcoming you to what I hope is going to be

'another sunny, sunny morning.

'And there's a soft, wee mist which is

'just drifting in from the Sea of Moyle,

'and it's inching its way from Glenarm Bay,

'way out to the right there, and swirling round the black rock.

'They tell me that all that is a sure sign that it's going to be

'another lovely, sunny day.

'Now, they are the good people of Carnlough, just one of those

'little towns that stud the Antrim coast road along its length.

'It's festival week in Carnlough

'and we've certainly been enjoying some of the attractions here...'

That was something like £5 a minute.

So, unfortunately, I couldn't shoot as much as I wanted to.

And there was a lot of stuff, like the interviews,

I took from the arts of the BBC people.

I would have loved to have got more but, as I say,

£5 a minute was always on my mind.

-What's it like living in Carnlough?

-It's kind of a sloppy place.

There isn't that much to do.

Those films I took were the festivals from '69 to '73.

They lay about in boxes for about 10, 12 years.

And I completely forgot about them.

And I decided... One day, I discovered them

and decided to edit them all together.

Then, a little surprise for Bernard, who thought his only

appearance on The Travelling Picture Show was as a toddler.

How long have you spent in preparing this sixth festival?

Maybe not as long as we should have!

We generally like to start before Christmas

but we get no real work done until after Easter.

I fear it's almost time for me to leave sweet Carnlough Bay.

We're at Cushendall tomorrow. Hope you can join me then.

Starting time, as usual, five past ten.

Many thanks for your company this morning. Bye-bye.

It is a snapshot of life.

And it's amazing how much things have changed over the years

and some of the things that we did in 1969 we can't do now at all

because of health and safety reasons.

And that's the pram race and the pub race and other events like that.

Because they're just too risky.

The pram race was a pretty rigorous event.

You "borrowed" a pram and two people took part in a race.

You ran all the way up High Street,

you either went round the front street at Harbour Road

or you turned at the end of High Street and went back again...

..changing the driver halfway.

It was a pretty horrific event in terms of thrills and spills.

We were relatively unencumbered in those days

by health and safety and insurance regulations,

so we had a load of fun.

Our own pram was used quite a lot when we were kids

and it's in one of the films as well

Margaret, as a baby, is in the pram.

That was a Silver Cross pram with big wheels and a suspension

and it became one of the really good prams in the pram races.

The hand-over-hand rope relay, that was a really simple thing.

It was just a rope stretched across the harbour.

And these guys were going across. And there was some of them,

I must admit, had a few pints before they did it.

And there was very few of them actually got right to the end.

That's a little time capsule.

A load of the people in it,

some of the young kids that were in the film,

in the fancy dress parades, they're grandmothers and grannies now.

Their children can look back on it and have a bit of a laugh.

I don't remember dressing up as a cowboy, not as a kid, anyway.

But I do remember the film being taken

and that had to be for one of the fancy dress parades.

Are you ready? Fire!

Think it's nice to share memories, I think,

and younger people to enjoy, you know, to see the older films.

I thought mine wouldn't be really interested but they all were.

The film that my father took,

I think he knew he was keeping a record of things

and it would be nice to look back on them some time in the future.

Looking back now though, I think it's incredibly important

that there's some kind of record of, you know,

days gone by and so on.

My memories are probably encapsulated in those few minutes

of films and in some of the still photographs that he took

but there was loads of things that happened at the time

that probably haven't been recorded, and it's just an awful shame

that we rely entirely on people's memories now

of what it actually was like then,

when we could have had a more permanent record of it.

But thanks to Alexander Black, Eddie Goodwin and Hugh Morris

we do have a permanent record, shared memories, good times,

and the sun always seemed to shine.

MUSIC: "Days Like This" by Van Morrison

# There'll be days like this

# When there's no-one complaining

# There'll be days like this

# Everything falls into place

# Like the flick of a switch

# Well my mama told me

# There'll be days like this

# Well you don't need to worry

# There'll be days like this

# When no-one's in a hurry

# There'll be days like this

# When you don't get betrayed

# By that old Judas kiss

# My mama told me

# There'll be days like this

# My mama told me

# There'll be days like this

# My mama told me

# There'll be days like this. #

APPLAUSE

-Who was the blond cowboy?

-That's me.

Bernard was the blond cowboy.

-Margaret, you were the one in the pram.

-I was, yes.

How did you react seeing yourself in the film?

It was nice to see it up on the big screen.

Some of them were saying they could see the resemblance

to the next generation, you know, from the baby photos.

-There were quite a lot of shots of you, Margaret, weren't there?

-Yeah.

First girl after three boys, I suppose I was a bit spoilt.

It was good that he captured stuff

that otherwise nobody would ever have seen,

because there were very few cine cameras and things

around in those days.

And as far as I know there's very few shots of Carnlough

in the area and people, other than maybe Eddie's stuff as well,

that has preserved all those memories.

And how do you feel about that? Are you glad he did it?

-I'm really glad he did it, yeah.

-Do you find the older you get

the more you appreciate that kind of film?

I think the older you get, the more lovingly you look at this stuff.

Well, I will never forget you as a cowboy.

-Thank you.

-I think you looked good, you were well dressed.

I'm glad you enjoyed it all.

-It was lovely to meet you. Thank you very much.

-ALL: Thank you.

And that's just about it for today.

but it's been fantastic to get a glimpse of Glenarm and Carnlough

as it was back in the '40s, '50s and '60s.

And it's also very reassuring to find out that this

magnificent part of the world has remained relatively unchanged.

It's peaceful, it's unspoiled and I tell you what, it's very welcoming.

So until the next time, from all of us, bye-bye.

Subtitles By Red Bee Media Ltd