When the Boat Comes In Those Were the Days

For more than half a century, the BBC have captured the changing face

of everyday life in Northern Ireland.

It all seems so innocent today.

But, without these moments,

something of who we are now would be lost forever.

These are the archives and those were the days.

It's completely invaluable, to look back at film,

because they take us back,

take us back to another time.

Memories are never buried with us.

Money will disappear.

But a good memory will never die.

I think what those films do show you is, sometimes change is evolutionary.

But sometimes there is a huge leap.

Whether it was a good thing or a bad thing,

those films tell us we have lived in interesting times.

Northern Ireland's enchanting expanse of coastline, lakes

and rivers has long called us to sea and shore.

# This is the captain of your ship

# Your heart speaking... #

From the North Atlantic's relentless surf shaping the Causeway coast

to skilful fishermen and amateur anglers capturing its very bounty,

these waterways have flowed through our soul,

sustaining our lifestyles, leisure time and livelihoods.

# You're going to lose a good thing... #

We live on an island. We're surrounded by water.

And no-one is more than an hour from the sea in Northern Ireland.

It's central to all our heritage.

We tend to focus,

when we talk about heritage,

we tend to look at the land.

The sea is as important, if not more important.

# ..You know that you love me now

# This is the captain of your ship Your soul calling... #

I think it's a tremendous part of our history and heritage.

We all have to travel across the sea to get anywhere.

The Vikings came in ships.

The Normans came in ships.

The planters came in ships.

So that's our heritage.

# You've got your signals crossed and now the compass points to love... #

At the very heart of our relationship with the sea was

the buoyant port of Belfast,

at its height, one of the biggest and busiest in the world.

And, towering high above the city,

were the giant cranes of our most successful industry.

The mighty shipyard.

# Hey nonny ding dong Alang alang alang

# Boom ba doh Ba-doom ba-doom, ba-day

# Oh, life could be a dream if I could take you up in paradise... #

There were something like 20,000 men, maybe more, at one time,

at Harland and Wolff's.

An awful lot of families depended on it.

Not just in the shipyard, but the peripheral industries.

The roadworks.

The carpentry.

The supply side of things.

A lot, a lot of people in Northern Ireland depended on

the huge success that Harland and Wolff was at that time.

The growth in shipping after the war,

replacing war-damaged tonnage,

meant there was a boom time.

All the major shipping companies were building new ships.

And they supplied not only to Belfast,

but all the other major shipbuilding sites around the UK.

# If I could take you up in paradise up above... #

Belfast was flying the flag,

building some of the world's biggest and most luxurious ocean liners.

And, in 1954, crowds braved the elements to watch the Queen become

the first reigning monarch to launch a passenger ship.

I name this ship Southern Cross.

May God protect her and all who sail in her.

As the ocean liner glided gracefully into Belfast Lough,

the men involved in its construction could look on with justifiable

pride at their nautical achievement.

# Every time I look at you Something is on my mind... #

And this is a means of constructing a notion of identity.

And the shipyard was absolutely crucial to that.

And so you have the Queen launching the ship.

And you have this pomp and circumstance.

And pointing out that the whole of that geographic area

is dependent on the shipyard.

And it's a great celebration when a ship is launched, in some ways.

The Southern Cross was a novel design of a ship.

When Shaw Savill ordered the ship originally,

they were thinking in terms of a conventional passenger liner.

But the design team at Harland and Wolff's persuaded them that

the engines aft idea would be much better for them,

because it would give more space on board the ship for the passengers.

The Southern Cross had been designed to transport emigrants

to a new life in Australia.

Inside, passengers enjoyed such extravagances as

air conditioning and hot and cold running water.

Three swimming pools, and a magnificent two-deck-high cinema,

made this a voyage to remember.

In that particular film about shipbuilding, I think there were

two things that they could not possibly have predicted.

One was the rapidity with which technology would change.

They could not possibly have predicted that,

over the next 40 years,

the shift in technology would be such that

shipbuilding would become almost obsolete, apart from leisure

and large-scale container storage and movement.

The other thing was that we were at the tail end of colonialism.

And probably people still believed that Britain,

and hence Ulster, ruled the waves.

And there was no awareness that the Asian countries were

developing an economy which would not only rival but probably

overtake us in that manufacturing sector because of prices and so on.

And this huge irony - the last shot is taken from the air.

And, of course, air would completely supersede.

It's one of the reasons why the shipyard is the way it is now,

because travel changes.

But there was no sense that that was going to happen.

There still was a firm belief that, in some ways,

shipbuilding would be at the heart of Ulster for years to come.

While shipbuilding suffered a demise that forever changed

Belfast's industrial landscape,

generations of hardy trawlermen continued to ply the seas

in search of their daily catch.

# Come with me My love

# To the sea The sea of love... #

Through the years, this precarious, yet vital,

skill had been handed down from father to son.

And during the Second World War, young hands and old heads

ensured delivery of the sea's rich bounty.

A lot of the guys all went away to the Merchant Navy

and served during the war.

And us young lads were coming up then, you know, 16.

And we started with older men that were skippers,

that was left on the boats.

And we learned a lot, us young lads there, off the old men.

After the war, people were hungry.

The rationing carried on for

a good while after the war, you know.

It just didn't end with the war.

And there was plenty of fish in the sea.

But at that time we were working mostly in Kilkeel.

And onto the fishing, boy, was I sick!

In the first year or so I was on the boats,

I was on the way out but I stuck it out and I worked myself up, then.

# How much I love you... #

And it was to the County Down town of Kilkeel

that the BBC cameras arrived in 1970

to catch the enduring tradition

of these herring fishermen.

This was the story of a community built around the harbour,

and whose prosperity relied upon the net profit.

We leave early in the morning, depending, of course,

on the distance we've got to go.

When we do a day's work,

we like to start at daybreak in the morning, just as the dawn's breaking.

Our little boats, our wooden boats, they're wonderful things, you know.

They're likened many times to a lifeboat.

A steel vessel doesn't rise and fall in the motion, the same as a wooden vessel does.

So, by and large, we go over the top of everything.

Well, in the first place, the boat was familiar

and the skipper was a very good pal of mine.

We chummed about together for years.

Gilbert Cousins was his name and the boat was the Jeanette.

We go to fish where we think the fish are.

And usually we find that out by means of...by contact with wireless.

One vessel usually tells the other where he's been the day before

and what catch he had during that day.

Every time you were shooting your net,

you were always waiting on the net coming up to see what was in it.

I don't know. Something gets into your blood.

When we were young, we used to go hunting rabbits.

The same thing. The hunt.

The hunt.

The money was necessary but it was the hunt that was the attraction.

It wasn't the money.

When you've got a good haul of fish, you're all smiles.

You seen a big bag of fish coming.

It's a great sight.

Top of the Pops.

You're dead on.

If your enemy was to fish first,

and they would wink at one another, or put a match in their mouth..

..no matter how great you were with a fish bar, she was your enemy.

But there was many a time that we'd come back with very little.

But what could you do?

As long as you're living and going to get a bit of dinner.

That was always about it.

The cruel sea is a theatre of conflict that's

not for the faint-hearted.

For these fishermen, the constant battle with this unforgiving

force of nature is all in a day's work.

Lives are risked, and sometimes lost, in pursuit of their haul.

And even the perfect storm is something to be revered.

# Well, that'll be the day

# When you say goodbye

# Yes, that'll be the day When you make me cry... #

And that was something that you learned very early on in life.

You always respect the sea.

But you get to know your boat,

the same as anything else.

You get to know what she can stand up to and what she won't stand up to.

I actually enjoyed storms.

There was a sense of excitement in them, you know.

# Well, that'll be the day When you say goodbye... #

You liked the excitement and it was a challenge.

People like challenges, you know.

They're still doing it.

You know, going to the North Pole and things like that.

So there was a certain challenge, in it, you know.

For every trawlerman,

the day dawns when the physical demands of the job weigh too heavy

and, sadly, they reach the end of the line.

And, although retirement means a life of shore leave,

their hearts and souls remain forever at sea.

There's a part of you gone

when you retire.

But in your mind all the time, it's fishing.

And the thing about fishermen, all the crew that are with us

passed on and you'd have a lot of boys gone.

If you're born and bred a fisherman, it's in you.

And that's all your thoughts about it.

So that's life.

I've two grandsons and they have small boats.

They're out there fishing.

And I was out with one of them here this year, mackerel fishing.

He says, "You want to come out, Grandad?"

I said, "Aye, yes, I would love to."

So I just felt 100 years younger than I am!

It was that great to get out there.

And it just felt great out in the boat somewhere, you know.

Back on calmer waters, in 1972,

BBC Northern Ireland embarked on

a voyage of discovery which took

viewers around Lough Erne and into the history of our waterways.

And our lakeland guide was a rising poet who would make waves

that would resonate around the world,

Seamus Heaney.

Christian missionaries landed in Ireland in the fifth century

and moved inland, challenging the power of the druids.

They toppled statues like the one on Bow and buried them underground.

It turned men's minds from the Earth to the heavens.

They startled the nature gods and put them to flight.

From then on, God's power was to be seen in the high cross,

as well as in the growing tree.

It must have been one of the very early television essays.

It's a very meditative piece.

I think Heaney's script is absolutely beautiful.

Pure poetry.

There's a lot of it in voice-over.

But we see Seamus walking. We see travelling shots.

But a lot of it is kind of internal.

After a while, you realise that it's in a different kind of rhythm

and you're caught, you're beguiled by this.

You're drawn into this world.

When you take a boat out on the Erne waters, you voyage into time.

Populations come and go.

The Lough goes on forever.

It's hypnotic, I found, to a degree,

both in terms of the script, but also when we think of the pictures,

the beautiful pictures of reeds and rushes and water and reflection

and low light and a boat and walking.

There's a kind of rhythm that's set up there.

You let the pictures tell the story.

And when you have the pictures telling the story,

and a very beautiful story,

and you have a poet guiding you with

sparse, rural, Celtic,

all of those things that he blends to make...

It's like a patchwork of tweed,

when you look at a brown piece of tweed and you notice,

when you look closer, there are little flashes of blue or green or gold.

That's what that programme is like.

In Fermanagh, and particularly Lough Erne,

it was a highway of the country.

The Shannon and the Erne were the highways.

The way people could travel, and the only way they could travel safely,

was on the water.

And whether you were a Viking or a Celt,

it didn't matter.

It was on the water

you had to do it.

And that's why Lough Erne is full of monasteries.

From the fifth century right through to the 11th and 12th,

and Augustinians, Franciscans, later Dominicans,

the actual spirituality bubbles from the spring as Heaney says,

a spring that bubbled up in a magical wave to form Lough Erne.

And what better symbol of life than water bubbling,

baptism and cleansing, and purification, and all of that?

And there is that spirituality in Fermanagh that is nowhere else.

You can still look the old gods in the face.

They stare at you among the graves and bushes.

They watch you in silence.

They want to speak to you of their power.

The film is multi-layered, like any good piece of art.

We have Heaney making the physical journey to Bow Island, to Devenish.

And analogous, and running parallel with that physical journey,

there's the journey through the history of Ireland,

going back to saints and scholars.

The hard landscape, as well, and the bitter winters out there

that have shaped the humans that populate the film.

Fermanagh has a very mystic psyche.

It has the remnants of the pagan.

It has the Christian. It has...

It's almost like going somewhere like Egypt where, at every turn,

you fall over another bit of pyramid or old god of some kind.

And it's an extraordinary place

and just a place that, quite often, we take a bit for granted.

Seamus Heaney's spiritual voyage was carefully crafted to be

a beacon of hope during one of the darkest times in our recent history.

Viewers were crossing from the turbulent present

into a poetic past.

I can only imagine, in 1972 when this film was made,

how difficult times were.

Bombs going off all the time.

The news reports, you know.

It was a form, really, of entertainment, this film,

that was an escape from that dreadful, dreadful world

40 years ago.

And I would imagine that anybody who looked at that would have had...

It would have been as good as a spiritual retreat for them,

in the midst of violence and trouble

and anxiety

and wondering about this wee war that had become a big war.

Put that in the context of millions of years of spirituality,

that long before Christ came, God was still talking through nature.

The islands lie like stepping stones in the long river of our past.

Wherever you look, or walk, or sail, somebody has been there before you.

You can take the pulse of Ulster's history in the slap of

waves against the boat.

Heaney makes that wonderful point about, you know,

the history slapping itself against the boat and, you see,

you can do it for rural Ireland and Lough Erne.

You can do it for fishing in Lough Neagh.

You can do it for shipbuilding in Belfast.

It's the slap of the water against the boat,

from the Titanic to Lough Erne,

and from Lough Erne back to the cots of the Vikings.

It's that water that is our heritage, that must be kept pure,

that must be maintained.

It's a magnificent piece that only a poet can,

with his sparse language, fully explain.

Five years later, another local shoreline was charted

by BBC Northern Ireland's cameras.

Beneath the surface of Strangford Lough flourished an as-yet

unfathomed microcosm of marine life.

# To rock the boat Don't rock the boat, baby

# Rock the boat Don't tip the boat over... #

And the underwater endeavours of divers from the Ulster Museum's

marine biology unit were to reveal a whole new world aquatic.

# Ever since our voyage of love began... #

Below the water could be the surface of the planet Mars because people

don't put their heads underwater

to look and see what's there.

They look at what's on land.

They look at what's in the air.

But put a barrier of an air-water interface in and...

it's foreign!

People don't know...

We wanted to convince people there was something important down there.

It was 1977. That was underwater conservation year.

And we thought this was a good time to make the first underwater

film in the British Isles.

Up till then, there had been lots of other films.

There had been Cousteau in the tropics.

There had been Hans Hass swimming in crystal-clear water with Lotte.

But no-one had, up to then,

attempted to do anything in our rather more murky waters.

We thought it was a good idea.

We convinced the BBC and, hey presto!

# Rock the boat Don't tip the boat over

# Rock the boat Don't rock the boat, baby

# Rock the boat... #

We're providing a background for a possible

conservation effort in Strangford Lough.

Now, by conserving the incredible variety we have in Strangford Lough,

I think we're getting very close to preserving the national heritage.

Team leader Dave Erwin was joined on his marine mission

by a group of expert divers, including 21-year-old

Queens University biology student Eileen Kelly.

The Lough is a very special feature of the Northern Ireland coast.

Because of the massive

amount of tidal movement,

both in and out of the Lough,

it means that it's absolutely

teeming with, essentially, food for the animals living in the Lough.

Up until our diving work, there was a certain

amount of knowledge of the Lough, but not a lot.

What we were trying to find is precisely what was there,

trying to understand the systems that were operating.

And that's what we achieved.

We found a unique system in Strangford Lough which was second to none,

not found anywhere else on the planet.

People assume that you have to go to really warm,

clear waters to see anything,

whereas the waters round our coast are so rich and teeming with life.

I mean, you don't come across huge fish and sharks and things.

But just lots and lots of fascinating plants and animals.

People think corals are only found in tropical reefs

but soft corals are evident here.

There's anemones, which are beautiful things.

Move into the mud, you have things like nephrops, which are,

if you like, scampi on the hoof.

In those days we're talking not about things that you would imagine seeing on a plate this length.

We're talking about things of this length.

They're literally like small lobsters.

Beautiful!

As well as filming new life underwater,

the cameras also captured life above the waves at the

marine biology station in Portaferry.

After a hard day's dive,

the team needed to wash that lough right out of their hair!

I remember giving a talk on one occasion to a group of people

somewhere who asked me the question, "Do all biologists have beards?"

I think that there was a sort of slight fashion amongst people,

the David Bellamy look, perhaps.

But I don't think it was conscious.

It was subconscious.

Back in the 1970s, it may have been unusual to find a young woman

in a team of marine biologists.

But Eileen Kelly played a leading role in this underwater adventure

and pioneered the way for future female scuba divers.

I suppose maybe it shows how things have changed.

I mean, diving now, you know, you go to any diving club

and it's all pretty much 50-50, men and women.

In those days it was a very male-dominated sport

and there were definitely much more men than women in it.

I mean, I was always a very strong swimmer,

always a very strong part of a team so, as far as I was concerned,

I was just, you know, a part of the team like anyone else.

As is fairly obvious in some parts of the film,

she did probably more than her share of the work.

She, at times, to try to prove that she was one of the boys,

ended up carrying more stuff, lifting more stuff, working harder.

I mean, in some ways, they probably would've preferred to

maybe have a bloke, rather than having a girl come along.

So, I mean, I was the perfect choice.

They didn't have anybody as good as me.

So they just had to put up with the fact that I was a girl!

It was an adventure.

A lot of the places that we were looking at, no-one else had looked.

We were discovering things, almost on a daily basis, for the first time.

It was an exciting, wonderful way of life.

Today, as the team reflects on the submerged world

they encountered all those years ago,

they are reminded of a time when the Lough was teeming with life.

This natural aquarium harboured the North Atlantic's aquatic treasure.

But only a carefully protected future can ensure its survival.

In those days, the good old days,

when we first were looking there,

Strangford was second to nowhere.

There were communities of animals there that were found nowhere else.

Sadly, since then, through fishing pressure largely, they've been lost

and the whole place has been degraded.

Strangford is still special but it's not as special as it was then.

Clearly, it's a super place to dive.

It's a super place to sail.

It's a super place to carry out all kind of watersports.

And it's hard to get that balance between, you know, us enjoying

the facility and yet not interfering too much with the environment and

making sure that that very special habitat is protected for the future.

The story of our life on water, from Lough Erne to the Irish Sea,

is also the story of how we used to live.

And, thanks to a rich archive and the magic of film,

we can still bring those bygone days back to life.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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