Episode 6 Santer

Hello and welcome to the last in this series of Santer.

On this, the last programme of the series,

Wilson Burgess solves the mystery surrounding a concrete structure

on the flow road in Londonderry.

What it isn't is what it looks like.

It looks like a garage inspection ramp.

Emma McDowell and Craig Lutton play together for the first time

in our musical challenge.

I think he's a bit enthusiastic,

we might have to cool him down a wee bit, but we'll get him.

I'll just follow what you do - you're the pro.

Mark Wilson reaches his journey's end in Dunedin.

Now this guy came from Ballyroney in County Down.

He would be, I would say, in my judgment,

the greatest Ulsterman to come to New Zealand - and there's been a few.

And Liam Logan chats to Noreen Hill about growing up in Islandmagee.

You'll be going on one before long.

Do you think I have a bit too much beef on me? I think you have, eh?

But first, music from Ballymena Young Conquerors Flute Band.

SHE SINGS IN ITALIAN

Well, Noreen, I wasn't reared in Islandmagee, but you were. Aye.

And what was it like growing up on a farm here? Oh, it was great.

It was great, them days, great summers and bad winters,

that's what it was all about.

Hard work, plenty of it.

Spuds to gather every summer.

The gathering of the spuds is wild hard work. Wild hard on your back, that's right.

And did you ever get any pay? Aye, you got fed.

HE LAUGHS That was your pay in them days.

And did the girls do as much work as the boys?

Oh, aye, nae choice. Everybody had to work then.

And did you do a wee bit extra inside?

No, I didn't want to be inside. You didn't want to be in the house,

you wanted to be out. So you done nae cooking?

No, I still cannae cook - so the weans tells me anyway.

And what about baking?

I like baking now, that's one thing I do like doing.

And did you ever make the yellow meal bread?

No. What about soda? Before my time, that was maybe about your era.

Aye, you're not wrong! Everything's a low-carb, high-protein diet now.

That's right, aye, aye. You'll be going on one before long.

Do you think I have a bit too much beef on me?

I think you have, eh?!

HE LAUGHS

Well, Noreen, I know you have a big interest

in the history of Islandmagee. That's right, aye.

I hae plenty of books but I just never get the time to read them.

Well, we are joined here by Stephen O'Direain, who has actually writ

one of the books - Islandmagee and Templecorran - A Postcard History.

Stephen, what inspired you to write the book?

I met Francie McHugh, whose postcard collection has been

used in that book, and I thought, well, this is a place where

the demography is changing rapidly, new people are coming into the area.

But it's also a place where the older generation

- for example, Maimie, Noreen's mother -

were dying off or leaving,

and all their stories were being forgotten.

So one of the objectives of the book was to capture their stories,

to put them in a historical context of Ireland,

and also to provide an identity for people moving into the area.

There would be a history here of sailors coming from Islandmagee?

A tremendous history, there was hardly a family on the island

that didn't have a member that was either a captain

or first mate or an able-bodied seaman on each of the merchant ships,

the schooners, the barques that sailed out of Larne Lough.

And they're found all over the world. And one time, for example,

Jack London, in his book Strength Of The Strong,

talks about the sailors from Islandmagee,

a Captain McIlra, probably fictional but nonetheless based on fact,

where he talks about a letter home to his wife,

complaining about the kind of life they have.

"Me managing in all seas and weather and perils of the deep,

"a ship worth ?50,000, with cargoes of times worth 50,000 more,

"and me with all the responsibility of getting

"a screw of ?20 a month and damn the risk."

Now that language that he's using there, Noreen,

it hasn't changed an awful lot in a hundred years.

No, it hasnae, in my eyes anyway.

SHE LAUGHS

And would they be complaining men from Islandmagee?

Aye, I would say they were. Men complain anyway,

no matter where they're from.

That's all I can tell you! Stephen... Heartfelt thoughts!

Now, we're talking about a lot of history but, of course, Noreen,

you hae your own wee bit of history with the local school?

That's right. And we're going to meet with your wee son, Tommy-Joe.

What's that you hae in your hand, son?

Well, this is the school register from 2006.

I was in P1 and here's my name, Tommy-Joe Hill.

And I was the youngest boy in the school at that time.

And then here's another one from when my brother

was in the school. He was in the school

at the same time, John-James Hill.

He was the oldest in the school at the same time

that I was the youngest.

Noreen, that was a very historic moment for you there.

Oh, it was, very historical, yes.

But he's following in the footsteps of...

His dad, his granda and his great-granda.

His great-granda started in 1910.

1910! Aye, he started this school about that year, aye.

You hardly mind 1910? No, but you would!

HE LAUGHS

Is she always as sharp with her tongue, Tommy-Joe? Yeah.

We'll join Mark Wilson now for the last time, as he finds out

more fascinating history about the migration

of the Ulster-Scots to New Zealand.

I'm now on the last leg of my New Zealand journey,

and I'm travelling down the east coast towards

the "Edinburgh of the South", towards the city of Dunedin.

Liam Kernahan is a Highland Piper born and bred in Dunedin.

He spends his New Zealand summers playing with

their Grade One champions - Canterbury, from Christchurch.

But then, in New Zealand winter, which is of course our summer,

he travels to Scotland to compete

with the Boghall and Bathgate Pipe Band.

For me that was a really good opportunity,

because you can play in New Zealand and you can get really, really good here,

but if you want to test your skills,

you've got to do it over there against the best in the business.

And with Boghall, you actually did come over and test it

against the best in the business, over in Northern Ireland

against our own Field Marshal at the European Championships at Stormont.

Absolutely. So, I arrived the Monday before Belfast,

and I sort of had a pretty quick initiation into the band

and getting the MSR's and things like that for Belfast.

And we arrived and managed to win the title on the day,

which was huge for me, because it is a dream you have as a kid

when you start playing - to be able to play up at that level.

So to be able to go and take it from Field Marshal,

who are a phenomenal band, was something really, really special

and I won't forget it ever.

They got their own back on you a couple of weeks later at the worlds

when they won the World Championships,

but you kind of turned round and said,

"Hey, guys, that wasn't a fluke" at Cowal Championships in Dunoon.

To take it against the world champions again was something special,

and there's not many bands that get to win two majors in a year,

and there's not many Kiwis that get that opportunity,

so I was just ecstatic, over the moon.

Dunedin was established in 1848 specifically to be

a Scottish Free Church settlement.

The founder's preference was to have Scottish settlers

ministered only by Scottish preachers.

However, that didn't prevent one Ulsterman making his mark.

That was Reverend Rutherford Waddell,

pictured here at the pulpit of what was St Andrew's Church in Dunedin.

This guy came from Ballyroney in County Down.

Ballyroney, just the other side of Banbridge, the town I'm from.

He wanted to be a Presbyterian missionary to Syria

but he was rejected as unsuitable for the job.

He then tried out for a ministerial post at Six Road Ends.

near where you're from too, would it? Yes, that's back in Ulster as well. OK.

So he had a trial sermon, and it was brilliant,

but the congregation thought it was too good.

They were a bit suspicious.

They thought he was knocking-off Spurgeon,

whose published sermons were widely available.

He wasn't. He'd never heard of Spurgeon,

never read any of his work. He was just a really good preacher.

But they rejected him. So, like many failed people

in the homeland at that time, he opted to come to New Zealand

for a second chance, and he was brought out here by

the Canterbury people in Christchurch,

and he started his ministerial career up there.

But he came and filled in here in 1879, I think it was, late 1870s,

when they were short of a minister and had sent home to Scotland.

They wanted the real McCoy, from Scotland, that's where you get the best ministers.

They thought they'd get the best Presbyterian minister from Scotland? They get this Irish guy,

"He'll do for a month. He's just filling-in." But the first sermon, they thought,

"Hang on a minute - here's the boy, this is what we want.

"Cancel the order to Scotland, we'll have this man."

So he stayed here for the rest of his career.

But eventually they built a church here, and away it went.

But it became a very interesting area.

This area was actually called The Devil's Half-Acre

and it was a place to be avoided -

drug dens, brothels, you know, drunkards,

hotels galore, fighting, you know. It wasn't a good place to be.

So he's sitting right on the edge of it,

but he's not looking down his nose at it.

He investigated the working conditions of people

in his parish, who were really struggling

and having to work long hours for minimum wages.

And he preached a famous sermon here in 1888 - "The Sin of Cheapness."

He pointed the finger at people in his congregation who were

wealthy Presbyterian employers of labour,

exploiting these poor women who were living all round here in poverty.

And from that, all sorts of things happened. It's a long story

but the end result was that working conditions in New Zealand

became regulated by acts of Parliament to contain the length of work,

the conditions in which people worked - it was a real revolution.

And it led to New Zealand being seen as a social laboratory for this world.

And you can really shoot a lot of that home to this man,

and that's a wonderful contribution, which is kind of overlooked now,

he's sort of forgotten about, but in his time,

he was a real giant, I think.

One of the difficulties with Rutherford Waddell was

he abhorred biography. He didn't want people writing about him

after he died, so he destroyed all his personal papers.

So all the scholars in New Zealand who should be

talking about this guy - there should be biographies galore -

there's nothing to work with.

So he's sort of been forgotten about,

because he would be, I would say, in my judgment,

the greatest Ulsterman to come to New Zealand, and there's been a few.

MARK LAUGHS

There certainly has been a few, in fact,

many thousands of Ulster-Scots came here looking for a new life.

And I have found the history of that migration fascinating.

And of course, I've also enjoyed getting

a few wee rattles on the drum.

Gibson, do you ever watch thon Great British Bake Off?

Oh, that's that programme about plastic surgery, isn't it?

No, it's nothing to do with plastic surgery!

It's baking in the English sense,

with an oven and flour and eggs and yeast.

Oh, you mean cooking-baking? I thought you meant "bake" as your face.

That's the Ulster-Scots word - it means your face.

Your bake, that's your neb and your een and your mooth and that.

If you happen to come home from the pub, and you had more drink

on you than you should hae, the wife might beat the bake off you.

Or slap the bake off you!

And if you wanted somebody to shut up,

you would ask them politely... "Shut your bake."

THEY LAUGH

The Pride of Ballinran Flute Band from Kilkeel play their music

with Miller Wicks flutes.

That's hardly surprising, considering that three of their members actually

mak' the flutes in a wee workshop at the back of one of their houses.

Us three have come through the ranks of the band.

I formed the band in 1980, and Kenneth and Paul

have been in the band a number of years.

In the mid-eighties, we made contact with a flute manufacturer

in London called Miller Wicks.

The Miller Wicks

- there was John Wicks and John Miller -

were coming to retirement age.

And the comment was passed that we would love to continue

the tradition of making the Miller Wicks flutes.

So I jumped on a lorry, made my way down to Romford in Essex,

and this workshop that John Wicks

had was down at the bottom of a garden.

And there was a tear in John's eyes when he seen these machines leaving.

We had all the machinery set up, and we now had to start making flutes,

which we hadn't a clue how to do.

We persuaded John Wicks to come over to Kilkeel, and John spent

five weeks in Kilkeel learning Paul and ourselves how to make flutes.

This is our finished B-flat flute, and this is the timber that we use.

It's an African blackwood.

This timber is used because of its density,

and the Wicks company has used this from the very start.

FLUTE MUSIC CONTINUES

The technical side isn't with me, it's with Paul and Kenneth.

We want to make sure that the bore is smooth and there's no

defects inside it. And that's very good, I'm very happy with that.

Kenny's assembling this flute at the minute now,

and whenever we brought the company to Northern Ireland here,

these men actually made these pillars,

and you can see the size of them.

How small they are, and the tread and all that's on them.

We bring them in, we buy them now. We couldn't do that.

Although we're not making these pillars and stuff here now,

there's still a lot of work involved in putting these keys on,

and there's no way of getting round without doing it by hand.

And it's just a slow process, and there's great satisfaction

whenever you get it all together and just...

..hopefully, it should be playing then.

And because we love playing a flute so much, I get to try it out.

The band is playing the Miller Wicks flutes and we are

making them from scratch in Kilkeel. It's a great achievement.

Like a small, three boys from Northern Ireland making

quality flutes that come from London?

Sure, anybody would be proud.

If you're oot and aboot across the province,

you might well come across some old buildings or concrete structures

and wonder what they used to be.

Well, more often than not they'll have been connected to the

Second World War, as Wilson Burgess found out near Londonderry.

Boys, we're just walking along this old flow road here,

and it's a real cold old day, but one of the things that I noticed here,

and maybe you two men could fill me in about it,

is this building out here in the middle of this field.

What it isn't is what it looks like.

It looks like a garage inspection ramp.

It's actually a radar site, and it's there since the Second World War.

Over in the next field behind the greenery there, we have the gun site,

which had four heavy anti-aircraft guns, plus the command post,

and a little bit further down, the ammunitions storage.

And then behind us, over here,

was the actual camp that the soldiers were billeted in.

Well, I'm ignorant in these things, but with the radar site

and the gun site combined,

were they getting information from each other, how did that work?

Well, the radar site provided information to the guns.

It was subject to an awful lot of interference,

and if you were living here at that time or walking along this road

at that time, there would have been a very strange sight.

That was not a green field. Why?

Because the entire field was covered with chicken wire

raised above the level of the ground that you can see here.

That wasn't unique, it wasn't just here.

Right across the United Kingdom on all these anti-aircraft gun sites,

to try to get a cleaner picture on the radar, somebody came up with the

bright idea that you could create a flat surface around the radar.

And that was done by buying up all the chicken wire

in the United Kingdom, 3,500 miles of stay wire,

and heaven alone knows how many

hundreds of thousands of paling posts.

I would wonder what the chickens did with all this wire

when it was all bought up for this war effort,

were they running free or what was going on there?

Well, I don't think they actually requisitioned the wire that

was already keeping chickens in, but anybody who was looking for

new chicken wire for a chicken run, really was going to have to wait.

Bill, I cannae leave you out of this conversation.

You were a local lad here.

As a wean you were running up and down these roads here

when the army was about this place,

it must have been exciting. It was very exciting.

We would have been stopped, talking to the sentry over the road here,

and he would have been having a wee chat with us

and got to know our names and one thing and another.

Do you remember the chicken wire? I remember we wondered what it was for a good while

when we saw them putting it up here, you know. You didn't think the army

was going to rear chickens or anything like that?

Definitely not, because they wouldn't have stayed in it.

Was it effective, this defence?

Was there any bombing went on in Londonderry at that time?

Well, there were actually two raids.

People remember one of them, because the first one in April 1941,

Easter Tuesday night, there were 14 people killed in Messines Park.

Houses demolished and literally well over 100,

nearly 200 houses badly damaged.

The second raid that I mentioned,

nobody in the town knows about it because they missed completely,

they actually dropped their bombs on a hillside

outside Malin in Donegal, which is about 20-odd miles away.

We lived about a mile and a half from here and the people all headed

out of the town, and they ended up in our house for shelter,

and then when I went outside, the barn was full of people too, so it was.

Well, after this, boys, anybody that's running up and down

the flow road will know what exactly this is,

and I just want to say thank you very much

for all the information you have given us today.

Emma McDowell, who plays with Cullybackey,

is one of the youngest Grade One female Highland Pipers in Ulster

but she had never played the Lowland Pipes.

OFF-KEY SKIRL

All right, go again then.

Craig Lutton is a percussionist with Kellswater Flute Band

and the Lightning Drum Corps, but he had never played the bodhran.

I think the Indians are coming over the hill here. MAN LAUGHS

John Wayne riding up the mountain.

But both were willing to take us up on our challenge

to learn these instruments to a standard

guid eneuch to play in public at an Ulster-Scots session.

Now they play together for the first time,

two or three hours before that session.

I feel pretty good, I'm really looking forward to this, this is

going to be something different

and I think we've both come a long way, so we have.

I'm looking forward to it too.

It's a lot different than playing in a band, like a pipe band,

so I really enjoy doing it.

I just think it's a big experience for me.

I might keep at it, you know, just keep on doing it, it's good.

Just watch you don't go high, OK?

A wee bit more pressure on you, a wee bit more tense, you'll put more

pressure on the bag and you'll send the chanter a wee bit sharper, OK?

I think he's a bit enthusiastic,

we might have to cool him down a wee bit, but we'll get him!

I'll just follow what you do, you're the pro.

'Every lesson's been great craic with Gino,

'it's a whole new ball game from day one, getting a new drum'

that I haven't even touched before, you know.

I never thought I would come to a day

I would find something else I haven't played. It's been great.

Breathe, don't forget to breathe. I know, I'm trying.

You just have to watch the nerves so it doesn't lift in tempo,

so always think slow.

Always think slow, because it will be faster.

I'm looking forward to it,

like, just getting along with other instruments and stuff.

It's going to be good.

Well, let's see now just how good,

as Craig and Emma are joined by other musicians

to play us out on this, the last show of the series.

We hope to see you again shortly. Cheerio.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

Hello. Well, it's a mainly dry night coming up

but a chilly one as well with perhaps the odd pocket of ground frost.

Then tomorrow it's a mainly dry day.

Probably not huge amounts of sunshine.

Cloud will start to spill in from the south

through the course of the day, but apart from the odd spot of rain,

as I say, it's dry and there should be a few bright spells.

Make the most of it by Friday, with heavy rain on the way

and an early warning has been issued once again.