Episode 3 Santer

Fair faa ye, and welcome to Santer.

Coming up on the programme,

Gibson Young meets Quinton Nelson

who's doing up a Cloughey Lifeboat decommissioned in the 1950s.

A lot of my friends ran this one boat, this wee boat here,

scooting out to the convoys and what hae you.

Jimmy Parke and his grand-daughter

bith hae a love for pigeons and for the Killyglen Accordion Band.

The band means everything to me. It just means everything to me.

When the band's going well, Jimmy's going well.

Mark Wilson arrives in Mabou on his musical trail in Nova Scotia.

The town's almost like a mecca for Nova Scotian music

and the shrine at the centre of it all is the Red Shoe Pub.

-And Young Farmers of Straid take up the Tractor Handlin' Challenge.

-The aim is that

the guys have to get the tractors round the course as fast as we can,

and we'll try and get a champion for Santer here today.

There's nae doubt there's been a lang-held tradition

in Scotland and here in Ulster

o' story-telling and balladry.

And it's great to see young musicians

still wanting to write their ain ballads. So to start us off,

here's Eilidh Patterson wi' Do I Ever Cross Your Mind?

# All the stars are out tonight

# The moon is hanging low

# Romance is in the air

# At this Willie Nelson show

# And everything is blue

# The stage, the lights, my heart

# And this feeling's nothing new

# Been there since we fell apart

# And I wonder where you are

# I wonder how you've been

# Is she all you hoped she'd be?

# Is she the sweetest thing?

# Do you ever think at all

# Of the one you left behind?

# Was I the only one to fall?

# Do I ever cross your mind?

# Blue eyes crying in the rain

# You were always on my mind

# Only remind me again

# Of the love I'll never find

# When underneath these stars

# I'm strengthened by the sounds

# Maybe I was just an angel

# Flying too close to the ground

# And I wonder where you are

# I wonder how you've been

# Is she all you hoped she'd be?

# Is she the sweetest thing?

# Do you ever think at all

# Of the one you left behind?

# Was I the only one to fall?

# Do I ever cross your mind?

# Was I the only one to fall?

# Do I ever cross your mind? #

In the Ards Peninsula,

there hae been many men down through the years

who hae wrocht on lifeboats.

Gibson Young's family is steeped in that tradition

and he has tracked down yin o' the boats his uncles wrocht on.

It's being done up by Quinton Nelson.

-Hello, Quinton. Blowy day, boy, isn't it?

-Fierce.

I knew this wee boat was in the vicinity, but I never knew where.

I don't think she ever left Northern Ireland. She was originally Cloughey.

We got her in Belfast. She was lying in the Lagan.

-The Lagan?

-A friend of mine bought her there and wants it restored.

So we brought her here, which was handy,

and we've been at it, the best part of three winters now, on and off.

I noticed in the stern, it says on it "Cloughey Life-boat, 1939/52."

That's right, yeah.

A lot of my friends in Portavogie, in Cloughey, were on this,

namely my Uncle Davy-John, my Uncle Bob

-and my Uncle Andy ran this one boat, this wee boat here...

-Yes.

Scooting out to the convoys and what hae you.

Nearly always at night too, in the dark, no lights.

-Hard men and real seamanship.

-That's right.

-Iron men in wooden boats.

-That's it.

How much of this is all original, Quinton?

What would be the new bits you put on?

You can see the join from the front. The darker wood is all the original

and the last three feet here was all missing,

it was completely cut away to have a wheelhouse set into it.

And the new owner deliberately doesn't want it

blended in away completely.

He wants it to be seen that it's had to be repaired.

So you haven't got to make so much of an effort to hide it all.

Quinton, how long have you been at this game?

At boats all my life,

but this came about because I have a lifeboat of my own

and I've been to a few organised rallies and what have you,

and people there liked the way mine looked

and sort of asked me would I have a go at theirs.

And we've now done three or four. There's two at the minute

and two away. One of them's on the Hudson River in New York.

We're trying to make it as original as possible.

This would've been there originally in beautifully cast bronze.

We've had to make it out of plastic

so it's just moulded plastic from an original.

Even these port-holes, we had to get these cast.

There's only one person in Northern Ireland can do it.

These are to replace ones that are missing.

The mast is the original mast.

We luckily got it from the guys who took it off the boat.

The lamp is the original lamp.

It's a Morse signalling lamp which was operated from the wheel here.

Lucky enough. To get stuff like this is impossible.

We're very, very fortunate.

You can see all around the boat, what look like seats -

up to a point they are seats,

but they were really designed to hold more of these buoyancy boxes,

all fitted in below the seats

to displace the water, so there was less water actually inside the boat.

Every one's made to fit somewhere in the boat. This is marked,

"6S for the Port Well", which is down in the back here.

You see the shape of the hull, it fits like so.

It's just a box and it was just filled with air,

put a plug in it, it was screwed and glued in

and that's how they were put in the boat.

The theory was, it would never sink.

-You'd literally have to break it up.

-Break the hull up?

Dozens of holes in the boat, as sometimes happened in rescues.

There were holes knocked in them everywhere.

The boat will not sink so long as the air boxes are OK.

You say you've been at this now about three year?

-Three winters, virtually.

-How long before you get her into the water?

-She's scheduled for launching...

-Sometime this year?

Yes, hopefully in about four months.

I'd love to see this thing at sea,

knowing the connection with my folks.

-Certainly. That's not a problem.

-It would make Andy and Lame-Andy

-and Stiff-back Andy brave and happy to see this yoke.

-A lot of Andys!

My name is Jimmy Parke.

I was originally born in Killyglen near Larne,

but I've lived in the Glynn this past 40-odd years.

I've kept pigeons most of my life, so I have

and then I started to race the pigeons, roughly about 17 years ago.

My granda has about 30-odd pigeons

and he goes every Saturday

to Lisburn

to fly them,

and they come back home.

Well, some of them do.

I've a great passion for my pigeons.

I really do like them.

But my first passion is the Killyglen Accordion Band.

BAND PLAYS

I'm in the band, my daughter's in it, and my two grand-daughters

and my grandson's in it.

Katie's like myself.

She wouldn't let a thing bate her, so she wouldnae.

She just keeps at the whole thing.

Katie's a very dedicated player.

She has been at the Northern Ireland Championships on numerous occasions

-and you won the thing twice, didn't you?

-Yeah.

She was the outright winner.

Well, Snowy up there is my favourite pigeon

because she was born on the day I was born.

She's going to race next Saturday for the first time.

ACCORDION BAND PLAYS

One night, we were up at Killyglen,

och, 40 years ago,

and there was two other fellas and myself standing talking about music

and one of the boys says to me, he says,

"Jimmy, what about starting a band?" I came hame and I thought about it

and I never was one for shrugging off a challenge.

And I said, "Right, I'll go for it."

We had our first,

if you want to call it, first band practice,

and about 40...41 musicians turned up

and from among all that lot there,

we only had one accordion, that's all we had.

And at this moment in time, we are the reigning British Champions.

The band means everything to me, so it does.

It just means everything to me.

When the band's going well, Jimmy's going well.

Throughout this series,

Mark Wilson has been following the trail of the fiddle style

that travelled out to Canada frae Scotland and Ulster.

He stays on that journey now in Cape Breton.

My musical journey, which started in Donegal,

and then brought me across the Atlantic to Canada,

to the port of Sydney in Cape Breton,

has now taken me further into Nova Scotia,

passing through towns such as Inverness and Aberdeen

as I head towards the Gulf of St Laurence and the town of Mabou.

Mabou, which means "the place where two rivers meet",

is home to so many of Nova Scotia's top musicians,

including the world-famous Rankin Family.

The town is almost like a mecca for Nova Scotian music

and the shrine at the centre of it all is the Red Shoe Pub.

And any time you walk through the door of the Red Shoe,

you'll always do so to the sound of the fiddle.

The Cape Breton fiddle style, with its marches, strathspeys and reels,

is most definitely of Scottish origin.

But the Cape Bretoners have developed a style of their own

which is much faster, much punchier,

more staccato, played at much higher tempos,

and without the delay on the first beat of the bar.

The other thing that's different

in Cape Breton music is the style of piano-playing.

FAST JAZZY PIANO MUSIC

I love talking about the Nova Scotia piano style.

I think, in my mind, it's very much still evolving.

I think it was something

that was meant to be an accompaniment instrument

and it was more in the background, I guess.

And more recently, it's become a little bit more in the forefront.

It's a little more action-packed,

it's meant to bring out the best of the fiddle tunes.

It's still much more chording

and a lot of bass runs.

That's kind of typical of Cape Breton styling.

It's never about performance.

It ends up being that way so that the world can see it

but we get to just do it in our natural setting.

It is what we choose to do for fun.

We, you know, on our weekends

or our weekends off from whatever we might be doing,

we would choose to do this, to get together and play tunes.

It's very much a give-give, win-win situation. We love it.

The Red Shoe Pub in Mabou is owned by the Rankin Sisters

from the famous Rankin musical family, who have for decades

been playing the Cape Breton music style all around the world.

Families here, big or small,

I think you see a pattern of families

trying to preserve the culture, the music, the dance,

so there is an effort to continue on with the culture.

I think in a good way it's evolving,

and I think you're seeing a lot more influence from Irish players

and Spanish players in the playing.

If you listen to the Beatons of Mabou,

they're still very true to the style of the coal-mines fiddle-playing

but in the younger players, you'll hear different influences.

Now I'm here in Nova Scotia, this place for me looks like home,

so I hope I'm back here at some stage.

Girls, thank you so much for your time.

-It's been an absolute treat for me.

-Thank you.

-And for us too. Thanks.

Straid is a wee village near Ballynure.

Frank McLernon paid it a visit

and met up with David Boyd and his nephew Alan

to find out a wee bit about its history.

So, Davy, you're a Straid man all your life?

-Yeah, born in the village.

-Born in the village.

Lived in it till the mid-'60s.

How close were you born to the village, Davy?

Right in the centre of it.

I was born and lived in the same house David was born and lived in,

-30 years before.

-Yeah.

-20 years before, whatever!

This would be one of the ouldest houses in the village here, would it?

This was Wilson's house and shop on the corner.

That was the local grocer's shop and Post Office

and farm supplies, feed merchants.

I think at one time they maybe even sold petrol.

-There's an old petrol pump inside that green door.

-A one-stop place?

A one-stop shop, aye.

-You see just up the trees there, Frank?

-Aye.

That's called The Plantin'.

In below that there, there was bauxite mines

away back in, I think, the late 1800s,

maybe as far into the early 1900s.

It was brought out along the bottom of the trees

and at the corner there, they used to tip it up.

That was called the Dippa up there.

-The Dippa?

-The Dippa Meeda.

-That was the Dippa Meeda up there.

-Right, right.

And then it was loaded there

into horses and carts

and taken to Ballynure and put onto the narrow-gauge railway

to go to Larne to the aluminium works.

Now, I know there's only the yin street in Straid,

but when I was doing a wee bit of research for the programme,

I heard o' a place called Gape Street.

Gape.

Gape? As in gaping out...?

-Gapin' oot the window.

-Right. Well, I don't know

cos we lived in the village at that time.

Maybe they were talking about us gaping out the window!

When I was a cub, we'd sit and gape out the window. I think you did too.

-Watched the lorries go up and down.

-Oh aye, see what's going by.

Oh, so it wasn't that you were nosy or anything.

-No, you just sat there.

-You'd nething else to do!

-We sat in the heat and looked out the window.

-You looked out?

Maybe that's why it was called Gape Street.

Yin of the things I uncovered about Straid was,

between Derry and Belfast,

youse had an unfortunate visitor deposited on youse.

Oh, the Turk?

-The Turk.

-The famous Turk.

It was up this road here, about a mile and a half,

was where they found the body.

I'd say it would've raised a quare whuid in the village, for that time?

Aye, it was... How long was it?

1930?

-1931.

-1931.

Obviously, everyone in Straid talks about the Turk.

When I was growing up, in school, I did a project on it

cos my mum and my dad told me the story of the Turk.

The story as I included in the project, that I'd been told,

is that he was part of the circus. They'd come from Turkey.

There was some dispute. By one means or another, he was killed.

That's where the body was dumped.

The odd thing, I suppose would have set the village's teeth on edge

was, he was found with nae clothes on except a blue and white bathing cap.

-Right.

-The body that killed him was an American.

-Right.

-So you had somebody frae the Middle East, frae Turkey,

somebody frae America,

-and the whole thing fell to a kibosh here in Straid.

-It all ended up here!

He done him and he was took to The Crum and he was hung.

-On the Crumlin Road?

-Oh, aye.

It was great to meet youse.

-And you, Frank. Thanks very much.

-Keep in touch.

If you were wi' us last time on Santer,

you'll hae seen Leslie Morrow taking a look at the film Us Boys.

The film was made in the 1990s

and it starred Leslie's twa uncles, Stuart and Ernie.

Sadly, they're nae longer wi' us

but the footage is still amazing.

This is a film about two uncles of mine.

My Uncle Stuart and Uncle Ernie,

a pair of characters in their ain right.

This'll be the Ernie boy getting a fire on.

Ernie liked to raise a bit of heat.

Ernie would open the stove

and thrown in a wheen o' sticks and a slap of coal.

If you thought that was enough, next thing he'd have a tin of red diesel

and that got horsed into the fire

and the flames would be roaring out round the stove and up into the air.

You wouldnae seen your finger in front of you for reek.

It's maybe no wonder them two boys were bachelors

for you wouldnae got a woman into that house to put up wi' that.

Maist farms round the countryside

had a grocery van pulled into the yard at night.

They had breid, biscuits and cigarettes

and whatever you need. Just a wee mobile shop.

The boy that come here come wile late at night.

Could be about 12 at night he's arriving.

Ernie goes out to him and they maybe swap him a wheen o' eggs

and Ernie'll get a wheen o' bits and pieces off him.

That boy'd hae had everything in that van

frae a battery to a loaf to mint imperials.

Aye, wee mints, Ernie?

Maybe you nae know?

-Oh, aye.

-That's a joke.

-Handy job, Ernie?

-That's a grand job.

-Thanks very much.

Oh, aye.

THUMP

Stuart has kind of disappeared out of the film at this stage

because he had been into hospital

and got some work done, and then they couldn't bring him back there.

So he went into a home for a wee while

and that sort of got him out of the house.

For a good while that chair was empty, and Ernie missed him.

He would be standing like that, sort of viewing the whole countryside

but he would try and avoid you seeing him like that.

You knew rightly he was just waiting

to get Stuart back into the house wi' him for a bit o' company.

They were like man and wife, the pair of them, nearly.

And I can still see the two boys sitting there.

It's easy enough to think about that.

Ernie was a great boy. If he was going somewhere,

he had to go and get cleaned up, you see.

So he always went to the sink over here at the window.

He'd have come over here to what he called the jawbox

and he just ran the tap into the jawbox until it was well full

and maybe a lot of hot water off a kettle there.

He'd heel it in, and he done his shaving wi' a car mirror.

He'd have held the car mirror up and been shaving away,

then he done this with the mirror,

looking out of the corner of his eye and then shaved a bit mair.

That went on until the finale of the thing was,

when the shaving was done, he put his heid down

and put the hands into the water

and next thing, there were a deluge of stuff flying up round his jaws

and if you'd been behind him, you'd have been absolutely drenched.

I stuck a 12-volt TV in for my Uncle Ernie

and, of course, it had to be run off a car battery

cos there was nae electric.

And this TV was a great job.

The first day or two, Ernie, he thought it was some touch,

but it soon got to be a chore. The battery was running done

and there was something on he wanted to see, so this is me coming,

yet again, wi' another battery charged up to get it onto the TV.

In fact, myself and my brother Adrian were absolutely tormented

charging batteries for Uncle Ernie.

It didnae take us long to work out what his favourite programme was.

No. It used to be a thing, it was a Saturday it was on.

-I cannae mind.

-You came up there

and it was tearing away, that Gladiators.

He liked the look of them big strong weemen.

He liked the weemen. He got wile upset

if the battery started to die in the middle of Gladiators!

It didn't matter what I came up to do or whether the cattle got fed or no,

I was sent straight back down to get the battery charged!

I had to take the battery out of my car one night

to let him see Gladiators!

'Difficult, but not impossible.'

Leslie and Adrian will be back

wi' a final selection of clips frae Us Boys

on next week's programme.

Earlier on, Frank was here in Straid

to find out a wee bit o' history aboot the place

and he chatted to David and Alan.

Wi' me is Alan, who's a member o' Straid Young Farmers' Club.

That's right. We thought we'd invite you back

cos we're going to run what we call our Tractor Challenge.

The aim is, the four guys down here and myself

get the tractors round the course as fast and as safely as we can

and we'll try and get a champion for Santer today.

Ready, steady, go!

So the winner of the first heat was Roger.

Ready, steady, go!

Young Farmers' Clubs, Alan, does everybody get involved?

-Is it a community thing?

-Totally, yeah.

Our club here's been going for 70 years now.

This year we've over 70 actual members. The youngest is 12

and myself, I'm getting a bit older.

Roger, that you saw taking part, is older again.

It's the kind of thing you don't get out of too early.

As long as you're enjoying it, you stick at it.

And the winner o' the second heat is Andrew.

Oh, Alan, I don't think you'll make the final wi' that!

Well, Roger and Andrew,

you're through tae...

I think we'll call it the final o' the Santer Tractor Challenge.

-Who do you think'll win?

-Oh, I think I'll have it.

I don't know, Roger. You've too many hours on the clock!

Ready, steady, go!

Very worthy champion, I think.

I don't know! I'm disappointed!

To finish the show this week, we're going tae go back to Canada

to hear some mair really guid music frae the Beaton Sisters,

but this time, they're bith playing the fiddle.

See you next time.

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