Liam O'Flynn played the “Minstrel Boy” on the uileann pipes at the opening of the service of thanksgiving for the life of David Hammond in St Finnian’s Church of Ireland parish church in east Belfast this afternoon - a familiar air that succinctly captured the spirit and nature of the film-maker, broadcaster, singer and song-collector.
From start to finish the service conducted by the Rev Noel Battye was as apt as it was at time emotional. Farewells were paid in uplifting music, poetry, prayer, reminiscence and song. That was hardly surprising because, as the minister told the congregation, David Hammond planned with him his funeral service in the months before his passing.
Just last Saturday, two days before his death, he asked for lines from WB Yeats to be added to the service booklet: “Think where man’s glory most begins and ends, And say my glory was I had such friends.”
That was fitting too because the church was thronged and overflowing with hundreds of his friends from many walks of life who joined with Eileen Hammond, and their children, Catherine, Fiona, Conor and Maryann to remember the artist.
The musicians who played for him on the altar were O Flynn, Nollaig Casey, Donal Lunney, Neil Martin, Matt Molloy, Arty McGlynn, Rod McVey and Jonathan Geoghegan.
Also there were his Field Day friends Brian Friel, Seamus Heaney and Tom Paulin, writers Michael and Edna Longley, Robert McLiam Wilson who is married to Mr Hammond’s daughter Maryann, Glenn Patterson, the actor Sean McGinley, singers Paul
Brady and Tommy Sands, the painter Basil Blackshaw, the former head of Channel 4 Sir Jeremy Isaacs who dubbed him a “poet of film”, and numerous more friends from the world arts world.
Also there were the Belfast lord mayor Tom Hartley and general friends and neighbours from Belfast, Donegal, Dublin and elsewhere including Johnny and Christine Boyle of the Highlands Hotel in Glenties in Donegal, one of his favourite haunts.
The funeral booklet also included Heaney’s poem, The Singer’s House, about Hammond’s holiday home in Gweebarra near Glenties, written in 1979 to encourage him to keep singing and to remind him of the importance of his art at a time when the troubles werr sucking the joy of song out of Hammond’s spirit.
Heaney in his address in the church said that it “would take a David to mourn a David; it would take the author of the psalms to give thanks for the life of this singer”.
The poet told many stories about his great friend and how at the Singer’s House in Dooey in Gweebarra he spent many happy days at the annual “David Hammond Summer School of Revelry and Rascality”.
Friend and senior BBC figure Pat Loughrey also recalled his humour and mischievous ways and convivial nights that went well past the dawns at his east Belfast home.
Another longstanding friend, the press ombudsman Professor John Horgan, spoke of his energy and hospitality, and the great legacy of the things “he did and wrote and said and made”. But, he added, his greatest legacy was “the lasting monument he left in the hearts of all his people”.
