My first indication that Belfast had a possessive fondness for its writers was when my father, pushing me through a turnstile into a football match one Saturday afternoon in a welter of duncher caps, pointed to a man dressed like the rest and said, "That's Sam Thompson. That's our Sam."
Thompson's marvellous play Over The Bridge had been performed recently on television. Why, I often wonder, has no one thought, in the midst of a virtual storm of writing from and about Ulster, to revive it?
Belfast writers
Belfast has cradled many excellent novelists and playwrights, some of whom may be in danger of being overshadowed by the younger, and in many instances less talented, crop borne upwards on the tide of "Troubles" writing. The novelist Forrest Reid, born near Queen's University in 1875, is commemorated by a plaque, unveiled in the early 1950s at 13 Ormiston Crescent in the city. The novelist Michael McLaverty was headmaster for a time at St Thomas's Intermediate School. The poet John Hewitt worked at the Ulster Museum and Art Gallery in Stranmillis Road. These and other writers are well served in the poet Robert Greacen's volume Rooted in Ulster (Lagan Press). Greacen himself, though a Derry man by birth, lived for some young years in Belfast.
It is apt, then, that he should be on the sub-committee charged with organising a tribute to Belfast's other literary Sam who, like Thompson, was also a trade union activist.
Sam McAughtry, writer and broadcaster, will be honoured by the Irish Writers' Union next Thursday, September 27th, at 6 p.m., at Dublin's James Joyce Centre, for his dedicated work on behalf of Irish literature.
My first encounter with Sam McAughtry was learning of his publication of The Sinking of the Kenbane Head, a harrowing story of loss at sea. Some years later I brought him to read on the factory floor in Galway as part of an embryonic writers-in-factories programme I had started and which, alas, died too soon. Sam's dulcet Belfast tones are most familiar to devotees of RT╔ Radio's Sunday Miscellany, to which he has contributed on more than 200 occasions.
RAF navigator
Born in loyalist North Belfast, he joined the RAF as a navigator in the second World War. The war came to his home town in the form of a couple of blitzes which left many dead and cut St Anne's Cathedral in half, more or less. For years, a defused bomb sat on a memorial plinth in the park at Shaw's Bridge. My own father was in the belly of beefy Sunderland flying-boats during the war, up to his oxters in foul water down at Short Brothers' aircraft factory.
Obviously, the RAF was seduced by Sam's navigational charms, for it recalled him in 1951 and catapulted him out to do that little bit extra in the Korean War. So he's no dozer, as they say back where he comes from.
When the scrapping ended, Sam worked as a civil servant and press correspondent. A trade union activist since the early 1960s, he received a gold gong for his work in 1974. Chairman of the Peace Train organisation and award-winning Irish Times columnist, member of the Seanad, recipient of an honorary doctorate of laws from the National University of Ireland, Maynooth - there isn't much this Belfast man hasn't achieved, and next week's event will recognise some part of it all.
The president of Maynooth, Prof W. J. Smyth, will provide a spoken tribute on the night. Others doing likewise include Chris Hudson MBE, the novelist Morgan Llywelyn, Prof Brian Walker of the Northern Ireland Arts Council and Anne Tannahill of Belfast's Blackstaff Press - who, if me memory hasn't failed me utterly, published The Sinking of the Kenbane Head all those years ago.
Writers' Centre
Tickets for the bash cost £10 for Irish Writers' Union members and £15 for non-unionists. No tickets available at the door. They can be obtained from The Writers' Centre, 19 Parnell Square, Dublin 1 (telephone 01-8721302 and ask for Katherine Moore). Early booking is advisable, given the enormous circle of friends within and without the literary and trades union worlds who will be eager to shake the hand of that rara avis of Irish letters, a writer engagΘ with worker politics.
Further information can be had also from the poet and broadcaster Gerry McDonnell, at 01-4907833, another member of the Writers' Union organising sub-committee with a Belfast connection. His Mud Island Elegy, a book of poems recalling Dublin's old Jewish community, has just been published by Belfast's Lapwing Press.