A noted folklorist, poet, songwriter and architect, Padraic Gregory was also a passionate nationalist, Belfast city councillor and governor of the BBC in the north. His grandson, Patrick Gregory, is the driving force behind a new collection of Gregory's work
THE only real impressions I'd ever had of my grandfather were associated with images of him from long ago: some old photographs and one pen and charcoal drawing. The black-and-white photographs showed, variously, a diminutive Edwardian dandy dressed in wing collar and frock coat for his wedding day - or, a later one, an avuncular old man in a crumpled suit holding a cup and saucer in the sunshine of his back garden in Belfast, a matter of years before his death in 1962.
The drawing, by Norman Keene, still hangs in my hallway. In mock-heroic style, staring out in profile - we were presumably meant to imagine the tortured soul of the Keatsian poet. Anyway those images are about as close as I ever really got to my grandfather. I never knew him - he died nine months before I was born.
Sad, as I shared his name and grew up with elderly relatives telling me how I was his "spit", in how I looked or carried myself.
They joked that he'd never really gone away. It always felt slightly like unfinished business and in recent years I began to look back over his work: written both in old stone and in dusty books collected and passed down by my father. The stone was in the form of buildings in the north, a lot of them churches which people still use. But the books remained old volumes of verse issued by long-ago publishers in London, Dublin and the United States: verse written in an Ulster-Scots tradition; countrified language from towns and villages in Antrim and Down where my grandfather had first heard it at the turn of the last century. Padraic Gregory was born Patrick Bernard Gregory in Belfast in 1886. He emigrated to America with his parents when he was a small boy and he grew up first in New York and later Durango, Colorado. The railroad and silver mines of the latter had acted as magnets to floods of labourers over the decades at the end of the 19th century and had pulled in his father. What became of Gregory senior we don't know but Padraic ended up back in Belfast aged 12, initially brought up by aunts and finishing his education. He was apprenticed to Belfast engineer Thomas Pentland and then an architect JJ O'Shea before joining forces with Norman Hall to set up his first architect's practice in 1906.
Architecture, which was his day job and which paid his way in life. But the maelstrom of northern life at that time was spawning a new generation of writers and he threw himself into that with as much gusto as he reserved for the drawing board. He became a founding member of the Ulster Literary Theatre and began writing his own verse. His first collection, The Ulster Folk, appeared in April 1912, a month more associated in our minds with the loss of the Titanic and a year dominated by political events which would later divide Ireland. But this little volume was a glimpse of a pre-partition north of Ireland: simple stories of Ulster men and women, country ballads written in that Ulster-Scots tradition, celebrating the life and language as it existed then. The Ulster Folk was driven by Padraic's desire to capture some of the snippets of ballads and songs he'd heard told and sung. He wanted to keep them alive and commit them to print; but also to write his own stories in that same style. He wrote as he heard, as language was spoken and remembered by people in the country. In his preface to The Ulster Folk he explained his intentions: "In the country districts of Antrim and Down I have collected - during the past few years - the words and airs of many fine old folk-songs. "Besides these, I have obtained some fragments - the beginnings, endings, and odd verses of many other songs... "There are many of our old folk-songs worthy of being collected, properly patched, if absolutely necessary, and preserved..." The Ulster Folk was followed by six more volumes during and after the Great War, before the major work of his early career, Ulster Songs and Ballads (1920).
All the while, individual poems appeared in journals such as the Catholic Monthly and, of course, his beloved Irish News. He enjoyed a life-long relationship with this paper: one which had begun in the early 1900s with the novice poet submitting early offerings, and continued until the years before his death half a century later. It had long been Padraic's intention to have some of his work set to music to realise their full potential, to bring them to life. Songs duly came along in the 1920s and 1930s: first his little ditty Padraic The Fiddler written by John Larchet in Dublin and later his two volumes of Anglo-Irish Folk Songs with music by Charles Wood and 'the Bard of Belfast' Carl Hardebeck. He continued as an architect, later aided by his son Brian, designing churches around the north and ones in Belfast including the chapels at St Mary's Dominican Convent, The 'Little Flower' church in Somerton Road and his restoration and altar design of Belfast's oldest Catholic Church, St Mary's in Chapel Lane. His public life included spells as Belfast city councillor for the Falls ward in the late 1940s and as a governor of the BBC in Northern Ireland. But his writing and lecturing occupied the greater part of his time. My own journey with Padraic - and I am neither poet nor architect - has allowed me only a glimpse of the man. We are probably very different in our outlooks and personalities. But the time has made me want to help him finish that which he started: to help pass on to another generation in the north verse and songs and a tradition which he was interested in preserving. If I can give anyone interested in this field - academics, folk associations or ordinary readers -- a glimpse of that north and an opportunity to keep its language alive, I think, I hope, it will have been worth it.