Obituary: David Hammond

Sep 1 2008 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

IF YOU could see his face again, white hair fluffing under a woollen cap, an unflinching stare, firm nose and jaw, the quizzically smiling lips, from which some fine ballads of loss and love had broken on those foaming nights, you would know that his country had needed him.

Of course, he had been born by the natural, biological process, but had that not been possible, would he have been left under a stone?

By the mean measure of biographical listings, he was a writer, singer, broadcaster, film-maker, storyteller and teacher. Above those things, he was an Irishman, whose going prompted Seamus Heaney, the poet, to say, “He was a great Ulsterman and a great Irishman, a man of rare energy and truly original – a man who was part of a whole generation of original spirits.

He was one of the transformers in Irish life . . . he added to the quality of life.”

After an education at the Methodist College, Belfast, and Stranmillis College, this son of a tram driver taught at Orangefield Secondary School, in east Belfast, where he introduced one of his pupils, a certain Van Morrison, to the charm of traditional music.

Hammond’s own voice, described by Healey as “the winnowing climb and attack” carried him into folk music, and he would later meet many others with a love of melody and sentiment, including the Americans, Jean Ritchie, Pete Seeger and Alan Lomax, as well as those closer to home – the Dubliners, the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem.

Hammond was not just that familiar Irish “broth of a boy”. In 1964, he joined the education department of the Northern Ireland BBC, introducing the culture of his land to pupils and teachers, through poetry, song and legend.

The intellectual tone was suffused with passion and this would continue when he formed Flying Fox Films in 1986, producing documentaries, including Beyond the Troubles, made in 1994 with the Beirut hostage, Brian Keenan; and the award-winner about the Belfast shipyards, Steel Chest, Nail in the Boot and the Barking Dog (1987). Earlier, he had made the charming Dusty Bluebells, a commemorative celebration of the disappearing Belfast street games, rhymes and songs.

The quality of these works led Jeremy Isaacs, the TV executive and broadcaster, to describe Hammond, married with three children, as a “poet of film”.

David Hammond, film-maker,born October 5, 1928;died August 25, 2008.