Life
1909-1990 [bapt. Samuel]; b. 16 Oct., Glasgow; son of Glasgow Herald
journalist James Bell (b.1870-1918), himself of Ulster parents from Killyglen,
who married Jane McCreay McIlveen in Raffrey 1906, returning with her
to Scotland; family moved to Greenock, and then returned to Raffrey, nr.
Crossgar, Strangford Lough [var. Mahee Island], on death of father; mother
moved to Belfast and occupied part of house of uncle at India St., where
she lived by sewing and taking paying guests, 1921; patchy education incl.
Belfast Art School; various menial jobs incl. watchmen, labourer, potato
grader; lab technician, and booking-clerk with Canadian Steamship &
Railway Co.; first stories accepted for BBC Children’s Hour; ‘Summer
Loanen’ accepted by Seán O’Faolain of The Bell,
1941, followed by ‘This We Shall Maintain’ in 1942, led to publication
of a first collection, Summer Loanen (1943); shared flat at 8 Wellington
Place, Belfast with Bob Davidson; fnd. Lagan with John Boyd and
Davidson, 1943; contrib. Ulster Now, ed. by the Campbells, and
Robert Greacen’s Anthology of Ulster Writing (1944); submitted
to BBC as test piece “Their Country’s Pride”, featuring
migration from rural regions to the city, and appointed to permanent post
as senior Features Producer at BBC Northern Ireland Region, 1945 (retired
1969), initially through good offices of Louis MacNeice; m. Midred Reside,
1946; a son Fergus b. 1949; “The Microphone in the Country”
(1949); his Ulster broadcasting incl. “Fairy Faith” (1952),
“The Saints and the Storytellers” (1953), and “Talking
Around the Hearth” (1961); programmes on William Allingham (by Roy
McFadden), William Carleton (by Bendict Kiely), and stories of Sam Thompson,
1956-58; also an account of George Farquhar (28 Aug. 1951), a history
of the stage-Irishman (28 Nov. 1951), the Ulster Group Theatre (9 Dec.
1965), the Ulster Literary Theatre (25 Nov. 1954); ed. with Nesca Robb
The Arts in Ulster (1951); issued Erin’s Orange Lily (1956),
on folk customs and folklore of the ‘nine counties’ of Ulster;
Within Our Province (1972), planned as part of “It’s
An Old Ulster Custom” [series], and incl. a paeon to the Shipyard
men as ‘giants’; moved to King’s Road, Knock, East Belfast,
1953; established the archives of folklore and folk music; broadcast some
folk tales, BBC; ed. literary section of Ulster Tatler; wrote December
Bride (1951), dealing with Sarah Gomartin, a young woman ‘married’
to the two Echlin brothers, son of Andrew, owner of a farm at Rathard.
nr. Killeagh, where she and her mother are employed, and featuring the
Rev. Sorleyson; a Hardyesque novel with an epigraph from Hardy, but reputedly
based on a comic story of his mother’s family which he was persuaded
to write by Seán O’Faolain; bigamous plot somewhat resembles
the story of Martha and Esther in St. John Ervine’s Mrs. Martin’s
Man (1914); successfully filmed by Thaddeus O’Sullivan (1990),
though too late for Bell to see it; issued The Hollow Ball (1961),
a novel set in the Depression, and centred on David Minnis of Ormeau Rd.
and Glenba[n]k United Football Club, who quits his obdurately religious
mother and his girlfriend in order to become a footballer in England with
Maitland Park, turning hard and selfish; the novel also features Bonar
Law, a socialist who joins the IRA and is killed; issued A Man Flourishing
(1973), a novel linked to December Bride by the family name Echlin
but dealing with the period of the 1798 Rebellion and the story of Hugh
Gault, who begins as a theological student but joins the United Irishmen,
escapes the reprisals, and finally turns businessman in illustration of
the Presbyterian reversion to conventional life after the abortive Rebellion
amid ‘shrivelled and relinquished liberties’; Across the
Narrow Sea (1987), a ‘romance’ about the plantation, dealing
with the career of Neil Gilchrist, a failed lawyer, representing the conscience
of the novel, who travels to Ireland with McIlveens, going to rent from
planter lord Kenneth Echlin at Ravara in 1608; after surveying the rights
and wrongs of the plantation, it ends with Neil’s elopement to Scotland
with Anne Echlin; d. at his home in Knock. DIW DIL MAX DUB OCIL
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Works
Novels, December Bride (London: Dennis Dobson 1951),
299pp.; Do., new edn. (Belfast: Blackstaff 1974; rep. [1982] 1990),
299pp., Do., rep. edn. (Edinburgh: Mainstream 1990) [infra];
The Hollow Ball (London: Cassell 1961; Belfast: Blackstaff 1990),
Do., rep edn. (Belfast: Blackstaff 1990) 256pp.; A Man Flourishing
(London: Gollancz 1973), 255pp., Do., rep. edn. (Belfast: Blackstaff
1986); Across the Narrow Sea: A Romance (Blackstaff 1987), 299pp.
Short fiction, Summer Loanen and Other Stories (Newcastle, Co. Down: Mourne Press 1943), 85pp. [ten stories, “Summer Loanen”; “Always Raise Yur Hat to a Hearse”; “Two Blades of Grass”; “The Broken Tree”; “Thursday Nights”; “A Fish Without Chips”; “This We Shall Maintain”; “Dark Tenement”; “Old Clay, New Earth”].
Miscellaneous, Erin’s Orange Lily: Ulster Customs and Folklore (London: Dennis Dobson 1956), 144pp. [infra]; The Theatre in Ulster: A Survey of the Dramatic Movement in Ulster from 1902 until the Present Day (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1972); ed. with Nesca A. Robb and John Hewitt, The Arts in Ulster: A Symposium (London: Harrap 1951), 173pp.; ed. Within Our Province: A Miscellany of Ulster Writing (Belfast: Blackstaff 1972), 131pp.(1972). Numerous articles incl. ‘The Poetry of Joseph Campbell’, Lagan, No. 3 [1945], pp.67-73.
Reprint Editions, Erin’s Orange Lily [1956], Summer Loanen [1943] and Other Stories [facs. of Dobson 1956 edn.] (Belfast: Blackstaff 1996), 224pp. [0 85640589 2].
Erin’s Orange Lily: Ulster Customs and Folklore (London: Dennis Dobson 1956), 144pp. [ded. ‘For my son Fergus’]. CONTENTS, Foreword [7]; To Chap the Lambeg [11]; Roaming the Fields on Boxing Day [27]; “I work Down the Island” [37]; The Way to Catch Mountain Dew [50]; Respect to Good Neighbours [69]; Dancing at the Feis [100]; Give us a Bar [113]; To Crack the Hearth [124]. Illustrations incl. painting by William Conor (Chp. 1); engraving by George Cruikshank frm W. H. Maxwell’s Wild Sports of the West (Chap. 2); George Petrie’s engraving of Long Bridge, Belfast (Chap. III); another from Alfred Barnard, Whiskey Distilleries of the United Kingdom, 1887 (Chap. IV); drawing from Thackeray’s Irish Sketchbook (Chap. VI); others from S. C. Hall, Sketches of Irish Character (Chaps. V and IX); and Mr. & Mrs. Hall, Ireland, Its Scenery and Character (Chaps. VII and VIII). [See under Quotations, infra.]
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Criticism
Douglas Carson, ‘The Antiphon, the Banderol, and the Hollow
Ball: Sam Hanna Bell, 1909-1990’, Irish Review (Autumn 1990),
c.p.96; Douglas Carson, ‘A Kist o’ Whistles’, in Radical
Ulsters: Three Northern Writers on the Side of the Outsider in Irish society
and Culture: Sam Hana Bell, Peadar O’Donnell, and Joseph Tomelty,
Supplement with Fortnight, 290 (Jan. 1991) [incl. also Patricia
Craig, ‘Out of the hands of zealots’, p.4]; Edna Longley, ‘A
barbarous nook’, review of A Man Flourishing, rep. in The
Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland (Belfast: Bloodaxe
1994), c.p.101; Sophie King, ‘A Salute from the Banderol’: Sam
Hanna Bell’s Contribution to Ulster’s Cultural Life’, Bill
Lazenblatt, ed., Writing Ulster [‘Northern Narratives’],
No. 6 (1999), pp.1-12; Sean McMahon, Sam Hanna Bell: A Biography
(Belfast: Blackstaff 1999), 238pp.
See also J. W. Foster, Forces and Themes in Ulster Fiction (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1974), and Sean McMahon, ‘The Realist Novel after the Second World War’, in The Genius of Irish Prose, ed. Augustine Martin (1985), 145-154; Robert Greacen, Rooted in Ulster: Nine Northern Writers (Belfast: Lagan Press 2001), 130pp.
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Notes
Desmond Clarke, Ireland in Fiction, Part 2 (Cork:
Royal Carbery 1985), lists Summer Loanen and Other Stories (Newcastle:
Mourne Press 1943), 85pp. [set in Lecale, Co. Down and Belfast; migration
to city and other themes, incl. furtive evening with prostitute]; December
Bride (London: Dobson 1951), 299pp.; [set at Strangford Lough; Sarah
becomes mistress of two brothers]; no listing for A Man Flourishing.
Frank Ormsby, ed., Northern Windows, an Anthology of Ulster Autobiography (Belfast: Blackstaff 1987), contains extract from Erin’s Orange Lily (1956) at pp.134-37.
Blackstaff Catalogue (1986): A Man Flourishing, James
Gault, young divinity student, deserts studies to join United Irishmen;
never reaches stricken field at Ballynahinch; hunted man; flees home and
sweetheart Kate Purdie, travels to Belfast, finds refuge with sinister
Doctor Bannon of Legge’s Lane, merchandise and crime broker; passage
after months of hiding to America, where revolutionary ardour is disappearing
before rising prosperity; his commercial skills and worldly ambition grow;
marries Kate; his bourgeois world rocked by blackmail and murder.
Blackstaff Catalogue (1986): Across the Narrow Sea, Neil Gilchrist, failed law student and son of feckless Scots laird, going to try his luck at James I’s court in London meets MacIlveens, peasant family fleeing persecution and sails from Portpatrick to Donaghadee; travel together to Ravara, estate of Kenneth Echlin, Undertaker, in Co. Down; MacIlveens’s rented holding raided by native Irish; Neil employed as arborist to chart woodlands of Ravara; MacIlveens intermarry with neighbours; Neil defends old crone Rushin Coatie against witchcraft charges; faces villainous Lachie Dubh with a rapier; falls in love with Anne Echlin; shown the road that leads back to the Narrow Sea.
Robert Greacen, Brief Encounters (1991), writes that Sam [Hanna Bell] shared a flat with Bob Davidson in Wellington park in Belfast [and had] still a remnant of Scots accent for he had been born of Irish emigrant parents in Glasgow where his father worked as a journalist; worked for the Canadian Steamship Co. in their Belfast offices and during the War years he was in Civil Defence; encouragement from Sean O’Faolain; through the good offices of Louis MacNeice [got] a permanent job in the BBC in N. Ireland; ed. literary section of Ulster Tatler; commuted Belfast-Notting Hill Gate and later Belfast-Ballsbridge. (pp.17-19).
Maurice Craig, reviewing Sean MacMahon, Sam Hanna Bell (1999), writes that he worked at the BBC during 1932-46 [sic] under 'the bleak regime of George Marshall who saw it as his mission in life to give aid and comfort to the Unionist establishment' (Books Ireland, Sept. 2000).
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)