How well do you know your mum or dad? Enough to write their life story?
My mum was Bridie Gallagher. She was best known as The Girl from Donegal and acknowledged as Ireland's first truly international pop star. Over a 50-year career she sang at sell-out concerts everywhere from small halls across Ireland to the London Palladium, Royal Albert Hall, the Lincoln Centre in New York and Sydney Opera House. She is credited with bringing glamour to show business in 1950s Ireland, giving new life to forgotten Irish ballads, and selling millions of records.
Her rise to fame in the mid-1950s was marked by enormous crowds wherever she appeared, winning the hearts of legions of fans in Ireland and overseas. She was one of the few Irish singers at that time who travelled internationally to entertain Irish people, and in one memorable show at London’s Albert Hall in 1959, mounted police had to hold back fans blocking the surrounding streets.
But she wasn’t only a successful showbiz personality. She was my mum – Mrs Bridie Livingstone (Gallagher was her maiden and stage name). While much of her career had been chronicled in newspapers over the years, her private life, especially as a mother, grandmother, wife and friend had not been the subject of public record.
She died on January 9th, 2012 and her funeral was covered extensively in the media. Within weeks, as her only surviving son and, according to many, the only person who knew her well enough, I found myself under pressure to write a book on her life story. But I had never written a book before. As a civil servant of 35 years, and a qualified psychologist, I had written academic papers, government policy papers and ministers’ speeches. A biography, however, especially about my own mother, presented a very different challenge.
I faced many quandaries. Should I just write a chronicle of events? How could I make it readable, and not sound like a ministerial press release? How far should I delve into her private life? And how could I ensure it was honest, objective and interesting, assuming some might suspect me as having a less than impartial perspective on the subject?
Having decided to tackle the challenge, my first step was to “go back to school”. I enrolled in a creative writing class in Belfast and, under the expert guidance of two brilliant tutors, was shown how to write all over again. I learned about structure, style, plot and language. I read other biographies by great writers, and set about researching material. This included Mum’s personal diaries, mountains of press cuttings, hundreds of photographs, as well as interviews I conducted with Mum’s old school pals, relations, showbiz friends, and even early boyfriends.
I quickly found myself on a voyage of discovery. I thought I knew all about her, being close to her to the end. Then, day by day, I learned more and more about this fascinating woman. It was relatively easy to detail the successes achieved in her career, the impact she had on expatriate Irish around the world, and the extraordinary people she met on her travels, like Pat Boone and Ginger Rodgers. I understood less about the difficulties she faced in show business and her personal life and how she coped with them. I experienced first-hand the personal tragedies that befell her – a failed marriage (which she hid from the public for many years) and loss of her 21-year-old son, Peter, in a motorbike accident in 1976. I also unearthed things I never knew, or more precisely, things she never told me. Perhaps they were too painful to share even with me.
Gradually the book took shape. I decided the first half would chronicle her life from the beginning to end. Starting with her childhood, near Creeslough in Co Donegal, in a large Catholic family, her early penchant for singing, her love of camogie, her first romances and heartbreak, and her eventual move to Belfast to work as a housekeeper for a wealthy family. Then her first steps on the professional stage in Belfast, falling in love with the Protestant boy, Bob Livingstone, who became her husband, and evolving into the most popular Irish ballad singer with a meteoric rise to fame culminating in her show at the London Palladium in 1959. The tours of her own variety show across Britain and Ireland (often with hilarious fun and frolics), frequent visits to America, Australia and even Africa, all made for an extraordinary career, before finally closing 50 years later in August 2000.
The second half of the book would focus on particular aspects of her career and life – her musical influences, the aspects of showbiz she hated, the chronic depression that afflicted the last 40 years of her life, as well as her private world of oil painting, cooking and her beloved grandchildren, all contributing to the legacy she left behind for all.
All of this required striking a delicate balance. I wanted to write an interesting and accurate story to give a true understanding of Bridie as a person. At the same time I was not prepared to divulge every last gory detail about her or, for that matter, others in her life, which might hurt people. So I decided I would not perform an autopsy, but rather write the story of a real person that was credible, insightful and honest, even if I found some of it painful. In other words, neither overly sanitised, nor brutally sensational. How well this balance has been achieved in the book, and for that matter, how well it is written, is for others to judge. For me, as the author, it’s been a truly emotional but deeply satisfying process of discovery and learning.
I wonder now would Bridie, who made famous A Mother’s Love’s a Blessing, bless her son’s efforts? My advice to others is, don’t leave it too late to know your mother’s story.
[ Bridie Gallagher – The Girl from Donegal is published by The Collins Press,Opens in new window ]
