“A Ballymena boy come home at last”, reads the stone over the grave of Sam Gilmour, whose ashes were finally scattered among the remains of his family on Wednesday, more than 50 years after he left for Australia.
His son, Bob Gilmour, made the more than 17,500km journey from Tasmania to Co Antrim – via Milan, Italy – to honour his father’s wish to have his ashes scattered in his home place. He is to travel to Birmingham to do the same for his mother on Friday.
Gilmour and his family spent four days in limbo after Aer Lingus lost his bags – and with them the remains of his parents – en route from Milan, but was reunited with them three hours before the scheduled ceremony in Ballymena on Wednesday.
“Everything worked out really well,” he told The Irish Times. “The ceremony was very informal, just a small, family group. He was 88 when he died and was gone from Ireland a long time so there wouldn’t be many people here still alive who remember him.
“It’s a family grave where his mother and father, his sister and her husband, and other family members are buried. We scattered his ashes and said farewell.”
Although he would later return, Sam Gilmour initially left Ballymena at 18 years of age to join the Royal Air Force. It was 1943 and Britain was at war. He had completed his training as an engine fitter but was desperate to join the aircrew.
“The Air Force knew he was a mechanic, and they needed mechanics much more than they needed people to man machine guns or radios so he finished up in the Air Force as an airplane fitter,” Gilmour says.
“He worked on Lancasters and Spitfires, and that’s where he met my mum because she was a rigger.
“These days it’s all hydraulics, but in those days all the controls on an airplane were via steel cables that ran through the fuselage, through the wings and around pulleys. Keeping all that stuff going was a rigger’s job, so that was what my mum did.”
Sam and Marjorie fell in love and, after the war, they got married. They lived for a short time in Birmingham before returning to Ireland where Sam worked for a company called Associated Electrical Industries in Larne where he eventually became a foreman.
Although he left school at 14 and had no formal education, he was qualified in two trades and is described by Gilmour as having been “very intelligent”. He wanted more from his life but realised “that was as far as he was going to go”.
It was a duality. Anytime Ireland was in the news, it had an impact on him
So, in about 1965, Sam and Marjorie began exploring options to leave Ireland. They considered Canada and Australia before settling on the latter after Sam was offered a job with a hydroelectric power group in Tasmania.
“We left on the ferry from Larne to Stranraer on June 2nd, 1967,” recalls Gilmour. “My dad settled well. He was an Irishman. He had the gift of being able to talk to people. He was friendly, cheerful and outgoing. He made friends easily.”
But Sam’s links with Ireland were to endure. “I don’t know – I’m beginning to feel it myself – there is something about being Irish which is just a little bit special, and he was just never going to let go of that,” says Gilmour. “The ties were never severed.
“Australia is a migrant country. When you leave your own country, whatever stories are happening in that country, they go on. The people you know have babies, and they get married. People die. But you’re not there so you’re not part of that anymore.
“You’re not in that story. But, in the new place, you’re different. You don’t belong. You’re not part of the past. I think what happens to a lot of migrant people is you wind up with a foot in each camp but your soul is in neither one.
“For my mum, there was no question, if she had been given the chance to come home to Ireland or England she would have done it in a flash. For my dad, it was a case of, ‘I’d like to be there, but we’re better off here.’
“For him, it was a duality. Anytime Ireland was in the news, it had an impact on him. Obviously there was all the news of the Troubles and everything that was going on, and there was worry about what might happen to family that were still there.
“While my dad thought we were better off out of all that, part of him was going ‘that’s my country, I should be there’. He couldn’t quite ever let go of that and I don’t think in his heart he wanted to.”
