DAVID HAMMOND:DAVID HAMMOND, who has died in Belfast in his 80th year, was once described by Jeremy Isaacs as "a poet of film", but film was only one of the mediums in which he revelled: radio, voice, guitar, song - these were also his chosen instruments.
Moreover, he deployed them with an apparent casualness that served only to disguise the depth of his knowledge, the sophistication of his art, and his distilled passion for authentic human experience.
David Hammond was born in Belfast on October 5th, 1928. His father, from Derry, was a tram driver and first World War navy veteran. His mother was from Antrim.
He was moved by the songs he heard at home to develop an all-consuming interest in the history, music and culture of his own and other countries.
He went to school at Methodist College in Belfast before qualifying as a teacher at Stranmillis College, where he met his wife Eileen, whom he married in 1952.
Thereafter he had a career of some 16 years at primary and secondary schools - notably at Orangefield in Belfast under its legendary headmaster John Malone. In these roles he demonstrated not only his skill as a communicator but his unwillingness to accept boundaries fashioned by others, especially in the complex and troubled circumstances of Northern Ireland.
He was a member of what is commonly called the North's majority tradition - except that, for him, there was really only one tradition, which embraced everything that he found worthwhile.
His voice - an unmistakeable sound, with a hint of the lilting tradition - could be warm, challenging or plangent by turns, and, together with his vast and growing collection of songs, meant that he was increasingly in demand, not only in Northern Ireland but abroad.
He was welcome in England and Scotland and, in 1956, got a scholarship to visit the United States where he met singers like Jean Ritchie and Tommy Makem, and was even interviewed on radio in Chicago by Studs Terkel. He made his first long-playing record, and collaborated with the then up and coming Clancy brothers.
Folklorists and musicians like Alan Lomax, Pete Seeger and Donal Lunny recognised in him a kindred spirit; friendships were formed, and endured.
In 1964 he joined the BBC's education department. Though based in Belfast, this department was in practice supervised from London and was therefore insulated from many local tensions - a boon to those members of its staff who were drawn from both of the North's communities.
Over the following two decades, he produced an important canon of work for radio and television as broadcasting became the medium through which he explored and expressed his passions. Radio programmes he made for schools had prosaic titles - like Today and Yesterday in Northern Ireland and Explorations - but nobody who heard them could be under any illusion about the calibre of their creator or the weight of experience they carried.
His BBC work was grounded, in the most elemental sense of that word, in the rich experience, history and art of the people among whom he lived. Moreover, it also excavated terrain that yielded treasures willingly to his skilled hands, notably the terrain of childhood and that of work.
As examples of these, he has left us Green Peas and Barley-O, a record of the street songs of children in Belfast, the record of the traditions embodied in his television documentary on the same subject, Dusty Bluebells.
Equally, his book Steel Chest, Nail in the Boot and the Barking Dog, memorialised - but without sentimentality - the life of the men who worked in the shipyard in Belfast. It was later the source for a documentary made for Channel 4 in 1986 which won the premier award at a Golden Harp television festival.
As well as his own work, he produced records celebrating other, equally rooted talents: Arty McGlynn's guitar, John Doherty's fiddle, Michael J Murphy's story-telling.
But the BBC could not contain him; probably nothing ever could. Even as he worked there, he was travelling widely, not least in a series of happenings sponsored by the Northern Ireland Arts Council in 1968 called Room to Rhyme. This tour, a collaboration between himself, Michael Longley and Séamus Heaney, was a missionary expedition which enraptured audiences in the smaller towns of Northern Ireland.
His solo performances, accompanied by Donal Lunny (and produced by the latter) were to be heard on The Singer's House, an LP which appeared in 1978. He inscribed a copy of it to a friend with a quotation from a letter from Charles Lamb to Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1802. It was evidently a precept he had taken to heart, and which he frequently enjoined on others.
"Think of what we might have become, if instead of being fed with stories, songs and old wives' fables, we had been crammed with geography and natural history."
He later became a director of Field Day, the radical theatre company established in 1980 by his friends Brian Friel and Stephen Rea.
Eventually, in 1983, he left the BBC. As a freelance documentary producer and director, and subsequently as the founder (in 1986) of Flying Fox Films, he continued to produce richly textured work for the networks, particularly for Channel 4.
Programmes like A Sense of Place and many others combined his feelings for the natural and built environment, for light and shade, for poetry and for people, in a range of luminous televisual essays that still have the capacity to evoke delight. Other films, such as those about Yehudi Menuhin, Stephane Grapelli and Brian Keenan rub shoulders in his repertoire with the series of six films entitled, Faces of Ulster. These were about weavers, farmers and Lambeg drummers, films celebrating the world and the work of the commonplace.
In the same period he acted as series editor on eight films for Channel 4 about different aspects of Irish Life. His multimedia output continued with the publication of Belfast, City of Song (with Maurice Leyden) in 1989. In the same year he also produced A Space for Dreaming, a television tribute to Prof Estyn Evans, which lamentably was not commissioned until after Evans's death.
In 1994 he received the Estyn Evans Award for his contribution to better mutual understanding within the communities of Northern Ireland. In 2003 his films and his life were celebrated at the Celtic Film Festival in Belfast, and BBC Northern Ireland commissioned from him a series of six short films. Collectively, they were entitled David Hammond's Ireland, an apt memorial to a fine talent.
In November of the same year, receiving an honorary doctorate from Dublin City University, Hammond made a short speech of acceptance and then - in a characteristic break with the orderliness with which such ceremonies are generally conducted - threw back his head and treated a delighted audience of newly conferred graduates to verses from My Lagan Love.
Jeremy Isaacs expressed something of Hammond's mercurial and perpetually replenished personality and skills when he asked an audience in 2004: "Did you ever see a television documentary whose maker, looking at you, broke into song, made you free of his bookshelves, walked you on seashore and mountainside . . . There is such a film-maker: David Hammond is his name."
Although Hammond was familiar with most corners of this island, there was one to which he was particularly attached - a little cottage in Dooey, Co Donegal, which could be reached across a beach only at low tide, and which in its own way embodied his own core characteristics: simplicity, authenticity, ruggedness, dúchas.
The welcome that greeted the visitor always engendered an additional element of pleasurable anticipation, in that one never knew who might walk in next.
He is survived by Eileen, and by their children Catherine, Fiona, Conor and Mary-Ann.
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David Hammond: born October 5th, 1928; died August 25th, 2008
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