At the beginning of March, dozens of wood pallets and tyres to be used in the summer’s bonfire festivities were dumped in the pathway of the Connswater Community Greenway – a new multimillion-pound project designed to regenerate this part of east Belfast by creating open public spaces.
On Wednesday, March 8th, a bridge stretching over the Connswater river was unveiled in the same spot. Named after east Belfast-born actor, director and writer James Ellis, you could be forgiven for viewing the scene as a clash of cultures.
Ellis was best known for his roles in the long-running BBC police drama Z Cars and as an archetypal Belfast hard man in Graham Reid’s Billy plays, but he had originally made his name in the theatre.
As director of productions for the Group Theatre, he was accosted in the centre of Belfast by one Sam Thompson, a brash and articulate painter and trade unionist who worked at Harland and Wolff shipyard. Brandishing his script like a weapon, Thompson threw Ellis the immortal line: “I have a play here you won’t touch with a bargepole.”
The play in question, Over the Bridge, depicts sectarianism in the shipyard and the stand of its protagonist Davy Mitchell against a mob who have ordered a Catholic to leave the workplace.
Though widespread in northern society always, sectarianism was not a subject the patrons of Ulster’s arts scene thought local audiences should worry about – their ultimate insinuation being, of course, that sectarianism did not really exist in the shipyards.
Ellis had already cast and publicised the play when the Group Theatre’s board elected to withdraw it a fortnight before its opening night in May 1959. Ellis and Thompson faced an establishment embodied by the Group’s chairman John Ritchie McKee – an estate agent and chief executive of the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (which Thompson swiftly renamed the Council for the Encouragement of the Migration of Artists). McKee was also a regional governor of the BBC and a golfing companion of unionist prime minister Lord Brookeborough.
Thompson sued the Group for breach of contract, receiving an out of court settlement, and with Ellis staged Over the Bridge at the Dublin-owned Empire Theatre in January 1960, where it was seen by 42,000 people over the course of six weeks.
Louis MacNeice attended the opening night, calling it “a red-letter day in the theatrical annals of Belfast” in a review for the Observer newspaper. It would go on to play in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Brighton and London, and has been revived ever since.
The Over the Bridge affair is also the subject of the short film Two Angry Men, directed by Ellis’s son Toto, which has just screened on the BBC and is currently touring the film festival circuit.
Shot in black and white and nicely performed by Adrian Dunbar, Conleth Hill and Michael Smiley among others, one thing it does not completely capture is the sheer bolshiness of the Thompson/Ellis combo. Both were fiery east Belfast men who tackled people they thought were out of order.
In the words of Martin Lynch, who adapted Over the Bridge on its 50th anniversary at Belfast’s Waterfront Hall, “They were two pugnacious shits and weren’t afraid of a fight”. To Eamonn McCann, their play was nothing less than “a kick in the backside, with love, for the Belfast proletariat”.
Those who talk about the arts being inconsequential must have missed the Over the Bridge controversy. It delivered a shattering blow to unionist censorship and was part of the momentum which finally unseated Brookeborough as leader of the Unionist Party and its connected post of Northern Ireland prime minister.
Supporters of the modernising Terence O’Neill pointed to the episode as evidence of the older man’s dwindling powers, using it to usher him towards the exit door. Dense layers of cronyism were uncovered for all to see, even if O’Neill returned the favour by setting out to smash the Northern Ireland Labour Party (NILP) when he took over.
Thompson was a card-carrying member of the NILP, shaking up its hierarchy and even running as the party’s South Down candidate in the October 1964 Westminster election.
He tangled publicly with O’Neill during the campaign and lost his deposit, but who knows anything at all about the victorious Unionist, Captain Lawrence Orr?
Aside from his work, Thompson also has an east Belfast bridge named after him which opened in April 2014.
Both Ellis and Thompson represent a once substantial, now largely forgotten Protestant culture: working-class and rooted in the Labour movement and literature.
Despite being able to look after himself, Ellis was well-educated and erudite, and while Thompson left school at 14, he too read widely as an autodidact and member of the Left Book Club.
There are different reasons for the decay of this culture, the chief being the constant identification of “Protestant culture” with the Orange Order by Unionist politicians and their wilful ignorance of any other.
Thompson laboured on in what he called the “Siberia of the arts”, delivering The Evangelist (1963) – driven by a powerhouse performance from Ray McAnally – and Cemented With Love, a television drama about electoral skulduggery. However, poor health caught up with him when he collapsed and died of a heart attack, more than symbolically, in the Waring Street offices of the Northern Ireland Labour Party on February 15th, 1965. Ellis too was essentially blacklisted and knew he would have to take his chances across the water, which was where the part of Bert Lynch in Z Cars came calling.
Northern Ireland is presently retreating to its favoured, polarised status quo. Yet those who have spent any time there know that movement happens outside the official political sphere. It occurs in community work, via the centres scattered along the interfaces, and it occurs culturally.
Sometimes these worlds combine. The bonfire debris has since been removed from the Connswater pathway following pressure from local residents, and the names of Sam Thompson and James Ellis live on in steel over the same river.
Connal Parr is a research fellow at Northumbria University. His first book on Ulster Protestant politics and culture is published by Oxford University Press in July 2017. Follow him on Twitter @ParrConnal
