There may, at first appearance, seem little connection between W.F. Marshall, “The Bard of Tyrone”, and the American novelist John Steinbeck. But they share a common bond: both had their literary manuscripts mauled by a dog, writes PAUL CLEMENTS.
The Rev William Forbes, or Bill Marshall, who died 50 years ago today on January 27th, 1959, spent most of his life as a Presbyterian minister in Castlerock, Co Derry. But he is best known for his ballads reflecting the life and speech of his native Tyrone. Born on May 8th, 1888 – appropriately enough, in the townland of Derebard – he was brought up in Sixmilecross,where his father was a schoolmaster.
The subjects that featured in Marshall’s poetry were the people and places that he knew well. He often turned humorous stories into vignettes and cameos. He wrote about the hills, valleys, glens, roads and rivers as well as the placenames reflected in the lilt of “Tyrone Jigs”:
There’s Cavanamara and
dark Derrymeen,
There’s Carrickatane and
Munderrydoe,
With Strawletterdallan and
Cavankilgreen
All dancing a jig with
Cregganconroe.
Marshall was a recognised authority on Ulster dialects and accents. As a scholar of local speech, he carried out pioneering work writing a series of talks entitled Ulster Speaks, which was broadcast and published in a pamphlet by the BBC in 1935. In this he suggested that, difficult though it might seem to believe, but a Tyrone labourer talks the way that courtiers and kings used to talk:
“When a Fintona man says he ‘be to be away somewhere’, don’t forget that he’s only saying something that Shakespeare has said before him. When a Limavady man tells you that he ‘heered a fella spaykin on the wireless’, please remember that the famous Dr Johnson said that ‘heered’ was the right way to say ‘heard’, that an 18th-century poet like Pope believed that ‘fella was the right way to say ‘fellow’ and that neither of the two would have dreamt of pronouncing the final ‘g’ in a word like speaking. Both of them would have said spaykin.
For Marshall, the farmhouse, the village street and the country roads were great speech-museums and scholars knew their value. Elizabethan English was still very much alive in Tyrone, Fermanagh and Armagh and in most of the rest of Ulster in the 1930s. He felt people had nothing to be ashamed of and that every student of English is indebted to them for holding on to their inheritance.
MARSHALL loved Ulsterisms and was in the process of compiling an Ulster dialect dictionary when his golden retriever pup destroyed the manuscript. Despite this setback he still managed to leave a rich literary legacy in a writing career that wasn’t just confined to ballads.
He wrote an Ulster dialect version of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Nights Dream, broadcast by the BBC, and an historical romance, Planted By a River(1948), set in Tyrone in the reign of Queen Anne. Other publications included Ulster Sails West, an account of 18th-century emigration to the new world, His Charger White, a collection of talks for children, and a play, The Corduroy Bag.
Some of the placenames in Marshall’s writing also featured on the literary radar of John Steinbeck, as he had a Co Derry connection. In the early 1950s Steinbeck wrote about visiting Ballykelly and Limavady in search of information about his grandfather, who came from the area.
Throughout his life Steinbeck kept dogs. One of them, an Irish setter called Toby, once chewed up half of the only manuscript of his novel Of Mice and Men. Explaining this delicately to his agent, he said: "The poor little fellow may have been acting critically."
Steinbeck managed to salvage his manuscript, but Marshall’s dictionary, which was almost completed, was destroyed by the dog and lost forever as hard drives did not then exist. Never mind computers, Marshall lived and wrote in the pre-television age. The radio, or wireless, was the senior and only service for most of his lifetime.
With the spread of TV-ese, the expressive way of speaking, or spaykin, has changed considerably in the intervening years. But walk or drive along the back roads of Tyrone today and you may still hear a farmers direction: “Give that horse a lock of hay” (lock meaning some, or a quantity), or a mother talking about how her “cubs” (sons) are getting on at school.
Fifty years after his death his name lives on in the main street of Omagh, in the W.F. Marshall Education Centre, and in Sixmilecross, where the W. F. Marshall Friends’ Club meets regularly. His work lives on too in parish halls, at young farmers’ clubs festivals, in school concerts, local history society gatherings, women’s institute meetings, or at a senior citizens knees-up, where Marshalls verses are recited with vigour and gusto.
He wrote many memorable ballads but the most enthusiastically performed one that has stood the test of time entertaining audiences up and down the country is the legendary “Me An Me Da”:
I’m livin in Drumlister,
An’ Im getting very oul’,
I have to wear an Indian bag
To save me from the coul’.
The deil a man in this
townlan’
Wos claner raired nor me,
But I’m livin’in Drumlister
In clabber to the knee.