The “shipyard poet” is how Thomas Carnduff was known. The Belfast-born working-class poet and playwright wrote about the lives of ordinary people as he witnessed them. Born in Sandy Row, he was very proud of his Ulster roots but also proud to be Irish.
Even though he spent most of his life in Belfast, he had strong links to the rest of Ireland. His mother came from Newbridge, Co Kildare, and he received some of his schooling in Dublin. Carnduff wrote for some of the Dublin newspapers, had his radio plays performed on Radio Éireann and some of his plays were staged at the Abbey Theatre.
Workers was his first play to be put on at the Abbey in October 1932. He described it as an “attempt to study the conditions under which the Ulster shipwrights live and work”. He wrote it because he claimed that workers had not been “adequately treated on the stage” up to that point.
Lamenting the fact that plays written about the working classes in a big city had not been written by the workers themselves, he felt that “as a worker”, he could do them justice with his attempt to “dramatise the lives of that class”.
The “shipyard poet” – Oliver O’Hanlon on playwright Thomas Carnduff
Setting the Bar High – Frank McNally on pubs called The Irish Times (and more songs about newspapers)
The Times they are a-name-checking – Frank McNally on songs about newspapers
Lexicographer at Large – Frank McNally on Dinneen’s Dictionary and the Dáil row about unparliamentary Irish
Trying to make it as realistic a representation as possible, Carnduff took inspiration from what he saw around him. One of the acts takes place in a public house on Sandy Row. He claimed that Workers’ characters were “drawn from life” and that the incidents were “founded on those of his own friends and associates”.
Machinery, billed as a “Belfast Factory Play in Four Acts”, was his next play to feature at the national theatre. Centred on workers in a weaving factory, some scenes were set in a chip shop on the Shankill Road. It was performed for the first time on any stage by the Belfast Repertory Company at the Abbey in March 1933.
Described as presenting factory workers “serving machinery and creating it, broken by it and inspired by it, mastered by it and mastering it in return”, it was warmly applauded by its Abbey audience. The critics were pleased too. An Irish Press reviewer praised Carnduff’s playwriting and argued that he had “mastered the major elements of his craft”.
His last play at the Abbey was an ambitious project that sought to reproduce on stage a turbulent period in Irish history. It seems that it was not as well received by the audience as the others. Called Castlereagh, it was labelled an “Ulster Play of 1798″.
It took its title from Lord Castlereagh who was acting chief secretary for Ireland when the Rebellion of 1798 broke out. His role in putting down the popular insurrection earned him the nickname of “Bloody Castlereagh”. The Dublin-born politician later helped smooth the way for the Act of Union in 1800.
Staged in February 1935, a critic from The Irish Times found that it suffered from “the lack of a background” and the “melodrama of its first act”. North of the border, the play was viewed more favourably overall, with the Belfast Newsletter claiming that Carnduff “succeeded in conveying a vivid picture of conditions in Ulster during the late eighteenth century”.
Traitors was his last play to be staged in Dublin. Performed at the Gaiety in December 1937, he returned to his preferred theme of the working class for this one. Praised for its high standard, it was set on a Belfast working-class street and explored what life was like for the unemployed. Carnduff knew what he was talking about, having experienced certain periods of unemployment during his life.
One of his main contributions to the arts in his native city was founding the Young Ulster Society. A non-sectarian non-political organisation, it has been dubbed “one of the most active of the pre-war literary groups in the North”. He was president from its inception in 1936 until his death in 1956 at age 70.
He also organised the first meeting of a branch of Irish PEN in Belfast which he hoped would “safeguard the interests of literature, to get literary people together, and to see the literature of the North on top”.
Carnduff’s political outlook changed over time. He was a member of the Independent Loyal Orange Institution (an offshoot of the Orange Order) but as lecturer in Irish literature Niall Carson has observed, Carnduff’s politics evolved to become “more communist in outlook and he believed in the emancipation of the working class above his Orange political views”.
Carnduff has not been forgotten in his native city as there is a blue plaque outside the Linen Hall Library noting that he was its resident caretaker from 1951 to 1954. His work lives on. Visitors to the Titanic Belfast visitor attraction can see lines from his poem Men of Belfast reprinted on a giant compass rose on the floor.
