Michael J. Murphy

‘The Last Druid’. 1913 – 1996

Michael J. Murphy, writer and folklorist, was born in

Michael J. Murphy was the last of the ‘uneducated intellectuals’ in the South Ulster area, in that he, in Patrick Kavanagh’s phrase which he alleged described himself, ‘flew to knowledge without going to college’. In order to look at his work it is necessary to look at the background of the man and at the landscape which produced the writer.

Michael J. Murphy is not without a literary background within his own family. His paternal great grandfather, William Jordan of Tiffcrum, Forkhill, was a Gaelic scribe and minor Gaelic poet. He sent two one-thousand line poems to the Pope and these were acknowledged by the Pope’s secretary. He set up a soup kitchen during the famine years at what is now The Three Steps public house in Dromintee, South Armagh , in opposition to the proselytising soup kitchen of the Rev. Doctor Campbell, Rector of Forkhill, in Forkhill village. The brothers of William Jordan had a shop in

Jordan seems to have abandoned the Irish language and writing because of the condemnation of the Gaelic Bible (The Blue Book), by the Catholic Church. Always in poor health he died at the age of forty-nine. His papers were left to Owen McCann, Carrive, Mullaghbane, but they have now disappeared.

It was from William Jordan’s son, Pat Jordan, that the medieval tales were passed on to his nephew, Michael Murphy senior (‘Mickey Buck’—from the Irish ‘bocht’,meaning ‘poor’) and consequently to Michael J. himself.

Michael J.’s mother was Mary Campbell and she was also a storyteller. Her father, John Campbell, had the distinction of being ‘the best curser in South Armagh ’ and figured in a number of articles and stories by his grandson.

Although he was born in Liverpool , Michael had already, by the time he was taken home to Dromintee in 1922, been brought up in an atmosphere of storytelling.

His father had an influence on his development as a socialist republican. Michael senior was a friend of both James Connolly and Jim Larkin. He was a seaman and worked and travelled widely. He was a fluent speaker of Scottish Gaelic which he learned on frequent visits to the Scottish Highlands and The Hebrides. He had been to Tsarist Russia through the port of Archangel and had worked for a period on the ‘ Mauritania ’.

Michael J. remembers the teacher in Dromintee school, Paddy Hearty, saying to him ‘You’re just like your father – a rebel from the toe-nails up’. The reason for the prophetic remark was that, while Hearty was still a monitor in Dromintee, Michael senior threw a slate at him. The slate missed, when Hearty ducked, and it hit the clock. The rebellious student left the school and had to attend Jonesborough school for three months until he received confirmation. Years later when Michael junior questioned his father about the incident his only regret was that he ‘missed the bastard and smashed the clock’.

Both of Michael J.’s parents were hired in Newry when they were ten years old and the stories which he heard from them had a profound effect on him. His mother was paid thirty shillings (£1.50) for her first six months when she was ten years old, and in later life she said that she had a weak chest and erysipelas (a disease which caused fever, chills and inflammation of the skin) from continual wettings while hired with inconsiderate farmers in County Down.

It was not accidental, therefore, that Michael J. campaigned throughout the 1930s against the ‘slave market’ which caused so much hardship for the children of the rural poor.

The influence of the old people whom he met around Dromintee reinforced the storytelling of his parents and it also gave him an appreciation of the imaginative speech. He always maintained that his creative writing sprang naturally from the speech of the people rather than being influenced by earlier or contemporary writers.

He did, however, have contact with the works of a number of Irish writers through the Catholic Students’ Library, Dublin . This institution posted books, even censored books, on loan to individuals and if the books were returned within the specified time the only cost was the postage.

The writers to whom he was most attracted at this early stage were Sean O Faolain (whom he always singled out as the best Irish short story writer), Liam O’Flaherty, Frank O’Connor, Peadar O’Donnell and Michael MacLaverty. He felt that these writers had the best grasp of the people about whom they wrote. The novel ‘Islanders’ by Peadar O’Donnell had particular memories for him.

However, the richness of imagery and the vividness of the language which we associate with Michael’s creative work came essentially from the people. He has continually paid tribute to the richness which he encountered around the firesides in Dromintee. He was not consciously influenced from the outside and is, therefore, the last, and possibly only, authentic voice of South Armagh language in written form.

In his early articles which appear in the opening chapters of ‘At Slieve Gullion’s Foot’ (December 1941) he mentions the ‘quaint, frank and even graphic phrasing of the idiomatic speech’ of the old people and how he finds ‘both poetry and pathos, imagination and colour filtering through their words and sayings’.

The other outstanding influence on the emerging writer and folklorist was the landscape and the earth around Sliabh Gullion in South Armagh .

The mystic quality of Sliabh Gullion has been recognised from the earliest times, as can be seen from the cairns on the summit and its association with Irish mythology. In modern times Standish O’Grady, the Cork-born historian and essayist who has been called ‘the father of the Irish revival’, called Sliabh Gullion ‘Mountain of Mystery’ in an essay which he wrote about the mountain; Eoin MacNeill said that South Armagh was the most historic region in Ireland and Art Mac Bionaid, the poet and Gaelic scribe from Ballykeel, Mullaghbane, said that you could ‘kick any stone and history leaps out at you’. Maud Gonne McBride, who was one of the first people to encourage the young writer, wrote to Michael and said that the mountain (Sliabh Gullion) ‘ sang’ to her and she could ‘write down the air’. W.B. Yeats, George Moore, A. E. (George Russell) and Arthur Griffith, amongst others, made pilgrimages to the mountain. Even the Duke of Connaught, the third son of Queen Victoria , climbed the mountain from the Dromintee side.

Michael J. makes one of his few excursions into verse when he writes of Sliabh Gullion.

‘Dome of Sliabh Gullion

 And of your brood

 My soul is a part

 In your rock-heather heart

 Slave to your mood’

He returns to the mountain continually in his writings and describes all of its moods and mystery. Sliabh Gullion is a ‘brooding spirit’, ‘mystic-dome’, ‘a standard which governs one’s whole outlook’, ‘a heritage’, ‘an earth spirit’, ‘a hypnotic presence’, ‘a frightening spirit’, and ‘mysterious and immense’. The ‘moods of its personality’ he says, ‘dominated and influenced the lives and living of everyone within its shadow, even the very fields’. The mountain dominates the surrounding area so completely that its spirit breathes out of the clay, which is turned by spade or plough.

When Michael J. left Dromintee national school at thirteen years old he began to work in the fields with local farmers and was in daily intimate communion with the mountain and its soil. When he describes them the reader is transported to the world of genesis and sees through his writings his essentially unmaterialistic philosophy for living.

It was the influence of ancestors, family, people and landscape which produced the writer. But all of these influences may not have come to fruition without some intervention, both accidental and planned.

Apart from the encouragement of Maud Gonne McBride, which must have been very valued by a young farm labourer, the other important literary intervention came from L.A.G. Strong, the short story writer who introduced him to Harper’s Weekly and prevailed upon him to submit work. This broadened both his horizons and his readership.

A much more accidental happening had an invaluable influence on the young writer. An old book was discovered in an unoccupied thatched house in Cloughinnea, near Forkhill. It had grown yellow with age and drippings from leaking thatch. It was taken to a house in Dromintee and Rosie Mulholland was about to throw it out in the dunghill when Michael’s sister arrived. Rosie offered the book to her because she thought it might be of use to Michael. He described it as the best present which he ever got. It was ‘Belles Lettres’ by Andrew Blair of Edinburgh University . It set out how to write and was very instructive on structure, style, imagery and so on. It covered all aspects of writing and illustrated from such sources as Swift, Addison and the Greek writers. This book became his bible and he read and re-read it continually for decades.

In the early 1930s Michael began to submit articles and short stories to newspapers and periodicals. The papers which he wrote for were The Evening Herald (which gave him one guinea per article throughout the 1930s and he wrote two articles per month), The Irish Independent, The Irish News, The Irish Weekly, The Belfast Telegraph and The Cork Examiner.

Surprisingly he was a contributor to a magazine called Aviation which was published in Dublin in the 1930s. He was receiving articles on new developments in aeroplanes from London and he later felt that much of this material was semi-classified because eventually a lady wrote to him as ‘Squadron Leader Michael J. Murphy’. It transpired that there was a real squadron leader of that name and he wrote to Michael J. after the war!

The type of articles which he wrote for the newspapers were dealing with country life as he knew it – harvest, spring sowing, potato-digging, customs, the people and so on. A large number of these have been collected in book form in such collections as ‘At Slieve Gullion’s Foot’ (1941), ‘Mountain Year’ (1964) and ‘Ulster Folk of Field and Fireside’ (1983). Occasionally he deviated and wrote political articles, including many condemning the concept of unionism.

As well as writing for the newspapers he began to submit work to a number of magazines and periodicals such as Hibernia , The Bell, The Irish Bookman, The Dublin Magazine, Envoy, Harper’s Weekly and The Father Matthew Record. In 1938 he received three pounds for winning a short story competition in The Father Matthew Record. With this money he bought his first typewriter (which was then fifty years old). He learned to type with the invaluable help of his sister Annie (O’Hare).

The writing led, in 1938, to the beginning of a career in broadcasting. The first broadcast was ‘The Goatmen of South Armagh’ and was produced by Henry McMullen for the B.B.C. in Belfast . Talks for both the B.B.C. and Radio Eireann followed and the usual fee was three guineas per broadcast. In the 1940s Radio Eireann broadcast half-hour features once per month and these brought his voice to a wide Irish audience. It was the semi-dramatised features for Sam Hanna Bell at the B.B.C. which eventually led to the writing of his six stage plays.

The breakthrough into book form took place in December 1941 when ‘At Slieve Gullion’s Foot’ was published by Harry Tempest of Dundalgan Press, Dundalk . The book consisted mainly of articles which had been published previously in the newspapers. Chapters about the forge, the mill, basket-making, home crafts, turf making, Mayday, weddings, wakes, sports, hiring fairs and Christmas add up to an invaluable chronicle of life as it was lived in South Armagh in the 1930s told with sensitivity and vividness. This book established Michael J. as a writer of great feeling and insight and led directly to an invitation from Professor Seamus Delargy to join the Folklore Commission in Dublin as a part-time collector. His lifetime involvement with folklore had begun.

Michael continued to work as a farm labourer, freelance writer and part-time collector for most of the 1940s. Sometime near the end of the Second World War when he received one shilling and three pence (about 6p) for a half day with a local farmer because heavy rain had begun to fall and the potatoes couldn’t be dug, he went home and never worked as a farm labourer again. (He remembered that a young refugee from Belfast was even less valuable because he only got one shilling). A one year ‘strike’ because of bad pay by the Folklore Commission, led to an offer to go as a full-time collector to County Tyrone in 1949 and this move led to the publication in 1973 of what has been described by the writer Benedict Kiely as a ‘classic in our literature’ – ‘Tyrone Folk Quest’.

The sympathy which Michael shows with both the people and their surroundings shows that the author was not confined to the people of Dromintee and the landscape of Sliabh Gullion. Characters like Francis McBride, Michael Morris, Francis McAleer, Padraig McCullough and Annie McCrae leap out of the pages towards the reader. The reader’s involvement with the characters is so complete that he or she is moved to tears at their passing.

This community of Glenhull in the Sperrin Mountains of County Tyrone is vividly depicted as it stands at the edge of a disappearing world. The traveller in Africa or Asia could not have had a greater sense of adventure, mystery and imagination. Benedict Kiely said in his review that Murphy might as well have been going on a voyage to New Zealand as going from South Armagh to Tyrone. He is just as powerful a craftsman in words as Padraig McCullough of Glenhull is in straw and rush.

The thirteen prose poems published as ‘Mountain Year’ by the Dolmen Press in 1964 capture the seasons and moods of a year around Sliabh Gullion. These prose poems contain his familiar theme of man and woman in their environment and the powerful imagery illuminates the weather, landscape and people. Some of these poems were released on cassette by the Arts Council in 1984.

In 1975 Michael’s highly entertaining collection of folktales entitled ‘Now You’re Talking’ was published by Blackstaff Press, Belfast, and contained photographs (all taken by the author) of some of the people about whom he had written in ‘Tyrone Folk Quest’.

In 1976 Blackstaff press published ‘Mountainy Crack’ (he always objected to the title, having preferred ‘People of the Purple Mountain ’) which is Michael’s only novel. It was a narrative version of ‘At Slieve Gullion’s Foot’ and dealt with a family over the period of one year. Its atmosphere of a pre-industrial, unmaterialistic age is produced against a backcloth of familiar landscape and brings vividly alive such characters as the grumbling ‘oul fella’, the amusing and wise ‘oul lassie’ and the rascally, puckish Peadar. Just like Kavanagh’s ‘Tarry Flynn’ it is not fiction; rather it is reality fictionalised.

In 1983 Michael returned to his original publisher Dundalgan Press when he issued ‘Ulster Folk of Field and Fireside’. This collection contains more than seventy short articles, essays and stories from areas covered in his folklore collecting – ‘Old Ulster’ from Rathlin Island to the River Boyne. Michael J. is as comfortable writing about the people of Rathlin, Cavan, The Mournes, Antrim or Inniskeen as he was when telling about his own people in South Armagh or the outstanding characters of Glenhull.

While on Rathlin Island in 1953 and 1954 Michael compiled a journal similar to the Tyrone journal. Unfortunately only one extract has been published officially. It is a ‘Rough Crossing’ which ends the very entertaining ‘Rathlin: Island of Blood and Enchantment’ (Dundalgan Press 1987). Hopefully, the entire journal will be published at some time in the future.

Sometime in the early 1980’s Professor Daniel J. Casey of New York State University in Oneonta presented Michael with a collection of bawdy folk tales from the Ozark Mountains in Arkansas called ‘Pissin in the Snow’ by Professor Vance Randolph. Michael realised that he had collected similar versions of virtually all of the tales in the collection and began to compile his own version of  ‘Pissin in the Snow’: The result was the publication in 1989 by Brandon Press of ‘My Man Jack’ with an introduction by Benedict Kiely. The author’s own preface is probably the best explanation of the difference between the bawdy tale and the pornographic and deserves to be reprinted  in part:

‘The traditional intent of the bawdy tale was to give healthy amusement and laughter in mixed company, in an honest expression of an impulse derived from a ubiquitous human instinct. Much of the same impulse may be claimed for the pornographic, but there is a fundamental distinction between the two: the bawdy tale is extrovert and outgoing, the other is introvert and  sly; the bawdy does not exult in the sexual content of its myths, the pornographic does nothing else. The bawdy can uplift in its mirth, the other arouses a smirk of suppressed guilt, is solitary and bound to be degrading’.

Again, in 1990, Dundalgan Press published ‘ Sayings and Stories from Slieve Gullion’. This is a collection of sayings and stories which are in the natural speech of the people and it illustrates the richness of vocabulary which evolved from the Gaelic and Elizabethan English mixture in south east Ulster .

Michael J. wrote six plays, all of which have a social content. They are: ‘The Hard Man’, ‘Culprit of the Shadows’, Dust Under our Feet’, ‘Men on the Wall’, ‘The Loughlin One’, and ‘The Sell-Out’.

‘Dust Under our Feet’, which came from a line by W.B. Yeats, explored the problems of sons and daughters tied to the familial seat and was produced by Harold Goldblatt in August 1954 in the Group Theatre, Belfast (one of the actors in the production was the late Stephen Boyd who went on to fame in Hollywood films). This play later transferred to the Arts Theatre in London and was reviewed very favourably by Harold Hobson in The Sunday Times.

‘Men on the Wall’ was produced in the Group and went to the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 1959. In this play the theme centred around a family which was torn apart by idealism and materialism. One son is involved in smuggling and the other son refuses to have anything to do with it. The message which comes across is that the greed and commercialism of the smuggling was compromising the republicanism which the author saw as very important.

‘The Loughlin One’, which was never produced, caused some controversy when it was read by some prominent northern Catholic laymen while Michael was living in the Antrim Glens. He was accused of transgressing Canon Law because the main character in the play was an illegitimate girl and she was portrayed as being intelligent. He was threatened with excommunication but replied that he couldn’t be excommunicated because as a socialist republican he had already been excommunicated three times.

Michael J. Murphy was an accomplished short story writer and in all wrote fifty short stories. Twenty-five of these were published in 1992 by Dundalgan Press in a collection called ‘The Rising of Yalla Ned and Other Short Stories’.

These stories can be divided into humourous stories, stories about the clash of cultures and stories about the struggle of the individual with his or her environment. The underlying theme in the collection is the clash of the spiritual world with the world of harsh commercialism. The idealised picture of country life as being peopled by cheerful country folk living in cosy white-washed ‘cottages’ is dispelled in Michael’s work. His characters inhabit the real world and have real fears and prejudices. Rural life is, in many ways, just as harsh for some people as the urban and the modern.

In stories like ‘Hero Go Home’, ‘Gone For Ever’, ‘The Fugitive’ and ‘Funeral From Flynns’ the main characters have put faith in the modern and the materialistic and have lost. The rural scene can also destroy the individual in that he or she can be trapped by respectability, convention and prejudice. Such characters are Jem in ‘The Wonderer’ and Brian in ‘Brian The Blade’(who is forced into an asylum by fictitious gossip).The abhorrence of the hiring system which his father and mother experienced surfaces in a number of the stories, but especially ‘Symbols Of Serfdom’, ‘The Return Of The Boy’ and ‘The Weakness’.

The latter story is one of the few stories in Irish literature which deals with tuberculosis. Michael confronts the disease head on as it breaks out in a new generation and L.A.G. Strong said that this story was one of the best stories to come out of Ireland in the twentieth century. ‘Return Of The Boy’ was first published in The Dublin Magazine and when Sean O Faolain read it he wrote to Michael saying that he envied him that story. It is included in a recent ‘Penguin Book of Irish Short Stories’.

Michael J. Murphy worked for the Irish Folklore Commission from 1942 until 1971. From 1971 until his retirement in 1983 he continued to collect folklore, keep a journal and compile a glossary of Anglo-Irish speech for the Department of Irish Folklore, University College , Dublin . His collection consists of over one hundred and fifty volumes; each volume has between three hundred and fifty and seven hundred pages. This is probably the largest collection of oral tradition by a single individual in the English speaking world.

After his retirement Michael and his wife Alice, who always shared his collecting work and endured all of the hardships involved in that mammoth task, moved reluctantly from Dromintee, South Armagh(after severe harassment from the British security forces) to Walterstown, Castlebellingham, Co. Louth. He lived there until his death in 1996. He is buried in Darver cemetery alongside Alice who died in May,1999.

He has now, as he might say himself, “ploughed the headrig” for the last time and the world of Irish culture is much poorer for his passing. He was a man of many talents – writer, folklorist, storyteller, critic, broadcaster, photographer, socialist republican, farm labourer and outstanding intellectual. He was the humblest of men and is well described by Benedict Kiely when he first met him in County Tyrone in 1950 as “the last Druid in Ireland ”:

‘He was informative and most moving, and suddenly I thought: this man here beside me is a druid, as much a part of this ancient land as the stone he sits on. He could have been here on this hillside under this oak before Patrick came. For such close wisdom could come only from centuries of meditation…A druid from the land around Fionn Mac Cumhaill’s mountain in South Armagh .’

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This article was derived from notes taken by me during a series of interviews with Michael J.Murphy over a number of years from the 1970s until 1996.I would like to acknowledge the help given and the hospitality shown over that period by  Michael’s wife Alice and their sons Patrick,Michael and Peter and their daughter Winifred.

Unfortunately,Michael J.Murphy’s books are now out of print,but the following complete list may be useful:

                            At Slieve Gullion’s Foot---Dundalgan Press (1941)

                            Mountain Year---Dolmen Press (1964)

                         Tyrone Folk Quest---Blackstaff Press (1973)

                          Now You’re Talking---Blackstaff Press (1975)

                          Mountainy Crack---Blackstaff Press (1976)

                          Ulster Folk Of Field And Fireside---Dundalgan Press (1983)

                          Rathlin : Island Of Blood And Enchantment---Dundalgan Press (1987)

                          My Man Jack---Brandon Book Publishers (1989)

                          Sayings And Stories From Slieve Gullion---Dundalgan Press (1990)