A former Benburb man is igniting children’s interest in the village’s past – thanks to the time-travelling exploits of a boy and a friendly eagle!
Colm Gordon, now aged 65, is devoting his energies to capturing stories which marry fact and fiction, having published the first in what he hopes will be a series of colourful and engaging children’s books.
‘Joey and the Eagle’ will serve as an introduction to forthcoming stories which will focus on different time periods and different places of interest in and around Benburb.
And Colm hopes that the written word will capture the imagination of children, as his verbal versions did for his own family many years now past.
Colm told Armagh I: “I have two boys – they’re in their 30s now – but when they were very young they would ask you, as children do ask their parents, to tell them stories about when you were growing up in Benburb. So I would start a story, a made-up story, and you don’t know where it was going really or where it was going to end.
“My father-in-law used to listen to me telling the stories to them about Benburb and then he said you should really write the stories down, or maybe even one day write a book or a series of books about them, which, now I’m retired, I’ve eventually got around to doing.”
Growing up, Colm had lived in the gatehouse to Benburb Priory; the Manor House was built by Belfast businessman, James Bruce, as his country retreat.
And with so many local landmarks and places of historic interest surrounding Benburb, there is a rich vein of material which Colm, a former financial adviser, is able to tap into.
“This is the first of what I would hope to be a series,” explained Colm. “The stories were all based really on Benburb’s history, going back to the time of the O’Neills, Shane O’Neill’s Castle, the 1500s, The Plantation, 1600s, The Famine, then eventually coming into the 1900s, when the Priory was requisitioned by the British Army and then the American Army as a convalescent hospital.
“The idea then is to hopefully encourage parents to tell their children about the history of their own town, whether it be Armagh or any other village in the Province, just to get children interested. Primarily it’s just a passion, it’s not for profit really, to make money from it, it’s just a retirement project I suppose.”
Colm left Benburb some 45 years ago, at the start of the 1980s.
But while he may live in Belfast now, Benburb has never been far from his heart and mind.
He said: “It’s always somewhere that you go back to. Obviously the people for a start. I’ve very happy memories, childhood memories. We lived in the Gatehouse going into the Priory, so it was like one big backyard, one big garden to play in. Then we had the Castle there, the White Bridge, crossing the Blackwater River into County Armagh. It’s iconic really. It’s a landmark.
“Joey is basically me as a child. I’m the youngest of a family of four by about 12 years. So whenever you’ve got older siblings like that you just feel a bit left out. They can do things that you can’t do, go places that you can’t go and all that type of thing. So it all comes to the fact that Joey wants something to happen, wants adventure.
“He finds this adventure by this beautiful eagle coming to his bedroom window when he’s looking out on his siblings playing football and what have you. The eagle takes him away on a trip around the village, to look at the Castle, the Priory, the White Bridge, the Blackwater River.”
While the character of Joey may be seen as Colm as a boy, he is named after Colm’s own father.
And the series of adventures which Colm has planned will take him to different times, different places and diverse situations – in a way to entertain and engage young and inquisitive minds.
“Joey will be the protagonist going forward. The eagle is secondary. He will turn up perhaps at times where Joey needs to get back from the past and places that he is and the eagle would transport them back home again,” said Colm.
“This one will be like an introduction, which isn’t actually historical really. It’s more about the eagle and Joey’s view of the village, the Priory, the graveyard down there beside the Castle and so on. There would be another five and we’ll go back to Shane O’Neill’s time.
“The theme basically is that I want to look at there is the fact that Joey befriends an O’Neill from that period in a series of tunnels. Where we lived in the Gatehouse, the Castle is in a valley going down from the Gatehouse. So Joey finds a tunnel in the living room under his mummy’s chair, like a little trapdoor. He goes down the tunnel and he’s transported back to the O’Neill period.
“Then’s he’s transported back again to the Plantation period. But the thing is that he has a friend or befriends children from both periods. It’s that type of crossover where children don’t see the differences, culturally, religiously, any other way, they’re just friends.
“And just with the passage of time, then we all become indoctrinated with our own cultures and then we start making differences and maybe losing your friends as you get older, because of the differences in nationality, religion and so on. So that interests me.
“Then going into the Famine, Joey finds out that he is so much more well off and advantaged than the children of that period who were starving, so he learns to share his food and whatever he has.
“Going into the 1900s will introduce the children to the war of that time and how Benburb was used as a hospital for both the British and the Americans.
“Going back right up to the 1970s, when Benburb Sunday was a main event in the area, with maybe 10,000 people there, there is a tightrope act, like Evel Knievel, where Joey will then be on a motorbike on a tightrope going over the village.”
While Joey will access the time of the O’Neills via a tunnel, Colm wants to explore different doors to the past through which his fictional boyhood self will venture – and different characters, perhaps an Irish Wolfhound, who would help him journey back!
Colm also has the assistance of a local historian who will help keep him right on what the landscape looked like in those historic times and what the dress might have been like too.
And he has been working with Belfast-based illustrator Paddy McConnell in bringing the stories to life as well.
“I brought him up to Benburb and spent a couple of days there,” said Colm. “He’d have taken photographs and it just gave him a feel of the place and what I was trying to achieve. He’ll go with me going forward because he’s got Joey down to a tee!”
Colm has already given copies of ‘Joey and the Eagle’ to various charities and charitable events to sell to raise funds, including the Kevin Bell Repatriation Trust and the Armagh and Benburb Branch of Mary’s Meals, which has a shop in the courtyard of Benburb Priory.
He is delighted that he is able to help raise funds in this way while at the same time enjoying his new-found passion in preserving the past both pictorially and in prose.
Colm hopes that others might similarly be inspired to do what he is doing in their own areas too.
“Hopefully it will interest people from their own villages or whatever, just to think that they had their history in the 1500s, so what was happening there and throughout each century? Just to look it, because Benburb’s not unique in that,” he added. “Every townland has their own folklore and their own history to look at.”
He hopes too that his own ambitions and adventure with Joey will help give a little lift to the Benburb area.
It certainly has for his own family, as it is now a tradition to visit the area where the stories told to his own sons were actually set.
“Every Christmas Eve we take a trip up, we do all the walks and then a pint of Guinness in the Bottle of Benburb to end it off,” said Colm.
“We were out with eight people on Saturday night, from different parts of Belfast, and they want to take a trip up too, to do the tour, stay overnight maybe in the Moy, so it’s to generate a bit of interest as well.”
Copies of Joey and the Eagle are available to purchase on Colm Gordon’s bio at @authorcolmgorman . The books are are also available in Benburb at McAnallens Supermarket, and at Mor Stables coffee shop and Mary’s Meals in Benburb, and O’Kane’s Superstore at Moy Road, Armagh.
