Gallagher Bridie - Bridie Gallagher: The Girl From Donegal

About the Author

Jim Livingstone is the only surviving son of Bridie Gallagher. A qualified psychologist, he retired in 2012 after a career in the Northern Ireland Civil Service. From 1974 he was his mothers business manager and, for a period, musical director, until she retired in 2000. He toured with her in Ireland, Britain and North America and, more than anyone else, knew and understood the woman who won the hearts of millions of Irish people around the world during her fifty-year career.

Ah tis well to be you that is taking your tae, where,

Theyre cuttin the corn around Creeslough the day.

CUTTIN THE CORN IN CREESLOUGH, (FRENCH, HASTINGS)

W hen the phone rang that Thursday morning, on 22 December 2011, it startled us all. We were about to leave for work. Early morning phone calls rarely brought good news. It was Linda, Mums private carer, who visited her every morning and afternoon. She cooked, cleaned, ironed, washed, shopped, chatted and, most importantly, made Mum laugh. She was really like a daughter to her the daughter she never had. She had just arrived for her morning call to discover Mum had had a fall, and so she rang me. I didnt hesitate. I ran to the car to get to her house.

Ten minutes later I found Mum lying beside her bed, a blanket over her, and Linda sitting beside her on the bedroom floor. After a quick inspection I could see she was obviously in severe pain and rang for an ambulance. It pulled up a few minutes later and the paramedic came in to make an assessment. Typically, she immediately put on a performance, smiling and joking with the paramedics checking her pulse and heart, even flirting a little while still wincing in pain at any movement.

Twenty minutes later we were in the hospital A&E department where she was seen quickly by a doctor, had X-rays taken and it was soon confirmed she had fractured her hip and needed to be admitted immediately for treatment.

The ward, like so many others, was a long corridor with five 6-bed units and single rooms off the right-hand side, and nurse stations and doctors rooms off the left. The sickly yellow walls of the corridor were decorated with a variety of oil paintings and prints. The nurses were getting Mum into the first bed. Just across from the bed on the corridor wall was a painting. A painting of a very special scene that shook me. It was one that Mum and all our family knew very well. It was of a little beach near Creeslough on Sheephaven Bay in County Donegal, with a wonderful view looking up to Crockatee Hill at the end of the bay with the towering dark-blue mass that was Muckish Mountain in the distance behind. The place was known as The White Gate. It was Mums favourite place in the world, half a mile from where she was born.

She was born on the Ards Peninsula, near Creeslough, just half a mile from The White Gate, on Sunday 7 September 1924 and a few weeks later was christened Bridget Ena Gallagher. But she was always called Bridie. Her mother, also Bridget, gave birth in a little cottage on the main road through Ards near Doe Chapel. Bridie lived her first year there with her mother and father Jim, as well as five sisters and three brothers. Her younger sister Maggie was born the following year, making it a family of ten, and they moved to a larger two-storey, four-bedroom farmhouse at Aghallative on Ards, set below a high ridge crowned by the pines of Ards Forest, which has been the Gallagher family home ever since. It was set up a steep rocky lane 300 yards from the main road along Ards peninsula, and half a mile from the big house at the end of Ards, which was then the stately home of the landlords, Sir Pieter and Lady Ena Stewart-Bam. The big house was demolished in the 1960s and replaced by a new Franciscan friary and retreat centre. Bridie was to spend her most formative years in this wild and wondrous place at the foot of Muckish Mountain until she was twenty-four years of age.

The Stewart-Bam house on Ards, near Creeslough, County Donegal. G. KIELY, BALLYSHANNON

Creeslough lies on a gentle green slope bounded by a few small lakes below Muckish with breathtaking views across the narrowest part of Sheephaven Bay, one of the many sheltered inlets on this beautiful Donegal coastline. Along with neighbouring Falcarragh, Dunfanaghy, Carrigart and Downings, it now welcomes a constant stream of tourists from all over the world. They come to enjoy Ards Forest Park, visit Doe Castle, climb Muckish Mountain and marvel at the spectacular scenery of Horn Head. But for Bridie, from a very young age, her favourite place was that little beach on Ards, The White Gate. She played there as a child, playing hide-and-seek with her sisters and hunting for cockles. Often she just sat on the rocks looking wistfully up the bay towards the dark brooding Muckish Mountain dreaming a young girls dreams.

The Gallagher house on Ards provided the setting for a happy childhood in which laughter and music played a major part.

The Gallagher family house on Ards c. 1930.

Our home was a big country house with an open fire in the stone-flagged kitchen on which everything was cooked, as well as providing heat. We had no electric, drank water from a spring well, and lived a simple but happy life. There was always someone singing or laughing and often too many people talking at the same time. Mother baked home-made bread every day in a pot oven hung on a crook over the fire. When the dough was put into the black pot oven its lid was covered with pieces of glowing turf puffing whiffs of blue smoke into the room. That beautifully warm sweet baking smell always reminds me of home.

They were a hard-working family, of modest means, and all active in the local Parish of Doe, especially its sports and music. There was little to suggest in 1924 that this pretty little dark-haired girl of this large family would one day become one of the most famous and glamorous singers ever to come out of Ireland, selling records around the world in vast numbers, starring in many of the great theatres of the world, like the London Palladium and Sydney Opera House, and performing on television and radio shows across four continents.

Her mother Bridget (affectionately known by friends as Biddy) and her father, Jim, met as teenagers working at Ards House in 1902. This mansion was built in 1708 and was set amid glorious scenery by the shores of Sheephaven Bay, 3 miles from Creeslough, at the end of the Ards peninsula, looking across to Downings and Carrigart. Sir Pieter and Lady Ena Stewart-Bam, whose 2,000-acre estate encompassed Ards and beyond, right up to the outskirts of Creeslough, were the estate owners and landlords. The Stewards, Lady Enas ancestors, were a long-established landlord family and had houses in County Down (Mount Stewart), Argyle in the west of Scotland and Kensington in London. Biddy started work as a housemaid and Jim as pantry boy at the age of fourteen in Ards House. Jim later progressed to head gardener and Biddy became Lady Enas highly valued personal maid.

While working for these upper-crust people, Mother and Father learned a great deal. The Stewarts treated all their staff very well and with great respect. Before she married, Lady Stewart also had a beautiful house in Addison Road, Kensington and about 1907 took Mother there for a few years as her personal maid. Lady Ena was very fond of her, and in fact I only discovered many years later that she christened me Bridget Ena in honour of Lady Ena Stewart. She returned to Ards when Lady Stewart married Sir Pieter Bam, a captain in the South African Army, in 1910 and met up with Father again. They fell in love and married in 1912.