A breed apart: Sam Hanna Bell - Writer and broadcaster 1909-1990

Sam Hanna Bell was an Ulster-Scot by both birth and tradition.  Born in Glasgow in 1909 of a Scottish father and Ulster mother, he was brought up in Northern Ireland and had a feeling for its people that few have been as well placed to express.

  The pipe-smoking mellow voiced writer and broadcaster brought the Ulster character to life, both through his fiction and radio documentaries.

  Bell was just eight, and the oldest of three boys, when his journalist father died.  His mother, Jane, brought her sons home to live with grandfather on the shores of
Strangford Lough and, though he only got to enjoy the rural life for four years, it stayed with and featured prominently in both his outlook and published works.

  When he was 12, his mother moved the family to Belfast, which was to remain his home base for the rest of his life.

  It was difficult for the single mum to make ends meet and she was forced to take in lodgers.  After leaving school, Bell worked at a number of jobs but struggled to find any to his liking.

  He returned to education, studing art at the College of Technology, though it soon became evident that his enthusiasm outshone his talent.

  The course did, however, mean he was moving in artistic circles and it wasn't too long before he discovered that writing was his true vocation.

  He helped found, and contributed to, the Lagan magazine, in which the emphasis was on Ulster writing and culture.

  It was as a broadcaster with the BBC, however, that he really came to prominence.

  He had been submitting short stories to the Corporation since the mid-1930s and was offered a staff job, based in Belfast but working directly to London, in 1945.

  His remit was to increase the regional content being put out by Ormeau Avenue and he set about doing this by putting ordinary voices and lifes on the airwaves.

  The likes of the Belfast shipyard workers, the Orangemen and the Rathlin Islanders were given the opportunity to tell their own stories.

  Bell also had a passion for folklore, and travelled the Province gathering  stories and tales, some of which found there way into his published collections and broadcasts.

  In addition to his compilations of short stories - his suggestion of Always Raise Your Hat to a Hearse for his first collection was an illustration of Bell's keen sense of humour - he penned four full-length novels.

  Of the latter, the most well-known as December Bride, published in 1951 and made into a film almost 30 years later in 1989, the year before Bell's death.

  It was filmed around Strangford Lough, with the author regularly on set to oversee the making of his story of Presbyterians brothers and their relationship with the same girl.

  Bell was himself brought up a Presbyterian and always held liberal views on politics and religion. His legacy still endures, with December Bride recently included in a list of works considered to be the best 200 novels written in English since 1950.