From Farm to Structural Steel

The third of a series of blogs looking at the life of my dad, Thomas James Campton. The photo on here is one taken from the farm mentioned below, but I suspect it is from after the war, and after the Campton family had left the farm. Most of those in the picture are members of the Mitchell family, but my dad is the second from the left.

Not only might my Dad have ended up with a different name or nationality with a slight change of circumstance, given a personal choice, he would have had a radically different career. Like one of my friends’ fathers eulogised on Tuesday, who also grew up in rural County Tyrone some years later, he remained a countryman at heart, and would have loved to have been a farmer, having grown up in that environment. However, the contrast with Tuesday’s tribute being that whilst my friend’s father remembered rearing pigs as a young man, my dad delighted in telling us about how he developed a reputation for being able to slaughter pigs, cycling from farm to farm with a sledge hammer, long metal spike and a sharp knife. Everyone has their unique part to play in rural life as elsewhere. Even while attending Claggan Elementary School, he helped out on the farm before and after school milking the few cows they kept, feeding the horses, cleaning out the byre and cutting turf up on the bog, taking turf to school for the fire in winter.

Claggan was a small one room school with two teachers, and according to his sisters my Dad was the teacher’s pet, although it didn’t stop him being hit with a ruler, map-pointer (used to point out the world map dominated by the pink of the British Empire) or even a blackthorn stick. He enjoyed school, especially nature study and reading, and indeed throughout my childhood he always had a stack of library books by his bedside, reading every “cowboy book” possessed by the local library board... for many years it was my job to exchange them when the  mobile library came by every Wednesday... he put his initials under the library stamp sheet in each book he read so that I wouldn’t come back with one he had read before. But despite enjoying school, he left at 13 to help his dad with the farm, because his health was failing. Again I wonder what would have happened had more educational opportunities been open to him. My father had about him a persistent sense of frustration, and at times rage, that I suspect was partly a function of his life not entirely being of his own choosing. 

And that included the decision to leave farming.  The small hill farm that my grandfather had been summoned back from America to manage wasn’t sustainable on its own, and his health was not great, so in the middle of the Second World War the farm was handed over to neighbours and relatives (most neighbours were relatives), the Mitchell family, who still hold it today as far as I am aware, and the Camptons all moved to 84 Solway Street in East Belfast. The older girls had already moved up to the city to find work, and when he moved my dad got work, not as many men did in that part of the city, in the shipyard or aircraft factory, which were understandably busy given the war, but in structural steel, working at first for R.J. McKinney who were at that time constructing air raid shelters, one of which ran up the centre of Solway Street. 

In the earlier years of the war he had volunteered in the Local Defence Volunteers back in Cookstown, later to become the Home Guard, or as it became lovingly labelled due to the TV sitcom “Dad’s Army”. In the case of our family it was our Dad’s Army, with him the age of “Private Pike” (you can see how young from the photo on the left), and he often told us that three puckered scars at the base of his chest were “war wounds.” As I grew up I realised that was unlikely to be the case as the Local Defence Volunteers or Home Guard were never under fire, but it was only much later that we discovered, after a heart attack and chest x-ray, that they were actually the scars of rudimentary surgery he underwent to address tuberculosis at Foster Green Hospital, where he spent some time in his youth. Indeed there are suspicions that it was his indisposition due to TB, perhaps contracted from cattle, that finally led to the family having to give up the farm. However, neither he nor his sisters ever talked about this... TB or consumption still carried a sense of stigma for them, and perhaps my father felt that his illness was the reason they all had to leave the countryside he loved.

Towards the end of the war, however, he met a young woman called Margaret Porter from around the corner in Island Street, who at that stage was working in Inglis’s Biscuit Factory on East Bread Street. I’m not sure how or where they met, but its a relatively small area and to this day everyone who lived there seems to have known everyone else one way or another. On the 5th May 1947 they were married in St Patrick’s Parish Church, on the Newtownards Road, East Belfast, with their first son Robert James being born a little over a year later on 26th May 1948. Lucky for Robert a younger brother, William Porter, came along on Friday 13th February 1953. There was then a 12 year gap before I arrived in 1965. I was named David Andrew after my dad’s bachelor uncle, Andy Davy Crooks, an elderly cattle farmer in Claggan, perhaps in hope that we might inherit, but it wasn’t to be. Our last brother, Samuel John arrived on 7th June 1969. Both my mother and I wanted a girl, but that wasn’t to be either, and my mum said she stopped trying for a girl when my eldest brother married and had a daughter, Heather, shortly after. Heather became the apple of my dad’s eye and the one person who could manage to get him to do anything she wanted without the slightest hesitation or complaint.

My mum also said that the reason for the long gap between my older brothers and myself was my father spending 11 years on the nightshift. That may have been part of the answer but I learned to take my parents’ answers to questions with a hefty dose of salt, which is how my father ate all his food... I have never seen anyone take as much salt on his food. Some of that may have had something to do with the toughness of his job and the length of hours that he worked. He may have stopped the night shift before I was born, but it didn’t mean I saw any more of him. He was always away before 7 in the morning and back around six most nights unless there was overtime, when it was much later. Health and Safety was only rudimentary for most of his career, so he was forever ending up with strange burns and cuts from welding and grinding metal, and when I was in my teens I hated it when our thermal vests or socks got mixed up, because if he ended up with any of my clothes they came back with holes burned in them or with metal filings embedded in them. 

When he did come in he had his dinner, heaped with salt and shovelled into him in the way that an steam train engineer would stoke a boiler. It was a simple view of food as fuel. It was generally some combination of meat, potatoes and vegetables, and he hated the evenings that Star Trek was on, because my mother was an addict (I think she fancied Captain Kirk) and on those evenings he only got scrambled eggs and bacon. I don’t ever recall him eating rice except in a pudding, and the only pasta he had was either tinned spaghetti or perhaps lasagna, although that would have been served up with chips.

In later years after my mum had died and he visited our house or my brother Robert’s, especially at Christmas, he would look with extreme suspicion at weird stuff like bruschetta or pate. But he rarely complained, he just shovelled it in. He had known the reality of the hungry 30s in his childhood so anything was better than nothing. He rarely cooked. Occasionally he would make scrambled egg, or if he had been given fish, which he loved and my mum hated, he would be banished to cook them on a primus stove in the back garden.

After he had had his evening meal he would then sit to watch the BBC Northern Ireland news, before going to wash, and shave. Most weeknights he would then get into his shirt, tie and suit to go to one meeting or another. That’s one of the big marks for me of social climbing. With those involved in the hard manual labour of days gone by they enjoyed getting dressed up in shirt and tie in their time off, whilst those condemned to the coal face of middle class offices cast off their ties as soon as possible before donning t-shirt and jeans. If I could get away with t-shirt and jeans all the time I would. But then I took to heart the message of a friend of my father who spoke to me over the garden hedge when I was young. He showed me his calloused hands with multiple fingers missing from both and said: “Son, take a good look at my hands or your fathers, and stick to your books and your schoolwork, or else you’ll end up with hands like ours.”

My father never lost any digits and he had a grip like the steel that he worked with, but I had no desire to end up with hands like his, so I stuck to my books and my schoolwork, a choice my father never had...

Shalom

This picture is one of my parents taken around the time of their wedding in 1947, snapped outside the Belfast Telegraph offices in Royal Avenue.