Autumn Graduation
6 November 2003

Dr David Hammond

In honouring Dr David Hammond today, we are doing at least three things. We are saluting a free and original spirit. We are celebrating what binds us together as a people, North and South, at a time when there are still many tensions tugging us apart. And we are underlining, as it is proper for a university to do, the vital role played by creativity and the artistic imagination, as we build a future on our past.

From his earliest childhood days in Belfast, Davy Hammond displayed an insatiable hunger for learning. As a teacher, first at primary and then at secondary level, his curiosity, and his unwillingness to accept boundaries fashioned by others, already marked him out. He was, and is, a member of what might be called the North's majority tradition - except that, in Davy's book, there really is only one tradition. And that tradition is to be found embedded in his passions. These include film and film-making, Belfast children's street songs, traditional ballads and music from all corners of this island and from many countries abroad; literature and poetry, and the industries of his native city and the people who work in them.

That teaching - and learning - was the springboard for a second career, this time with the BBC, which he joined in the early 1960s. As a broadcaster and film-maker, his programmes and documentaries on both radio and television, whether for schools or a wider, general audience, were something out of the ordinary. They rang true. They spoke of deep feeling, and intuitions about, their subject matter. And they communicated marvellously. They communicated the freshness of a talent that was always exploring, always challenging the listener or the viewer, always pointing to some unexpected horizon, or to some half-forgotten treasure buried deep in the loam of Ireland, north or south. One of the offshoots of these activities was a series of missionary expeditions, on behalf of poetry and music, into the smaller towns of the North, under the general title "Room to Rhyme" These were undertaken jointly by David, Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley, under the auspices of the Northern Ireland Arts Council. As someone who accompanied them on one or two of these perilous missions, I can vouch for the fact that public money has rarely been better spent on the arts. I bear some of the scars to this day.

It was to be expected, perhaps, that many of the BBC programmes won critical acclaim and international awards. But David, restless as ever, moved on and, in the 1980s, formed Flying Fox Films, an independent production company with which he continues to create significant new work. These not just films which describe or celebrate key parts of our cultural heritage - although they do this with a rare verve and sensitivity. They are films that are themselves now part of that very heritage. His documentaries about music with Yehudi Menuhin and Stephane Grapelli, about Seamus Heaney and his poetry, or about the Beirut hostage Brian Keenan, are classics of the medium. Not for nothing has Jeremy Isaacs, who should know, described him as 'a poet of film'. And his talents are employed not just to celebrate the names that are on everyone's lips, but also - and equally importantly - men and women from all walks of life: farmers, weavers, and Lambeg drummers. All of David's work is infused with this profoundly democratic principle, which recognises that every topic, every individual, has an individual worth, an intrinsic value. In this way part of David's technique has been to enable such an extraordinary range of people each to find his or her individual voice.

Somehow he has also found time, in the midst of all this, to throw back his head and sing - and he sings as if his life depends on it. Perhaps in a sense it does. Music for David is a constant, a force that binds his and other lives together indissolubly, a key with which he can unlock the heart of anyone who hears him. His friends and collaborators over half a century range from the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem to Donal Lunny, and include the great American folklorists and musicians Jean Ritchie, Alan Lomax and Pete Seeger. He has produced a haunting CD of Belfast children's street songs, and records of some of his own performances. As well as publishing pamphlets and books on music, he has written an extraordinary memorial of life in the Belfast shipyards, Steel Chest, Nail in the Boot, and the Barking Dog: this was later used as the basis for a film which won the premier award at one of the Golden Harp television festivals. He has also been a director of Field Day, the radical theatre company established in 1980 by Brian Friel and Stephen Rea.

I think that what I have said may persuade you that Davy is, in that well-worn phrase, a man of many parts. But the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and the uniqueness of David Hammond is his Midas touch, the way he can discern art and poetry in the commonplace, and above all the way in which he effortlessly explores - I would almost say creates - a common ground on which Irishmen and women of every tradition and disposition, no matter how cantankerous or self-regarding we may be in other areas, can meet each other, and re-discover a vital part of ourselves.

In all of this, his wife Eileen has played a quiet but essential part. Their home in Belfast has for years been a magnet for cultural waifs and strays of every description, an embassy of song, its warmth and hospitality a standing rebuke to the image of the dour wee North that is most prevalent among people who have never crossed the Border. The decision by the governing authority of our university to confer the honorary degree of Doctor of Philosophy on David Hammond is a timely recognition not only of his selfless, dedicated and skilful work over many decades, but of his unique status on this island, and his reputation as an ambassador for us all outside it. It also underscores the importance of cultural life, activity and traditions in the creation of a new Ireland