The poet Tom Morgan, who died aged 80 on August 10, was an urbane, witty and companionable observer of Belfast and Irish life, as well as a teacher and proud father and grandfather.
He was born in 1943 in Ligoniel as the third child of Catherine and Bobby and the fortunes of the family serve as something of a social history of the city in the mid-century. Where Catherine was a home-maker, Bobby had joined the RAF as an ordinary serviceman, working his way up to warrant officer.
While his father was away, one of Tom’s older brothers, Roy, was one of the casualties of the notorious outbreaks of polio in Belfast in the 1950s. He died at only eight years old. Bobby left the RAF, returned home and got a job working in the Post Office.
Of Tom’s five siblings – Edna, Roy, Marie, Dermot and Laurence – only the two youngest survive. The family lived at various times in west Belfast: Glen Road, Coolnasilla and Finaghy Road North. Indeed they lived at 317 and then 321 Finaghy Road North, which entailed Tom rolling an upright piano along the pavement to the new house. It ended up on its back, but otherwise unharmed.
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At 15, Tom sustained a foot injury, ending up in Musgrave Park Hospital. Though his father brought books to him in hospital, Tom packed the schooling in and took off with his best friend (and fellow cycling enthusiast) Eddie Rafter to London. Incredibly, the two teenagers got good jobs with London Transport – Tom as conductor on the bus driven by his mate. They lived in Highbury, overlooking what was then the stadium of Arsenal FC.
When Tom came back, he managed to get into St Patrick’s College, Bearnageeha. In his late teens and studying with pupils who were four or five years younger, he flourished, went on to Trench House, did his teaching degree, began his teaching career in St Augustine’s and became head of the English department there.
He met and married his life partner, Bernie Finan, and they had two children, Darragh and Niamh-Áine. They bought a cottage in her native Sligo, in Ballintrillick under the slopes of Ben Whiskin, a beloved retreat from daily life in Belfast.
A mark of their uncommon qualities as a couple is the fate of a kitten someone had thrown out of a car at speed along a country road with a tin of food. It was injured and disfigured. Tom and Bernie nursed it not only to survive but to live like a king for a decade and half.
Tom had already become friends with many in the Irish literary world in Belfast and across the island, the likes of Padraic Fiacc, Seamus Deane, Dermot Healy and Leland Bardwell, and had begun to publish his own poetry to acclaim.
His debut collection, ‘The Rat-Diviner’, was published by Dublin’s Beaver Row Press in 1987, followed by ‘Nan of the Falls Road Curfew’ in 1990. ‘In Queen Mary’s Gardens’ appeared from Salmon in Galway in 1991 and ‘Ballintrillick By The Light of Ben Whiskin’ was published by Lagan Press in his native Belfast in 2006.
His poetry, especially in ‘Nan’, expresses a profound compassion for suffering as well as a fearless and fearsome directness which is never less than memorable.
In later years, he was able to perform his work alongside his son, the renowned violinist Darragh, and his daughter-in-law, Mary Dullea, in exquisite pairings of words and music.
They hauntingly played Britten’s arrangement of ‘Down By The Salley Gardens’ at Tom’s funeral in Sacred Heart Church, Glenview.
Well-read, generous, wry and interested, he enjoyed the friendships of a wide selection of people from across the city and the island, epitomising for many all the best qualities of the ‘Belfastman’.
He is survived by his wife, Bernie Finan-Morgan, children Darragh and Niamh-Áine, daughter-in-law Mary, grandchildren Daithi, Aoife and Caoilainn, and brothers Dermot and Laurence.
Ballintrillick
At my garden’s edge a fuchsia bush stirs
in a holy amber light flung from far Atlantic.
The place is eerie, still; now pagan, then Christian,
whatever one might will; green edging purple, gold
under a crescent moon as it slopes to Muckrin;
down the mearn wall to stir the bogwood
and the curlew in Derrylehon.
