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Fr John Doherty,

This story is taken from an interview with Fr John Doherty, and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions. The interview was by Deirdre Donnelly, and transcription was by Bruce Logan.
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It was a summer morning, coming home from Mass, and there were buses coming out from the street to Donegal and all that. And Chamberlain coming off the radio, weeping and saying “we’re at war”. And although we didn’t consider ourselves at war with anybody, we realised that this is a change. In the bus going down the street they were singing “It’s a Long Way To Tipperary”.
Then the factories began being inundated with orders of Khaki — that was the thing, khaki. And that brought great prosperity to the city. And seeing that, we would all have glengarries made by the factory girls, and the factory girls of course were our own sisters. Our own mothers. And we would of course go marching down the street, because war was in the air. Then came the blackout blinds soon after, and we looked to Read’s on Carlisle Rd, and being measured for blackouts and all that.
The social life continued pretty much, you know. Dances went on in the Corinthian and the Crit, and Guildhall, but all blackout all over the place, and getting there you needed to have your wee torch or your wee flashlight. And that was the thing — homes had to invest in batteries, and you go everywhere in the dark. I was myself interested in brass bands at the time, but our bands continued right on through the war yrs. In fact, Derry came to life in a certain way during it. And then I was called upon to serve Mass on a Sunday morning, being from the Long Tower area. He was a bigger fellow, he had contact with major Divine who was a naval chaplain. I think Fr Devine had been from Castlederg. Well-known man in the services, since he had served in the 1914-18 war, and suffered great disability through poison gas in the trenches. But he was again as large as life in the Second World War. And he would have Mass every Sunday morning in St Columbs’s Hall. This is forgotten, because recently when some people were showing me around St Columb’s hall now I told them there was a Mass there. They thought it might be a dream, but it’s not. Up the stairs, the main stairs into the lecture room. And that was the chapel for all the years of the war. And to the right of the conference room, that’s where the top brass would meet with the Chaplain, in there. And to the left was the balcony. That was the confessional, the back seats of the balcony — the chaplain would have heard confessions in there. And not so very long ago I had a funeral here, and one came along to me. Dan O’Docherty, I think he’s the director of the Derry City FC. And he reminded me of all this. Because he as a boy in the Christian Bros had sung in the choir in this little chapel, and he reminded me of one Sunday they were singing a hymn “pray for the wanderer, pray for me”, and these sailors were nudging one another, and it was a sort of a smile. And we found out that the ship they were sailing out in that night in the convoy was the “Wanderer”, no knowing the Wanderer, and I would leave it to Dan to tell whether the Wanderer ever returned. We were wee boys, and that was the Derry we were growing up in. And to be part of this kind of thing on a Sunday morning, with parades, when you at the same time felt that your country wasn’t at war.
Derry on Sunday morning would have been church parades. The Army would have been parading, so would the bugle bands. The Navy going to St Colum’s Cathedral or St Columb’s Hall. And the chaplain would have been Major Devine.
Later on, when he went out to sea or further afield with the troops, he was replaced by a famous Jesuit called Bodkin. The Reverend Mathias Bodkin. A great writer. And he came up from Columba’s Wood College in the South, and he was the chaplain in Derry for years. A very good one. And he was followed by a priest of the Diocese, Fr Gerry O’Neill. So our years during the war centred around the lecture room in St Columb’s Hall, and later when the Bishop of the town, Dr Farran, became the chaplain to the US Forces he came once or twice. But not as a rule. I think they worshipped out in Springtown. Only once did he come, and I think it was some Presidential thing. That was one of the sort of the big memories of that. The organist in those times was a lady called, first of all, Veronica McCavity. She later became Mrs McGonigal, and Greta Denise. I forget who Greta married. I met her sister Letty not so long ago. Mrs Gough. She was telling me about her, and reminding me of these days too. Because the first time I was ever at midnight mass was in Ebrington barracks, which at that time had become C-E-ville. And we had to go there in a special bus. Otherwise it was like getting a passport into the territory of the Forces. And later I had my first Midnight Mass. With the troops. And back into wartime Xmas in Derry.

And there are some of WRENS at that time are still around. I can remember Ursula Reid and Pearl McGee. She was Hyams then. Rita. I’ve met some of those not so long ago. And a lady who later became principal of Thornhill. A Mercy Sister. She was a Wren.

VJ Day was a big realisation for us that we would be back to sugar rationing and butter rationing, all the things of war would remain with us a while yet. But I look back on it as a very important time of my life, because later on when I found out that my education would involve travel, I found out that I was travelling in areas where I would be meeting people who too had crossed the pond, as they would say. From Halifax to Derry or Londonderry. And how often they had crossed — one had crossed 14 times. They could retrace their steps, leaving their destroyer or their corvette or their minesweeper, and coming under the bridges. I didn’t get for a moment what “the bridges” meant — they meant the gates of Derry! To their favourite pub. And one of them could trace it — “going under the bridge, up that steep street, past the war memorial” — it must have been Tim Healy’s, up at Bishop Gate, because that was just under the shadow of one of the gates of Derry. And I would meet people who would love to sit and talk about visiting “dirty” Derry. When they talked about “dirty” Derry they meant it very affectionately. Because in this city they had met girls and their families, and had good times, found a haven during the dark days of the war. Newfoundlanders especially found our city a very welcoming place. And they found that they had so much in common with us, and living with them I could realise why.

After the one air-raid we had in Derry, we had our first example of how censure had been introduced in the war. You read in your own paper about a place in the NW which had suffered heavy aircraft activity … and it was all sort of covered over. You could have read it once and not realised that it was Messines Park. And so it was.

We seemed to be getting off pretty well, until one day coming out of school we saw the beautiful — we called them barrage Balloons the. There was one up in Blease lane, there’s one at the foot of Bishop St, there’s one at the foot of Brook Park, and there were others encircling the city. And the old people would tell us, “when you see those going up, you’re a target”. And we didn’t know what it really meant, what purpose it was. But luckily, Derry didn’t get off too badly. And as I say, when the war did end we thought it was the end of something bad. But in many ways it brought a lot of employment and a lot of, new wave of life. I don’t think our city was ever the same after the war.

During the war, our area up the Lecky Road would have been “out of bounds” at times for the troops. Shore patrols would have been walking up the Lecky Road from William Street to Stanley’s Walk. Not that it stopped the forces from coming along, but we were part of their beat. You would have the odd dance going on in the street, and a colourful fight … there was someone in Derry at that time, Harry Roddy, god rest his soul. Harry was the King of parody. And one of Harry’s songs was “The Strand Road Parade”. And I’m sure there’s many in Derry who still remember that song, and “at Wm St Corner, you’ll see every night, the queue for the city, all watching the fight. Well, the Yanks out on Rossen Street start a blockade, and the boys go to town on the Strand Road Parade”.
It would have been either a fight between the Canadians, maybe, and the Brits — or the Yanks and the Brits. And that was part of life. It was part of life.
There was an amusement centre in William Street, and of course the dodgem cars and all like that would have been part of every evening entertainment. Winter and summer, for the strangers of the Forces coming into town.

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