Peadar O'Rafferty and Irish Folk Dancing

Peadar O’Rafferty (1889-1974) made a significant contribution to the arts, culture and positive community relations in Belfast and Northern Ireland, but there is no blue plaque in his name, no mural of him on any wall, no etching of him on a city hall window. Neither the Gaelic/Irish tradition or the Ulster-Scots/British tradition claim him. His legacy lies in the space in between.

When writing my book, Irish Dancing: The Festival Story, I spent a disproportionate amount of time researching Peadar O’Rafferty, initially through the newspaper archives, and then by asking everyone I spoke to, ‘did you ever meet him?’ By all accounts, he was a quiet man and a gentleman. Seven years after publication, I have finally had the chance to speak to a living relative. I now have a picture of a grandfather coming to the door of his home, singing a ditty and dancing for the children who greeted him with English accents. Peadar has become both song and dance, the arc of him an island and an archipelago.

The following words set the tone for nearly a century of artistry in Irish folk dancing. Written by Peadar in 1934, they still resonate within the festival community of Irish dancing today. 
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‘All the movements should be performed gracefully, but without that straining after effect which is invariably disastrous. The carriage should be natural and easy, the body being held lightly, the head erect, but not stiffly so, the arms, when not employed, held easily by the sides.’

In 1912, Peadar O’Rafferty’s pupils from the Belfast Irish Dancing Academy performed an event organised by Gaelic Revival group Craobh Ruadh (Red Branch). The journalist wrote that Peadar was ‘one of the most graceful and accomplished Irish dancers in Ulster.’ The writer, who praised his up-to-date teaching style, explained, ‘Mr O’Rafferty takes a personal interest in every one of his young pupils, and the academy is doing much to further the cause of this branch of Irish-Ireland work.’

An early photograph of Peadar has him in a couples hold with dancer Marie MacStocker. The Misses McStocker, Peadar and dancer Sean Best often performed the four-hand-reel together at the early feiseanna. His lessons also comprised music and dances of the Scottish tradition:known for teaching ‘The Lancers’ and ‘The Caledonians’, his preferred set dance, ‘Maggie Pickins’, is also thought to have been an old Scottish step dance.

I had once read that Peadar O’Rafferty’s family hailed from Donegal, but having spent a long time rooting around in birth and census records, I could only find one match — in Portadown in County Armagh. An article sent to me by a relative of his wife confirmed that he had moved to Belfast from Portadown at three months old. It’s not clear who taught him to dance, but he began teaching in 1906 and won the Ulster Championship for Irish dancing in 1911. His first exhibition team comprised himself, Alex Heggarty, Sean McKeown and Peter Ward. They practised by lamplight just off Fountain Street.

As a young adult, Peadar O’Raffery lived at 46 Kashmire Road in the Falls Road area with his mother, Mary Ann, and his sisters, Cecilia (26) and Rose (24). (Cecilia Rafferty was still at the address in 1951). At the time of the 1911 census, he was working in a tobacco factory, but he later worked as a commercial traveller. His last job was as a clerk for the coal board. In fact, he worked there right up until he was 83, despite partial blindness. His Irish dancing exploits, including 25 years teaching in the Malone Training School, a reformatory and training school for Protestant boys; ten years at Stranmillis College; and other organisations like the Girl Guides, Boy Scouts and Irish Folk Dancing associations, were critical to the spread of Irish dancing in unionist areas.

Peadar was at a juncture of Irish and British national spirit that was of its time. On 22 April 1915, he danced at a fundraiser for the Belfast Regiment of the Irish National Volunteers, nationalists who supported the British War effort. Such allegiance was a factor, perhaps, in his setting up classes in British Legion halls. He remained in Belfast throughout the war, where he kept on teaching, taking Eileen Flynn to All-Ireland Junior Championship victory at Dundalk in August 1915. On the first day of the Battle of Somme in July 1916, he performed at a variety concert in Belfast; on the date marking the end of the Easter Rising in Dublin, he ran his fifth annual variety concert with Winifred Lavery, his future wife; and in July 1918, his dancers performed at the Aeridheacht in Castlewellen, an event with a more nationalist bent. Peadar had found a way to retain his nationalist spirit within the context of British rule, and this is best illustrated by a February 1916 event to raise money for the volunteers at which a call was made for nationalists to become stronger by fighting for ‘liberty’ in France against a ‘common enemy.’ In 1919, he married Winifred Lavery, an accomplished musician, who played in the first silent movies of Portadown and Belfast in the 1910s and 1920s. (They ran an Irish dancing school together in the war period). They initially moved into Winifred's parents' house, Erin Cottage, in Andersonstown.

After partition, the backdrop to Peadar’s endeavours became more British in tone. In 1926, Dolly Millar invited him to train Girl Guides in Ballymena. The ‘Misses Millar Academy’ had been teaching Irish dances in Ballymena from Academy Street (now Thomas Street) since the early 1900s. (They were Presbyterian). The Misses Millar followed in the wake of the Misses Haines’ Academy and represented a bridge between the fancy dancing of the late 1800s and early 1900s and Irish folk dancing. Irish dancing became the chosen physical exercise for the Girl Guides, replacing performance skipping. Peadar O’Rafferty’s pupils would continue the tradition of teaching Girl Guides, not least Patricia Mulholland, who took her Girl Guides team to the Festival of Britain in 1951.

At the very end of this video is a very short clip of Girl Guides dancing in Belfast in 1929 - these dancers are likely to have been trained by Peadar O'Rafferty.

Among Peadar O’Rafferty’s pupils in the late 1920s were the Mulholland children, notably Stella and Patricia, who took over his dance classes in Larne; the Convery children, including Veronica and Monica, who would go on to lead their own dancing lineage (primarily in the feis tradition, but also crossing over into the festival tradition through Betty Greer in Ballyclare and Ballynafeigh School’s Gertie Mulligan); and Agnes McConnell, who represented his Ballymena Girl Guides Team at the Royal Hippodrome Theatre in Belfast in 1928 (when she was in her late twenties). In 1968, Peadar also cited All-Ireland champion, Betty Lewis, and dance teacher, Marjorie Andrews, as being among his first pupils. Both dancers went on to dance in the Mulholland School in the early 1930s.

Mulholland dancers, Irish Folk Dancing Festival, Larne, 1935

Marjorie Andrews, 1930s

That Peadar O’Rafferty taught in Dungannon, Lisburn, Portadown, Belfast, Larne and Ballymena must have been entirely dependent on good public train links, for he never owned a car. He took dancing far beyond competitions, putting on frequent shows in the Ulster Hall, and becoming involved in BBC Radio with the Irish Rhythms Orchestra. One family legend is that he taught Hollywood actor Errol Flynn to Irish dance. (Errol Flynn’s father, Theodore Thomson Flynn, took up the chair of zoology at Queen's University Belfast until his retirement in 1948, so it’s feasible that the two men met). A 1934 event at the Ulster Hall saw Peadar’s children Gerald, Peggy and Eamon O’Rafferty, taking to the stage with their mother and father. I could only find one record of such a family affair, but it is likely they worked together on other occasions. Gerald co-wrote an Irish dancing book with Peadar, which was published 1953, when Peadar was around 64 years of age. Gerald was also an adjudicator at festivals before moving to London, where he pursued a career as a languages lecturer, leaving Irish dancing behind.

The fact that Peadar O’Rafferty reached thousands of Protestant Irish dancers, bringing them onto the same stage as Catholic dancers, and ultimately instigating the musical festival tradition in the late 1920s, is also worthy of note. He travelled around the country researching old dances, some of which remain only in his books. ‘Soldier’s Joy’, for example, was recorded by Peadar O’Rafferty in Ballinderry around 1932 at the home of Joseph Stewart. ‘Soldier’s Joy’, in this instance, was danced by adults, but it is often the first team dance that young children of the festival tradition of Irish dancing learn. It is marked by entertaining ‘winding’ and ‘fists’ hand gestures, otherwise called ‘rolly-polly’ and ‘knock, knock, knock.’ ‘Soldier’s Joy’ is also a dance that renders the demarcation between ‘Irish’ and ‘Ulster Scots’ faint, contributing to my own belief that Irish Folk Dancing was the main tradition of folk dancing in the twentieth-century among those of Ulster Scots extraction, particularly in counties Antrim and Down. That it blossomed in communities where Scots migrants arrived two or three centuries before, is telling. Joseph Stewart was 72 when he hosted the gathering on Crew Farm, where ‘Soldier’s Joy’ was recorded. There were many Protestants involved in both the Lambeg and Belfast Irish Folk Dancing Societies taking part that night, and I doubt that any of them attempted to demarcate country dances from the 1800s into identity silos. Irish was a collective term for all of Ireland’s traditions.

At the same farm, Peadar O’Rafferty collected ‘Hooks and Eyes’, also known as ‘Padeen O’Rafferty’, which is set to ‘Humors of Donnybook.’ It’s not included in the portfolio of dances Ár Rince Foirne (Our Team Dances), published by the Gaelic League’s Commission on Irish Dancing (CLRG) in 1939.* He also collected ‘Biddy the basket-woman,’ a square dance set to the Norah Creina Jig, a neglected dance which is due a revival. There are beautiful names in his books for figures that have been lost through time: the flirtation, for instance, in ‘Lannigan’s Ball’ is the name for the man travelling around the circle, ‘visiting’ and swinging each woman in turn. Book 1 also contains ‘The Seige of Carric’ ‘The Fairy Reel’, ‘Lannigan’s Ball’, ‘Rinnce Mor’, ‘The Bridge of Athlone’, ‘The Waves of Tory’, ‘The Walls of Limerick’ and ‘The Seige of Ennis’. Peadar published these dances nine years before the Commission, so it is likely that teachers trained in Belfast, Larne and Ballymena up until 1939, used his book. His second book, published in 1950, progressed to more challenging dances: ‘The Little Stack of Barley’, ‘Petticoat Swish’, ‘The Humours of Bandon’, ‘Six Hand Reel’, ‘The Harvest-Time Jig’, ‘The Glencar Reel, ‘The Sweets of May’, ‘O’Rafferty’s Eight Hand Jig’, ‘The High Caul Cap’ and ‘O’Rafferty’s Sixteen Hand Reel.’ ‘The Sweets of May’ was collected from Ada Harrison and James McParland in County Armagh. 

A dance that is synonymous with the festival tradition is the slip jig. In 1968, Peadar reminisced that he was the first in the north to teach the solo slip jig, and that he did so from 1914. (The ‘Scottish Lilt’ is a similar dance). If the slip jig was historically unique to men, then Peadar must have introduced it to women in Belfast at an early date, as his all-ireland junior champion Evelyn Flynn danced the slip jig at one of his displays on 29th April 1916. It is probable that Patricia Mulholland learned the slip jig from Peadar O'Rafferty and then changed the tempo to the slow slip jig that became mark of the festival tradition.

Peadar cited a poem by his contemporary Owen Toale in his 1934 publication The Irish Folk Dance book. The poem demonstrates how language has absorbed the influences of migration, and this is true also of Irish folk dancing, in which Scottish and Irish traditions meet and link arms.

An we didn’t need much coaxin
When our merry party danced,
At first scrape o Joe’s ould fiddle
We were in the reel at wanst.
And sure twas fine to watch us,
Just how we heel’d and toed,
When the moon in all her glory
​Lit the Ballyscullion Road!

Peadar O’Rafferty died on 9 March 1974. His funeral was at his parish church, St. John the Evangelist, and he was buried at Milltown Cemetery. 






*(CLRG’s chosen team dances, some of which were covered in O’Rafferty’s book were ‘The Walls of Limerick’, ‘The Siege of Ennis’, ‘The Bridge of Athlone’, ‘The Fairy Reel’, ‘The Haymakers' Jig’, ‘The Humours of Bandon’, ‘The Harvest Time Jig’, ‘The High Caul Cap’ and ‘The Eight-Hand Reel’. The 1943 edition comprised ‘The Waves of Tory’, ‘The Rakes of Mallow’, ‘The Gates of Derry’, ‘The Sweets of May’, ‘The Bonfire Dance’, ‘The Antrim Reel’, ‘The Glencar Reel’, ‘The Three Tunes’, ‘The Siege of Carrick’, ‘Lannigan's Ball’ and ‘Saint Patrick's Day.’)

You can read more about both Peadar O'Rafferty and the festival tradition of Irish dancing in my book Irish Dancing: The Festival Story.  NB The first half of the book does cover the history of the feis in Ulster, but I continually collect stories of interest, so please send anything along that you notice is missing from the book. 

Angeline King is a novelist and researcher from County Antrim.