EDDIE IS A BELIEVER IN THE MAGIC OF THEATRE
Edmund Henry has brought productions from Sligo around the world. He spoke to Gerry McLaughlin about a dramatic life
THERE CAN only be one! Anyone who has sat in Sligo courts over the years will never forget that rich, deep baritone voice of the one and only Edmund/Eddie Henry (he answers to both) filling the room.
It rises from the tar of his native town – a guth galánta as the native Irish would say – a voice that conveys many moods in a heartbeat.
Eddie also has presence and charisma in spades as befits one of Sligo’s most colourful and most talented thespians.
He is a born raconteur, a man who passionately believes that words are to be cherished and are gifts to be given away to enrich all who hear them. Listening to him is like taking a leisurely stroll through drama in Sligo over many decades as Eddie moves from one anecdote into another as easily as breathing, for he is a natural seanchaí with all the attendant moves. Eddie got this love of the spoken and written from his late mother, who taught in Forthill Primary School.
And there is a neat symmetry here as Eddie, who is a wellknown practising solicitor, began his career in Holborn Street and has made many friends on the Hill over the years.
From an early age, he and his brothers loved to act, perform and sing.
He has two All-Ireland medals, one for singing with a choir in St John’s Temple Street and another for Scór with the GAA in Sligo.
His talents were nurtured at an early age in Scoil Fatima along with his great friend Tommie Gorman.
They were honed and deepened in St John’s, while elocution lessons also gave the young Eddie that bit extra that helps you to be a winner.
He and his brothers cleaned up at recitation at feiseanna and not even the late, great Supreme Court Judge Adrian Hardiman was able to best these Sligo boys even though he travelled down from Dublin as a very confident teenager.
At Summerhill, Eddie appeared in numerous productions and began to attract the interest of local drama groups. One of his proudest productions was when he and two friends landed Eddie’s enduring idols Thin Lizzy to perform in the college.
Eddie has an interesting little anecdote on that and many other adventures that the theatre has taken him to.
He wanted to be a full-time actor and to study theatre, but his late parents, perhaps wisely, steered him in the direction of the law – a profession in which acting skills come in useful. So he is an amateur actor in the true sense of a word, an
essentially romantic soul who will love the theatre until the day he dies.
In the course of a two-hour interview he paid tribute to the many other theatre people who helped him along the way. Frankie Brannigan, who also was an esteemed presence in Sligo District Court for many years, in particular was a pioneer who started off with what Eddie terms socialist-type plays. He then did some great productions of Brendan Behan plays, most notably The Hostage.
The late great Walter McDonagh was another fine mentor of Eddie’s. In the 1990s Eddie helped found the Yeats Theatre Company and they toured the US and Europe for many years doing memorable productions with the Sligo Drama Circle.
They also put on a memorable atmospheric production of a Yeats play in Lissadell House – a venue Eddie believes is a brilliant location for any of Yeats’s plays.
The pandemic has hit Eddie hard, but he is hopeful that theatre and the performing arts will be up and running by the autumn.
Edmund Henry was born in St Patrick’s Terrace, next door to Ireland’s later EU Commissioner Ray MacSharry, on November 16, 1955.
Eddie said: “I was always very fond of Ray MacSharry and he was always very kind to me. “I remember him living there and he was a cattle dealer at the time. When my mother was trying to feed us as children, she used to say ‘open up now, here comes Ray MacSharry’s truck’. “They were next-door neighbours and very good neighbours.”
Eddie’s late father was Eugene Henry, whose people were of hardy Coolaney stock. His mother’s name was Kathleen Joyce, a Sligo native, and her father Matt Joyce was an alderman of Sligo.
HE SAID: “My mother was a national school teacher and she taught most of her life in Forthill school. “She was always known as Miss Henry. I would be down the town of Sligo and they would say there is Miss Henry’s son, and I would say that I was not illegitimate and tell them my mother’s name was Mrs Kathleen Henry. “She ended up as principal of the girls’ section of Forthill, and she was highly regarded.
“My father started off as a carpenter. He also did technical drawing classes on Quay Street. “He went on to become a director of Western Wholesale and then he moved into politics.
“He was elected for the corporation and the county council, and he was a mayor of the town in the 1970s. My father was a very hard worker.
“I have two older brothers – Paul and David.”
Eddie got his great love for words, learning and performing from his mother Kathleen. He said: “She had a great love of the English language, of poetry and of theatre, so she was a huge influence.”
But Eddie has wonderful
memories of growing up in Sligo in the late 1950s and early to mid-1960s.
Eddie said: “Every door on our street was open. We went in and out of the houses.
“From where the Hawk’s Well is now over to the cathedral was known as Browne’s orchards. It was a jungle. It was like something you would see in South America and it was our playground and it was safe.
“Bishop Hanley was living in the palace at that time.
“We played soccer from morning to night and Sligo Rovers was a big part of our lives too and will always remain so.” Eddie’s career on the stage began in Scoil Fatima. He and Tommie Gorman featured in a photo in last week’s Sligo Weekender from a production called Saucy Sue in 1964.
Eddie is in the centre of the photo in the back row.
He said: “Those were tough times and it cost quite a lot to make a costume. Mrs Hopper made all the costumes and Sister Sarto was generally the driving force behind those productions. “To us it was as good as a Stephen Spielberg movie.” Eddie’s first day in Scoil Fatima was not too impressive. He said: “I was dropped in, and I saw this creature at the head of the class all dressed in black with a white veil.
“So I ran away and made my way all the down Burton Street, into Temple Street to Hanley Terrace and hid in the garden. “Eventually I got over the nerves.
“In those days the nuns and the brothers had the big stick which they were not too shy about using.”
Eddie moved on from the nuns in Scoil Fatima to St John’s in Temple Street, which was run by the Marist Brothers.
There was more drama for Eddie in St John’s and he especially remembers Brother Sebastian as a guiding influence.
EDDIE AND his friends had gone from being sailors to pirates in another production. He said: “We won a few cups with one production for an Irish language play in the Taibhdhearc in Galway and we went on to play in the Gate Theatre in the All-Ireland final. “For us, this was like going to New York.
“Tommie Gorman told me a great story about how we possibly did not win the All-lreland title, even though we were hot favourites.
“Everything was going very well, and Tommie was a deck hand on the pirates’ boat and had a broom to do his job. “Unknown to Tommie, Brother Sebastian had set up the sound effects on a large reelto-reel tape.
“It had to be precisely turned on to give storm effects, wind effects, cannon gun effects and crowd effects, all timed perfectly with the play.
“Tommie sadly pushes his broom handle back and it gets caught in the tape and the reelto-reel gets knocked off and the whole system collapses.
“This was our Waterloo and Tommie told me that it was his broom that put us out of winning the All-Ireland title.” Eddie also performed in the Little Nut Tree and the Emperor’s New Clothes while in St John’s.
And he recalls another interesting story about a production that had Brother Einard at the helm.
Eddie said: “He was a great musical man, and his choirs were famous, and he would drill us in choirs after school.
“He would ask me to do the spoken part.
“We took part in national competitions, and we got to the AllIreland final in Mullingar, and we won the tutle. We did songs like Oaklahoma.
“When we won, Brother Einard, who is deceased, went to celebrate this great victory in a hostelry. We were let loose on the streets of Mullingar.
“One of our troupe got into our bus. It was parked on an incline in the middle of Mullingar. He got into the bus and was able to release the handbrake.
“The bus careered down the hill and crashed into a chip wagon setting up for the evening with the fires on and everything. “The chip wagon went up in flames and the gardaí and emergency services were called. “Brother Einard came out of the hostelry to find the bus stuck in the chip van.
“Strangely enough, the bus made it back to Sligo, where there was a major enquiry. “The people of Mullingar have never forgotten the day the St John’s boys’ choir came to town.
“It was like the Spanish Inquisition when we got back, but it was not pushed too far as our manager was as láthair when the bus hit the chip van. “Corporal punishment was in vogue, and I did get some beatings at St John’s but we were kids and we were resilient. “I had two older brothers and we ran around in gangs on the street.
“Our house backed on to St John’s so all I had to in the morning was to hop across the wall and I was in school.
“And as my mother was a teacher and was away all day, I was allowed during the 11 o’clock break and put on the dinner on the stove for the family.” Meanwhile, Eddie and his brothers got great encouragement from their mother to compete at various venues.
“We were encouraged to take part in the feiseanna of Sligo, Feis Cheoil and Feis Shligigh. “David my brother and I won a lot of cups for recitations.
“I was very lucky in that I had a great teacher called Mary Watson. She was famous as an elocution teacher in Colooney. “She was very good and went into breath control and the whole physiology of the body and voice and how it worked. “She sent us off to Dublin to the famous Leinster School of Music to do exams.
“She sent me off to Dublin on the train when I was barely into my teens. She gave me a half crown to go into Bewley’s in Grafton Street and order a cup of coffee and a sticky bun.
“I did the exam. I had to perform a piece. Then I had to do a piece of poetry and a piece of prose. I was assessed and I got awards.”
Adrian Hardiman, later a Supreme Court judge, came to Sligo from Dublin to take on Eddie and David Henry in the feiseanna. Eddie said: “We sent him home to think again.”
As a teenager, Eddie won the
“I saw this creature in black with a white veil. I ran to Hanley Terrace and hid in the garden”