Billy Mc Kinley

00:00 My Name is Billy Mc Kinley, Ballylawn. I was born in 1935. My family would
be very much of Ulster Scots background. I’ve done a lot of research –
quite a lot of research on the family, and we can trace them back to
around 1800, to a Robert, or ‘Bab’ Mc Kinley, who was an attendant on the
estate of the Marquis of Londonderry, and resided in Ballylawn. He had
three sons; William, James and John, and it is from the John Mc Kinley that
I am descended [from]. John Mc Kinley married a lady called Esther Dunne,
who is from the same Dunnes that resided the Raylands, where Ronald
Crawford now has the farm. They had again three sons; James, John and
Robert-William. The Mc Kinleys only used four names in the main line
down throught the ages; Robert, John, James and William, and that has led
to quite a lot of confusion as you can well imagine.

01:40 James (my great grandfather), he married Rebecca Parker from Ruskey.
James actually died quite a young man. I think he was only 20 when he
was married. He died suddenly one Sunday afternoon, after coming home
from church here in Ray. His wife became known as the Widow Mc Kinley,
and theres a field in the farm which became known as the widow’s chair,
because when you are looking across from the loft side it looks like a
chair, and so it was known to the folk as the Widow’s Chair. She lived
on until the second half of the 1920s. They in turn had three sons; John,
and my grandfather William and Samuel. Samuel also died fairly young,
just a year after my great grandmother in 1927. The farm went to my
Grandfather William.

03:16 Now he, as a young man, married one of the Robinsons of Ray, down here.
The Robinsons as you know were the people had come into the place of
the Montgomery’s, who were of the sort of Protestant gentry, but
obviously got into some sort of debt. They (the Montgomery’s) were
evicted from Ray. I think there was a certain amount of stigma connected
with the Robinsons for taking over the land – they came up from
Artegarvan in County Tyrone. There was this sort of stigma because to
take over from an evicted person was considered to be not a very nice act
at that particular time as you could well imagine.

04:10 My grandfather then emigrated to Canada, in Toronto, and working in the

Heaton stores, which is where all the people from this area and Northern
Ireland tended to head for. At the outbreak of the first World War he came
home again to Donegal and joined the ministry of agriculture as a potato
inspector. He served in Carndonagh and in Creeslough. His longest stint in
actual fact was in Newcastle in Co. Down. With the setting up of the Irish
Free State, he gave up his job with the ministry and he bought back the
other half of our present farm, which then belonged to a man called
Nathan Mc Connell, who had inhereited it from his Uncle James Mc Kinley,
who was sometimes know as ‘Mad’ James Mc Kinley.
05:28 There a great story that Nathan never had very much money, and there
was the rumour that although Mad James was found drowned in the Swilly,
some of the locals maintained all their lives that Nathan dragged him
down and threw him into the Swilly. He got rid of him to get hold of the
farm! How much truth there is in that I do not know! I think in those days
there wasn’t an inquest but I think that the foreman was a local man down
from Beleeghan called Johnny Anderson, I don’t think they took the matter
too seriously. And that was that! But anyway, Nathan died around about
1920 and my Grandfather in 1922 bought the farm back again from the
executors of the estate of Nathan Mc Connell. Nathan Mc Connell in actual
in actual fact was related anyway because his mother was one of the Mc
Kinleys and that’s how he got the farm in the first place. So the present
farm dates to that as it now stands.

06:53 My grandfather had two children. My father John, or Jack as he was always
known, and my aunt who married Robert Mc Croosan here of
Manorcunningham and later of course resided in Lifford. Robert is a
brother of Sissy and Fred so theres a connection there as well. My father,
he married Maude Duncan, who was the daughter of John Duncan, the
principal of Beleeghan national School. John Duncan had come to this
country from Co. Tyrone. I think he was from a small school down in
Fanad, Rosnakill or some of those ones for a short period of time and then
he came to be the principal of Beleeghan National School or Beleeghan
School. He lodged with the Barnhills of Tagharan and in actual fact
married one of the daughters Jane Barnhill. So my maternal grandmother
was one of the barnhills of Tagharan.

08:19 John Duncan was kind of infamous in this country as being a mighty cross
teacher indeed. The wee wains used to go around and had a rhyme about
him. It went ‘Mr. Duncan’s a very good man, he goes to church on Sunday.
He prays to God to give him strength to batter the wains on Monday.’ And
batter them he did! My father and my mother had three children; myself,
who was the eldest, born in 1935, and Ronald, who was born in 1942 but
died of diphtheria at the time of the epidemic in 1943.He was just over a
year old at the time, and then my brother Samuel, who was born in 1946.
So there just the two surviving members of the family. M

09:52 My grandfather Duncan was also related to President Woodrwo Wilson of

the United States. My uncle in actual fact was called Robert Wilson
Duncan, and I remember my aunt being in correspondence with the
Wilson family in America when I was a wee boy. I used to go round and
stay with her in Ramelton. Her husband was a blackmsmith out at the
Clooney. It brings back a lot of memories of the old way of living, with the
big open hearth fire and the big barrow load of turf put on in the evening.
Blacksmiths were generally what we would call coldrifed, and they liked
the heat, after being used to it all day…and I remember the bread being
baked in the pot oven hanging over the fire, and the cinders being placed
 on the top of it and so on. I found it very very interesting indeed, that sort
of thing.

11:10 The other thing I’d like to say about the Mc Kinleys of Ballylawn was that
there was a always a rumour that they were connected as well to
President William Mc Kinley in America. It was always said that the Mc
Kinley’s came originally from Scotland. They first stuck over in County
Antrim. Once branch of them came here to Donegal and the other of them
went to America. Certainly in America they used exactly the same names,
because the president was William and the father was James. So that was
something I’d probably like to do more research on if at all possible.

11:51 As for myself, the usual pattern. I attended Beleeghan National School for
a while, then when the war ended I went to the Mullen School in Derry,
then to Foyle College and then onto Queens University. I completed a
course there in 1957, and decided I would like to join the Colonial
Education Service, as a sort of an experiment. I was interviewed and then
offered a post in what was then Tanzania, in East Africa. But I never got to
Tanzania, because about three weeks later a very urgent letter arrived
asking me would I like to take a post in what was then the Somaliland
Protectorate in the Horn of Africa. I don’t think that was just quite as
fashionable a place as maybe Tanzania was at that particular time but I
decided I would take it. It was something in actual fact that I never
regretted, because it turned out to be a very interesting post indeed.

13:25 I didn’t really realise what the implications were. The outline was very
sketchy but when I arrived there I discovered that what had happened was
that a school had been set up four years earlier and the first pupils had
just graduated from it. The remit there was to educate the future leaders
of the country. It was quite a daunting task for someone straight from
University, as you can well imagine. Fortunately the head master was a
very very different background from me. He was Harrow and Cambridge,
and I was Manorcunningham and Belfast, which was just maybe a different
field altogether. The curious thing was that we got on terribly well
together, and we became very very close friends over the years and
remained very close friends until he passed away about two years ago
(2008).

14:38 Just a year later they decided they would build a brand new secondary
school for 200 borders at a place called Sheikh, and as it turned out no
money was spared on it in actual fact. It really was a really lovely school to
work in, because we were taking the top pupils from all the intermediate
schools. There I remained. The country became independent in 1960, we
were invited to stay on in the school and we remained there for another
eleven years, and probably would have stayed longer had it not been for a
military coup, a Russian inspired military coup which had overthrown the
civilian government. We discovered in 1971 that the local military
commander was taking a maybe rather unsavoury interest in what was
 going on in the school and we decided that it was time for us to cut our
stick and get out, so we came back here in 1971. I took up farming, I
decided maybe I wouldn’t maybe like to teach here after being sort of
dare I say it, near the top of the profession, because I had risen to the rank
of Senior Education Officer and advisor to the government so it was going
to be something very different here in this country, so I went back to
farming with my father and brother. My father, he died very suddenly in
1976 so the two of us then continued to run the farm until the present
day.

16:40 I like the animal side of it, I think. It used to be very much a mixed farm
where everyone grew potatoes, turnips, barley and oats and so on but we
gradually phased out the other crops and cattle side of things.

Liam: Did you miss the teaching?

You missed it for a while but it really was a clean break then from…it was
two very different things. I suppose coming from a teaching background
and a farming background…

Ena: Well the weather would have been very different too Billy wouldn’t it?

Very very different, the climate was very very different. We were very
fortunate in that we were about 4,500 feet up on the edge of the
escarpment. Down on the Red Sea coast it was very very hot indeed and I
remember being down one day when the temperature was 113°F (45°C).
the maximum temperature up where we were was about 90°F (32°C),
roughly around that. But the air was so dry. I mean you would feel far
warmer here at 70°F than you would at 90°F in that particular climate.
Very arid. For about six months in the year you got no rain at all. And the
rain when it did come down in big downpours, big heavy thundery
downpours and everything very nearly washed away. I think one of the
heaviest rainfalls we ever recorded at the school was four and a quarter
inches in an hour and a half. It was a very heavy months fall of rain in an
hour and a half. It was nearly frightening actually, the severity of the
thunder and the lightning. But otherwise it was a very interesting life, very
simple, very isolated, no shops. The nearest shop was about seventy five
miles away. You either sent an order to the regional capital which was 110
miles away or down to a shop on the coast in a place called Berbera. You
got a months supply or whatever. We used to get in fresh food like
sausages and butter and bacon and son and if someone was coming up to
the school from it, it was always their duty to bring a consignment for you,
and then we kept them in the fridge.

Ena: Would you have had milk?

19:53 Powdered milk we tended to use. The local milk always tasted of smoke,
because the ladies always had the job in Somali society of milking the
cows. To disinfect the milking pans they smoked them over the fire. The
 milk and the tea of it, as you can well imagine always tasted of soot and
smoke. I didn’t like it. Otherwise the meat wasn’t at all bad. You had got
sheep and you got the little goat. Now the leg of the goat was very very
good indeed. The cooks were good. You hadn’t to do any cooking yourself.

20:54 Theresa: What was the socialising like out there?

Non-existant. Occasionally in later years the United States information

service used to bring films and so on up to the school. Curiously enough
the man in charge of it was the brother of Telly Savalas, you know,
Kojack? He was called Gus Savalas – a great big hunk of a Greek
American.

21:25 My colleague in actual fact-all I’ll say is that my colleague married a

Somali girl. And they live very happily in London at the present time. It
was a muslim society entirely, completely muslim.

Liam: Would the military coup have been a frightening experience?

Not really. It didn’t really affect us directly so much at all in the school. No,
it wasn’t really. I think the time when it could have been most dangerous,
but fortunately it didn’t flare up into anything serious was in the mid 60s
when a referendum was held in the Norhtern Frontier district of Kenya,
which was inhabited by Somalis, to see what they wanted. Well, the British
were completely mad, because the greatest fool in this world would have
known that 90% of them were going to vote to join with Somaliland. And
of course they did. The referendum was held and they did vote-over 90%
to join, and then they (the British) said ‘ah well you can’t do that.’ Of
course it was of very serious interest. To some extent it undermined the
civilian government as well, which was very pro-western in Somalia. It
would certainly have weakened it. It played into the hands of the Russians
and so on who were…what they did was take these young chaps,
particularly from the South from what was the Italian part of it, and take
them to Russia and train them. Then of course provide them with military
aid and then they were in a wonderful position to engineer a coup as well.

23:50 The school was entirely male at that particular time. There were girls
schools up until intermediate level, nut we were hoping maybe in the year
following, had we been there maybe to admit one or two girls to the
school. The school in actual fact, after we left, there was a civil war
between the North and South in Somalia, and the southern troops wrecked
the school, and carried off everything they could and for a number of
years it was derelict. But then in the 1990s an Austrian charity stepped in.
SOS children’s villages it was called, and they spent something like, I think
it was two million dollars, restoring it to its former glory, so its back to the
state it was in when we left it again. You see the Northern Region of
Somalia, it was a British protectorate, it broke away as a result of the civil
war but nobody recognises it. It manages its own affairs, it has its own sort
of government but it hasn’t been recognised by any government in the
 world, and the rest of it, the Southern part of it as you know is in complete
chaos, complete anarchy. You’ve got the Puntland area, which has more
or less broken away as well and it is the home of the Somali pirates, who
are so good at… In actual fact my colleague’s wife comes from that
particular part of the country. So if anybody’s in any need of money in
manor we might be able to contact the pirates.

26:00 I was home here each summer. When I joined first it was really for two
years for two and a half years, but the situation was if you stayed that
length of time you were entitled to about five months leave or six months
leave. So you would have to employ other teachers as well. So what they
decided to do was to send us home each summer, during the summer
holiday, for about eight or nine weeks. So I was home here from mid-July
to mid-September each year. So I never was out of contact with the folks
here as well. You had the best of both worlds. Air traffic was coming into
force at that particular time. The first time I went out it was through British
Overseas Airways at that particular time. We had an engine problem
coming into land at Rome. We didn’t realise it until we did land, it wasn’t
too serious, but we had twenty-four hours in Rome, and we were really…I
suppose I’m one of the few Manor men that has ever been in St. Peters.

27:30 I remember we were taken out for dinner in the evening to a restaurant
which originally was the home of Mussolini’s mistress. No we used to
travel through Rome and Tripoli, Khartoum and then over the Adan ,
across from Adan to Har Gaza in a little DC3, you know, the Dakota. We
were piloted by British ex-RAF madmen, who would attempt to land on a
postage stamp if they could. But anyway we got there safely.

In latter years when Adan became independent and the British Overseas
Airways withdrew their services, we used to travel with Middle-East
Airlines, which was then based in Beiruit. Now Middle-East Airlines was a
wonderful airline to travel with. You were superbly well looked after I must
say. Beruit was a lovely city – very French. The Christian part of it was
very very French with big wide streets and boulevards, with trees up and
them and so on. It was a lovely, lovely city.

29:01 We could talk all night about Somaliland and the customs and so on. The
people of course were nomadic, most of them. Very few of them were
actually settled. They lived in round houses called gurys, which were made
out a matting, put over a bent sticks, and when the grass ran out in a
particular area…each tribe had its own grazing areas, you could move
back and forward you see according to the seasons. You’d pack up the
house, put it on the camels back and away with it with your flock of goats.
Only the women were allowed to put up...they had the job of putting up
the houses and taking it down again. I don’t think the men did too much
work really.

Liam: Were the natives good? Were they easy to get on with?
29:59 Well, they were indeed, the pupils were, the harder you worked them the
better, because the more you taught them the more likely they were to
succeed. They were very clever, but, tended to be highly strung as well
because there was terrible lot of inbreeding. They all married within the
particular tribe or clan, or even the sub tribe, so that you had a lot of
cousins marrying cousins. They tended to be very highly strung people,
very tall, and musical. David Bowie’s wife was a Somali girl, the model. All
I’ll say was that the Somali girls in Kenya were supposed to be the
favourites of the whites but I’ll not go into that subject.

Theresa: What skin colour had they?

Oh they were not fully black, they would be a bit of the Arab influence or
Hamitic, rather than the Bantous farther south. Very similar to the
Ethiopians in look and build. They were Hamitic as well but they were
Christians wheras the Somalis were Muslim.

Liam: What was Russia’s interest in Somalia?

Oh it was the days of the Cold War really wasn’t it? The more bigger areas
you could extend your influence into the better. Of course once the
Russians supported one side the Americans were sure to support the other
side. And of course what both sides were guilty of, the Russians in
particular, was to flood Africa with arms. Oh Kalashnikovs and so on
became just…even children were using them. In our time now it was very
very peaceful country. I mean we never felt in any danger, we walked to
wherever we went to through the countryside. You never felt in any
danger whatsoever, we never carried any armed guard or anything like
that or had a gun in our possession even.

Kevin: Were there any wild animals about there?

Aye you did get the lion. Occasionally. The cheetah as well, maybe
warthogs and so on, you got them. And the hyena. They hyenas were very
good at raiding your dustbin at night if it wasn’t very well protected. The
school staff was very much international. The mathematics/science side
was all in the hands of Indians, who were Christian Indians from the state
of Kerala, most of them. They were very agreeable.

Ena: What did you teach?

Me? Geography and History. That was my side.

Ena: Did you tell them about Ireland?

Oh yes, yes they were very interested in Ireland sometimes. The Somalis
to the British were known as the Irish of Africa. Impossible to govern!
People are not all that much different really, when it comes to the bottom
of it. We used to have very interesting conversations Wacook and I about
things…the outlook wasn’t all that different. The Somali language was not
 easy to learn. I knew a certain number of words and so on but then the
students when they came to our length…well they started off first in the
Koranic school, that was the first thing you did as a wee boy, to learn the
Koran. You had to be able to recite it from beginning to end. That the was
the first thing, then they went to elementary schools, then they went for
four years, starting around the age of six, then they went to intermediate
school for another four years and then we selected the top ones from it.
Then, by that time, they had a very good command of the English
language. They had to have, because instruction was in English and the
examination at the end of the day was the overseas GCE from London
University. But they were very willing, they were a pleasure to teach in
particular sense. They were verey very good. We had some very good
results. The more you could teach them, the more you were respected. I
remember one year out of a class of 25 in Geography we had 22 grade As,
2 grade Bs and a C.

William: Was that boarding?

It was boarding yes, they were taken from all the Somaliland Protectorate
Northern Region, all over the area. There were 200 boarders. So you with
them 24 hours a day more or less.

William: So they weren’t affected by the lifting of the tents and moving
on?

No, they weren’t directly moving in a little house. The main animals were
the sheep and goat, and the camel. Some cattle, but not on a big scale.
The sheep were the fat tail variety, you know with no wool on them. Very
short haired. They stored fat up in their hind quarters during the rainy
season when the grass was plentiful, to last them over the drought then
later on in the year. The goats I think were a menace to the country, they
were a cause of destruction of surface vegetation because the main tree
of course was the Acacia…thorny very thorny, but the goat would eat it
even when it was just a little seedling, it never got the chance. You could
see in actual fact the destruction that was being caused because the
government at various times to try and illustrate the conservation used to
fence off areas, and in four or five years it was really remarkable how
much recovery there was, with that sort of policy. But, I suppose like our
own country, numbers count, the bigger the number the bigger the man
you were too. That was unfortunately a problem.

William: Were there many minerals or oil?

38:34 No, exploration for oil took place several times but they weren’t successful
and haven’t been successful until the present time. A little bit of fishing
took place along the coast, but then, that’s what caused the pirate
problem. Very few people realises the big international trawlers came and
hovered up everything and left them with absolutely nothing, so therefore
these little tradional fishing villages turned to piracy in recent times, to
exist. Bananas were going down south a lot, under irrigation in the Italian
region, down along the rivers Jubba and Shebelle, down south. There were
a lot of bananas grown and very good bananas they were in actual fact.
They were all exported to Italy. That was one thing you had quite a lot of,
was good fresh fruit. Bananas and Pomegranates and so on, and pawpaw.
Lovely cool with a wee sprinkling of lemon on it in the morning.

Potatoes we had, but they came from Ethiopia. They looked very much to
me like Sharpes express but they were very very grown having been
grown in the… you would got the local eggs and plenty of vegtables as
well, all the vegtables you wanted really. Cabbage, carrot, beetroot,
beans.

Ena: Had they rabbits?

No, thank goodness! Sometimes we grew our own tomatoes too. I

remember my Wacook going up onto the roof and bringing down all the
pigeon manure with him and putting them in the garden. Well I’ve never
seen tomatoes quite like them in my whole life…they were fantastic.
Everything was cheap. Your house waws rent free, you weren’t travelling
too much. If you did want to travel you had the school transport anyway,
they had a land rover of their own. You never travelled that much really.
For cooks, £5 a month was a big sum of money for them at that time.

Ena: They hadn’t much to spend it on.

Not really, no. So maybe that’s enough, I hope all this has been recorded!