What do you do when you’ve a stupendous ending to a story, but no beginning?
Well, if you’re TikTok famous former boxing champion, playwright and now novelist Frank Gilfeather, you make it up.
If the Dundonian’s new release, The Harp and the Violet, sounds familiar, it’s because it was adapted from the play of the same name, which filled the house at the city’s Rep theatre throughout 1991.
But the story of wayward Pioneer Corps soldier Frank McGarrity – who comes home to Lochee on the eve of a football match between rival junior teams Lochee Harp, and Dundee Violet and sets in motion a chain of events which culminates in a dramatic showdown between three men on the banks of the Tay – is one Frank first heard as a young man.
“I first heard about it from my brother Dennis (Gilfeather, also of Dundee boxing fame) in the late ’60s,” Frank, 76, explains.
“But the only thing that was really known was that ‘Frank McGarrity’, whose real name was John Fitzgerald, came home on leave, and ended up…”
Well, those who know, know. For those who don’t, suffice to say the scenes at Tay Rail Bridge station that night in 1941 were explosive enough to live on in Lochee lore for generations.
“It was such a good ending, I really needed to find beginning and a middle.
“And I thought, ‘well there’s nothing left for me to do but make it up’.”
So The Harp and the Violet was born, and in its new life as a novel, Frank has been able to conjure up an even more vivid portrait of the post-war Lochee he grew up in – including the long-gone Nine Bells pub, scenes on Atholl Street, and of course the famous Cox’s jute mill.
Mill worker women were ‘fabric of Dundee’
It’s a Lochee that, he’s quick to point out, was run by tough women like McGarrity’s wife Bridget, married to ‘kettle-biler’ husbands.
“When I came to writing the book, I made Bridget’s character a lot bigger,” Frank says, revealing that she was partly inspired by his own grandmother.
“My granny lived in Tipperary (a ghetto of Lochee) and she worked in the mill until she was 78,” Frank recalls.
“She would start work at 6am, and finish at 6pm. And during that lunch break, she would have to go home and make a lunch for her sons.
“So I hope it comes out in the book how invaluable these women were to the fabric of Dundee.
“Because without them, the whole bloomin’ place would have collapsed.”
Butcher dad’s hacks to make ends ‘meat’
Frank’s drawn on characters he “used to see walking about Lochee”, but also on real-life stories of post-war hardship – like the time his butcher dad had to pass off minced donkey meat as beef for a steak pie.
Or, he recalls, when a relative was chased out of a stone mason’s office for being Catholic.
“There were deep religious tensions in Tipperary at that time,” Frank admits solemnly. “There was bigotry going on.”
Those themes are, he says, reflected somewhat in the rivalry between the eponymous Harp and Violet teams – but this is not, he stresses, “a football book”.
“The match is an excuse for Jack-the-Lad McGarrity to get out of his house,” Frank explains.
But the real intrigue of the tale is McGarrity himself, what kind of man he is, and why he appeared back in Lochee so suddenly after marching off to war.
Frank, who lives in Aberdeen now but still feels firmly Dundonian, says it’s a story he’s always felt belongs to his home city.
“When I told [acclaimed poet and playwright] Liz Lochhead the story one night in the late 80s, she said: ‘That’s a movie, you’ve got to make it a movie’.”
Buoyed by her enthusiasm, he approached writer-producer and actor Tom Conti (Heavenly Pursuits) who offered to “take it off my hands”.
“But I said no!” Frank chuckles. “I had a vision, that I wanted it put on in Dundee for Dundee people. I wanted my mum and dad to be there.
“At that time there were very few plays about Dundee – and in fact, there are very few books about Dundee, it seems to be the forgotten city half the time.”
TikTok madness for former boxer
Already, Frank’s working on another Dundee-based novel – but after going viral on TikTok this year for his online boxing tutorials (one of which has a whopping 3 million views) I wonder, will he ever write his own story of growing up in the founding family of Camperdown Boxing Club?
@gilfeather Frank says: Keep your #bodypunches short for more power! #boxing🥊 #boxingtechnique #boxing #combinations #punch #boxinggym #boxingclass #fypboxing #boxtok
“Who would be interested in that?” he laughs with typical Dundonian modesty, as I point out his 75,000 followers.
“Maybe I’ll give it a go.”
- The Harp and the Violet by Frank Gilfeather is available now in ebook and paperback from Amazon.
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