W. R. Rodgers - Early Life

Early Life

He was born in Belfast and grew up in Mountpottinger in the east of the city. At school he showed a talent for writing and went on to read English at Queen's University Belfast where he won a number of prizes for literary essays, graduating in 1931. On completion of his degree, he entered Presbyterian Theological College and was ordained as a Presbyterian minister in 1935. He was first appointed to Loughgall Presbyterian Church, Loughgall, County Armagh, where he was minister for 12 years. In 1936 he married Marie Harden Waddell, a medical doctor who set up practice in the village. Awake! and Other Poems (1941) was given glowing reviews in Britain and America, although the first edition was almost totally lost when the publisher’s warehouse was destroyed in the London Blitz. His wife became ill (later diagnosed as schizophrenia) and they left Loughgall temporarily in 1943, she to seek treatment, he to write in Oxford. He returned to Loughgall after a year but resigned from his ministry in 1946 to take up post at the BBC in London as a scriptwriter for the newly established BBC Third Programme after being approached by Louis MacNeice and offered a post. He involved himself in the Regionalist movement among Ulster writers in the 1940s and 1950s and contributed to a number journals which were used as a vehicle for the regionalist movement such as Lagan, The Bell and Rann. He collaborated with Louis MacNeice in the unpublished The Character of Ireland.