Portadown Festival Association celebrates the Hadden family's long-established links with popular programme

A welcome was made by Portadown Festival chair Mrs Diane Kane to committee members and extended Hadden family and those present were entertained by bursary winners from the five sections. The Deputy Lord Mayor Alderman Lavelle McIlwrath paid tribute to the work of the Hadden family and wished the festival best wishes for the 2027 season. A special painting by Billy Austin was presented by Mrs Carolyn McCabe depicting the originator of the festival in 1922, Dr Winnifred Hadden and the current president, Miss Rosalind Hadden. An arrangement of flowers was presented to Miss Hadden.

In her address, the president paid tribute to all who make the annual programme a success. She said: “I was surprised, when I came home from London after retiring, to be invited to become vice-president, and later president, of the Portadown Festival Association – surprised, but pleased. I feel honoured to renew the family link set up 90 years ago by my aunt Dr Winifred Hadden, who was the association’s first (joint) secretary in 1922, and helped to arrange its first Music and Speech Festivals.

"My aunt Winifred was a woman of many interests besides medicine. Born a Victorian in the 1890s, she kept pace with later ideas – I’m sure she would have been enjoying e-mail and Facebook if she were alive today. She loved innovation, and yet was careful of tradition: both qualities which still resonate with us. She carried the festival’s interests always close to her heart, and frequently stepped in to help (despite her demanding job as a family doctor here) right up to her death in 1960.

"How she would have appreciated today’s festival, on its scale so much larger than that first one, but still maintaining its original non-political, non-denominational basis. She would certainly have admired our people: we are still run not only for volunteers but by volunteers. They put in hours – days, weeks – of effort to plan and stage a multiple of friendly competitions in six different sections, now through three or four months. Back in the early 1920s those first festivals attracted relatively few entrants; nowadays we count them in hundreds, even in thousands.

"Of course we have to pay our professional adjudicators, and rent proper performance venues: each year now we need over £50,000 just to cover our outgoings. We are accordingly very grateful to each and every one of our sponsors, and to the local council for its continuing support. How many teachers hereabouts devote effort to training and encouraging their pupils to enter; how many proud parents and grandparents rejoice with us each year as the new generation of five year olds first step up on stage to go through their paces, and older competitors step out into the real world of the performing arts.

"Over 90 years our Festival has had its share of problems and crises, and niggling difficulties, but we never closed – not during the war, and not even when more recently a bomb went off close by. We look forward now to completing our first century. How wonderful it is that our volunteers, and our entrants, and our sponsors – not to mention our audiences – still find our festival so enjoyable year by year. Thank you, everyone, and let’s keep it going strong!”