My friend Billy Teare, who has died aged 75, was a professional storyteller, appearing at schools, libraries, theatres and clubs across the UK, as well as at festivals around the world.
We worked together as a Northern Irish story and song duo for more than 20 years, having first met at the Sidmouth folk festival in Devon in 2003, and as a collaboration we also wrote Antrim Folk Tales (2013), a book that showcased many of the tales we told.
Billy started out in the 1980s as a standup comedian on the tough Belfast circuit in the evenings, while working by day as a law clerk in the civil service. By the early 1990s he was able to give up his office job, and thereafter made a living out of storytelling for – although with occasional part-time jobs supplementing his main income.
A jack of all trades, he had a natural stage presence and frequently supplemented his tales with songs, magic, juggling and other theatrical skills.
Billy was born in Ballycarry, County Antrim, to Molly (nee Hume), a housewife, and Duncan, a painter and decorator. He attended Greenland school and then Larne Technical College, both in nearby Larne, where he lived for most of his life.
His mother encouraged Billy’s theatrics from childhood, having him perform at Women’s Institute meetings , a secret they both kept from his father, who probably would have disapproved. In his teens he formed a comedy duo with a friend, Arthur McQuitty, before going solo as a standup comic in the Belfast area.
While working for the civil service, in his spare time he gradually developed a one-man variety act, adding hypnotism, magic, tarot reading and mentalism to his comedy routine. He also carried out prodigious memory feats, such as getting an audience of, say, 100 people to tell him their names as they came into the auditorium, and then later recalling each one of them.
In 1990 he heard the Scottish instrumentalist and storyteller Robin Williamson telling stories in Bath, and decided to follow a similar path. Becoming an even more popular act as a result, he appeared – on his own, and with me – at countless venues, as well at various international storytelling festivals, including in North America. In 2008 he held a residency at the International Storytelling Centre in Tennessee in the US.
Once Billy had moved into semi-retirement in 2016, he kept up his theatrical interests as an enthusiastic member of the Carrickfergus-based traditional music group the Edenites, playing harmonica and bringing with him his own brand of craic.
Lately he had taken to busking at St George’s market in Belfast, while also regaling passersby with his “Calendar Man” trick, asking them to name any date in history and then revealing, straight away, what day of the week it had been. In his various guises people found him uniquely captivating, and, in the words of an old song, he was “a man you don’t meet every day”.
Billy is survived by two daughters, Lee and Grace, from his 1972 marriage to Venice Graham, which ended in amicable divorce, and a grandson, Robbie.
