William Robert Rodgers (1909–1969), known as Bertie, and born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, was probably best known as a poet, but was also a prose essayist, a book reviewer, a radio broadcaster and script writer, a lecturer and, latterly, a teacher, as well as a former Presbyterian minister.
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.
In 1936 he married Marie Harden Waddell, a medical doctor who set up practice in the village.
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.
[3] His wife became ill (later diagnosed as schizophrenia) and they left Loughgall temporarily in 1943, she to seek treatment, he to write in Oxford.