Belfast Born, Bred And Buttered
“Oh yes, you can take the person out of Belfast, but you can
not take Belfast out of the person, it is etched in their souls”
By Joe Graham (Rushlight Magazine.)
Chapter 1
I was born, 30th January, 1944 at the City Hospital, Belfast, which was then called “The Union”, reminiscent of the then not so long gone, dark days when this was the site of the “Work House”, which often housed hundreds of poor and destitute people. Many in living memory will recall that during the ‘Hungry 1930’s’ the work house was in full swing. For all that there was certain grandeur, if you were a Catholic child, about being born in the Union. You were born in the then most affluent Belfast Catholic parish, St. Bridget’s, Malone Road, and as was the then norm, every Catholic child, born in the Union, was baptised soon after birth by a visiting priest from St. Bridget’s, and so the child’s birth would be registered at that Chapel. And to this day the first official recording of such a child’s arrival on God’s earth rests in a huge book among the swanks of our native City, but that was about as close as most kids would get to the Malone. I was taken home to our home of that time, a second floor tenement in the old ’Scotch Quarters’ in Carrick Hill, our gable wall window apparently over looked the old Jacob’s Biscuit Factory, in Donegall Street, which was at that time occupied as a Barracks by the American Army, this being during the last world war. A time when streets of houses were levelled to the ground by German air-raids and in one particular raid, May 1941, 1,000 people were killed.
A story my mother liked to relate was, due to me being so swarthy, while I sat in a pram she was pushing, she was asked one day by a passing black American soldier, “is the baby one of ours?”, I can still see the laughter on her face to this day as she told that story. The Carrick Hill tenements, more commonly called ‘rooms’, would have been quite cramped but housing was scarce in Belfast at that time when I had 4 older sisters and three brothers, after me twin brothers and two more sisters were to arrive, 12 children in all and my mother would joke she found us all, one by one, ‘under a gooseberry bush’. Most of us, as was the tradition then, were named after Aunts, Uncles or Grandparents, starting with the eldest, there was, Bridget, Patricia, Elizabeth, Richard, Annie, Patrick. Hughie, Joseph, Myrtle, Brian, Noel, and Geraldine. No doubt the name with the oldest genealogical link was Elizabeth, or Betty as we call her. Betty was named after our Grandmother who was named after her great Grandmother, Elizabeth Graham, of Grahamstown, Glenwherry. “Grahamstown”, which came into being in 1637, disappeared in the town land shake up of 1970 when the Post Office decided to drop a lot of the ancient townland names from the postal address system, it just became Glenwherry.
The war ended a year later in 1945, and on the Westcircular Road a military camp there, used to house anti air-raid gunners closed with the return to barracks, or demobbing, of the soldiers. This afforded an opportunity to many families, like my own, to improve their housing conditions, but it meant squatting in the village like army camp. The camp consisted mainly of ’Andersons Shelters’ metal rounded type buildings, but right at the back of those were two brick built, semi detached, bungalow type buildings used to house the officers. These were officially to be later known as 34, 35, 36 and 37 Westcircular Road Huts, we moved into number 37, the Barnes, Trainor and McNulty families moved into the other three brick buildings, thirty three families, of mixed religions, moved into the other Andersons Shelters. This ’squatting’ did not go down well with the City Hall who had earmarked the camp for demolition. The parents organised themselves into a committee and marched on the City Hall and demanding that the ‘Huts’ be modified and utilised as temporary family homes and the families be given rent books. Eventually the City Hall gave in and the ‘camp’ became temporary housing. I haven’t a lot of memories of the ‘Huts’, but one always stays with me, the nights when hundreds of Shankill Road and Woodvale men came and fired catapults and air guns across the Forth River at the people of the ‘huts’ and chanted “Fenian’s Out”, which was more the “in” word than “Taigs” to describe Catholics back then, and yet, about half the Hut people were protestants. Even back then in Belfast the ugly face of sectarianism was never too far away.
In 1949 I began attending St. John’s School, at Colinward Street on the Springfield Road and it was there for the first time I met the legendry schoolmaster Michael McLaverty Insert who was to teach me through all my school years, first at St John’s and later at St. Thomas’s Secondary on the Whiterock Road. Michael McLaverty, or “Mickey”, as we kids called him, behind his back of course, was a great man, great teacher and humanist.
St. John’s School was built in 1910 to help facilitate the ever growing amount of boys and girls in the St. Paul’s Parish and to alleviate over-crowding at St Paul’s and St. Gall’s Schools. At the time it was built a pattern was developing which indicated that the Springfield Road, going country wards, would soon be greatly peopled by Catholics over spilling from the already densely populated Falls area. It became apparent that these new residents would soon envelope the old Village of Springfield and that’s where the problems began. It must have become clear to the Catholic authorities that there would be total opposition to a Catholic Chapel ever being built near St John’s School which would have naturally took place due to the tradition of building a Chapel near a school or vice versa. So this left St. John’s School marooned from St. John’s Chapel which was built further up the Falls Road at St. James, in 1928, instead of close to the school of its name as in the case of St. Patrick’s, St. Paul’s, Holy Cross, etc. To further confuse matters, in 1933 when they built the parish school to St John’s Church they called it St Kevin’s School for another St. John’s School would have been confusing. All this from that message from the Springfield Village unionists, “Thus far and no further.”, so we now had a parish school with no Parish church, and a parish school, St Kevin’s misnamed. Even today the proposal of a Catholic Chapel on the ‘mid Springfield Road would generate, to say the least, very heated debate.
In 1920 the area around the old village, where Workman’s Avenue is today, was almost totally Protestant, perhaps with the exceptions of a few Catholic R.I.C (police) men and their families. St John’s school was built very close to the massive James Mackie’s Foundry , a firm not known for its liberal employment of Catholic men, By the 1950’s many Catholics had moved into the area indeed in the late 1950’s the Rev. Ian Paisley would appear outside Mackie’s factory at Forfar Street and hold gospel sessions during the lunch breaks, even in the 1950’s, a period that some refer to as peaceful times, religious and political differences were very obvious, it was an extra-ordinary ‘peace ’.
It has often been joked that you could always know a Protestant because his eyes were closer together than a Catholic, but believe it or not it was easy to recognise the difference on the Springfield Road of my childhood at ’mid day, for when the Angelus Bells rang out passers-by would make the sign of the cross, men would remove their caps, kids would cease their noisy games for a few minutes, and lips moved in silent prayer, these were Catholics.. and there were people who didn’t seem to hear the bells, no hats removed, no moving lips, and their children carried on whooping and playing, these were Protestants, this was ‘peaceful’’ Belfast.
Images of our differences were never far away, during the month of July, the nearby streets of ‘Poet’s Corner’, Tennyson, Ruskin, Ainsworth, Whitmore street, were all colourfully bedecked with Union Jack flags, whilst in other nearby streets none flew. This was the time of the year Catholics referred to as ‘The Mad Month’, while Protestants breasts swelled with pride and spoke of the ‘Glorious Twelfth’ and relived battles past and victorious. They need not to have harkened back to 1690 but to battles fought on the Springfield Road only thirty years earlier which would have been more vivid in the minds of local Catholic people who had witnessed murderous attacks on their co-religionists. Of course I am writing in hindsight, but without such hindsight how could I ever begin to understand unexplainable images that I witnessed as a child in that complicated ‘peaceful’ Belfast. A coldness from that adult, a warmth from this one, a smile of approval from another adult, a fleeting look of indifference from that one… what did they mean.?
Today those images hold no mystery to me, but I feel a sense of sadness that some adult people back then could not curb their sectarian hatred and bigotry even in the presence of children, they squandered their tomorrows for a cheap ‘dig’ at innocent children, using children’s minds as a blackboard on which to chalk their scribbles of intolerance and hatred.
I was five years old, when I began to attend St. John’s and spent the first year in Mrs McCarthy’s ‘Infant Class’, looking back she seemed an older lady, but she must have been quite a young woman at the time for I understand she was still teaching up to just a few years ago. I have little memories of this class, the fact that I have no bad ones says a lot for Mrs McCarthy.
Then I went into the big boys world of “First Class”, today’s kids I believe call it ‘Primary 0ne’, and that’s where Mr. Michael McLaverty came into my life. This man stamped patterns, values, views and memories into the minds of two generations of Belfast boys and I have yet to meet one ex-pupil who would ever have a bad word to say about ‘Mickey’. he was my ‘Master‘ throughout my schooldays, a ‘Master’ was a male teacher those days, Michael McLaverty was no mere teacher, as far back as 1936 he had many of his now famous short stories published and now much of his works can be read in many languages throughout the world. Michael was an artist with a pen; he could paint a picture in words that could equal any masterpiece of even the great Michael Angelo. In one of his short stories, “The Sea”, one of his characters, an old man, “Peter”, following the death of his wife poised the question to his adopted son, “ What is the nearest thing to death about a house”, he then answers himself, “Well. I’ll tell ye.. A hearth without a fire and a house without a woman.” Show me the man who would not agree with Peter, indeed Michael, who after all penned the sentiment. Very little is recorded of Michael’s background, and sadly it lead to a foreign writer recently suggesting, so wrongly, that Michael was reared with a silver spoon in his mouth, was somewhat aloof from those he taught and lived among. The reality is that Michael came from a very working class background.
Michael McLaverty was born in 1904 at Carrickmacross, Co. Monaghan, in 1911 his family moved to Beechmount, Belfast, where his father took up employment as a waiter at the Queen’s Hotel, Queen’s Arcade. Michael began attending St Gall’s School at Clonard, he had three brothers and four sisters. He later went to “Strawberry Hill” the Catholic teachers’ College in London and soon after, in 1928, took up his first position as a teacher at St John’s Primary School, Colinward Street. In 1933 he married Molly Giles, whose brother later became a well known Springfield Road G.P, the couple went to live at Knock (Belfast) for a few years and later moved to Deramore Drive at Malone, they had four children, two boys and two girls, Shelia, Kevin, Colm and Moira. It was in the early 1930’s that Michael McLaverty’s published works began to appear and in was in the short story field that he became known. His book, “Call My Brother Back”, which he wrote in 1939, is a graphic insight into working class Belfast life in the 1920’s. Some say it was based, true or not I do not know, around a real life event, the murder of Sean Gaynor in his home just around the corner from the school, and to lend more poignancy, Sean’s brother Liam had been a teacher at St. John’s School,
It is rumoured Bill Harvey, an ardent Nationalist and Gaelic Scholar, lover of all things Irish, and Head Master, (Principal) at St. John’s, resented Michael’s use of such a background on which to base his story. Bill, you see, would have known Sean and Liam Gaynor very well, for like Sean Gaynor, Bill was a great G.A.A man. Apparently Bill and Mickey never spoke on friendly terms after the publication of the book, of course, if true, this would have went over the heads of us kids, both being too professional to show any signs of a rift to their pupils. Michael left us a treasure trove of writings, stories such as, “Stone”, “Lost Fields”, The Sea”, “The White Mare”, The Wild Duck’s Nest”, etc, some are based on Rathlin Island, where he was a frequent visitor, and others around Portaferry where he spent much of his leisure time, we all have our heavens on earth, I think Portaferry was Michael’s, and when he died that is where he was buried. Michael was very kind to us pupils, for remember those were not so affluent days and often enough parents found it hard to supply the kids with money for pens or catechism’s and this is where Michael stepped in. Every day he ran a penny ballot and the winner won a beautiful fountain pen or on another occasion, a pencil box or catechism.. But... looking back it is very interesting to note that no one child ever won the pen , pencil box or catechism twice, this was obviously Michael’s way of helping us kids obtain these little luxuries, indeed necessities, and of course our pennies would never have covered his expense of purchasing the things. Mickey, as we pupils all knew too well, had a tougher side to him, if he found two boys fighting he would drag them up in front of the class, take two pairs of boxing gloves out of his desk and make both boys put them on and he would say, “Right, now fight ”. Ninety nine out of a hundred times the boys sheepishly stood with their hands by their sides, the odd time they would ’leather’ into each other, whilst Mickey refereed. Most pupils will have their own stories of Michael, but one aspect they will all mention, his afternoon story-telling session, usually about 3 o’clock every afternoon, he would open a book and read a chapter, and a pin could be heard if dropped, such was the interest we had in his stories, a wonderfully decent man was Michael.
Eddie Tansay, the ‘Music Master’ was however a different ball game, cruel and intolerant, he tried to beat music into us, and somehow he got to like the beating above the music. This six foot man, with long yellow teeth and grey thick hair, would come alongside a boy, who had perhaps giggled and grip him by the side lock just by the ear, bringing him up on tip toes, march him up to the front of the class. I witnessed many a boy wet his pants as Tansay flailed into him with ‘six of the best’ , six slaps on the hand with his short thick cane.
“Hat and Coat” was the nickname we kids had for Bill Harvey, the headmaster, due to him being extremely thin, we joked as he walked down the street all one could see was a hat and coat moving because he was so thin. Bill was also known as ‘Dead Eye Dick’ because of his accuracy of catching boys on the fingertips when caning them with his long thin cane. This finger tip caning was perhaps the most painful of all caning, and Bill perfected it., but do you know...? I do not ever remember a boy getting caned for nothing.
“Milk Time” was also a favourite part of the day at old St. John’s, free half pints of milk were given to the children and we all made sure we had saved a Lozenger which we had bought earlier at Charlie Williamson’s chemist shop at the top of Colinpark Street, these gave a special flavour to the milk. We maybe even would have saved a broken biscuit or two from our ‘Penny worth of broken biscuits’ which we could have bought from the ‘broken biscuit tin’ in Parke’s Bakery at the corner of Elswick Street. This block between these two streets, Elswick and Colinpark, was burned down in a loyalist attack on the 27th of June 1970, during the Orange ‘mini 12th parade’. There was an incident in the early 1950’s when a boy pupil was crushed to death beneath the lorry delivering the milk, I say ‘boy pupil’ because St. John’s was a boys and girls school, boys on the upper floor and girls on the ground floor, their playgrounds divided by a seven foot wall.
The school ‘free dinners’ were available at St Paul’s Parish hall in Hawthorne Street, and the daily race at dinner time by children down the Springfield Road to the hall was like the Grand National, the boys clapping their back sides as though riding on a galloping horse.
Usually a teacher from St. Paul’s or St. John’s would supervise the behaviour of the kids during meals. But at times a priest, Fr. Madden, a strict disciplinarian was present. This man was any kids worse night mare, without warning he would clip a child, boy or girl, round the back of the head with the umbrella he always carried, for the slightest ‘offence’, like talking while eating. The dinner ladies themselves, Mrs Devlin and Mrs Orr, were second mothers to all the kids, and indeed to any unfortunate men who would drop in hoping for a bite to eat, it was not unusual to se the women ‘slip’ a dinner to the men as they sat in the hallway. Interestingly in later years it would be hard to get any one to admit they were ever in receipt of a green ticket for a free dinner, and yet, the hall was always bunged to the door and with a queue half way up Hawthorne Street. Similarly, few in modern times seem to admit their family ever had need of a pawnbrokers service yet the seven or eight Falls pawnshops flourished back in those days, particularly ‘Uncle Hughie Rice’s’ . “Uncle Hughie’s” pawnshop stood opposite a building, Springfield R.U.C Barracks, which featured much in the life of Catholic West Belfast since the birth in 1921 of the state of ‘Northern Ireland’. A state that could just as well have been called “Carsonia” as in the case of ‘Rhodesia’, after its ‘founder‘, not that I would want to suggest that the 1920’s was the ‘start of it all our sectarian troubles’, even in 1798 we had thousands of Orangemen parading through Belfast, in 1809 and 1813 there were terrible sectarian riots in Belfast and these were repeated with sickening repetitiveness throughout the 1800’s.
The following story of Edward Newell, based around the 1798 period in Belfast, contains many issues the reader will recognise as typical of topics mentioned in the recent thirty year conflict, collusion, people expelled from their homes, murder, internment. The big difference was that the Presbyterian people suffered alongside the Catholic people, for at that time they had fresh memories of how it was to suffer under the evil “Penal Laws.” Let us digest for a moment and look at that period through the life of a man who could rightly be described as Belfast’s first “Stakeknife”.