(Belfast Born, Bred And Buttered By Joe Graham)

Chapter 8

The Corporation dumping ground, or “Tip Head”, as it was called, was in a disused quarry between Ballymurphy and Beechmount, here every day hundreds of Corporation dustbin lorries and some private companies would empty their loads into the massive quarry. Much of what was discarded had a value, sauce bottles, old pots, pans, jam jars, old rags and this brought a small army of men to salvage the items and bring them to the then many rag stores around the Falls. I remember as a child watching the car loads of ‘peelers’ coming in from many directions, Westrock, Springfield, etc, to try and trap the men and arrest them , for you see, they said, it was illegal to take rubbish from the ‘Tip Head’, and if captured the men would be charged with, “Stealing the property of the Lord Mayor, Aldermen and Citizens Of Belfast”, even as a child I felt, ‘these men are doing no harm, they have no work and are only trying to earn a few shillings by gathering that which could be reused by society. I remember standing on the edge of a group off men one day at Westrock Bungalows, one, who had been arrested, was showing the others his charge sheet, I recall the astonishment I felt then and I would only have been about 11 or 12 years of age when I heard the man read that line “Stealing the property Of the Lord Mayor, etc, etc...”, desperate, unemployed men were being criminalized, whilst the real criminals were those who practised discrimination day and daily against Catholic people, the man received two months imprisonment. Once some kids broke a couple of street lights in Ballymurphy and they were brought to court and what the magistrate said, was blazoned all over the “Belfast Telegraph”, he blasted not only the culprits but the whole community, he said, “Ballymurphy is a breeding ground for delinquents and Teddy Boys”, he forgot to mention the criminals who gathered jam pots from the tip head to feed their families. He forgot to mention the young men and girls who trekked all the way down into Mays Market in the summer in the hope some farmer choose them to come out to pick his potatoes, and for wages ..they got half a Crown and a stone of spuds to bring home, it was reminiscent of the black cotton pickers in the deep southern states of America. By God even into the 1950’s it seems the industrialists were following Craigavon’s advise, ‘Don’t employ Catholics’. This evil practise obviously forced whole Catholic families to immigrate to England and elsewhere, a continuing form of ethnic cleansing ?.

Nearly every other family in Ballymurphy in those days had some little home industry going, some had little ‘house shops’, some sold ‘Candy Apples‘, Home made Confectionery, ‘Penny Drinks’, some sold home baked ‘Soda Farls’, ‘Currant Squares’, smuggled ‘Free State’ Cigarettes, etc., some women, who had sewing machines, would do sewing work, there were dozens of ‘dealers’ in the estate, Flower sellers, Fruit Sellers, Oil Cloth Mat sellers, Firewood “Sticks” sellers, Hobby Horse Owners, ragmen, some with hand carts some with pony and carts, one man had a tricycle ice cream cart, a mass of talent and a proud determination to survive against all the odds stacked against them. But one thing I must mention, a very important factor, the people were very helpful and supportive of one and other. Back then Alarm Clocks were little heard of, there was still the ‘knocker upper’, usually a woman, who would wake up any neighbour who was fortunate to have a job and might oversleep, My mother was involved in many of the old neighbourly traditions. She was often called on when a neighbour died, ‘to see to the body ‘, prepare the corpse for the wake, she would bring along her silver Crucifix and candle sticks and white linen to drape the windows and mirrors, these functions today would be carried out by the undertaker. In those days also many children were born at home and my mother often attended such births. I recall many instances when excited neighbours would run to our door calling for my mother to “Come quickly Kitty..”. Of course I would not have known why she was so urgently wanted, and dared not to have asked, for I had long before learned the lesson, usually by a scalp on the ear, that, ‘children should be seen, not heard’. Even children who had stitches inserted at hospital were brought to have them removed by my mother rather than their mothers running away down to the Royal Victoria Hospital with the child. My mother was also a great baker, she would bake apple cakes soda farls, mince pies, needless to say, with her big heartedness, plenty of them were dished round neighbours. I can picture her now with her sleeves rolled up rolling the dough on the board with a milk bottle, no fancy rollers back then. There were little in fancy kitchen utensils, a milk bottle was also used to mash the potatoes in the pot. My father made a big wire fork for toasting bread on the open fire, us kids taking turns in holding the fork to the fire. And God that toast tasted special with the Echo Margarine melting on the hot bread. When sent to the shop by your mother you would be asked to “Get a block of Margarine and two ounces of ‘good’ butter for your father”. I often expected Brian McGowan the grocer to retort, “Listen son, we don’t sell ‘bad’ butter, and you tell your mother that “.

Our house, at 3 Ballymurphy Crescent, at times was like a little factory, my mother had a Singer Sewing Machine on which she would make pillow cases, ‘Quilts’, bed sheets, etc, and coming near Christmas she would make Ceiling decorations which us younger kids would sell round the doors off the ‘big’ houses down the Springfield Road, I remember selling Christmas Holly there. My father had a pony and cart which he stabled at John Gordon’s Yard down the Springfield, near the ’Flush’. What a treat it was to get out with him when he would go off to work, one day in particular sticks in my mind, and always will.

It was a bright sunny Saturday morning as I walked down the Springfield Road with my father, he walked quite fast and I had to skip every now and then to keep up with him, today I was going out ‘hawking’ with him, a rare thing, for one or other of my older brothers usually cornered that privilege. Arriving at John Gordon’s yard, other men were ‘yoking up’, harnessing their ponies and carts, to go about days work, my father and they passed pleasantries and soon we were in at our stable. We yoked up ‘Tommy’, daddy’s little palomino pony to the cart, got the basket of ‘stock’, cups plates, saucers etc, which he would give to customers for rags, rolled up the stone of corn in a sack for Tommy and put them on the cart, and off we trotted. I sat up front beside my father, I was very young, maybe nine years of age. I listened to the clippity-clop of ‘Tommy‘s’ shodden hooves , it was like music, my father must have seen what I was doing, and with that beautiful smile of his, he amused me by singing, ..

“Horsey, Horsey, don’t you stop, Just let your feet go Clipitty Clop,

He drove over the Shankill, across the Crumlin and Oldpark Roads and stopped in a street off Cliftonville Road, which in those days was a quite affluent district. To me as a child these area’s seem so strange and different, full of shops , traffic and buildings, for Ballymurphy in those days was quite rural, considered to be ‘out in the sticks’, in fact, it was humorously said if any one was to visit Ballymurphy from Ardoyne or down the Falls they would need to take a flask of tea and a couple of sandwiches for the journey.

“Right Joe, you sit on the cart,” said my father, “ I will only be a few minutes”, and off he went to ‘hawk’, returning every ten or fifteen minutes with some ‘swagger’ in his sack to put on the cart. Every now and then he would have a sort through the swagger, woollen articles, which fetched a higher rate at the rag stores, went into a separate sack, and he a special bag for ’Pruck’, which were articles of clothing which were still wearable, clothes discarded because perhaps a child had out grown them and unlike the big families of Ballymurphy had no younger brother or sister to ‘hand them down to’ . This bag he would discreetly wrap in brown paper and bring home after he sold the rest at the rag store, usually Annie Kane’s store in Abercorn Street North. My mother, Kitty, would have a sort through the ‘pruck’ bag and what did not fit one of us kids she seemed to know a child in the street it would fit. “Here Joe”, she would say, as she wrapped the article up in newspaper, “Take this over to Mrs ..... , and tell her your mummy said this should fit her second oldest lad.. and don’t let anyone see you .“ I must have made hundreds of those wee trips in my childhood and looking back on it I have to chuckle when I recall that I must have brought one of Kitty Graham’s wee parcels to every other house in the street and the next street. I now realise that many eyes would have known what I was doing when I ran up the street with a bulge up my jumper trying to look so ‘normal’. The mother would say “Tell your mummy thanks very much son ”. Later that day, or the next, her second oldest lad would appear in the street wearing a different pullover, as proud as any child today would in a new designer garment, we were all poor and didn’t know it.

Up comes my father again to the cart, “Here Joe, I got some special pruck from a wee shop on the corner” and with a big smile, he added, “don‘t eat them all at once”. and handed me a bag of chocolate Chewing Nuts, tiny chocolate coated caramels, I don’t know if they can be got today, but they were my favourites. I sat there eating them, my legs dangling over the side of the cart, happy as a pig in the proverbially manure.” But what he returned with next made me gulp, he arrived back pushing a bicycle , a black one, with two flat tyres, and rusting handle bars. I immediately recognised it as just like the one the old retired peeler rode around Ballymurphy on, delivering the “Notice To Quit” to tenants who got behind with their rent. My father lifting the bike up onto the cart must have seen the expression on my face, “No it isn’t for you, we have to dump it for a lady who wants rid of it”. I breathed a sigh of relief, for I pictured the odd looks I would get from my wee mates as I rode round Ballymurphy on my peelers bike. There was a peeler in those days, who lived in Ballymurphy, there was two in fact, Head Hayes lived in Ballymurphy Road and Sergeant McCourt lived across from us in Whitecliffe Parade and he rode one of those big peelers bikes which he used to lean against his front wall when he was at home. Tired of the usual pranks, like letting his tyres down, our Hughie came up with a brilliant idea, well, we thought so at the time. Off we went and got some rope, he climbed up the lamp post and we helped push the bike up to him which he tied to the highest point of the lamp, the lamp being, of course, right close to Sergeant McCourt’s house for best effect. We all retreated over into Andy Tyrie’s entry to watch for the peeler coming out, out he came, and without even a look to his left or right went straight to the lamp post, shinnied up it and took down his bike, threw his leg over the cross bar and rode off as though the top of the lamp post was his usual parking place for his bike. Our prank went down like a damp squib, the peeler had the last laugh but as peelers go McCourt wasn’t a bad old spud.

Ballymurphy in those days was quite mixed, Liz Martin who later became a Loyalist City Councillor grew up in our street, Andy Tyrie, the U.D.A Commander grew up three doors from us, across in Whitecliff Parade, in the opposite direction, four doors from us at 3 Ballymurphy Drive, the mother of the now prominent loyalists, Andre and Ihab Shoukri was reared, all three family’s were good neighbours. In the main people got along quite well although for the first two or three years of the estates existence, around the 12^th of July, a visitor could have been excused for thinking, by the Union Jack flags displayed, it was a unionist housing estate. Once or twice there was an incident around the door of an Orangeman, a Mr Mooney, who took to displaying a huge union flag, each year from his Ballymurphy Road home, the size of which some seen as provocative. Billy Savage, a Whiterock man, took particular offence and tore the flag down for which he got three months imprisonment. It seems it was alright for the Orangeman to celebrate his culture and heritage, light bonfires in the streets, but should anyone feel a sense of inequality, the message seemed to be, bite your lip or you will end up in jail.

Billy Savage came from the nearby Whiterock estate, or “Rock”, an older and more settled area. The Whiterock estate was built in the 1920'S and was then considered to be the model housing estate of West Belfast, there were 333 houses in all and shortly after it opening the junior minister for home "Northern Ireland" , had this to say of the estate, "To walk along the roads in summer time is to see a sight that must gladden the heart of every lover of well kept gardens, these houses are perfect for three or four children, a clean and tidy wife, and a father who does not want to go out either to a public house or to a Local Option meeting, he wants his "Evening Telegraph"(not “Irish News“ ?) and after patting his children on the head and said good night to them he sits down in that house which is his own or becoming so more and more each day". An indication as to who the houses were intentionally built for is to be seen in the line, "..perfect for three or four children", Catholic families were most likely at the time to have eight, nine or even more children. The rent in the earliest days was 13 shillings(65p today's money) almost half of the working mans wages of the day, so there would be little chance for the man of the house.. "to go out to a public house“, in fact, before long people were being evicted from this 'paradise' because they couldn't afford the high rents in the "model estate" .. and needless to say, 'the well kept gardens', went down hill rapidly. By the 1930'S the estate became known as "The Moving City" due to the fact that so many families were moving in and out again of the houses, even though, by now, the rent was reduced to EIGHT shillings a week, these were hard times. The area became quite polarised religiously in 1935 due to the hundreds of Catholic families being burned from their homes by sectarian gangs in the York Street area in particular, hundreds of fleeing families squatted in the Whiterock houses. By the early 1940'S the estate settled down and took on its own identity and character, it was surrounded by ancient Fairy Hills and Fairy Thorns and Wells, much to the delight of its new population who identified with this beautiful Irish folklore.

The Whiterock Road was earlier known as Kill Pipers Hill,(the old pipers hill), then later known as "Sinclairs Loanen", after William Sinclair who had a, in fact three, Bleeching Greens in the area at one time. This Sinclair was at one time a member of the Society of United Irishmen and in Wolfe Tone's diary, Tone mentions having gone to visit the home of "The Draper", his nick name for Sinclair. Tone also refers to Thomas Russell as “P.P.” (Parish Priest). It seems Tone had taken to the old Belfast habit of nicknaming people.

The original “Ballymurphy House”, was situated on the Whiterock Road and existed there right into the 1960’s. It was a quadrangle shaped, one storied stone built farmhouse and out-buildings, and was situated just above