Belfast 1921 by Sheena Wilkinson

 A photo can tell you so much. 

When I was writing Hope against Hope, set in Belfast and along the new Irish border in 1921, I spent a lot of time walking round East Belfast and trying to see it as it would have been one hundred years ago when I placed my fictional girls' hostel there.  I also pored over old photos. Some streets and buildings – terraced houses, churches and mission halls and shops – haven’t changed too much, but there are new housing estates where once were factories; new motorway links and huge junctions have replaced back allies and tramlines.

 

Belfast in 1921 was on fire – often literally. Northern Ireland, which commemorates its centenary this year, was born from compromise and conflict, an expedient solution to an age-old problem. It was not really designed or expected to succeed; many would argue that it has not. But this is not a political post. This is about two little girls who had their photo taken in East Belfast in the early 1920s – it might not have been 1921, but I like to imagine it was because of the novel. 

Their names are Frances and Annie Duff. Frances is about thirteen and Annie nine or ten. They are my grandmother and my great aunt. They smile out, both with the expressions I remember so well from their later lives as elderly women. (They both lived into their nineties.)  They are well dressed, with the extravagant hair bows I remember from early school story illustrations. Both wear pearls and Annie has a wristwatch. This is clearly An Occasion. 

I like to think that it is June 1921 and that they are all dressed up to go and see the King and Queen open the first Northern Irish parliament at City Hall, as thousands of other unionists did. But possibly not. Gran, an inveterate teller of Stories of the Olden Days,  never mentioned such an outing. But then I knew nothing of this visit myself until I did the research for Hope against Hope, so perhaps I just didn’t ask the right questions. When I look closer at their frocks – all their lives they would call dresses frocks -- I see that they are fashionably short, but with huge hems –  made to last. They contrast with the lace edgings of their best frocks in the photo taken some years before – and I think this is not just a change in fashion, but a change in family fortunes. Their mother, Fanny, made their clothes, and took in sewing after their father died – which I believe was in between the two photos. As was the death of their big sister Sadie. 

 

Unlike the first photo, which was definitely taken in a photographic studio, I fancy this one was taken at home in Beechfield Street. I imagine that I remember that very vase, that little table with its barley-twist legs, but both would have been commonplace in 1921, so they may well have been in a studio.  Wherever they are, I do know that outside was a troubled city, disturbed by rioting and burnings. I know their local Catholic church was attacked in 1920, and that same year, thousands of Catholic workers were run out of the shipyard where Frances and Annie’s father and brothers worked. Nothing of that shows in the photo, but then neither does the tragedy even closer to home – except that Frances, now unexpectedly the Big Sister instead of the middle one, leans rather protectively into Annie – perhaps she is thinking of how fragile a sister’s hold on life can be. Or perhaps she is just doing what the photographer asked: all her life she was a gentle and compliant woman, unlike her granddaughter.

My favourite scene in Hope against Hope is a garden party, where the girls of the hostel at the centre of the story invite neighbouring families for tea, sports and entertainment. Of course I know that’s not where Frances and Annie are going, a treat after the family deaths, a distraction from the troubled city outside their front door. Because I made it up.

But without Gran’s stories, and photos like this, I couldn’t have. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

History in Abundance by Sheena Wilkinson

Greetings from the Clockhouse, Arvon’s writing retreat in the grounds of The Hurst in Shropshire. 

I’m sitting here in front of a view that hasn’t changed substantially in centuries, a landscape that has inspired writers from Housman to Webb to Malcolm Saville. The building I’m in, while recently refurbished, is properly old, with windowsills two foot thick. I’ve spent hours wandering ancient forest pathways. The ground is riddled with hoof-prints and it’s so easy to imagine them belonging not to a modern pleasure horse but to a hack or carthorse of years gone by.

Oh yes --  and I’m here to edit a novel set in Belfast 1921. A story of politics and rioting and tribal loyalties and young women. A story of despair and hope. 

So there’s HISTORY in abundance – in my head, on the manuscript at my elbow as a type, in the built and natural environment in which I have my being for this week. Easy, I thought, when I realised my History Girls post would fall due while I was here: lots of inspiration all around you. No excuse! And yet…

Sometimes, I admit, it’s really hard to think of what to write for this blog. I checked through some recent posts for inspiration. Maybe one of them would spark a response in me. There’s certainly an eclectic mix of topics – from Roman medicine to Thomas Cromwell, women artists to 195os housekeeping. All fascinating, all guaranteed to pull me out of Belfast 1921 and into various other worlds. And let me assure me, almost anywhere is a better place to be than Belfast 1921. Belfast 1921 is the last thing I want to write about just now. And yet, it's here in my head, chasing out almost everything else. 

It never fails to astonish me, how much work people put into their History Girls posts – the careful research, the detailed analysis, the well-chosen and often hard-to-source pictures. I know I often take a History-Lite approach myself – a bit of family history, a few old houses, some Musing. Other times – like next month, I promise, when I will have emerged from Belfast 1921 sufficiently to have something interesting to say about it – I manage a more thoughtful, erudite post. 

But for now, I’m so mired in my own historical fiction, in what I often call The Editing Cave, that I don’t think I have much more to offer. Apart from these pictures of an ancient landscape. 

Belfast 1918 -- A Poem by Sheena Wilkinson

Today is 50 years since the Civil Rights march in Derry  the reaction to which is generally thought to have sparked off the NI Troubles  I wrote this poem in response to a photo of Belfast 1918, but 1968 and what came afterwards was very much in my mind too. 

Belfast 1918

I was never here before

At least not in these black-and-white

Silent movie days.

I won’t be born for fifty years.

These streets are not silent. Trams clatter

Past blank-blinded brick terraces

These streets are not sepia.

Nor do they run with the blood 

Of the thousands who have lately marched

Down them on their way to the Somme,

Though they will in time run red. 

The Duffs of Beechfield Street -- a poem by Sheena Wilkinson

Like many History Girls I love watching Who Do You Think You Are? and am always struck by how little I know about my own antecedents. This poem pieces together snippets from things my gran told me about growing up in Belfast. She was born in 1908 and must have had memories of the Great War, the Great Flu, the Home Rule Crisis, Civil War, and the Belfast Blitz, but she always spoke about the domestic: home and church, work and leisure. 

There was nothing remarkable about her family. Except of course to her. 

The Duffs of Beechfield Street

The Duffs built the Titanic.

In 1913 James Duff moved his family

two streets further up the Newtownards Road

To save on the tram fare to the Yard.

The Duffs all worked at the Yard

The Duffs  were stalwarts of the Christian Endeavour

At Albertbridge Congregational Church.

They won prizes for Attendance and Bible Knowledge.

If you didn’t eat your dinner, James would say,

Put it in the oven, she’ll eat it when she’s hungry.

A Belfast street

 The Duffs loved animals, Annie a smuggler of kittens

Upstairs, hidden in her pinny, Frances never tiring

of the story of the wee Pomereen pup

found sleeping in her daddy’s boot.

The Duffs did as things did with them.

When James died Fanny took in sewing

And made sure the children had good clothes for Sundays.

The girls left school at thirteen, sewed shirts,

and hoped to marry. Sadie died at sixteen.

Annie, the kitten smuggler, Sadie who died, Frances, my gran

Alexander loved dancing. He always got Sandy.

Frances married Charles from a semi-detached

With a garden up the Castlereagh Road.

Jim went to Australia.

Annie dreamed of Australia

But when her mother died in 1936 she stayed

In Beechfield Street with her brother John,

And a cat called Dinky who was allowed upstairs.

Fanny Duff's death notice in The Belfast News Letter, 1936

Streets of Belfast 1901: An Animated Photo - Joan Lennon

My sister flagged up this video to me, because our grandfather came to Canada from Donaghadee (a small place not far from Belfast) about 10 years after this scene was filmed.  I looked out for him in case he was in Belfast that day (he had a pronounced limp because one leg was substantially shorter than the other, from a badly set break as a boy, so he would have been spot-able) but no luck.

This was filmed from the top of a horse-drawn tram by Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon, on a fine sunny day in May, 1901.  The end product, an "animated photo"*, was shown in the Usher Hall, Belfast and you can see perambulating billboards advertising the performance at 1:28 and 2:20.

It's riveting, isn't it?  The casual way people stroll into the street - the weight and swish of the women's skirts - I feel as if I've learned a lot, seeing the clothes in motion, instead of just in static drawings or still photographs - the different lengths of skirts for different ages - those enormous hats on those little girls!

I keep seeing more each time I watch it - 
at 0:07 - the barefoot boy 
at 1:10 - the extremely pregnant woman carrying a baby and holding the hand of a bouncy little girl in white and a big hat -
at 1:31 and 1:36 and 1:41 - the way women with more of a bustle would grab the back of their skirts with one hand
at 2:55 - the little boy in his sailor suit, standing out in the street
at 3:05 - the country woman in a shawl and apron 

I can't help noticing the sad condition of some of the animals, then, right at the end, two perky dogs trot by.  Our grandfather loved dogs.  He would have approved.


*"Film" and "movie" hadn't yet consolidated their places as the accepted terms for moving pictures.


Joan Lennon's website.
Joan Lennon's blog.
Silver Skin.