W.A. Maguire
(Keele University Press, £10.95)
Belfast, being the political and sectarian cockpit that it is, has been well served by histories of one kind or another or has featured in many general Irish histories. This most recent offering from W.A. Maguire provides us with an accessible account of all facets of its history over almost four centuries. In addition it contains sixty illustrations, mostly photographs from the extensive collections of the Ulster Museum. All this is contained in just over 200 pages, a tribute to the author’s economy of style which in no way reads as either synoptic or truncated. Indeed he has succeeded in appealing to both the academic and general reader.
The book gives us the particular flavour of each era. Thus we are offered successive snapshots of Belfast in terms of politics (local and national), industry and commerce, living conditions, public health, education, transport and entertainment. We are told of the Ewarts, the Pirries, the Gallahers and the other magnates who contributed so much to building the city and of the skilled craftsmen and their families who shared in the benefits of industrialisation. At the same time we are made aware of the appalling workplace conditions and the disease-ridden hovels endured by the city’s poor, a consequence of meteoric growth and the ineptitude and corruption of municipal government. Nothing of any importance to the city and its inhabitants is left unrecorded. Thus the day-to-day existence of each generation is noted as well as the more familiar great events, including the cycle of sectarian civil disorder.
The story begins at the start of the seventeenth century when Béal Feirste, till then a few dwellings around a ford at the mouth of the River Lagan, was subject to an influx of planters led by Arthur Chichester who, having received a large royal grant of the surrounding land, rebuilt its ruined castle and established a town beside it. In 1613 it received a charter of incorporation and its founder was created Baron Chichester of Belfast. The family would control the town for the next two centuries, latterly as Marquises of Donegall. The book traces Belfast’s slow expansion as a market town and port in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and looks at the emergence of a Presbyterian merchant class which, hamstrung by the political impediments of the penal laws, became radicalised and involved with the United Irishmen.
Entering the nineteenth century, Belfast, with a population of 20,000, was heavily involved in the cotton industry. However in the 1830s this changed: following a fire at their cotton mill, the Mulholland family imported the new wet-spinning technology of James Kay, allowing for the power-spinning of linen. Their success was emulated by other manufacturers and Belfast became a leading linen town. Fortune smiled on the industry and town in the middle of the century, when the American Civil War resulted in a blockade on the cotton-exporting southern states. This hit the cotton manufacturers of Lancashire and Clydeside and gave Belfast access to world markets on a large scale which it was largely to retain and augment. This led to an increase in the employment of mainly women in the industry and the consequent growth of population which soared from a mid-century figure of around 90,000 to 350,000 at the start of the present century.
The late Victorian era was the most successful period in Belfast’s history. If ‘Linenopolis’ was the epithet reflecting the prime mover in the growth of Belfast, it was not the only factor. Other great industries included textile engineering arising from linen, shipbuilding, tobacco manufacturing, a ropeworks, printing, whiskey and mineral water in all of which Belfast was among the world leaders. The city (a status granted under a royal charter in 1888) consequently became a great port, going from third in size in Ireland in the 1840s to third in the United Kingdom in 1900, surpassed only by London and Liverpool. The heyday of industrial Belfast was the Edwardian era and Maguire is particularly expansive on the social, economic and political aspects of the city at that time.
After the first world war a decline started in all of Belfast’s traditional staple industries which accelerated in the ‘hungry thirties’. The second world war temporarily reversed the trend but the decline resumed its inexorable progress in the forties and fifties. However the sixties saw a period of growth based on inward investment in light engineering and man-made textiles encouraged by a world-wide boom and government grants. The mid-sixties’ unemployment figure of 3% in retrospect is rightly seen by the author as a golden age. This petered out in the seventies coinciding with the advent of the present troubles. The book ends in the recent period with the city now reduced in size due to population movement to dormitory towns and housing estates fringing it. It ends on the unhappy note of there being no obvious end in sight to the troubles which have exacted such a price from those who have remained.
Peter Collins