A Personal History of Sailortown
by
Paul McLaughlin
Everyone has heard of Sailortown, haven’t they? My father says that if they haven’t, then they haven’t been listening for the story of Belfast’s first waterfront village has hardly been out of the news for the past two years. The story of St Joseph’s church certainly, but how much does the ordinary Belfast punter really know about the place itself?
After 30 years, the story of the area is still crying out to be told and the anecdotes on the tongues of oul hands and mothers who were the heroines of the district deserve to be preserved for posterity.
Most of the bricks and mortar have been obliterated but, from the resulting Diaspora, the spirit of community in the hearts of its people lives on. Well, where exactly was this dockside village? Boundaries were never held that fondly by Sailortown folk. Like rules and regulations they were meant to be flexible and, as a result, that is exactly what happened on the ground.
Local poet Tommy O’Hara faced argument and derision when he tried to crack that old nut in his poem “Sailortown”. “From Whitla Street to God knows where, Now there’s an argument right there”, he wrote and summed up the controversy about borders that has raged in many’s the bar-room down the years. But, I think most people would agree that Sailortown ran from Henry Street, where the M2 motorway begins, to the old Fire Station in Whitla Street. One thing is certain, the boundaries may have been grey, the people were anything but.
Whitla St taken from The Midland Hotel
November in Sailortown felt a chilling wind whipping in from the Lough. Within a few seconds of dock, factory and mill horns trumpeting their call to arms, the little streets of one of Belfast’s best-known communities came alive. Hundreds crossed shining half-moons in the hustle and bustle to work. The great Linen cathedrals of Jennymount and York Street issued their summons, the full and empty bellies of boats at dock cried out for relief. A community, many of whose fathers and son were breathing the salt of distant seas in search of a living, was on the march. Another day of graft and grind had begun.
For nearly 100 years, this was the morning spectacle as the city’s most exotic quarter bantered its way into another morning with a hurly burly of activity.
Garmoyle Street, straight as a spinster’s look, was the main thoroughfare of the area. It was an artery that fetched and carried to and from its heart. It was a highway that ferried seamen to ships, dockers to backbreaking labour and millworkers to some of the most menial of tasks. It was a pupil’s pavement to Earl Street School and path of pilgrimage for the faithful to St Joseph’s chapel just around the corner.
Once or twice a week, the Sailortown stampede of cattle and pigs to market would echo down this street on the way up to town. Children would wallop them into order with canes supplied by the drovers. A shiny “sprazzie” might be their only pay but eager hands would grab for their first earnings at this market on the hoof.
More than 5,000 souls were packed into the ribbons of red-bricked terraces that hugged the dock from Pollock to Clarendon. Families and friends who shared a sense of community hewn from hard work and sacrifice. Homes rang with laughter and tears in their turn but the struggle for survival bred a fierce pride into every child.
Sailortown survived through the dark shadows of poverty and pogrom and established itself as a distinct village within urban Belfast. Here was a bustling portside area, cosmopolitan beyond the imaginings of other city dwellers, even in the days when sheep were still being grazed in the meadow behind the City Hall.
Sailortown was the hub of the port and hundreds of foreign seamen trod its streets each week. Its pubs and eating-houses were the stuff of legends. Places where the languages of half of Europe and beyond twisted their tongues round stout and pigs’ feet. Where else in this city could be heard the call for six pints of porter in as many languages?
The seafarers found a welcome here, a shared kinship unique to those who plough the deep. Goanese and Spanish, Poles, Germans, the many varied folk who lived on the shores of the Baltic and a multitude of Chinamen disembarked regularly for days at a time as their ships were turned round and made ready for sea. They made it home and many, including the numberless that shared the worship of the local people, spread the name of this place far and wide. They recognised this place as a favourite port of call.
Most families had men and boys, some only 14 years of age, away “deep sea”. The knew, first hand, the hardship of seafaring and shared a kindred spirit with their guests.
The dock gates at Whitla Street became a hive of activity when a docking boat was announced in the pages of Baird’s Telegraph. Mothers, children and sweethearts hurried to meet men making the long awaited trip home. Kit bags were carried shoulder high, presents distributed and many’s the thirst quenched in celebration and relief. Tales were told of hell in Baltic, long, dreary days in the Indian Ocean and icebreaking in the St Lawrence Seaway. Then all too soon, the cycle would turn and farewells would be said in hope and prayer. Life was hard and, often, uncertain, but the people toughed it, keeping faith in themselves and their religion. Development caught them unprepared, disbelieving and, perhaps, naive. It brought promises of many things but guaranteed only destruction.
The community was plundered in the name of progress as the people were scattered across the city and houses, that had been homes, were swept away. Yet, 30 years after the ball and chain of developers broke hearts and promises, the spirit of the dockland community, squandered to make room for a motorway, is a legacy that is being treasured. The Roman historian Cicero wrote that “memory is the treasury and guardian of all things”, and, with that in mind, the Sailortown Cultural & Historical Society was formed in 1999 to ensure that the collective memory of the district is preserved and promoted. That memory is like a chain that links us to the past.
The Industrial Revolution came late to Belfast in comparison to Manchester, Liverpool or Birmingham and it was not until the 1820’s that changes began that transformed a small town on a sandbank into a world leader in a number of industries.
From the 1820’s urban growth saw the city spread northward as it followed the expanding docks. As they developed, moving up from High Street, where the ships used to dock outside where Woolworth’s is now, housing followed along York Street and Corporation Street. New streets were built in the area with names like Pilot, Trafalgar, Nelson and Dock that told the tale of the people who lived there. Ships’ pilots, sea captains. chandlers and merchants of all descriptions were their first owners. A new middle class had arrived on the back of the affluence created from trade.
A view along York Street
With the coming of the Industrial Revolution and mechanisation, places such as York Street mill and Gallahers became the largest of their kind in the world. The linen industry mushroomed, docking became increasingly labour intensive and hundreds more people were drawn into the area to fills the needs and pockets of the new employers. New streets were added on reclaimed land up to Whitla Street and Sailortown, as we remember it, was established in the middle of the 19th Century.
The middle class continued to prosper and to control but more and more from a distance as they made good and headed further north to villas on the Cliftonville, Antrim Road and Cavehill.
Families from all over Ulster and beyond flocked to the city and the dock to take up poorly paid jobs that were better than nothing and housing that surpassed anything on the land. Sailortown became a working class enclave sandwiched between York Street and the Lower Dock, with the streets at the latter end becoming almost exclusively Roman Catholic.
This followed a pattern that, largely, dictated the religious break down of housing throughout the city.
Money was scarce, many houses overcrowded and work mostly menial. Among the men, carting, dock labouring and seafaring were the best on offer while the women were tied to the linen mills and the cigarette factory. Times were hard before the Great War and got worse as the 1920’s careered into a world depression. It hit Belfast and Sailortown harder than most as trade came to a virtual standstill. At this time, the women of the district came into their own. Many kept families from going to the wall, or even worse the union, by returning to work. The sweat of their labour, often in spinning rooms ankle deep in water, brought little reward but the role they played in those terrible years cannot be overemphasised. They reared families and made do with little. But chapel and children were preserved, often in that order. Sharing became the watchword for a generation as pots of soup and stew fed more than one household and friendship became as strong a bond as family. Ties born of those days remained unbroken until the final days of this district and the legacy of sharing was handed down to our people today.
The depression was a waking nightmare, as many of the older folk will tell you, and, ironically, it took another World War to bring relief. For the first time in years, there was full employment and the luxury of overtime. Many worked a 75 hour week and Sailortown reaped the benefits in the hinterland of a bustling port. Hard work brought its reward and, despite rationing, most people enjoyed a healthier diet than before.
The 1950’s and 60’s, when the British Prime Minister was saying we had never had it so good, were actually a positive time with plenty of work and cause for hope. Things were looking good but nothing is ever that simple.
Planners at City Hall had a new look for York Street up their sleeves, a look in which the motorcar and container lorry would take precedence over places and even people.
By the middle of the 1960’s, the housing stock in the area was in need of refurbishment. More than 100 year’s of weathering at the dock had taken its toll and renovation and replacement was necessary and, urgently so. But developers and consultants – a strange title given that nobody here was consulted – had other ideas. The future, they decided, was dependent on motor transport and, therefore, on roads. They surveyed Belfast and saw the dockland as the prime target for their blueprints.
The Belfast Ring Road was the future and nothing could be allowed to get in its way. Promises of new houses were made as residents moved out. People were less sophisticated 30 years ago than they are today. Many believed developers without question, others found themselves isolated without the protection of the kind of community organisation that would save other parts of the city.
People were caught on the hop and politicians, planners and even clergy helped smooth the way for demolition. The area was obliterated street by street and the people moved to district like Shore Crescent, Carlisle Estate and as far away as Twinbrook.
Today we have three houses left and only a handful of residents in the old Sailortown. But spiritually and emotionally, the community is still very much together. A bond has been formed in the face of adversity of those intervening years, a bond that has been strengthened by the threat to St Joseph’s chapel.
The story of chapel where clergy, in the guise of “birds of passage” make decisions to sell off a holy place that belongs to its people, desecrate that place in the name of profit and expediency and lie barefacedly throughout is a disgrace. Their unwillingness to listen is reminiscent of earlier developers but, as guardians of the faith, their shame is incalculable. They have been notified – Loud and Clear – that the people have moved on and that the chapel stays.
The factory horns are silent now and the streets have been swept away but the salt still tingles on the skin and the memory of the many refuses to be destroyed by the few.
The folk who come from this district, no matter where in the world you meet them, are proud to tell you where they are from. The don’t say Belfast, they say Sailortown. They just expect you to know.
And it’s like my Da says: “if you haven’t heard of Sailortown, you haven’t been listening”.
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