The Belfast Blitz: The City in the War Years

By Brian Barton

The Second World War was a titanic struggle against totalitarianism. It involved civilian populations – in the production of ships and armaments and as victims of aerial bombardments – as never before. In this respect, Belfast played an important role. The more it became vital to the war effort the greater was the risk that it would be subjected to a blitz from the Luftwaffe. In spite of that, it remained woefully unprepared for attack. For Belfast, like Coventry, there was to be no gradual conditioning. When the Luftwaffe squadrons first struck, on Easter Tuesday night 1941, the sudden and sustained bombardments devastated the city. Equally seriously, civilian morale was shattered.

This book examines the reasons for the authorities’ lack of preparation and describes the full terror of the blitz. It also details how the raids exposed extreme poverty in Belfast. It considers the impact on social policy and on the emerging welfare state, particularly in housing provision and health care. It assesses their effect on sectarian relations within the city, on North/South relations and on the relationship between Stormont and Westminster. It can claim to be by far the most wide-ranging, comprehensive and accurate account of the Belfast blitz yet written.

Drawing on a rich range of primary and secondary sources it gets closer to the events described than any previous publication. Large numbers of people, including first-hand witnesses, were interviewed, and documentary material was assembled from some thirty archive centres – including private diaries, memoirs and correspondence, civil defence message books, Belfast City Council papers, accounts by British and American servicemen, intelligence files, meteorological records, and military war diaries and analyses.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ulster Historical Foundation
• Release date: May 8, 2015
• ISBN: 9781909556355

Brian Barton

BRIAN BARTON was a Senior Research Fellow in Irish History at Queen's University, Belfast, and is now a tutor in History for the Open University. He has also co-written (with Mike Foy) The Easter Rising which is being re-issued in a new edition at Easter 2011.

Book preview

Brian Barton was born in Dunkineely, County Donegal, in 1944, was educated at Methodist College, Belfast, graduated from Queen’s University Belfast in 1967, was awarded an MA by the University of Ulster in 1979, and completed a PhD at Queen’s in 1986. He lectured at the College of Business Studies, Belfast, 1971–1994, tutored in modern history with the Open University, 1995–2013, and was a research fellow at Queen’s and at Churchill College, Cambridge. He has authored or edited twelve books on Irish history and politics. His most recent publications include: The Secret Court Martial Records of the Easter Rising (The History Press, 2010), and he co-authored with Michael Foy, The Easter Rising (The History Press, 2011). He co-edited with Patrick Roche, and contributed to, The Northern Ireland Question: The Peace Process and the Belfast Agreement (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). He also contributed chapters on Northern Ireland to A New History of Ireland, Vol. VII, Ireland 1921–1984, produced by the Royal Irish Academy (Oxford University Press, 2003).

The scene at the corner of Hillman Street and the Antrim Road, on 16 April 1941, after the Easter Tuesday raid.

© National Museums Northern Ireland

To Rachel, Kate, Maggie and Marcy

Blitz

They empty the swimming baths and lay out the dead.

There are children who haven’t learnt to swim, bundled

With budgerigars and tabbies under the stairs.

Shockwaves are wrinkling the water that isn’t there.

MICHAEL LONGLEY, Gorse Fires

The Belfast Blitz

The City in the War Years

BRIAN BARTON

ULSTER HISTORICAL FOUNDATION

A cartoon by Leslie Gilbert Illingworth, which appeared in the Daily Mail on 6 July 1940. It expresses the incomprehension and exasperation felt by many in Britain at the inability of Ireland’s political leadership to cooperate when confronted by the threat of imminent German invasion.

LLYFRGELL GENEDLAETHOL CYMRU, NATIONAL LIBRARY OF WALES

This publication has received support from the Northern Ireland Community Relations Council which aims to promote a pluralist society characterised by equity, respect for diversity, and recognition of interdependence. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the Council.

Ulster Historical Foundation is pleased to acknowledge support for this publication from the Esmé Mitchell Trust and the Northern Ireland War Museum.

Published 2015

by Ulster Historical Foundation

49 Malone Road, Belfast, BT9 6RY

www.booksireland.org.uk

www.ancestryireland.com

Except as otherwise permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means with the prior permission in writing of the publisher or, in the case of reprographic reproduction, in accordance with the terms of a licence issued by The Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publisher.

© Brian Barton, 2015

ISBN 978-1-909556-32-4

Printed by Martins the Printers

Design and production by Dunbar Design

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

1Recession, Poverty and Progress: The Inter-War Years

2Ill-prepared for War: 1935–1939

3‘Probably the pleasantest place in Europe’: September 1939–March 1941

4The Dockside Raid: 7–8 April 1941

5The Easter Tuesday Raid: 15–16 April 1941

6Picking up the pieces: 16 April–3 May 1941

7The Fire Raid: 4–5 May 1941

8Morale ‘is definitely disappointing … not first class’: 5 May–December 1941

9‘Fearing the end of the War more than its continuance’: January 1942–May 1945

Appendix: Civilian Deaths in Northern Ireland that resulted from the German Air Raids

Persons who were interviewed and/or provided written memoirs or archive material relating to the Blitz

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank the staffs of the following institutions and bodies for their assistance: the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, Belfast; the National Archives, London; the Imperial War Museum, London, especially Terry Charman and Alan Wakefield; the British Library (Reference Division), Newspaper Library, London; the Tom Harrisson Mass Observation Archive, University of Sussex, in particular, Dorothy Sheridan; the Irish National Archives, Dublin; the Irish Military Archives, Dublin; the National Library of Ireland, Dublin; the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, Maidenhead; the Main Library, Queen’s University Belfast; the Central Library, Belfast; the Linen Hall Library, Belfast, especially John Killen and Mary Delargy; Anne Pedan at the Royal Welch Fusiliers Regimental Museum, Caernarfon; the Royal Artillery Library, Woolwich, in particular, Paul Evans; Lawrence Spring at the Surrey History Centre; the Royal Ulster Rifles Museum, Belfast; the Royal Irish Fusiliers Regimental Museum, Armagh; the Ulster Aviation Society Museum; the British Broadcasting Corporation Written Archives Centre, Reading; the Royal Ulster Constabulary Museum, Belfast; Bob Pugh at the Belfast and County Down Railway Museum Trust; the Northern Ireland Fire Authority, Lisburn; the Belfast Hospital for Sick Children, Royal Victoria Hospital, Belfast; the presbyteries of St. Patrick’s, St. Mary’s and St. Malachy’s Catholic Churches, Belfast, and the Bundesarchiv-Militararchiv, Freiburg, Germany.

Many of the photographs used to illustrate the text are from the collections held at the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, the Linen Hall Library and the Imperial War Museum. Most sincere thanks are also due to other institutions and individuals who provided visual material: the Ulster Museum and Michelle Ashmore, Museum Assistant; North Down Museum and Leanne Briggs, Museum Assistant; the Northern Ireland War Museum; British Library; Belfast Telegraph; Catherine Doran and the Derry Journal; St Patrick’s Catholic Church, Donegall Street; the Dublin City Library and Archive and Ellen Murphy, Senior Archivist; Dundalk Fire Brigade; Drogheda Fire Brigade; Bundesarchiv-Militararchiv; Harland and Wolff; Bombardier Aerospace; William Wilton of Wilton Funeral Service; David Ashe; Phyllis Doherty; Ian McQuiston; Paddy O’Flaherty and the Very Rev. John Mann, Dean of Belfast.

I must express my gratitude to the Deputy Keeper of the Records, Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, for granting me permission both to quote from material deposited there and to incorporate copies of photographs held at PRONI. I am deeply indebted to the following depositors: Brian Dingwall for giving me access to Lady Spender’s diary; the Spender family for Sir Wilfrid Spender’s Financial Diary; Michael Duffin for Emma Duffin’s diary; W. Topping for the Topping Papers; and Mrs W. Ward for William Ward’s notes on the Belfast air raids. Mass Observation material is reproduced by permission of the Trustees of the Tom Harrisson Mass Observation Archive, University of Sussex, and I am especially grateful to Moya Woodside, who allowed me to use her name throughout the text. I wish also to thank Michael Longley for generously granting me permission to include his poem ‘Blitz’ from his collection Gorse Fires (Secker and Warburg, 1992), and to Professor F.W. Boal for permitting me to reproduce his map relating to the Easter Tuesday raid from the volume which he co-edited with Stephen Royle, Enduring City: Belfast in the Twentieth Century (Blackstaff Press, 2006). With regard to the Thomas A. Crawley sketch, ‘The Shelter Warden’, every effort has been made to gain permission for its reproduction, but the copyright holders could not be traced.

I am deeply indebted to those individuals whose expertise, help and advice, not least with regard to the identification of primary sources, were crucial to the completion of this volume, including: Dermot Archer, William Butler, Ernie Cromie, Jeremy Crang, Richard Doherty, Deirdre Donnelly, Marianne Elliott, Robert Fisk, M.T. Foy, Walter Gray, Tom Hartley, Fred Heatley, Anne McCrossan, Paddy O’Flaherty, Jim O’Hagan, Joe O’Loughlin, Philip Ollerenshaw, Raymond O’Regan, George Pollock, P.J. Roche, Fr Michael Sheehan, Denis Tuohy, Kenneth Wakefield, Martin Watts and Ian Wood. I wish to record my profound feelings of indebtedness in particular to Ian Montgomery, Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, for his astute guidance with regard to the records held at PRONI and, indeed, for his support throughout.

The published works cited in the bibliography contained much valuable information on many of the issues considered in the text. Especial mention must be made of two of them. Trevor Allen’s book, The Storm Passed By: Ireland and the Battle of the Atlantic, 1940–4 (Irish Academic Press, 1996), was engrossing and indispensable, particularly in relation to German sources. Equally so was Jimmy Doherty’s Post 381: the Memoirs of a Belfast Air Raid Warden (Friar’s Bush Press, 1989); it is incomparably the most comprehensive and best first-hand account of the Belfast blitz.

I wish to express my sincere gratitude to my publishers, the Ulster Historical Foundation, whose proficiency and encouragement were vital in shaping this book – to Fintan Mullan especially, to Brendan O’Brien, the copy editor, and to Wendy Dunbar who did the design work. I must also thank the Northern Ireland Community Relations Council, the Esmé Mitchell Trust and Northern Ireland War Museum, Talbot Street, Belfast, both of which most generously grant-aided this publication. I wish to acknowledge the support provided by the War Museum’s trustees and staff, in particular, Ciaran Elizabeth Doran, Curator, Kerry McIvor, Administration Officer, Jenny Haslett, Education Officer, Major John Potter OBE, Ian Wilson and the late John Hughes. I wish, above all, to express my most sincere gratitude and my profound indebtedness to the many citizens of Belfast and elsewhere whom I interviewed in the course of my research, for their unstinting kindness, patience and generosity in relating to me what were all too often such painful memories.

Finally, to my wife Valerie, who painstakingly proofread each of the many drafts, my deepest gratitude.

BRIAN BARTON

Belfast, 2015

The devastation on Bridge Street in the aftermath of the fire raid, 4/5 May 1941

Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, PRONI/CAB/3/A/68/B

1

Recession, Poverty and Progress

The Inter-War Years

In Northern Ireland, as in much of Britain, the inter-war years still evoke bitter memories. They were vividly depicted in Down the Shankill by an ex-resident, Winifred Campbell. She recalls:

Short time [i.e. short-term] unemployment was common enough. It simply meant a tightening of the belt for a while … [But] as months stretched into years people began to despair. Every possible economy became the way of life … The only thing that people had left was their self-respect and they tried very hard to hold on to this.

The 1920s and 1930s are forever identified in the public mind with economic recession, slum housing, malnutrition, poor health and, for many, poverty that was eased inadequately by heavily means-tested benefits. In 1932 violence, rooted in widespread distress, erupted in Belfast, followed three years later by the worst sectarian riots in the city since the ‘troubles’ when Ireland was partitioned in 1921.

A pre-war view of High Street, taken from the Albert Memorial Clock. It was Belfast’s earliest main street, and an important transport hub, as well as a commercial and business centre, from the late nineteenth century. Below it, the culverted River Farset runs to the sea, silent and unseen.

Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, PRONI CAB/3/A/68

Yet Belfast had begun the twentieth century as a confident and energetic provincial centre in the full flush of its industrial and commercial power. During the late nineteenth century it had grown more rapidly than any other city in the British Isles. In 1911 its population was 387,000, a twenty-fold increase since 1800. It was by then the largest urban area in Ireland, and the most dynamic; in 1900, just one quarter of its citizens had been born within its boundaries. It could boast two of the largest shipyards in the world, Harland and Wolff with 10,000 employees in 1900, and Workman Clark with 9,000 in 1910; both were stimulated by inflated demand during the Great War and, by 1918, they had a combined workforce of almost 30,000. The Lagan valley was the world’s most important linen-producing region, an industry that also benefited from substantial wartime contracts. Belfast had 200 mills – one, it seemed, on every street corner – and York Street Flax Spinning Company was reputedly the most extensive single textile firm to be found anywhere. The city had both the biggest independent tobacco factory in existence (Gallaher Limited), and the most sizeable rope works of its kind. In addition, it contained roughly forty engineering premises and was an important centre for food processing, whiskey distilling and aerated water manufacture. In total, on the eve of war, it accounted for one-third of Ireland’s entire industrial output. Its banks had an enviable record of unbroken prosperity – they had known no failures since the early 1820s.

In common with the rest of Ireland, Belfast’s most affluent years were those up to and during the First World War, and the subsequent boom; its economic prospects then seemed bright. Physically it remained undistinguished, never able to compete or compare with the grandeur of Dublin. Rather, it had developed as a typical British industrial town, built sturdily and inelegantly. Its saving grace was its setting, a green river valley, nestling between the surrounding hills. Visitors expressed divergent opinions of it. In early March 1941 Doreen Bates, an HM tax inspector, single and in her mid-thirties, described it in her diary (kept for the Tom Harrisson Mass Observation organisation)1 as ‘a hideous place. I go to the office [in Donegall Place] in a rattly old tram (for 1d) along streets without one building worth looking at, except perhaps the new BBC building.’ But her unflattering comments were perhaps influenced by her circumstances. She had just been transferred from London under protest; she was offered a choice, to ‘resign or go’. In addition, she was pregnant (she gave birth to twins in October) and this was causing uncertainty as to whether she could continue to be employed by the civil service. In contrast, Major J.G. Westover, a GI officer who disembarked with the first contingent of American troops in January 1942, at once felt at home in Belfast; he regarded it as ‘an attractive city’ and found its ‘downtown buildings … ornate’ though, he noted, none was higher than five storeys.

Unionists in Belfast were proud of its nineteenth-century transformation and of its prosperity, which they attributed to the frugality and enterprise of its Protestant people, and the security and protection of the Union. To preserve and sustain it, they orchestrated the political resistance to Irish Home Rule throughout the northeast from the 1880s, prompting Arthur Griffith, the founder of Sinn Féin, to describe the ‘Ulster question’ as, in essence, a ‘Belfast city question’. Westminster’s attempted compromise, the 1920 Government of Ireland Act, resulted in partition, and in its becoming the ‘capital’ of a new semi-autonomous state, ‘Northern Ireland’. It was dominated politically by an insecure Protestant majority and, during and after the establishment of a provincial government, the region’s traditional sectarian divisions assumed still greater prominence and ferocity (in the ‘troubles’, 1920–1922, almost 500 persons died, over half of them Catholics, and 10,000 were intimidated out of their workplaces and 20,000 out of their homes).

From 1920 both the city and Northern Ireland as a whole entered a period of persistent and unyielding depression. In the six counties, on average, 19 per cent of the insured work force was unemployed between 1923 and 1930, and 27 per cent for the years 1931–1939. In mid-1938 the figure was the highest since the creation of the state, and in 1939 it exceeded that of any other region in the UK; it was then double the level in Scotland, and almost 50 per cent greater than in Wales. In 1931 roughly one-quarter of Belfast’s labour force was without work, and again in 1938. In 1932, the trough of the ‘great depression’, the figure had peaked at 76,000; 68 per cent of those previously employed in the shipbuilding and engineering sectors had by then been made redundant. One of the most memorable features of working-class districts during the 1930s was the clusters of gaunt and undernourished men standing idly on street corners. In Ronnie Munck and Bill Rolston’s oral history, Belfast in the Thirties, Florrie Addley recalls: ‘You would have been identified as what corner you stood at. They would say, Oh, sure you know him, he stands at the corner of Henry Street. They’d nothing else to do, nowhere else to go.’ Bryce Millar, then a young shipyard worker, remembers the local convention that ‘You could not stand with them until you were over fourteen and had left school.’

The prolonged recession was not due to the impact of partition, the economic consequences of which were slight. Rather it was caused by the stagnation and decline of Belfast’s traditional, export-dependent industries: in particular, shipbuilding and linen. These giants of the nineteenth century progressively became the dinosaurs of the twentieth. With justification, Sir Crawford McCullagh, the city’s longest-serving Lord Mayor, observed that their contraction had been ‘brought about by problems over which neither the [Stormont] government nor the municipality has any control’. During the inter-war years, the shipbuilding industry suffered from falling world demand caused by widespread economic recession and the downturn in global trade, and from intense new foreign competition, especially from the United States, Scandinavia and Japan. In their response, the two local yards benefited little from the policies adopted by successive Westminster governments; these were, in any case, only marginally effective even in Britain. Between early December 1931 and May 1934, no ships were launched from Harland and Wolff; the grass grew on the empty and derelict slips. Outfitting and repair work on vessels had also dried up. Due to harsh economic conditions, accentuated by mismanagement, the inappropriately nicknamed ‘wee yard’, Workman Clark (which had specialised in refrigerated ships), was forced to close in 1935, its operations being absorbed by its larger neighbour. Meanwhile, Harland and Wolff itself had built up a massive overdraft, £2.3 million by 1931, there was much talk of liquidation, and employment at the firm had plummeted to between 2,000 and 3,000. Nevertheless, over the course of the 1930s, it performed creditably. By May 1934 its work force had recovered to reach 10,000. In 1935 its tonnage launched was a world record for the year, and in 1938 its total output was the largest of any shipyard in the UK. A key to its survival was diversification of production. It built diesel-electric trains for the Belfast and County Down Railway Company (the first in the British Isles); more conventional locomotives for North and South America and Australia; engines for oil pipelines in the Middle East; grain silos; and skeleton steel structures for shops and cinemas. By late 1939 it was employing approximately 18,000 workers, despite benefiting little from rearmament and Admiralty contracts. In fact, few Northern Ireland firms attracted government orders although this region was the least strike-prone in the UK, having ample supplies of labour, and relatively remote from Germany.

In contrast to shipbuilding, the linen industry experienced a substantial and permanent decline in output and exports during the 1930s. This was caused less by the general contraction in international trade and increased levels of foreign competition than by a dramatic decline in the level of global demand. As a consequence, less than 40 per cent as much flax was then being processed worldwide as pre-1914. Unforeseeable changes in female fashion were a major reason for this downturn. After the First World War, skirts became shorter and required less voluminous layers of material for underwear. With the growing taste for novelty, the durability of linen clothing became less of an asset. Also, progressively fewer people could afford the retinue of domestic servants needed to launder the cloth properly. Linen tableware became less marketable. Cotton cloth was cheaper and better suited to the mass market. Although the Northern Ireland linen industry responded admirably compared to firms in Britain, its work force dropped from a post-war peak of 90,000 to 57,000 by 1935. The tobacco industry was the one ‘old’ industry in Belfast that continued to thrive; the exports of Gallaher Ltd increased almost three-fold between 1930 and 1936, and its workforce rose to 3,000, mainly women.

Belfast’s unemployment problem was aggravated by a drop in the levels of emigration in the inter-war years. In addition, the population of the city rose by 50,000 between 1911 and 1937 to 438,000, by which time over one-third of the people of Northern Ireland lived within its boundaries. A proportion of this growing labour force was absorbed into the engineering sector, which revived in the 1930s (into specialist firms such as James Mackie and Sons, Davidson’s Sirocco Works and Musgrave and Co Ltd), or into the expanding building industry. Others entered the thriving service sector; the numbers it employed expanded by 20,000 between 1926 and 1937 – partly as a consequence of the formation of the new regional government. A minority also found work in the small number of new firms that were attracted to the six counties. The most important of these was the aircraft factory of Short and Harland. The company was formed in June 1936 against the background of deepening international tension in Europe and beyond, as a consequence of which, earlier that year, the Royal Air Force had placed so large an order for Sunderland flying boats with Short Brothers of Rochester that it was forced to expand its capacity. Belfast offered a unique and irresistible range of inducements including: a grant from the regional government; a location thought to be beyond the reach of German bombers; a skilled labour force; a deep-water dock; a large stretch of sheltered water in Belfast Lough, suitable for flying boats; and an airport under construction at Sydenham, with a 1,500-yard runway – it was officially opened in 1938 by Mrs Anne Chamberlain, wife of Neville Chamberlain. By August 1937 building work on the aircraft factory had been completed and the production of land and marine aeroplanes had begun. By September 1939 it was employing almost 5,600 workers. Much of the credit for this success rests with the Harbour Commissioners. They had been responsible for building the airport on some of the 400 acres of slobland that they had recently reclaimed. Moreover, other improvements that they had initiated – notably, the opening of the one mile long Herdman Channel, and the Pollock Dock and Basin in 1933 – had meanwhile contributed to an increase in the volume of trade cleared through Belfast’s port. It rose from 3 to 4.5 million tons between 1933 and 1939.

The drawing office at Short and Harland’s in June 1939 – clearly a male preserve. After the ‘fire raid’ it was described by W.P. Kemp, the aircraft factory’s director, as the ‘brain centre’ of the firm.

By kind permission of Bombardier Aerospace, Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, PRONI D4474/2/233

However, like many regions in the United Kingdom, Northern Ireland generally found it difficult to attract sufficient new industry. It lacked raw materials, it was remote from GB markets, and its transport costs were higher than in Britain. In addition, Northern Ireland ministers were unable, and those at Westminster unwilling, to provide adequate financial inducements to attract potential investors. Stormont legislation introduced for this purpose in 1932 had attracted just four applications after five years. This measure, combined with updated legislation in 1937, succeeded in creating only 279 new jobs. This abysmal record prompted Tommy Henderson, an Independent Unionist MP, to enquire whether ‘if the Government set up a few fish shops they would not give more employment’. Overall, the local economy slipped further behind the performance of the United Kingdom as a whole. Additional employment was not being created quickly enough within the North to absorb its growing work force or to compensate for the decline of its traditional industries.

Nonetheless, during the inter-war years conditions for the vast majority of the population improved substantially. Between 70 and 80 per cent of Northern Ireland’s insured work force remained in employment throughout, and between 1932 and 1937 the number of those in work rose by 15 per cent, a growth rate that was almost identical to that of Scotland, the north of England and Wales. Also, real income per head within the six counties rose by 10–15 per cent between the wars, though this was less than the average increase in Great Britain, which was 25 per cent. Furthermore, during the 1920s and 1930s a measurable improvement took place in health, life expectancy and the overall quality of life throughout Northern Ireland, and also in Belfast’s civic and social amenities. Electricity generation proceeded rapidly, particularly after the creation of a regional electricity board in 1932. Consumption trebled over the next eight years, which was greater than the average rate of increase in Britain. By 1940 80 per cent of the generating plant in the six counties was located at the harbour power station in Belfast; it had been completed in 1923 and was sited – unwisely – in the dock area. The first ‘all electric’ houses in the city (in Balmoral Avenue) were advertised for sale in 1928, and trolley buses first plied for fares in 1938 (along a three mile strip on the Falls Road). They competed with the petrol-driven service, which had begun in 1923 and had become a Corporation monopoly five years later. Telephone House was completed in 1934 and, as it was linked to nine satellite exchanges, provided a modern telephone system for the entire region. Its construction cost £500,000 (including apparatus and cables) and took three years – as it was built on 400 piles, sunk to an average depth of over 40 feet, and these supported the granite raft on which the six-storey building stood. In hindsight at least its location too, in the town centre, was ill advised. Meanwhile, nearby, the Corporation had increased the capacity of the city’s only gasworks (on the Ormeau Road), and the Silent Valley reservoir in the Mournes was officially opened on 24 May 1933; it had cost £1.4 million, had a capacity of 30,000 gallons, and became Belfast’s main source of water supply.

Leisure activities also became more varied. In September 1924 a BBC transmitter and studio were established in Belfast, and by 1939, roughly half of all households in Northern Ireland had a wireless set. The number of private motorcars on its roads increased ten-fold between 1919 and 1937; for the population as a whole, car ownership rose from one for every sixty families to one for every seven. Press reports claimed that 500,000 gathered to see the first Ards Tourist Trophy race in 1928. Golf, yachting and cricket became more popular, mirroring social developments in Britain. Up to 30,000 spectators watched rugby internationals at Ravenhill. Belfast’s Museum and Art Gallery opened in 1929. In addition, leading British ‘chains’ such as Burtons, Woolworths and Austin Reed opened branches in its commercial centre, offering consumers greater choice.

Bridge Street on the eve of war, looking north from High Street. John Arnott’s retail drapers dominated its east side. The premises of the Belfast Banking Company, which faced down the street at its northern end, dated back to the mid-eighteenth century; all milestones radiating out from the city were measured from this building.

Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, PRONI CAB/3/G/15

However, beneath this surface of mainly middle-class affluence there were deep chasms of social deprivation throughout Northern Ireland. For many living in working-class areas of Belfast, unemployment, low wages, high rents, overcrowding, poverty and ill health were part of the inescapable reality of urban life. Their existence and true extent only began to be realised when brutally exposed by the German air raids on the city during the spring of 1941. The social inequality that permeated Belfast society was graphically illustrated when one of the directors at Gallaher’s tobacco firm had the misfortune to catch pneumonia. He lived above the company’s offices in York Street. In Belfast in the Thirties Florrie Addley recalls

sitting while they laid turf because he was coming up to a crisis … They tied up the knocker in case there would be a noise, and we would have noticed this and be told as children: ‘Oh, be very quiet and keep away; there’s a crisis coming.’ Well, this had happened to him and they laid turf, carts and carts of turf, laid from Earl Street to Brougham Street to deaden the noise of the trams; so they must have been – to us they were – very, very wealthy.

Bryce Millar vividly remembered some of the features of his childhood home in Michael Street in north Belfast during the 1930s – the cramped rooms with their bare boards, the water tap behind the front door (there were no bathroom facilities), and the flickering light from naked gas flames. In late 1941, seven months after the blitz, Dr Thomas Carnwath undertook an inquiry into all matters relating to health in the city. As one civil servant observed, his generally unfavourable report was an ‘indictment’ of his employers, the Belfast Corporation. He observed that there were ‘undoubtedly bad areas’ of housing, and listed some of them: ‘Edward Street, courts and passages off the Newtownards Road, the Ravenhill Road, between North Queen Street and York Street, Cromac Street …’ The most common defects were ‘damp, mouldering walls [with] many of them bulging, rickety stairs, broken floors [and] crumbling ceilings’. Some of the houses were ‘mere hovels, with people living in indescribable filth and squalor’. Large families were being raised in these ‘unsavoury conditions’; some of the tenants had been in occupation for twenty years or more. Nevertheless, rents were high, ‘considering the nature of the accommodation’: 1s. 9d. (9p) per week for a ‘small attic which it was an adventure to approach’, and up to 3s. 8d. (18½p) for rooms on other floors. The report concluded that ‘overcrowding was confined to very poor people [living in] worn out houses, without back passages and of obsolete design, situated in narrow streets and cul-de-sacs. The worst excesses were discovered in large tenement houses ‘in decayed neighbourhoods, sublet with one or two rooms each, with half a dozen families in a house originally built for one, and rents up to 9s [45p] per room.’

Other surveys carried out in 1941 confirmed these gloomy findings. One indicated that in parts of the city such as Smithfield, up to 10 per cent of the houses were each occupied by two or more families, while a study of Lonsdale Street, off the Old Lodge Road, found that a total of 190 people were living in twelve houses, with over thirty in one of them. Adrian Robinson, a senior civil servant at the Ministry of Home Affairs, described these findings, some of which had been produced by his own department, as ‘typical of the bad areas of the city’. During 1942 and 1943, ministry officials conducted further inquiries into both city-centre and more suburban districts, including North Queen Street, Dock Street, Henry Street and Whiterock Gardens. They concluded that properties with seven to eight rooms, occupied by between seventeen and thirty people, were the norm – a ‘typical return of the number of persons in each house in a working class street’. In their view, ‘housing conditions in Belfast are as bad as they can possibly be; gross overcrowding prevails … The position has become so acute that, even under war conditions, some remedial action is considered essential.’ In fact they suggested that it was ‘politically necessary to do something’ for the ‘good of morale’; likewise, William Lowry KC, Parliamentary Secretary at the Ministry, thought it was ‘vital from the political point of view’.

Housing conditions in the city during the late 1930s were of course less bleak than these wartime statistics would suggest. They had, after all, deteriorated significantly after September 1939. Nonetheless, a major housing problem already existed even before the outbreak of war. From 1936 onwards Medical Officers of Health repeatedly advised Belfast Corporation that ten thousand houses for which it was responsible were ‘not fit for human habitation’ and ‘inimical to health’ (Dock and Cromac wards were among the worst). Accordingly, they condemned them for demolition, but no action was taken. In 1939 a Stormont government spokesperson stated that there were two thousand ‘insanitary houses’ inside the city boundaries. Writing in hindsight in 1942 and 1943, Ministry of Home Affairs officials concluded that during the inter-war period housing had been ‘allowed to lag behind England very materially’, and this opinion was endorsed by ministers. This was confirmed by the region’s first comprehensive government inquiry into the issue (held in 1944), which concluded that during these years, proportionately, ‘nothing like the same number of houses was built in Northern Ireland’ as in Great Britain. Westminster’s interwar legislation had not been replicated locally; Robinson pointed out that the Stormont government had made available ‘no grants whatsoever of the same kind’ as in Britain, and had not attempted a slum-clearance scheme of ‘any sort, kind or description’. Thus in Great Britain £200 million had been paid in housing subsidy but in Northern Ireland just £3 million, ‘half of what it should be’. In England and Scotland over 300,000 slum houses had been demolished and their occupants rehoused, while ‘nothing was done here’. During the inter-war period, 4 million new houses were built in Britain compared to fewer than 50,000 within the six counties.

In their housing legislation, Stormont ministers were consistently less generous than their counterparts at Westminster. However, they did labour under crippling financial difficulties. Their lack of funds is reflected in the poor quality of all public services throughout the region during these years. Both from preference and from necessity, they had therefore relied on private enterprise to provide the much-needed houses with, they hoped, local authorities providing the necessary encouragement. But Dr Carnwath reached the conclusion in his report that ‘private effort cannot be relied upon’, that the ‘main responsibility’ therefore rested with the Belfast Corporation and ‘the fact that little or nothing has been done is a grave reflection on its housing administration’. Throughout these years the city’s unionist-dominated Council perpetuated its habitual and malignant record of municipal corruption and incompetence; favouritism rather than ability determined the pattern of its appointments. Both its political composition and its practice of discrimination against the city’s Catholic population (23.8 per cent of the total in 1937) in the allocation of jobs and contracts served to deepen sectarian division and further alienate the minority community. Councillors were conservative in outlook and lacking in energy, foresight and a sense of social responsibility, and constantly provided minimal services whether in housing, health, education or support for mothers and children. They sought to justify their inactivity in the face of the city’s pressing social problems by casting responsibility on to the Stormont government. From the early 1920s, there were recurrent hints that they would be suspended and replaced by commissioners, as had happened in Dublin for similar reasons. But Northern Ireland ministers proved reluctant to take this decisive step, fearing the political consequences.

The Corporation was given every encouragement by the Stormont government to provide housing for the underprivileged and, in the early 1920s, it did produce a scheme. But this generated so many complaints of scandalous irregularities that it resulted in an inquiry being held in 1926, and this exposed financial impropriety, the misuse of materials, contracts being agreed without tenders and scandalous extravagance; these and other charges resulted in the prosecution of contractors and the resignation of two Council officials. A subsequent investigation into the city’s administration, in 1928, concluded that Belfast was being run on lines more suited to a village. It made thirty recommendations, all of which were accepted. In total, the Corporation was responsible for the construction of a mere 2,500 dwellings between the wars, all of them built before 1930. Between 1918 and 1939, a total of roughly 30,000 houses were built in the County Borough of Belfast, mostly by private contractors and developers, with the help of a government grant; they were popularly known as ‘subsidy houses’. But Stormont ministers themselves accepted that the successive housing acts they had introduced between 1923 and 1936 had done ‘practically nothing to meet the needs of the poorer working class’, as only the higher-incomed artisan and the lower middle class could afford their rent. Nonetheless, George B. Hanna, Junior Minister of Home Affairs, was well pleased with them, suggesting that they would be perfect for three or four children with

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 and, after having patted the 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 every day.

James McMahon, a Nationalist senator, did not share these sentiments. Commenting on the quality of some of the new housing in the city, he stated:

If you saw [them] … you would wonder how anyone could live in them and certainly if anyone died upstairs, he would have to be taken out through the window because you could not get a coffin downstairs.

He concluded that no family could possibly remain in one for ‘any considerable length of time’.

Clearly, appalling housing conditions persisted in some areas of the city throughout the inter-war period. Taking a broader perspective, however, when compared with regions in Britain, neither Belfast nor Northern Ireland appears to have been uniquely disadvantaged. Between 1926 and 1937, one-sixth of the population of the six counties moved into new houses. Although, proportionately, far fewer dwellings were constructed locally than in other parts of the United Kingdom, the relative demand for them was smaller than in Britain. Northern Ireland had a lower rate of population growth, its marriage rate was lower and it experienced comparatively little internal migration. In Belfast itself, the housing stock in 1919 was much newer than in most British cities, reflecting its more recent growth. It therefore probably avoided some of the worst excesses of overcrowding and hardship associated with earlier industrialisation elsewhere in the UK. Though its poorer districts had a uniquely high number of dwellings per acre, in 1937 it had an average of 0.88 persons living per room. In 1931 the equivalent figure for Glasgow was 1.57, for Edinburgh 1.15 and for Scotland as a whole 1.27.

Overall Dr Carnwath considered that Belfast’s housing did not compare unfavourably with towns of comparable size in England. Even so, he felt convinced that it was a cause of the city’s ‘poor health record’, and this was evidenced by the faces and demeanour of many working-class people. Moya Woodside was the wife of a leading consultant urologist in the Royal Victoria Hospital, lived in south Belfast (8 Elmwood Avenue), and was university educated and actively involved in promoting family planning. She records in her diary (kept for the Mass Observation organisation) interviewing at her ‘welfare office’ on 10 April 1940, a ‘woman who said she was twenty-eight, but looked to be forty – toothless, haggard, undernourished, thin lank hair … the mother of eight living children, three of them tubercular … suspected of TB herself. Her husband, of course, unemployed.’ She continues: ‘I feel so conscious, almost guiltily so, of my own health and good fortune, when a woman only a few years younger than myself tells me this dreadful story of poverty and pregnancies, ill-health and overwork. And there are thousands and thousands like her in this city alone.’ Perhaps predictably, given her middle-class Protestant background – she was from one of Belfast’s leading mercantile families – she laid much of the blame in this and other similar cases at the door of the Catholic Church. The woman, she notes, was ‘Catholic. I try not to be intolerant, but a religion which turns women into reproduction machines, regardless of the effect on health and happiness is brutal and inhumane.’

In Belfast in the Thirties, Paddy Scott recalls:

I remember going over to Queen’s as a student, walking along the Antrim Road, and one of the incidents which struck me then, which left an indelible mark in my memory, was seeing young children with deformed legs, gaunt looking; I subsequently discovered it was rickets due to malnutrition. I also noticed the women were gaunt … and particularly the young men … Their eyes were lifeless, expressionless, which gave me the impression that they were people who had lost all hope.

Belmont Street, off the Woodstock Road, in February 1939: the street – cobbled, with gas lighting and cramped, worn out, characteristically overcrowded housing – was typical of Belfast’s terraces, yet average city rents were high.

© National Museums Northern Ireland L2778

The experience had a ‘tremendous effect’ on Scott: it made him a socialist. It was knowledge of these conditions that prompted Dr William Lyle, Unionist MP for Queen’s University Belfast, to plead for the formation of a Ministry of Health during his maiden speech in October 1942. The Commons listened in ‘tense silence’ to his allegation that in the ‘slaughter of innocents’, the Stormont government had ‘out-Heroded Herod’.

In the inter-war years, public health in general actually showed a measureable improvement in Northern Ireland. The death rate was falling, and life expectancy at birth rising; in 1931 it was 57.1 years, a figure similar to the rest of Europe, including other parts of the United Kingdom. Moreover, hospital provision was extended and more specialist staff appointed: for example, the Royal Victoria was enlarged and, in 1933, a maternity hospital and a new children’s hospital were opened and, at the Union Infirmary, the Jubilee was completed in 1935, and the children’s ward expanded. Nonetheless there was much preventable illness and death and, in some vital areas, progress was slower than elsewhere. During the 1930s maternal and infant mortality rates in the six counties were respectively 30 and 60 per cent higher than in England and Wales, and childbirth carried increasing rather than diminishing risks for women in Northern Ireland. Maternal mortality rose by one-fifth between 1922 and 1938, while the infant death rate remained alarmingly high. Belfast had a lamentably poor record for both. In the late 1930s, there were roughly 800 deaths in the city each year during the first twelve months of life (roughly one out of every ten live births). By 1940 the proportion had lurched even further upwards, to one in eight. This was its highest level since 1920, and about twice the comparable figure for Liverpool or Manchester. In a modern continental city such as Amsterdam, the proportion had dropped to one in thirty on the eve of the Second World War. In Down the Shankill, Winifred Campbell observed:

Child mortality was a sadly accepted part of life and it was rarely that a whole family would reach adulthood. It was reasonable to assume that a family would lose at least one child. When asked how many in the family, the answer might be ‘four living and two dead’.

In Belfast in the Thirties, Anne Boyle reflected on how these sad statistics affected her own family:

There was so much infant mortality that it seemed as if every week blue-baby coffins were coming out of every street. I had three brothers and a sister dead before they were two years old, out of eleven of us.

Moya Woodside relates another case (in April 1940) of a woman who appeared at her welfare office – her

husband had no work for the past seven years, she was thirty-three, tubercular, had a bad heart, and was the mother of nine living children. Seven other children had died. She came to us for baby clothes, as she was shortly expecting her fourteenth confinement … The eldest child is only thirteen … In our social work we are inured to large families plus poverty, but this woman’s story left us speechless with indignation. Neither hospital nor family doctor has ever done anything to help her control this appalling fertility. The husband presumably did not care, while the priest … applauds.

In similar vein, Dr Carnwath reached the conclusion in his 1941 study that the root cause of Belfast’s appalling death rate was not ‘primarily’ the poor quality of its housing, or means of sewage disposal, or system of refuse collection or water supply. Rather, he held its lack of personal medical services to be mainly responsible. He considered that they fell ‘far short of what might reasonably be expected in a city of its size and importance’. He attributed the high maternal and infant mortality levels to a range of factors – the fact that midwifery services were poor, nurses were too few, no provision of special foods was made for expectant mothers, no attempt was made to detect anaemia or to monitor difficult pregnancies or to educate women in cleanliness, and there were few health visitors employed to check on infants’ progress. In 1938 a report by the Maternity Services Committee estimated that maternal mortality could be halved merely by providing better facilities such as these and, in 1939, a government report conceded that ‘inadequate provision’ was being made ‘for ante and post natal care.’ For many working-class women, bad health was endemic. They were underfed and overworked, and maternity itself was a dangerous occupation. Bryce Millar remembers that when his mother reached her confinement, she refused to take more than three days off work; the family could not afford to go without her wages for longer. She would come home from the mill and ask him to go and fetch the nurse. At first as a young child, he felt perplexed, having no idea why she should feel in need of medical attention.

In 1935 the death rate for both diarrhoea and pneumonia was between three and four times higher among Belfast’s citizens than for those in comparable English cities. Among infants, they were the major causes of death (pneumonia frequently followed whooping cough or measles, and was the greatest killer of all – among the elderly as well as children). Both were mainly due to defective knowledge of childcare and of course the lack of hygiene – unclean milk, hands, teats, bottles, floors, clothes, yards and houses. Conditions such as these must also have contributed to the fact that in the late 1930s, 51 per cent of all deaths in Belfast under fifteen years of age were caused by infectious diseases; this was 25 per cent higher than in English county boroughs. Belfast’s school medical officers, who were by then conducting 250,000 medical inspections each year, reported a marked increase in the incidence of vermin and nits, and of skin diseases, which could disrupt sleep and spread from the pupils to other members of their families. Bad teeth were inevitable when the education authority appointed just one dentist for every 23,000 children; the average throughout England and Wales was one for every 6,000.

Much death and disease could therefore have been avoided by a modest increase in expenditure on rudimentary health education and on medical care. Overall, Belfast’s health services were poor by British standards. Ultimately the blame lay with the Belfast Corporation and the Board of Guardians. The precise division of responsibility between them was a cause of dispute but both were inactive, niggardly and conservative in approach, tending to regard the provision of medical care as a parental duty. The Northern Ireland government was unable to increase its level of grant support towards the development of existing health services: once again the ‘whole difficulty was finance’. As a consequence, recommendations made by departmental inquiries were rarely implemented. Successive Medical Officers of Health lacked sufficiently trained staff, and indeed a specialist role; they were also responsible for the inspection of food, milk, the abattoir, lodging houses … The advice given by one of them with regard to venereal disease was that ‘people should get a grip on themselves’.

For the adult population, working conditions in the city’s major industries were a traditional source of ill health and even of premature death. At the shipyard the conditions were primitive: employees were exposed to high noise levels, filth, the lack of proper sanitary provision, and inadequate protection either from the weather or from their machinery. In the linen mills the inhalation of flax dust, known as ‘pouce’, caused restricted breathing, bronchitis and lung disease. One of the industry’s best-known songs had the refrain: ‘You will easy know a doffer’ (a ‘doffer’ was a ‘learner’ in the spinning room, who assisted and aspired to become a full-time spinner). They were easily ‘known’ by their swollen legs and ankles, varicose veins and damaged feet. After extensive research in the 1870s Dr C.D. Purdon, a medical doctor, described how, at the age of thirty, the appearance of linen workers ‘begins to alter, the face gets an anxious look, shoulders begin to get rounded – in fact, they become prematurely aged, and the greatest number die before the age of forty-five years’. In 1913 James Connolly wrote a ‘manifesto’ on the ‘linen slaves of Belfast’, in which he described the mills as ‘slaughterhouses for women and penitentiaries for the children’.

However, pulmonary tuberculosis was the most virulent killer of young adults in Belfast; it was commonly referred to euphemistically as ‘going into a decline’, and was regarded with terror. During the late 1930s, it accounted for roughly half of all deaths in the age group fifteen to twenty-five, and for 38 per cent of those between twenty-five and thirty-five. There were roughly 400 fatalities from the disease in the city each year, the highest total relative to its size of any county borough in the United Kingdom. Although the mortality rate from tuberculosis fell sharply throughout Northern Ireland (by 40 per cent between 1922 and 1938), it consistently remained almost 50 per cent higher than in England and Wales, and it accounted for over 1,300 deaths in 1941. It was caused partly by inferior medical services but was mainly due to low standards of nutrition and poor-quality housing. It receded as living standards rose, and social and sanitary conditions improved. Since average incomes were substantially lower in the six counties than in Britain and were falling further behind, there was inevitably more malnutrition (in 1924 income per head was 61 per cent that of the UK average; in 1937, it was 57 per cent). During the late 1930s, Belfast’s school medical officers recorded increased numbers of physical ‘sub-normals’ and of those definitely undernourished, and suffering from anaemia. They considered these findings to be significant, and a clear indication of the lack of nutrition widespread among the city’s pupils. As Winifred Campbell observed in Down the Shankill:

The first priority was the rent. That must be paid, otherwise a family could be evicted and their belongings seized in lieu of rent. Next came food, a necessity of life. A long way behind came fuel, clothes, utensils, bedding.

Meat consumption in Northern Ireland was 30–40 per cent below British levels – it was a luxury for some even over the Christmas period. In Belfast in the Thirties Leo Boyle recalls seeing ‘people going down to Sawyer’s on Christmas Eve and waiting on the remnants of the turkeys, buying gizzards and turkeys’ necks. They couldn’t afford a turkey or a chicken, and made soup out of that.’

Two independent church studies, both conducted in the late 1930s, provide some insight into the very considerable levels of poverty in working-class areas of Belfast. The first was an inquiry carried out by the Methodist Church Temperance and Social Welfare Committee on behalf of the Belfast District Synod into a new housing estate, a two-penny tram ride from the city centre. Over 700 households were researched just before Christmas 1937. Over half of the sample, 376 households, were at least partially dependent on some form of state benefit. A poverty line or minimum income was devised which was regarded as barely enough to meet the most basic human needs of the occupants, such as rent, food, fuel, gas, electricity and clothing. Nonetheless, the committee found that the incomes of 58 per cent of the households surveyed fell below the minimum laid down, and that for those entirely dependent on public financial support, the proportion rose to 80 per cent.

The second inquiry was undertaken by the social services committee of the Irish Presbyterian Church. It examined a ‘representative working-class area’ of 436 households during the period November 1938 to February 1939. In part its purpose was to ‘bring home to the conscience of the church the very serious state of affairs in Belfast’. Their poverty line was ‘very harshly drawn’ by a professional economist and was based both on the British Medical Association’s 1933 assessment of minimum food requirements and the criteria adopted by the pioneering social investigator, Seebohm Rowntree. A family income was calculated that would provide the least that was considered necessary for the health and strength of its members to be maintained. No allowance was made for spending on ‘luxury’ items such as tobacco or amusements. The study concluded that at least 33 per cent of the families were in ‘considerable economic distress’, and that a further 29 per cent were living under conditions that were ‘barely sufficient and probably intolerable for any length of time’.

If the scale of the deprivation highlighted by both surveys shocked those who read them, the causes they identified were more predictable. A key factor was unemployment; it had begun to move upwards once more in 1937. A very high proportion of those relying on state benefits did not have enough to survive on. Most pensioners were also living in poverty, and it was regarded as ‘inevitable’ in households with two or more young children. A further crucial element was the low level of wages, especially as prices rose sharply after 1936. In the Methodist Church survey it was found that one-third of families fully dependent on wages were below the poverty line. In some cases, distress was caused by poor financial management, but this was difficult to avoid where householders had insufficient earnings to provide for contingencies. As a consequence, food and clothes were acquired on credit and any major item of expenditure, such as furniture, was often bought on hire purchase. Clearly, a burden of debt at high interest rates proved difficult to avoid and could quickly accumulate.

During his boyhood in Ballymacarrett before the Second World War, Jimmy Penton experienced the reality of the poverty that lay behind these depressing statistics. He was ‘born and bred under the gantries’, and recalls the well-beaten track to Davey Cupples’s pawnshop on the Newtownards Road or, as an alternative source of ready cash, the ‘two wee Jew men’, Appleman and Fink, money lenders with a draper’s business in High Street who were well known throughout the neighbourhood. Driven by hunger, he regularly stood with friends at the gates of the shipyard, waiting for the workers to come off their shift and offer ‘crusts left over from their piece’. As he said: ‘It filled a hole.’ At 10 p.m. on Saturdays his mother would walk to Davey Esther’s butcher’s shop on the corner of Dee Street, hoping that he would ‘give her something for one or two pence’. When Jimmy’s brother was dying, the doctor was sent for; it was widely assumed that when he failed to arrive, it was because he was uncertain of receiving his fee of 2s. 6d. (12½p).

The shared experience of poverty helped generate a strong sense of community spirit. In Down the Shankill, Winifred Campbell recalls: ‘Any event, happy or sad, became the business of the street and was openly discussed. Advice was freely given, invited or not. Doors were left open.’ Children were brought up in an ‘extended family’ made up of neighbours as well as relatives; ‘the street reared you’. In order to survive, families shared the necessities of life. In her experience, ‘help, such as it was, was given and received with simple dignity’. Every possible economy became instinctive and routine:

Soup was made from bones instead of meat. Scraps of bread were made into boiled plum duff. Small pieces of soap were rendered down into a sort of cleaning jelly. Teeth were cleaned with salt and water and men gave each other a haircut. Only powdered ash from the fire was thrown away; every cinder was carefully picked out to back the fire. The floors had to be scrubbed with water only in order to save the precious soap. Little boots went from child to child until they were past wearing. Even then, they were filled with dampened coal dust and used for fuel. Men and women had only the clothes they stood up in – all the others had long since gone to the pawn shop or been made over for the children … They were remarkably courageous … They were all in the same boat.

Tightly drawn communal bonds also held open the prospect of finding work, whether through friendship with a factory foreman or contacts within the church or the Orange Order. At the shipyard, Masonic membership or family links with the firm were vital in determining the allocation of jobs available. Jimmy Penton later recalled: ‘It was a tradition; my father put my name down.’ It was only later, as a trade-union official, that he began to realise fully the extent of Masonic influence.

Means of escape from this dismal environment were few. The educational system provided little opportunity for social mobility during the inter-war years. Substantial improvement did of course take place – for example, in the provision of elementary schools and in teacher training. Between 1923 and 1928, fifty of the city’s most run-down schools were closed, others improved, and sixteen new ones either built or started. But Lord Londonderry’s prescient and courageous attempt to avoid sectarian division in the state sector by excluding denominational religious teaching during school hours was defeated. By 1930, Protestant church pressure had ensured that, in effect, only Protestant teachers were appointed to state schools, that bible instruction was given daily by staff, and that there was strong clerical representation on each of their management committees. Catholic schools remained under church control and received more generous financial treatment than in Great Britain. Little was done to improve the prospects of the poorer classes. Just fifty scholarships were provided each year to Belfast’s grammar schools – a wholly inadequate response compared with other UK cities – while at university level there was no advance on the five awarded annually since 1913, each worth £160 per year. D.H. Akenson states that in Northern Ireland as a whole in 1937, just 7 per cent of children received an education at ‘academic post primary schools’ and their related preparatory departments, and fewer than one in twenty of these were in receipt of scholarships.

With such a pervasive and sustained experience of poverty in working class areas, the growth of support for socialist candidates in central and local government might reasonably have been expected. However, this did not take place; unionist control of the Belfast Corporation remained unshaken, indeed almost unchallenged, from the early 1920s. The party consistently held over fifty of the sixty seats in the council chamber, the remainder being virtually monopolised by nationalist representatives. During the trough of the Depression in 1932, just three of the city’s fifteen wards were contested, and this fell to two in 1934. Although the Northern Ireland Labour Party won thirteen seats in 1920, it never again approached this level of success. Instead, it struggled to remain a significant force even in its heartland – the central areas of Belfast and the docks. Its performance in the city’s