PUL

Spinning Memories

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The inspiration for this new piece of street art by KMG (ig) was the Strand Spinning Mill (formerly the Jaffe Spinning Mill) which closed in 1983 and is now the Portview Trade Centre. During WWI the mill made munitions and during WWII viscose rayon. The film Lint And Linen (youtube) covers both pre-industrial and mechanical linen-production (though mostly focused on yarn from line fibres rather than from tow, which was the Strand mill’s claim to fame (Duffy Rafferty)); the painting appears to present a more primitive and imaginary age in which fibres could be spun using the human hand.

For photographs of the old mill on the Trade Centre, see previously the image of A Block in Strand Spinning Mill.

“Spinning memories” is the name of a planned collection of stories for an archive at Portview (Portview Stories).

Townsley Street, east Belfast, next to the Narnia sculptures and facing Aslan Is On The Move.

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Two Smart Alecs

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“Alexander Green McMullan came from Tobermore to Belfast in the 1900s and was employed as a horse drawn delivery driver to local grocers. Two ‘Smart Alecs’: Thomas Mitchel, a grocer at My Lady’s Road, helped Alex set up his own grocery business by providing initial stock. By 1913, ‘Alec’s’ was open for business at 54 Imperial Street. He married Naomi (Nomi) Love who also had a good eye for business. She asked Alex to make a pulley line from the ceiling. This line displayed clothing which she sold ‘on tick’. The shop thrived. When a ‘Twelfth’ bonfire shattered the shop’s gable window, Alex seized the opportunity to increase selling space – he bricked up the gable wall, creating shelving for stock. The shop was very much a family concern. Their children, Alexander Green McMullan junior, and Isabel, worked in the shop, making pounds and pounds of butter, straight from the slab, which they wrapped in greaseproof paper. During the Second World War, loaves of bread, smuggled from the Free State, added to the family income as these were sold on to the grateful customers. Alex junior inherited his parents’ eye for a business opportunity. Using his engineering expertise and his Morris Oxford car, the entrepreneur delivered and collected washing machines daily to housewives. Daily rental was half a crown (12.5 pence). By the mid-1960s, Alex junior had sold his parents’ business but it remained in the common memory as ‘Alec’s Grocers Shop’.

Imperial Street, east Belfast

Other entries in the Eastside Lives Heritage Trail include Miss McMinn’s Girls’ Club | The Godfather Of Legal Betting | No Ordinary Woman | Desano’s. For a list of all fourteen, see the Trail’s pamphlet (pdf).

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My Lady Of Chimney Corner

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Sculptor Anna Cheyne (WP) produced the piece ‘My Lady Of The Chimney-Corner’ for Antrim Council in 1998, inspired by the domestic and farming scenes in the 1913 book of the same name by Antrim native Alexander Irvine. The book is subtitled “A story of love and poverty in Irish peasant life” – Irvine’s parents were in a mixed marriage. (You can read the book at Project Gutenberg or at Google Books).

For more information on Irvine and the mural next to his Pogue’s Entry home (which is also the location of the blue plaque, below), see A Tale Of Ireland.

The two sides of Cheyne’s sculpture are shown above and immediately below. ‘Alexander Irvine Park’ is also home to a memorial garden to the victims of the covid-19 pandemic in the park – see the final two images, below. (A similar garden was installed at the Whiteabbey/Jordanstown foreshore.)

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In The Service Of Our Country

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These are images of people collecting for Andy Allen Veterans Support (web) on the Shankill, Belfast. At its peak (in 1973) the UDR had more than 9,000 personnel (Statista). The UDR was amalgamated into the Royal Irish Regiment in 1992 and a 2005 estimate put the number of its veterans at about 58,000 (Veterans Services NI).

The title of the post comes from a UDR memorial in Carrickfergus.

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Auld Cobblers

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This new three-storey mural by Dee Craig (Fb) is at the city end of Newtownards Road and so serves as a highly-visible introduction to east Belfast. People arriving in the area are now greeted with a vintage image of a smiling bearded man in a cloth cap, surrounded by occupations from the industrial era: “Cobbler, rag’n’bone man, fish monger, welder, builder, sweep, carpenter, window cleaner, butcher”, capped off by an inspirational “Be your best”, with yellow highlights that match the colour of the shipyard cranes Samson and Goliath (see the third image).

In being overshadowed by the mural, the “Let’s Twist Again” sculpture on the plaza in front of the business centre now becomes a symbol of east Belfast rather than the symbol. It too features east Belfast’s “industrial past” (BelTel), using rope as a metaphor for community: “By being bound together in a common cause, the natural tendency for each twist, fibre, yarn, and strand to separate, only serves to make the rope stronger.”

On the wall behind the sculpture and below the mural is one of the Eastside Lives Heritage Trail (pdf) figures, Jane Scott, whose fifteen-year-old son Samuel fell to his death from a ladder while working on the ship in 1910. She supposedly cursed the ship and it sank two years later. (See also Godfather Of Legal Betting and various others.)

For a straight-on shot, see the post at the Paddy Duffy collection.

Images of the completed piece are from March 27th and 29th. The in-progress image below is from March 18th.

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Pride Of Ardoyne

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The Pride Of Ardoyne flute band memorial site was overhauled in November. The silhouetted bandsmen (seen in Pride Of Ardoyne) are gone and the cross and wooden plaque at the top (see Billy Hanna) have been joined by two large boards, naming “J. Bailey, W. Hanna, S. Rockett, B. McClure” and, (on the drum) “Charlie Dunn (1957-2021)”, along with 20 small plaques of these five plus 15 more who are an “absent member”, “absent friend”, and “loyal supporter”.

For Bailey, see On This Day. For Rockett, see Essence And Space. For McClure, see UPI. For Dunn, see the band’s Fb Page.

The image below is of a 50th anniversary Pride Of Ardoyne flag inside the door of Lainey’s craft shop on the Shankill Road.

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Loyal People’s Protest

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“Since 2012” and lasting until the undetermined year “XXXX”. Protests against the restricted flying of the Union Flag at City Hall were held on a daily basis in the winter of 2012-2013 after the Council’s vote on December 3rd. It became a weekly protest perhaps in the spring and a group of die-hards continues to meet each Saturday. There does not seem to be a functioning public social media channel for “Loyal People’s Protest”; the numbers might be small enough that a private group chat is sufficient. The male in the top right of the placard is unknown; there have previously been media profiles of Billy and Ann Dickson (Belfast Live).

For background links, see Union Jack – Donegall Pass.

Previously from the railings: Eddie Supports The Flag. A tarp from earlier protests: British And Proud.

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