City/Town

Two Smart Alecs

Extramural ActivityLeave a comment

“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).

Click image to enlarge
Copyright © 2024 Seosamh Mac Coılle
X14986 X14987

Tosaíonn An Domhan Ar Leac An Doraıs

Extramural ActivityLeave a comment

“Think global, act local – [the world begins on the doorstep]”. This environmental message is by UV Arts (ig) at Buncrana Youth Club, Castle Avenue, Buncrana, Co. Donegal (Inish Live), painted for Children In Crossfire (web | see also Derry Lama, A Wall For All, and Break The Bias).

Click image to enlarge
Copyright © 2024 Andy McDonagh/Eclipso Pictures (ig | Fb)
X14972 X14971 [X14973] X14974

My Lady Of Chimney Corner

Extramural ActivityLeave a comment

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.)

Click image to enlarge
Copyright © 2024 Seosamh Mac Coılle
X014967 X14966 X14968 X14969

In The Service Of Our Country

Extramural ActivityLeave a comment

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.

Click image to enlarge
Copyright © 2024 Seosamh Mac Coılle
X14959 X14958 X14957

Let The Fight Go On

Extramural ActivityLeave a comment

This is a west Belfast instance of INLA graffiti – seen previously in Derry (Saoırse Go Deo) – celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the group’s founding, in December, 1974.

The Lasaır Dhearg (web) stencils go back to 2020; see Britain’s Occupation Of Ireland.

Waterford St, west Belfast, replacing Israel Get Out Of Palestine.

Click image to enlarge
Copyright © 2024 Seosamh Mac Coılle
X14951 X14952 X14950 [X14949]

Still Standing

Extramural ActivityLeave a comment

The WHO and UNRWA now estimates that of the 34,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza, about 14,000 were children (Egypt Today). 18 were killed in a single explosion in Rafah yesterday (AP). This new board in west Belfast illustrates the disparity between Israeli forces and ordinary Palestinians by showing children in ragged clothing armed only with a single, odd-looking (AI hallucinated?), slingshot facing off against other children armed with assault rifles and wearing riot gear.

Of the RNU social-media handles along the bottom, only the Facebook and TikTok ones actually work.

Previously, from 2018: RNU Stands With Palestine.

Northumberland Street, west Belfast; later with a knotwork surround – see T08102.

Click image to enlarge
Copyright © 2024 Seosamh Mac Coılle
X14945 X14944

Auld Cobblers

Extramural Activity1 Comment

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.

Click image to enlarge
Copyright © 2024 Seosamh Mac Coılle
X14898 [X14897]
X14934 [X14935] [X14936] [X14937]
X14940 [X14939] [X14938]
X14900 X14901 X14899 X14902 X14903
X14894 [X14895] [X14896]

No Ordinary Woman

Extramural ActivityLeave a comment

“Mary was born in Dundela Avenue in east Belfast in 1892 and lived to the grand old age of 90. Mary Rodie was no ordinary woman: she was the only daughter of five children born to Robert and Ellen McKee. She married John Rodie on July 1918 at Lisburn Road Methodist Church and they had five children who she introduced to literature, by reading to them, and to music, by playing the piano. John worked, as did many men in east Belfast, in the Harland and Wolff shipyard. These were war years and food was rationed. This motivated Mary to always supplement the family income. She was a fantastic seamstress and, throughout her life, used this skill for her family and for others. During the 1930s, and until the end of the Second World War, she ran a branch of Milville’s Funeral Directors on the Newtownards Road. The family lived about the premises during those years. In fact we learnt that locally she was known as Mrs Melville as she was the face of Melville’s. She became a person who offered advice and guidance to those in times of need, almost like an early version of Citizens Advice. Mary viewed the world with practicality, compassion, and kindness which she shared with people who lived in the neighbouring area. Her Legact lives on through her wisdom, love and her philosophy of ‘Give flowers to the living‘ and be grateful for the life you have.”

Gawn Street, east Belfast

Other entries in the Eastside Lives Heritage Trail include Miss McMinn’s Girls’ Club | The Godfather Of Legal Betting | Two Smart Alecs | Desano’s. For a list of all fourteen, see the Trail’s pamphlet (pdf).

Click image to enlarge
Copyright © 2024 Seosamh Mac Coılle
X14904 X14905

Under The Green Paint Tree

Extramural ActivityLeave a comment

Here is a bonus post, thanks to our London correspondent, of the latest offering from Banksy, showing “foliage” added to the wall behind a pruned-back cherry tree (BBC) by a youth with a canister sprayer. The piece perhaps indicates a desire for more greenery in the area – Finsbury Park in north London; it has already been vandalised with white paint (Guardian).

The final image below is of a 2012 Banksy (Artlyst) that is still hanging on in Kentish town, of a girl with a large lollipop pulling a kiddie-wagon containing a rocket.

Previously on Extramural: Banksy-style art in Belfast and Bundoran.

Click image to enlarge
Copyright © 2024 Peter Moloney
X14911 X14910 X14912