Belfast’s White City and a dream that died
When Professor Marianne Elliott was a child, her parents moved into White City, one of the first mixed religion housing estates to be built in Belfast after the war. Now she has written a fascinating new book, Hearthlands, part memoir, part social history
Marianne Elliott modestly says she has to pinch herself at the distance she has travelled in life from the young girl who used to swing around the lampposts in the White City estate north of Belfast.
Acclaimed historian, co-author of a groundbreaking report that played a pivotal part in the peace process, author of several highly regarded books and director of the Institute of Irish Studies at Liverpool University for 18 years are key entries in her distinguished CV.
Her contribution to Irish studies and to the Northern Ireland peace process led to her being awarded an OBE in 2000 and next Thursday she will receive the Irish equivalent, a Presidential Distinguished Service Award.
That is an event she is really looking forward to, for another recipient is Ballymena-born Hollywood A-lister Liam Neeson.
“I become like a 16-year-old in the presence of such stars”, she says laughing.
We are chatting about her latest book, Hearthlands, which is a memoir of growing up in the White City estate, then a model of mixed-religion housing.
She admits she is like many academics unwilling to make herself the story — to her there is no ‘I’ in history — but was dragged kicking and screaming by her editors at Blackstaff Press to include her personal reminiscences in the book.
She peppers the book with both personal memories, but draws extensively on those of former neighbours and friends as well as her late mother Sheila, who passed away in 2014.
Marianne admits that she had a much grander vision for this book at the beginning.
“I had lovely memories of living in north Belfast and I always felt passionately about the fact memories were dying of the decades between 1945 and the 1960s when people of different religions did live together,” she says.
“Much of the credit for that has to go to the NI Housing Trust — a benevolent public body — which created mixed-religion housing estates throughout Northern Ireland. The research involved in telling that story would have been enormous but would have created a number of jobs as well as told a story that deserved to be better known.
“There were a number of glowing peer reviews of the idea but one was really nasty, stating that my hypothesis was nonsense, that Northern Ireland was always polarised, and that angered me so much.
“I could not go ahead with my plan, but instead decided to use my early life in White City as an exemplar of the work of the Housing Trust and as an entry into writing about the social history of Belfast.”
When she began to write the book she was astonished to find so little source material on social history. Much of the existing literature concentrated on the political history of the province and even the Public Records Office had to search its archives to find the material she needed. Many of the Housing Trust records had been destroyed.
She is full of praise for the trust’s record on remaining non-political and allocating homes on a non-sectarian basis, which was ironic given that local authority bias in housing allocation led to the creation of the civil rights movement — and the rest, as they say, is history.
Civil servants also come in for praise for standing up to some of the more extreme politicians of the day — this was the time of undiluted unionist power — “Social history looked at from their perspective was a quite different story from the accepted political rhetoric. Also look at how the welfare state, which changed so many people’s lives, was introduced on a totally non-sectarian basis again due to civil servant influence.”
But this is not some weighty or worthy academic tome, even if serious issues are discussed. Little vignettes of life in post-war north Belfast revealed an astonishing level of gaiety — Bellevue was a mecca for all ages, with 60,000 people crowding into the attractions there on Easter Sunday in 1959, and the Floral Hall attracted 127,917 dancers during 1947.
Enlightened city councillors said that while the attractions should pay for themselves the bottom line was not the be all and end all and that the facilities should always be open to the citizens. Attempts to introduce Sunday closure in the late 1950s failed but attitudes were changing and the gates were chained in 1964 on the Sabbath due in no small part to the rising influence of Ian Paisley’s Free Presbyterian Church.
Marianne, her four-year-old brother Terry, and her father Terry and mum Sheila moved into the White City in 1949 when she was just an infant. Terry, who had lived on the Falls, and Sheila, originally from Co Kerry, had lived for a short time near Strangford but jumped at the chance of getting one of the homes in the still being completed estate. Marianne’s sisters Geraldine and Eleanor would arrive in 1953 and 1960 respectively.
Marianne’s memories are of a spacious home with large garden at the rear — theirs was one of the last houses before the Cavehill — where dad grew marrows and other vegetables, as self-sufficiency was necessary in those days of rationing. A good front garden was filled with flowers tended to by mum and the children.
In those days, surrounding areas of north Belfast were home to the middle class who in some instances looked down on the new arrivals. Marianne recalls how she and her siblings made plastercast hand-painted decorations which they tried to sell to their well-off neighbours only to have the door dismissively slammed in their faces in most instances. Indeed, it was the people of White City who were most receptive to the gifts.
The Floral Hall was also a meeting place for local teenage girls and boys, although the girls were well warned by anxious parents that flirting should go no further.
The new tenants, along with the Housing Trust, were keen to keep the estate as tidy as possible — for example, the front doors were repainted in vibrant colours every four years with republican icon, poet, songwriter and playwright Brendan Behan one of the
gang of painters who carried out the work.
Marianne also recalls the astonishing story of a young woman from the estate who become the centre of a baby-stealing scandal — the baby was taken from Dublin — but neighbouring mothers linked arms in an attempt to prevent police taking the baby, which was well cared for, away along with the young woman. In those days even the black sheep of the area were not automatically shunned.
When Marianne was 15 her family moved out of the estate when they purchased a home in Glengormley. “To my mind we were moving down in the world as our White City house was much more spacious, but obviously my parents regarded it as a step up in status,” she recalls.
“However, we never really lost touch with the people we have lived beside for so long and I have dedicated this book to six of those people who have shared their memories of moving into the estate at the beginning. Three of them, including my mum, have since died but I am delighted that the local community group has asked me to have a launch party for this book in the estate on Monday.”
One of those early residents, Flo Kelsey, told Marianne how after the horrors of the war and the Blitz, which had a huge impact on north Belfast, people did not even think about sectarianism afterward.
“Quite a few people who had lost homes in the Blitz ended up in White City, which had also been affected. There were bomb craters and even unexploded devices still in the estate for years afterwards,” she says.
The 1971 census showed a Catholic population in White City of 23% — 20 years later it was 5%. So where did it all go wrong?
Marianne lays the blame on disastrous planning decisions. Between the wars Belfast had the worst house building and slum clearance record in the UK, according to Charles Brett, who would later become head of the Housing Executive.
This led to the most overcrowding, the worst infant mortality rates with one in 10 dying before the age of one, and the greatest lack of open space.
Slum clearance on the Shankill, just as the political atmosphere was souring in the mid-1960s, created problems for White City. Thousands of people were being displaced and had nowhere else to go except to the mixed religion estates on the outskirts of the city like White City and Rathcoole.
From her research for her book Hearthlands, which was supported by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, Marianne found that these new arrivals brought with them their trappings of loyalty — painting kerbstones and flying flags — and although the Housing Trust tried to stop these displays the seeds of discord were sown. The good relations on the estate continued for several years into the Troubles and several long-term Catholic residents remained and were welcomed but it became known as a Protestant, even loyalist, estate as years passed.
Like most other areas of north Belfast it became a new interface. North Belfast was always a mixed religion area but as the Troubles began and people retreated into single identity areas they could not move far away from each other, creating the cockpit which made the area the worst killing fields of the Troubles.
That was a far cry from the area that Marianne grew up and went to school in. She remembers the area around Holy Family primary school in the Limestone Road area as full of lovely homes and nice leafy parks and has similar fond memories of her time at Dominican College at Fortwilliam.
On graduating from Queen’s University she was initially offered a job as a history teacher at St Malachy’s College — someone knew her from her time as captain of the ladies table tennis team at university — and her parents were disappointed when she turned down what was a good career at that time. She planned to do a PhD at Trinity College in Dublin until her history professor said she should study at Oxford, provided she obtained the required entrance qualifications, which she did.
It was there she met her husband-to-be, Trevor Elliott, who she describes in the book as her most consistent and long-lasting support, muse and best critic, and who sadly died as she was researching Hearthlands.
Today Marianne lives about 10 miles from Liverpool, but still retains much of her Northern Ireland accent. She comes back often to visit her sister and nephews and a wide circle of friends and her son Mark has followed her into the world of academia, doing his own PhD at university in London.
When she brought him back to Belfast and showed him Queen’s University he told her she should have made him come here and she admits, despite our recent history, that the city is buzzing.
But she says that we should not forget what happened. During her work with the Opsahl Commission — a body headed by a Norwegian human rights lawyer — which heard submissions for some 3,000 people on potential ways forward during some of the darkest days of the Troubles, it was the comments of a group of women from north Belfast which resonated strongly with her.
They remembered, like her, the days when people lived and mixed together and were keen that those would be recorded so that young people growing up post-Troubles would not fall into the trap of thinking that Northern Ireland was always a totally divided society.
“We talked to anyone willing to talk to us, people that no one else was meeting. It was a very humbling experience and sometimes those who have suffered the most are the most inspirational ways forward. This work did change me and made me explore more deeply how we could cope with sectarianism in the province,” says Marianne.
The work of the commission was largely blanked by politicians — the only senior politician to give evidence to it was John Hume, whose wife Pat was a strong supporter of the work. Other political parties were represented at a much lower level, and no doubt Marianne’s suggestion that many needed political education if they were to govern again contributed to their opposition to the finished report.
But it did valuable work in outlining how to deal with everyday problems, suggestions which perhaps could have been followed up more carefully when devolution was restored.
Marianne recalls that a senior civil servant who had gone to university with her expressed the hope that the commission could break the deadlock in political activity which had stifled interparty discussions in the early 1990s.
Although Marianne has not lived in Northern Ireland for many years her memories of it in good times as well as bad feed her continued passion for the country. “I know the basic decency of the people”, she says.
Her memoir of White City life is her tribute to that decency even if outside factors intruded eventually.
Sometimes those who have suffered the most are the most inspirational