Overlooked Britain Lucinda Lambton

SINCLAIR SEAMEN’S Presbyterian Church in Belfast was built in 1857 as a holy harbour of refuge for the many thousands of shipyard workers, dockers and seamen from all over the world who toiled in the Sailortown district of the city throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. Built of the local marble-like Scrabo sandstone in the Italianate style, with a free-standing campanile linked to the church by an arcaded bridge, it has a presence that handsomely defies the M3 motorway, only feet away, as well as a welter of uncomfortably close roads and car parks. Sailortown has all but vanished today, but not so the evocations of seafaring life within this church.

It was commissioned as a memorial to ship owner and provender merchant John Sinclair by his son Thomas (who, by the by, also introduced golf to Northern Ireland). Sir Charles Lanyon, responsible for many of Belfast’s finest buildings, was the architect. It was, though, the Rev Samuel Cochrane – a pleasing sounding fellow as ever there was (he dedicated a stained-glass window to his father with the words ‘A Merry Heart Doeth Good Like Medicine’) who between 1906 and 1944 transformed the interior into a sparkling seafarers’ shrine. It was said of him that ‘in his amiable and optimistic flight he never allowed his wings to droop’. Nor indeed did he, commissioning and collecting a wealth of nautical artefacts with which to adorn his church.

An anchor is set into the floor for couples to stand on while getting married – ‘Safely anchored for life’. Shining forth

The ship’s prow pulpit, illuminated by port, starboard and main-mast lights

from the walls are memorial brasses of anchors and bells, a ship’s rudder, a lifebelt, a ship’s incliner, a lighthouse and a Bible. Schooners and a naval flying boat hang from the ceiling.

I could go on until the fleet comes in. A brass binnacle is inscribed to the good reverend’s mother; a brass bell from HMS

Hood – used as a block ship in 1914 to protect the fleet in Portland Harbour – is rung six times to mark evening service on Sundays. Such is the size of a mighty ship’s wheel of solid brass – made in Michigan and eventually salvaged from an American ship sunk during the First World War – that it gives all the appearance of being able to steer the church off down the River Lagan (past Titanic’s dock). Here, too, is the capstan, which had suffered the same fate as the wheel on the seabed. Criss-crossed along the walls are rum measures on poles which were also used as collection boxes.

Most marvellous is the thundering great pulpit and organ case made of gleaming teak from an old windjammer. Carved with a semi-circular sweep of blind arches, it has, joy of joys, a prow of a ship thrusting elegantly forth over the congregation. From here the minister still preaches, illuminated by starboard, port and main-mast lights from old Guinness barges on the Liffey.

Now for a fantastical footnote: there is another pulpit in the shape of a prow of a ship, in New Bedford, Massachusetts. It was there, in the Seamen’s Bethel of 1831, that Herman Melville, sitting beneath the memorials to whalers, was inspired to write Moby-dick. When John Huston made the film in 1956, he was refusing to work in America, after having been accused of communist sympathies. The interior of the chapel was therefore recreated on a film set in England, with one charmful difference; that in place of its old box pulpit, there was, as Melville had decreed, the prow of a ship. People flocked to New Bedford to see the wonder, only to discover that it did not exist. So it was in 1961 that a prow pulpit, figment of Melville’s imagination, which had been realised on film, was actually built into the Seamen’s Bethel. During the Belfast Film Festival of 2011, Moby-dick was shown on a great screen in Sinclair Seamen’s Church. There they both were; two prow pulpits, side by side.