A Drive Through Belfast

The Weekly Machen

We return for another installment of Arthur Machen’s trek through the political turmoil of the Emerald Isle. After interviewing a group of Unionist businessmen, Machen meets with a Nationalist jarvey, an old term for a hack-car driver. For those of a sensitive nature, be forewarned—the ending is a pip.

Unfortunately, the fourth segment, “What I Saw in Ulster,” remains stubbornly elusive. {UPDATE: This article has been found.} However, the concluding article is the subject of an early Machen Study. Lighter in tone, it allows our reporter to discuss a subject more to his liking: Fairy Glens in Ulster.

---

A Drive Through Belfast:
Nationalist Jarvey Talks of the Fight
by
Arthur Machen
September 27, 1913

Belfast, Friday Night.

“Drive,” I said to the man on the hack-car which is also called a jaunting-car, “drive me all round and about Belfast. Drive me to the residential quarter, where the well-to-do business men live, drive me to the shipyards, drive me to the streets where you yell ‘To Hell with the Pope,’ and get your head broken for your pains.”

The car man pondered, and said, “Ye want first to see the highest and the lowest, is that ut?” and I said it was, and climbed on to the car.

Now it was a full thirty-seven years since I had been on an Irish car, and it came to me with a shock of a new sensation.

Thus, then, did I view Belfast. We went first to the Nationalist quarter, going in the direction of the mountain that serves as a background to the city and gives a certain dignity to its vistas. There is nothing peculiar about the Nationalist quarter; I had seen it before, since it might be a replica of the poorer parts of any small industrial town in Lancashire or Yorkshire.

I drove through Leeson-street, which the driver told me was famous. It used to be paved with cobble stones or “kidneys,” and not so long ago these stones rose up—with assistance—and flew through the air fast and thick like hail, and I have seen streets very like this terrible Leeson in Farnworth, which is near Bolton.

Everywhere in Belfast there are vast works and factories and mills. For Belfast manufactures tobacco and ginger-beer and whiskey and linens and woollens, and I don’t think I have ever seen such hugeous castles of industry.

“As far as the eye can see,” Mr. Murphy, the driver, told me again and again, “that’s so and so’s factory.”

Labour Well Paid

He said that labour was well paid at Belfast. A great many girls are employed in the linen industry, and a girl of fifteen will earn fifteen shillings a week. Mr. Murphy seemed to think that this was very good, and I suppose he is right. One can see that the total income of a working family might attain a highly respectable figure.

We left the Nationalists and began to approach the residential quarters. Very like a suburb anywhere you please; the doctor’s house, the lawyer’s house, the rows of small villas with one bow window, with small garden spaces in front; all this gave place to the greater prosperity of the detached villa, the larger lawn, the greenhouse, and the stately entrance gate. Some of the best of these houses are situate on a fine avenue of limes, with gates at each end marked “private.” The whole quarter was evidently prosperous and well-to-do, and stood for excellent incomes; the rents, the driver thought, might be a hundred a year. But there was a kind of grimness about these houses; the greenhouses attempted a sort of pompous architectural manner, the flower beds were formal; and I fancy Mr. Gradgrind would have found himself very much at home in this part of Belfast.

A “Nut” in Belfast

I saw Queen’s College and drove through Ormeau Park, and we descended to the edge of the Lough or of the Lagan river; I am not quite clear as to where the one ends and the other begins. Here on the one side were the steamers ready to take you to Greenock or Heysham or Ayr or Liverpool or Dublin, or direct to London; and the other side was more coaly than a colliery. And then I saw a really splendid sight.

Framed in a wood of iron and steel scaffolding, the huge hull of a liner towered above the water, a great, grim, dim shape. There were men all around it and over it and about it, and above the electric cranes traveled to and fro, and high on the liner’s side was a red glow like an angry star, and from it there fell showers of rosy sparks. They were rivetting—ravetting, Mr. Murphy called it—and they banged and rattled and clattered and hammered and thundered again with their hammers, and metal clanged on metal with such a din as I have never heard.

“And that’s how they get the nuts,” said my guide, as if he wished me to consider shipbuilding a fanciful business with a practical substratum to it.

For in Belfast a nut is not a young gentleman of extreme fashion. It is a bit of metal punched out of the ship’s plates in the rivetting process, and as another Belfast enthusiast told me, “it has nice jagged edges.” And these nuts are used, with the stone kidneys, in the expression of one’s political and religious opinions; which means in Belfast pelting the police.

I found out as we drove along that Murphy, the man with the car, was a Nationalist.

Ulster Will Fight

“What I say is that Home Rule has been talked about long enough, and it’s time to have done with ut. We shall have to settle ut as the Americans settled their trouble, and that will be at the point of the bayonet. And so it’ll be finished once for all, and we shall have done with ut.”

To Mr. Murphy the Protestant counties of Ulster are like the seceding Southern States of America; they are to be beaten in the fight and to become obedient for ever after.

I was deeply gratified by one thing I saw on my drive round and about Belfast. On the blank wall of a house, not far from the docks and the shipyard, there was an inscription, roughly done in white paint. Thus it ran:—

NO HOME RULE.
NO SURRENDER.
TO HELL WITH THE POPE.
1690.

I should have been sorry if I had left Belfast without this taste of its traditional quality.

---

The Weekly

Previous: Belfast’s View of Home Rule

Next: An Irish Leader of Yesterday

---

Introduction and supplementary material – Copyright 2024 by Christopher Tompkins. All rights reserved.