Accounts of life as a Protestant in Northern Ireland are rather thin on the ground. What follows is an account of my memories of growing up in Newry, a small frontier town whose whole development after the partition of Ireland in 1920 was determined by the proximity of the border with the Irish Republic and the attitude of majority Unionist politicians in government at Stormont to its largely Catholic inhabitants. There may be points where my memory of events is perhaps not totally accurate to the level demanded by the methodology of historical research. But this is my Newry, my life, my growth. We all have memories of our growth and development, and it is our individual sense of what has happened around us which makes for flavour. We can all be challenged on dates, circumstances and attitudes. Often, when I mention a childhood incident to my mother or father, the response is "Oh! it wasn't like that at all!" So be it. I tell a simple tale of remembered experiences. Although this will be a roughly chronological journey along the road I travelled in the second half of the last century, when I come to an interesting side turn on the route I will go down it, have a look, and rejoin the main road when we have shared what I have found.
Numbered underlined links will take you to supplementary notes in this document; links without a notation number are off-site sources. I will repond to requests to alter the layout/look of this document to make it as easy to read as possible. I will also consider more detailed explorations of any background material which readers find interesting, time permitting.
I was born on a late Sunday afternoon - about 4.15 PM on March 3rd, 1946, at 30, Cowan Street, Newry, the home of my mother's parents. They were William and Susan Mallaghan, my mother was 'Mary Grace', affectionately known as 'Minnie'. My grandfather had been born in the gatehouse of St. Andrew's Anglican church in Omeath, County Louth, six miles from Newry along the Cooley Peninsula on the southwest side of Carlingford Lough. His father had hailed from County Tyrone, and was the caretaker and gardener of the church. This church, by the way, was sold several years ago, its Protestant parishioners having died or moved north in the decades since the creation of the Irish Free State. It was purchased by followers of the "renegade" Catholic priest, Father Pat Buckley 1. My grandmother was born a McAlpine in Ballybot, Newry - down the hill and across the River Clanrye from Cowan Street. Across also the Newry Canal, opened in 1742, the first summit-level canal - technology later employed to build some of Britain's great canals.
I was very small. There were no incubator cots in those days , so when one of the doctors in the local practice remarked a few days later 'is it a boy or a skinned rabbit?', he was actually making a comment on the likelihood of my surviving. My birth cost the family thirty shillings. In those days, if you wanted the services of a doctor, you paid up-front, the creation of the National Health Service being still three years away. Luckily, the money was available because my father was in the Royal Air Force and sending money home. Dr McMahon, who made the 'rabbit' remark, was apparently rather fond of whiskey, and frequently breathed the fumes of his imbibing over his patients.
Where was my father when I was born? I was not to know him until I was nine years old because he was either serving in England or much further afield in Gibraltar, India or Singapore. He had joined the RAF in 1938, along with his older brother, Alfred 2.
Well, my father was in a cinema in Leicester Square watching a Gary Cooper film, "Saratoga Trunk", the programme having started at 3.30 pm. Given compassionate leave home for the birth, he had travelled the previous day from his base at St Austell in Cornwall all the way to Stranraer (Scotland), via London, to cross to Larne(Co. Antrim) on the Steam Packet. In Stranraer, he had received notice from the station master that it was a false alarm, and to return to base. Staying over in London on the way back, he had ambled into Leicester Square and decided to go and see the latest Gary Cooper film at the Warner Cinema. An advertisement in The Sunday Express for March 3rd 1946, an original copy of which was given to me by a friend as a 50th birthday present, confirms my father's recollection of that afternoon. As a matter of interest: the main headline in that edition was 'Britain's New Army May Be Trained In Germany To Avoid Demob Crisis'; other headlines included 'Food Minister Flies To US', 'Three Judges Vanish In Berlin', and Ripley's Believe It Or Not contained the fascinating information that 'The Trunk Of A Redwood Tree Contains More Water Than Wood!'; on an even lighter note, there is a report that in 1944 'the fall in births' may be 'associated with the heavy exodus of Service personnel following D-Day' (for 'The Longest Day' substitute 'The Longest Night...?').
For some of his reminiscences of the appalling poverty in which my father George Dodds was reared in the countryside outside Newry, click here. He is now eighty years old.
St Patrick is said to have planted a 'Yew tree at the head of the strand', that is by the crossing-point or ford on the Clanrye River which runs through Newry into Carlingford Lough. Translated into Irish this becomes "Iubhair Cinn Tragh" (pronounced - more-or-less - 'Oor Kin Tra').The town's historical origins can be traced to the Cistercian Abbey founded in 1144 and confirmed by a charter granted by the King of Ireland, Murtagh McLoughlin, in 1157. By then, of course, 'the British were coming!' (well, the 'English', I suppose).
When Henry VIII decided to disolve the monasteries and grab their lands and treasures, the Abbey was among his victims in 1545. An English adventurer called Nicholas Bagnal, who later became Marshal of the army, occupied the Abbot's House and fortified the town. The Bagnal dynasty lasted through a long period of political and military upheaval. The town was taken by Con Magennis in 1641, but surrendered to Cromwell's Colonel Venables in 1649. Newry was burned by Berwick during the Williamite war in September 1689. The last Bagnal died in 1712.
Because of the town's commanding position on a ford on the main east coast route from the south of Ireland to the north, it was soon rebuilt. The Earl of Hillsborough's plans effectively moved the focus of the settlement from the Clanrye Valley sides down to the valley floor; a road - Hill Street - with two new squares, became the main thoroughfare through the town. Elegant Georgian buildings were constructed along the street.
By the time railways arrived in 1849, the canal to Portadown (opened 1742) had begun to decline. It was originally intended to transport coal from Coalisland, for shipment to Dublin (which paid dearly for imported English and Welsh coal), but production never lived up to expectation. The new ship canal from the Albert Basin along Carlingford Lough to the sea enabled Newry to develop a flax-spinning industry exporting Irish linen. This trade was stimulated by the huge reduction in cotton exports from North America caused by the Civil War. But Belfast was rapidly becoming the major port in the north-east of Ireland, and this competition, coupled with the expense of de-silting the passage from the end of the canal to the sea, led to the eclipse of Newry as a major port.
Newry port has been closed for years now, although when I was growing up it was, to my eyes, one of the busiest places one could imagine. By the 1960s, port, railway and mills were all gone. The horns which every morning used to summon the workers - including members of my family - were being silenced one by one as my teenage years progressed.
URL: www.mourne.net/frontier.htm
NOTES
1
from: Sydney Morning Herald 16/09/982
Alf ended up living in Moreton, Cheshire, a short ride across the Mersey on the New Brighton ferry from Liverpool. Baggage Master on the liners Queen Mary and then Queen Elizabeth became his subsequent career - followed by a stint as a bus driver in Liverpool (!) - , and his story in itself is rather interesting, and you can read an obituary article about him in a Queen Mary Foundation magazine here. When he died in 1993, he was cremated and his ashes were posted by ordinary Royal Mail (!) to my father, who scattered them in the graveyard where my Aunt Ena, the eldest child of my grandparents on my father's side, is buried. On the day she died, I was standing in the car-park by the lighthouse at Cap Frehél near Fort la Latte in Brittany, the castle location for the Kirk Douglas film 'The Vikings'. I was talking to a local French lady who sold lace articles to tourists from the back of an ancient station wagon. She was particularly fond of her 'pointes irlandaises' - circular 'doilies' made to an old Irish lace pattern brought to Brittany by Irish fishermen. I hadn't seen Ena for years, and discovered the next day that she had died at precisely the moment when in faltering French I proudly told this lady that my aunt made identical articles still even though she was in her eighties. I'm not particularly superstitious, but I must confess that this incident left me wondering if the acronym 'ESP' has a degree of validity....
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