Belfast – Page 229 – Extramural Activity

Surviving The Titanic

2015-04-182024-12-23Extramural ActivityLeave a comment

Here are two final images from the south side of the Donegall Road bridge over the Victoria Street line, one about Titanic and the other about locals awarded the MBE.

“I was in Lifeboat 13. I always remember that. My father was waving to us and talking to a clergyman, the Rev. Carter. The Titanic went in the ice and I heard three bangs. Before we hit, there had been terrific vibrations from the engines during the night as the ship was really racing over the sea. As the lifeboat pulled away we heard cries from the people left on the Titanic and in the water and explosions in the ship. There were lots of bodies floating … We were in the lifeboat nine hours. I kept looking in the water for my father and when we reached New York we went to the hospitals to see if he had been picked up.” Mrs. Charlotte Collier

How many people survived the Titanic is one of the most frequently asked questions regarding the history of this legendary ship. Of the 2,228 passengers and crew members who set sail, only 705 survived the Titanic.

See previously: Titanic Lifeboat | The Titanic Story and various other Titanic murals

1. Belfast Blitz #2
2 & 10. The Thread Of History (weavers)
3 & 9. Work Organises Life
4. In The Wars (Korea)
5 & 8. Surviving The Titanic
6. The Door Opens And Lets The Future In (Carnegie Library)
7. The Beautiful Blues (Linfield football)

Click image to enlarge
Copyright © 2014 Seosamh Mac Coılle
X01850 X01853 X01844 disaster great loss of life buckingham palace “Being a man or a women is a matter of birth. Being a man or women who makes a different is a matter of choice.” Tommy Wilson, MBE – for service to the community; Rita Mills MBE – for service to the civil service

Standing Stone

2015-04-172024-12-23Extramural ActivityLeave a comment

“The scars on this stone were caused in the German air raids of the second world war. Despite severe damage to the building, the Belfast Telegraph was published without interruption.” The masonry above forms part of what was the old front door of the offices, at the corner of Royal Avenue and Library Street.

Click image to enlarge
Copyright © 2015 Seosamh Mac Coılle
X02552

The Right To Be Happy

2015-04-162024-12-23Extramural Activity1 Comment

The life of a child in the New Lodge of the 1900s was one of poverty, disease, mill work, and being displaced by German bombers in 1941, with only a lamppost swing and marbles for relief. (It was also in black-and-white.) The struggle for young people’s rights “to be loved, to family life, to freedom of expression, to life, to your own beliefs, not to be bullied, to be safe from war, to privacy, to play, to be happy” continues in the panels on the right-hand side (for a close-up, see Young People’s Rights).

Click image to enlarge
Copyright © 2014 Seosamh Mac Coılle
X02423 tom mcelwee mickey devine linen tram irish news bronchitis

First Movement

2015-04-152024-12-23Extramural ActivityLeave a comment

Patrick O’Connor was born on this day in 1924 on the lower Falls but after his father emigrated he spent his early years – until age 5 – with his grandparents in East Street in the Markets. It was as a high-schooler in New York that he adopted the name Pádraıc Fıacc (“fıach dubh” is “raven”) and began writing poetry. He settled in Glengormley upon his second and final return; it is not clear that he ever saw East Street lined with British Army soldiers, as shown in the mural above. He wrote of his early life in ‘First Movement’:

Low clouds, yellow in a mist wind
Sift on far-off Ards
Drift hazily …
I was born on such a morning
Smelling of the bone yards
The smoking chimneys over the slate top roofs
The wayward storm birds
And to the east where morning is, the sea
And to the west where evening is, the sea
Threatening with danger
And it would always darken suddenly

Some of Fıacc’s poems are in the TroublesArchive. There are two videos below. The first is an interview with NVTv’s Bernard Conlon; the second is of a reception in Belfast City Hall.

Click image to enlarge
Copyright © 2022 Seosamh Mac Coılle
X02057 [X09070] X09071 1929

The Hunting Heart

2015-04-132024-12-23Extramural ActivityLeave a comment

Seamus Heaney was born on this date in 1939 on a farm in County London-/Derry. His first (full) collection was Death Of A Naturalist in 1966 and it included the poem Twice Shy, the concluding lines of which are painted on Stranmillis embankment: Still waters running deep along the embankment walk.

Painted by UUSU students (see also Animals Two By Two).

Belfast City Council report.

Click image to enlarge
Copyright © 2015 Seosamh Mac Coılle
X02576 X02577 uusu

The Human Condition

2015-04-102024-05-19Extramural Activity1 Comment

“The way a society treats children reflects not only its qualities of compassion & protective caring but also its sense of justice, its commitment to the future & its urge to enhance the human condition for coming generations.” Words by the United Nations Secretary-General Javier Perez De Cuellar in 1987 inscribed on a mural by Margaret McCann and Andrea Redmond in Dunlewey Street in Clonard.

Click image to enlarge
Copyright © 2015 Extramural Activity
X02548 X02549 X02550 rainbow mountains duck flying “1/4 of W. Belfast is under 15. 12 of 16 most deprived wards in Belfast are in W. B.” dolmen races children