My grandmother, Agnes Kyle, was born in Belfast, Ireland, October 20, 1899. The youngest of eight children, she was born off the Sandy Row, then as now a Protestant stronghold. The house was likely of the two-up and two-down variety—too small for ten people. And they were large people too, with raven hair, olive complexions, and dark eyes. The neighbors called them “The Spaniards,” and indeed they looked more Spanish than Irish. Stories abound about the source of this coloring—the surviving sailors from wreckage of The Spanish Armada in the 16th century, hidden from the English along the northern coast of Ireland and the southern coast of Scotland (https://www.constancegemmett.com/origins-hello-sailor/) .
Whether or not that bit of tantalizing trivia is true or not , my grandmother’s ancestors lived in Kyle, part of Ayershire, Scotland. Ayershire is on the southwest coast, on the Firth of Clyde, and not far across the North Channel from the northeastern-most coast of Ireland.
How the Ulster-Scots Came To Be
My grandmother’s ancestors left Ayershire to set up shop in the north of Ireland (the Ulster Province) as part of the Ulster Plantation. Designed under King James I (1566-1625), the Plantation brought settlers from Scotland and England to Ireland, where they were given land formerly occupied by native Irish. Farmers and tradespeople, the settlers were installed to dilute the Gaelic influence of the Irish Kings (most of whom fled) and the native Irish. Similarly, Great Britons arrived on the American East Coast to settle lands given by royal decree, dispossessing the American natives.
To create the Ulster Plantation, lands were given to wealthy settlers in 1606 (not coincidentally, Jamestown, Virginia was first settled in 1607), and ordinary people were brought over to work for the wealthy settlers throughout the 17th century.
Still Farming, Two Centuries Later
Fast-forward to the mid 19th century, and my grandmother’s grandparents were still farming in the northeast of Ireland. Only so many people could fit on a farm however, unlike a two-up-two-down Belfast house, and so the industries of Belfast beckoned. Rope makers, tobacco processing, shipbuilding, and the largest linen production in the world—all offered jobs—low paying and increasingly difficult to get as the century grew older. The descendants of the settlers flocked to Belfast, a leader in the Industrial Revolution and nicknamed “Linenopolis,” crowded with job seekers, polluted by the belching chimneys of industry, and the cheap coal used for heating.
Ascendancy/Descendency
The Protestant population—brought to Ireland to Anglicize the country, repress the native Catholic Irish, and seal its union with Great Britain under the King—ruled the roost. The wealthy version became known as the Ascendancy, living in the big houses built on lands granted. But the farmer class Protestants needed the jobs Belfast offered in the 19th century, so the Catholics were pushed out of many jobs.
Home Rule—Not Yet—There’s a War On
The Act of Union of 1800 merged Ireland and Great Britain. It was strongly opposed, and with violence, but the movement collapsed. What was left morphed into the movement for Home Rule, or Irish votes for Irish political parties and Irish representation—a state of dominion within Great Britain. This movement was strong in much of the island of Ireland (excepting the Protestants in the north), and included a bargain struck but never honored: Irishmen volunteered to join the British Army during World War I in return for implementation of Home Rule after the war. At least four bills failed to pass in Parliament from 1886 to 1920.
A Poisoned Brew
Layered as it was on top of the memory of the Great Famines and the mass emigration of the 19th century, the brew of the big houses and failure to gain Home Rule poisoned everything. Eventually, as Irish patriots moved closer to gaining freedom, part of Ulster was partitioned from the rest of Ireland in 1922. The partition followed a series of negotiations and betrayals committed by all sides in order to gain that freedom. The partitioned section of Ulster (6 of the 9 counties of the province) remains part of the United Kingdom as Northern Ireland. With Belfast as its capital, the violence fomented—known as The Troubles—became part of everyday life in the 1920s, as the violence of the Irish War for Independence ravaged the whole of the island.
Partitioned
The Irish Free State was formed in 1922, snipping the last tie between the 6 counties of Ulster and the rest of Ireland. The partition remained in place through the 1949 birth of the Republic of Ireland, as it does to this day.
The Free State remained neutral during World War II and refused Churchill’s pleas to allow Britain to use their many strategic harbors as British naval bases. A desperate Churchill offered to lift the partition so that the Ulster 6 could rejoin the rest of Ireland. De Valera, the Prime Minister (Taoiseach) of the Free State, said no.
Suppression
My grandmother’s father worked in the gas works, a large utility where men shoveled the coal burned to generate gas for the gaslights and gas ranges ubiquitous in the city. He worked there, where no Catholic was allowed to work, while my grandmother’s sister Margaret worked at the Harland and Wolff Shipyard—builder of RMS Titanic. The shipyards purged all Catholic workers in the 1920s—often committing beatings and drownings to discourage return—as they had been purged from civil service, utilities and many industries.
The violence of those purges and the rioting afterward reached its peak in 1922. What followed was a ratcheting of the discrimination against Catholics—the removal of the vote, nightly curfews, neighborhood raids and arrests without cause, burning of businesses—intimidation by murder, rape and arson undertaken by a new class of “policemen,” the B Specials—The Black and Tans (a brainchild of Winston Churchill).
Catholic or Protestant?
How did anyone discover what a person’s religion was? For one thing, the handy “RC” for Roman Catholic stamped on a baby’s birth certificate followed the baby through its life. For most people their home address and school name were telltale (since many native Irish names already had been Anglicized, surnames of Catholics were not necessarily native Irish). In desperation, some Catholics tried to pass as Protestants in order to work. The threat of discovery hung over their heads and encouraged extreme violence against them.
Historians Please Forgive
The above is a boiled-down and simplistic history of Ireland and Belfast in particular. It is at least a description of the culture into which my grandmother was born at the very end of the 19th century. She grew up in poverty and was a young woman at the height of the 1920s Troubles, the like of which was not seen again until the 1970s. How did the culture of violence affect my grandmother’s life? The reader will be able to guess some of the ways in which it may have affected her, but there are others which may be more hidden—and hiding was key—which will be revealed in the next post, My Grandmother, Part II—Belfast and Brooklyn.