The Mournes and Me: Kath's Story

Kath Maguire is 75 and lives in Newcastle, Co. Down, where the Mountains of Mourne sweep down to the sea, and where she owns and runs her own furniture shop on Main Street. She continues to work, happily totting up the figures as she did at the age of 16, when she got her first job in Belfast in 1946. The daughter of Jimmy and May Faulkner, and the eldest of nine siblings, she told me her story between phone calls in a little office at the back of her shop. The following are her memories and opinions of the war and its immediate consequences, mixed, at times, with thoughts of my own. Kath is my great aunt.
“I can remember we lived in a wee kitchen house in Valentia Place, and we could hear the German planes going over. Nowadays you just see the trails they leave, but in those days there was a noise that was really, really annoying, deafening. I can remember the planes coming over, knowing that they were going to bomb somewhere, and getting down on my knees, praying that nobody would be killed. We were all issued with gas masks, but we had two or three babies in our house, and they had to be put into a mask that sat about two feet high, a full body mask.
“We were living in that tiny house in Valentia Place, which had two bedrooms and a living room. There was no bathroom or kitchen or anything like that. The living room had a range in it, and we had a toilet and a cold tap in the yard. We had moved down from a house in Castlewellan, which had three bedrooms, a big living room and about two acres of garden. But in Valentia Place, you opened the front door and you were literally on the street. There was no garden.
“The English soldiers were all in the barracks, around the town in different houses, but any of them who had families had the option of bringing their families with them. So, although we only had two bedrooms in our little house, my mother and father took in a soldier and his wife and son, and let them have the second room; we all stayed in the one room. And right up until mummy died, that woman still sent Christmas cards every year. She wrote to mummy all the time. Barclay was her name. The army paid six shillings a week for their rent, but her and mummy both would have mucked in together.
“Everyone got ration books, because you could only get two ounces of butter a week, and there was absolutely no fruit. I can remember the first time I saw a banana, and I thought this was from outer space. With our ration books you got two ounces of butter and four ounces of bacon, things like that. There were no restrictions in the South, so we would go to Dundalk and bring sugar home with us. They couldn’t get tea in Dundalk, so we would have taken them tea in exchange. Although the South was neutral, there were still some things they couldn’t get.
“The lack of food was terrible, but we weren’t too bad, especially once they started a scheme where the offices of the Mourne Observer are these days. There were two or three fields there, which were let out in what they call ‘plots’. The plots were probably about eighty feet by twenty feet, and you had to pay something like nine or ten shillings a year for a plot. My Da would have worked it on his day off, and everyday when we came home from school, regardless of what homework we had been given, we would all go and work the plot. But it meant that we could grow potatoes and other vegetables, which people in the urban areas like Belfast couldn’t. So the plots were a great thing for us. People survived through enterprise. But we only used our plot for ourselves. Maybe we gave some of what we grew to elderly neighbours, you know; but the plots weren’t big enough to sell what you grew. It was just to encourage everyone to look after themselves.
“The Germans blitzed Belfast in 1941 or ’42, I’m not exactly sure. But after that, they started to evacuate people from Belfast; they all wanted out of the city. I can remember watching the people walking along the Dundrum Road, people who had walked the whole way from Belfast; men and women, teenagers and even young children, coming to Newcastle to see what they could get. Of course, in those days, people would rent houses out for the summer, so they had somewhere to stay. Some of them stayed until the war was over, but some people came to Newcastle and never left.
“A lot of Jewish people came to Newcastle too; there were a lot of Goodrich’s and Piers’. It was awful really, but I remember a lot of people didn’t like the Jews. There were very few working-class Jews, they nearly all had businesses and could even afford to buy their own houses. It wasn’t as bad in Northern Ireland as it was in other places, but there was definitely a stigma attached to the Jewish people. They also evacuated a lot of Gibraltarians to Newcastle. They were mostly based in Ballykinler, the army base, but I remember going to school with several people from Gibraltar. They were very proud of their English heritage.
“My father worked in the Slieve Donard Hotel. He started off as a kitchen porter, and then became head porter. But it was different for him during the war. On account of rationing, there was very little petrol. People who could afford cars couldn’t afford to run them. Doctors and people like that were given a ration of petrol, but there was no public transport, so there were no visitors coming to Newcastle. The evacuees who came from Belfast, their friends would come down on the train. All of the guest houses and hotels were virtually put out of business. It was all changed; certainly the Slieve was closed, and there were very few staff left. But my father stayed on, and I think they retained a manager, because the Slieve was full of evacuees from Belfast and Gibraltar.”
To think of the clientele and the business that the Slieve Donard Hotel now attracts, it is difficult to imagine that most eloquent and grandiose of buildings filled with families driven from their homes, poor and hungry, dreaming of the blitz as the waves lapped the shore below and the soldiers worked beneath the shadow of the mountains. They say a picture tells a thousand words, but this description highlights the sense of uncertainty and the extent to which the war had disrupted the social equilibrium of Newcastle and Northern Ireland better than any picture I have seen.
“Then they started the ARP, the Home Guard. All the local men joined and they went three or four nights a week to get trained up. It was only a part-time thing; you just went in your own time. You weren’t paid for it; you might have got ten bob a month or something like that. But it was something you were encouraged to do to defend your locality, and it was a bit of craic, someplace to go. They all had their uniforms, and they all had guns, and they had to keep their shoes clean like the soldiers. In can remember my father polishing his shoes for two hours, and then he would go to work and he’d say, ‘Now you sit and polish them for me.’ I had to spit on them, as well as put the polish on, and rubbed them until they were gleaming.
“But the reason my father joined the ARP was because of a man called Gerry Ansley. He owned the castle in Castlewellan and the terrace of good houses up the top end of Valentia Place, where the fire station is. The week after my Da joined the ARP, Jerry Ansley gave him one of those houses to rent, so we all moved in. It was a house with a sitting room, a kitchen, three bedrooms and the whole bit. It was like a mansion to us. Of course my father took the house and then filled it. My mother had another five or six children.
“Where the labour exchange is now, that was a field, and they dug trenches in that, roughly the shape of a grave, about three feet wide and eight feet long. The military used to come and get into the trenches to practise shouting. It was so different, you know? We were kids, and this was the field we’d always played in, and suddenly for the soldiers to be acting like cowboys, it was like the movies.
“The town was absolutely full of military. I remember there were a lot of English and American soldiers, and they were everyplace. Ballykinler was always full, but when the war started they came to Newcastle, and any place that was vacant, they took over. For instance, this place (Kath’s furniture shop) was the electricity board, so it wasn’t used. But next door, and all along Main Street, there were lots of terraced houses, and they were all occupied by the military. All those houses had a front garden, a small wall about two feet high that had metal railings, and a gate. The soldiers took all the railings and the gates for munitions. And about the middle house down, there were two sentry boxes, wooden sentry boxes, and an armed soldier would stand there twenty-four hours a day, on the main street of Newcastle!”
We were just about finished up, and the tape on my Dictaphone was slowly running out, when Kath remembered one more thing. It was quite a shock to hear it, and I have been unable to corroborate the story, but my great aunt swears that it happened, and that’s good enough for me.
“You know where the library is now?” she asked. “Well, that was Whiteside’s Garage back then. I can remember, it must have been during the end of the war, because the Americans left not long after. But they built a platform there, just a wooden platform. Well, I remember General Eisenhower, who subsequently became the president of the United States, standing up there on that platform. He wasn’t stationed here, of course, but he came here. There was a parade, and he stood while the soldiers and the ARP all paraded past him in their nice uniforms. The Americans had the nicest uniforms; the English soldiers and our men all wore this coarse material, like tarpaulin, you know. But they all paraded past, and Eisenhower took the salute. I watched it from Whiteside’s Garage.”

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