Some long years ago I was interviewing at the Chinese Centre off the Lisburn Road. It was all about the Chinese New Year and we were waiting for one of the honourable elders of the community to arrive, he was off celebrating in town. When he arrived he was charming, with little English, so it was explained to me he’d been taking part in a traditional dance. I talked away to him complimenting him on taking part in line dancing, especially as he was not in the first flush of youth. I kept chuntering on, great for your health I said, my friend Lionel Blair is very keen on it, (trying to impress), I had tried I boasted but I wasn’t very good remembering the steps but loved the music. I was greeted with silence, confused looks, heads shaking in disbelief at my ramblings. Then the penny dropped when one of the ladies realised what was going on –
“Not line dancing Anne, he was the head of the Lion Dance.” Did I feel foolish or what. Apologies to all those involved, even after all these years I still shudder at my mistake. However there will be lots of lion dances and dragon races all over the world this weekend, fortune cookies and spring rolls and to everyone, especially here in Northern Ireland, may I wish the Chinese community a very Happy New Year, 2023 the Year of the Rabbit.
CAUGHT ON CAMERA
By great good luck, when the Hon Christopher Brooke made a routine call to the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland it turned out to be a lot more than routine, it turned out to be the uncovering of a treasure trove, a one chance in over three million, because there are over three million items in PRONI and on a top shelf in one of the vast store rooms there were 48 boxes containing 1100 glass plate negatives, a family history left lying since 1975 and thought lost. You can just imagine the delight and excitement that followed the discovery of these photographs taken well over a century ago by Christopher’s great grandmother Mary Alice Young.
Needless to say they are no longer on that shelf, they’ve been taken down, cleaned and catalogued. Once cleaned the black and white negatives were placed on a light box and photographed at a very high resolution many having gone through the intricacies of restoration so that any cracks or broken glass have been repaired to perfection.
The story goes back to a young woman born in 1867 in Bushmills, married Willie Young whose family made their wealth as leading linen manufacturers with offices in New York, St. Petersburg and Chile.
Life Down On The Farm
In 1850 the couple bought Galgorm Castle in Ballymena one of the major agriculture estates in Northern Ireland. Today it’s an international golf course but then it was a busy farm and a fashionable residence both staffed by local men and women and many were the subject of Mary Alice’s photographic eye, turf cutters, gardeners, cooks and chamber maids as well as family members and visitors.
By all accounts Mary Alice was a stylish woman who valued her staff and was well liked by the gentry in Co Down and beyond. She was a councillor, she was involved in the scouting movement and loved choral music but above all she believed women should have their place in the world, a strong woman who liked nothing more than driving her Vauxhall convertible around Ballymena. However, she had one over riding talent – photography.
Through the years she built up a library of images of family and the Ulster Scots community; as one of the earliest female photographers in Ireland she not only had an eye for composition but had the ability to capture a mood, a glance to the camera, a secret smile, children at play, society beauties, an employee using a fiddle to scatter the seed. liveried coachmen. There is even photographs of family and employees training with the Ulster Volunteer Force, indeed in this day and age she would have been considered a photo journalist.
Emotional Journey Into History
So, over the last couple of years, Christopher has built a picture of her life working with historians and photographic experts. With the help of her diaries, which she wrote every day, he has built up a history of those times. An exhibition of the black and white photos, her diary and papers are on show in the Braid Valley Museum and Arts Centre until the end of February.
One entry in her journal talks of 1914 being a bleak year ‘with Irish politics boiling over with militant woman suffragettes doing all the destruction they could.’ Although a suffragette herself she was very anti-violence but of strong opinions, she notes that ‘experts know everything that is known and don’t want to know anything that isn’t.’
Sadly when she became old she took her diaries to Portrush and threw them into the sea. But there is one left.
She died in 1945 and in her last entry she writes that she had been very ill and that her days were numbered. ‘I have had a full and happy life full too often of my own mistakes but I have enjoyed it all and now I must say goodbye.’
Thankfully, this pioneering woman’s work has been captured in, The Lost Photographs of Mary Alice Young, a programme made for BBC by Imagine Media with Kathy Clugston guiding us through the lens of community life over 100 years ago. It will be broadcast as part of a new season of arts programmes at the end of this month on BBC2 and iPlayer
BBC’s Public Service …..
…… aims to educate, inform and entertain. Sir John Reith.
What on earth is going on in BBC Radio Ulster? The proposal to devastate the North West with a mean decision to cut programmes is not fair. They preach about the importance of communication and now our major communicator proposes to diminish the life blood from a faithful intelligent audience who want their own news and current affairs from their own radio station in their own area. Who foots the bill for Radio Foyle? Does the purchaser not have any say? I’m not the only one to think that local broadcasting often leaves a lot to be desired – copious phone-ins and teenybopper music shows dominate. Hopefully decision makers at Broadcasting House will take note of the public outcry and the packed protest meeting in Derry and think again.
