It had once been easy to ignore the slums scattered across Belfast’s destitute working class areas, and the dismal, unhygienic conditions which the poorest lived in. The destruction of working-class housing made the problems afflicting these previously hidden communities visible, exposing Belfast’s concealed shame. Poverty and unemployment had deepened during the 1930s, a decade of global economic recession. Houses were damp and cramped. Rents were high, houses were poorly built and overcrowding was rife. In one area near Crumlin Road, 190 people were found living in twelve houses.[1] Conditions hadn’t improved much since the days of the Industrial Revolution.
Widespread homelessness raised concern about the vulnerable, disabled and elderly. At the start of war, air raid warden James Doherty had visited homes across Belfast to record how many people lived in each house, and the numbers of chronically sick or invalid people who would need special care should the bombs arrive. He noted a general reluctance to talk openly about disability. As he noted, ‘the practice at the time was to hide ‘handicapped children’ with some sense of shame…they were rarely seen in public’. Doherty added:
The wardens made many discoveries in all areas when they were attempting to make a census. I am not suggesting that these children or young people were neglected but they were hidden away from the outside world and deprived of the company of friends and neighbours.[2]
Life on Croziers Row in the Boundary Street area of Belfast (1912). Poverty was still rife in Belfast three decades later. Courtesy of the Hogg collection National Museums NI.
Doherty was referring to the social stigma directed towards children with disabilities at the time which encouraged all manner of practices including sending them to institutions or hiding them away at home out of shame. Church bodies had traditionally played a role in stigmatising the disabled, and disabled children were not afforded equal status in education and work life.[3] The Blitz itself increased the number of disabled people requiring some kind of life-long care. On the night of Easter Tuesday, Samuel Ball was injured and died at the Mater. His wife, Isabella, survived but lost one of her eyes, and lost sight in the remaining one. Left permanently disabled, Isabella was unable to ever work again.[4]
As the air raid sirens sounded overhead, it proved difficult to move elderly people from their homes, even despite the obvious imminent danger. Sometimes, this was due to sheer stubbornness. Margaret Wilson remembered her grandfather’s insistence that ‘Hitler wasn’t going to move him out of his bed’ on the night of Easter Tuesday. Another problem cited was that grandmother’s corsets were downstairs, and she didn’t want to come downstairs to collect them.[5] However, in many cases elderly people were too immobile to be easily transported to safety.
Those working in the medical and welfare services worked in an environment that gave little thought to the elderly, many of whom would, in normal times, have ended up spending their final years in the workhouse unless they had the financial resources needed for a better end to life. Even well-meaning welfare workers were tainted by harsh opinions and perspectives. Moya Woodside was a home visitor for the Belfast Welfare Committee, a campaigner for wider access to birth control and wife of an assistant surgeon at Royal Victoria Hospital. She recalled:
We had two cases of bedridden old ladies waiting to be evacuated, and nothing can be done for them. The government have made no provision for this type of case and the Infirmary (Poor Law) refuses to take them in, alleging shortage of beds and nurses. They will only accept the homeless infirm. So we have to tell people that if they wait until they are bombed, then we can help them.
One of the old women in question this morning is 75, paralysed and without the power of speech. She is still lying in the room where the windows and doors were blown in on top of her and was helpless when it happened to even to summon her niece who was sheltering below stairs.
Eugenically speaking, of course, such people would be better dead.[6]
Belfast Blitz – Destroyed houses. Image source unknown.
As Woodside’s throwaway comment suggests, she was a staunch eugenics advocate, and remained so long after the war, even despite the revelations of the Holocaust which had been inspired by such ideas. A graduate of Queen’s University, she was the Honorary Secretary of the Belfast Branch of the Society for Constructive Birth Control and became a Fellow of the Eugenics Society in 1951 which allowed her to further develop her interests, which included human sterilisation.[7]
The Blitz also raised the visibility of poor hygiene conditions. Many people volunteered to take in evacuees, but were shocked to encounter, for the first time, the health conditions of people who lived in their own city. Poverty and misery was now being seen at very close quarters. According to Woodside, writing in her characteristically unsympathetic tone, these families now put up with young evacuees living in their homes who were filthy, smelly, refused all food except bread and tea, and enjoyed urinating all over the floor. Woodside wrote in her diaries (being collated for Mass Observation) of her shame in asking ‘decent working people with clean houses’ to take in such guests with their ‘filthy habits’ and ‘take it for granted attitudes’. These children didn’t even like the sausage pie made for them, nor the home-made jam, complained Woodside. Instead, tea was all wanted to eat and drink all day.[8]
Belfast Blitz – Unexploded Bomb. Hughenden Avenue, Cavehill. (Unknown source).
Attitudes were hardly more favourable at government level. Minister of Home Affairs, Dawson Bates, wrote a memorandum complaining that ‘lice and vermin are being spread through the country, buses and trains are being infected, and clean and well-kept households are having billeted upon them filthy and verminous people’. This insensitive, uncompassionate tone assumed no responsibility for the various government-level policy failures that had worsened the Blitz’s impact for Belfast’s poorest communities.[9]
A report by Dr Thomas Carnwarth compiled in 1941 lambasted Belfast’s housing conditions for being cramped and poor. In areas around Newtownards Road, Queen Street, York Street and Cromac Street, he found ‘damp, mouldering walls, many of them bulging, rickety stairs, broken floors, crumbling ceilings’. Carnwarth placed the word ‘houses’ in inverted commas as he thought they looked more like hovels or huts. He concluded that Belfast’s medical services fell short and criticised government and local authorities for wasting time arguing and debating while infants and children unnecessarily died around them of preventable diseases.[10]
This inertia impacted upon the matter of rebuilding houses. Debates on this important matter dragged on until the 1950s, suggesting a lack of urgency. In 1944, the Ministry of Health requested powers to requisition land for building houses on the blitzed sites. Governmental discussion about the matter went on for months.[11] Around 3,200 houses had been were destroyed during the Blitz, or demolished soon afterwards. The bombed areas has been grossly over-crowded, and sub-let, with as many houses built as possible in cramped areas of Belfast. Some destroyed houses were a century old, and now grossly inadequate. The blitzed sites only had space for 140 flats and 300 houses. By the 1940s, a new emphasis on light, ventilation and adequate living space meant that the equivalent number of houses could not simply be re-built on the bombed spaces. There was a pressing need for playgrounds, educational facilities and similar amenities. Between 1945 and 1950, only 530 new houses were rebuilt
[1] Barton, The Blitz, pp. 8-9.
[2] Doherty, Post 381, p. 9.
[3] David Kilgannon, Intellectual Disability and Ireland, 1947-1996: Towards a Full Life? (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2023).
[4] Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, PM2/2/23, Correspondence between Isabella Ball and the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland’, 1941.
[5] Northern Ireland War Memorial, Oral History BBP3, ‘Margaret Wilson’.
[6] Douds, The Belfast Blitz, pp. 114-15.
[7] Mary Woodside, Sterilization in North Carolina: A Sociological and Psychological Study (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press 1950).
[8] Barton, The Belfast Blitz
[9] McMahon, The Belfast Blitz, pp. 94-5.
[10] PRONI, LA/7/3/E/12/1, ‘Report of Dr Thomas Carnwarth to the Special Committee of the Belfast Corporation on the Municipal Health of the City’, 24 December 1941.
[11] PRONI, MPS/3/58, ‘Post-Blitz Situation Reports following Raid on 4th/5th April’, 1941.