A MISCELLANY,
ALMANACK,
AND COMPANION
COMPILED, ALMANACKED
AND MISCELLANED BY
REGGIE CHAMBERLAIN-KING
BLACKSTAFF PRESS
First published in 2014
by Blackstaff Press
4D Weavers Court
Linfield Road
Belfast BT12 5GH
With the assistance of
The Arts Council of Northern Ireland
© Selection and Introduction, Reggie Chamberlain-King, 2014
© Photographs and illustrations, as indicated
The acknowledgements page constitutes an extension of this copyright page.
All rights reserved
Design by Lisa Dynan
Illustrations by Samara Leibner at www.samaraleibner.com, except where indicated Produced by Blackstaff Press
Reggie Chamberlain-King has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act to be identified as the editor of this work.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
EPUB ISBN 978 0 85640 942 4
MOBI ISBN 978 0 85640 943 1
www.blackstaffpress.com
Contents
AN INTRODUCTION
Gilded Cages - Circus, Cinema, Sideshow, & Spectacle
The Naked Turk
The Mercy of the Court - Crime, Process, & Punishment
“I have arrived in your city”- The Ripper in Belfast
Your Own Good - Madness, Medicine, and Miracle Cures
The Goligher Circle - An Experiment in Spiritualism
Threshold of the Unseen - The Unnatural in Folk and Science
Nora’s Grave - A Tale of Two Lovers
The Cave Hill
The Botanic Gardens
The Water
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
For Kitty,
For Ever
THE LATE READER
Chirp, chirp, chirp –
What’s thon? A cricket’s cry!
Chirp, chirp, chirp –
Somebody’s goin’ tae die!
O the wild wind’s ragin’
Ower the heathery hill;
Iv’rybody’s in bed but me,
The house is calm an’ still.
Chirp, chirp, chirp –
I hear a cricket sing.
Chirp, chirp, chirp –
I wish’t I cud see the Thing.
Dead long is my father,
My brothers are ower the sea;
Naebody’s in the house the night
But mother, an’ Kate, an’ me.
Chirp, chirp, chirp –
Kate’s young – not married long;
Chirp, chirp, chirp –
My mother’s hale an’ strong.
Then who does it cry for
Wi’sich an evil glee?
Holy Mary, Mother o’ God!
O can it be for me?
Chirp, chirp, chirp –
“Come up, Dan, tae your bed,”
Chirp, chirp, chirp –
“Them book’sll turn your head.”
Dan doesnae answer—
She sleeps, calls him nae more;
But at the white o’ dawn they find
Him, huddled on the floor!
Padraic Gregory
1912
The area known as Belfast first appears on record in 666 AD or thereabouts and the city has been the locus of unusual activity ever since. Not all the behaviour was devilish, not all the events were miraculous, but there is something in the crossed lines of streets and the sharp shadows of buildings that permits weird things to happen in a city – even a brick-faced puritan town like Belfast.
This miscellany of dark materials allows the reader to move in and out of the strange and shrill in Belfast over several centuries, showing how the occult, the capricious, and the uncanny met with everyday life. So too with the remarkable and the pass-remarkable. These things do not reveal ‘The Other Side’ of Belfast, or the ‘Hidden’ or ‘Secret’ Side. They were, in fact, all part of everyday life and the tangle of the city: the charm of superstition and the fear of magic; the discoveries of scientists and obscurities of con men; a revulsion from murder, but a love of gruesome detail. The pieces in Weird Belfast, side by side, will give the reader a sense of Belfast as a place of folklore, a bastion of reason, home to radical thought and primal brutality – a strange place in which strange things happen. Which is perfectly normal.
The only suitable format for such material is the miscellany, although you also might like to consider it as a companion and an almanack, with elements too of the compendium, ephemeris, digest, and collectanea. The great Charles Fort, compiler of the unusual and originator of the term Fortean, describes such data as ‘the damned’ and ‘the excluded’: that which is too marginal for science and too slight for history. He means, perhaps, those things that beg more questions than they answer. Or, if they raise no questions, they raise a solitary eyebrow.
As anomalies to the quotidian, such things do not advance a story of ourselves or of the place. If they were part of the tapestry – or even followed a thread – they would not draw the eye in the same way. Each is an independent thing, at once insignificant and interesting. They are presented here as they are, as items in a museum, a nineteenth-century French salon, or a child’s scrapbook, almost touching, but not joined – brought together, because together they are at their most compelling. The miscellaneous, when assembled, becomes miscellanea and this, a miscellany. A miscellany is the cataloguing of coincidence and, coincidentally, one of the nineteenth century’s most-popular was Smith’s Almanac, written and published annually in Belfast by Joseph Smith, and deemed ‘an infallible guide on all subjects treated in this wonderful repertory of heterogeneous information’.
If this current repertory of information – I am reluctant to say facts for obvious reasons – does not prove wonderful, it cannot be argued that it is anything but heterogeneous. This varied content comes from many sources: newspapers, both local and international; medical journals and academic texts; monthly magazines, including the high-minded and populist; some obscure manuscripts; some out-of-print novels; books of poetry; pamphlets; and, naturally, rumour and hearsay. Nothing here is presented from the same vantage point. What connects them only is their worthiness of inclusion: things get a little weird.
The standard for weird is moveable though and what is included here may, in cases, seem to be mere happenstance, morbidity, or local colour. By my measure, the weird embraces ghost stories and graveyards, tragic tales and comic asides, as well as ballads and broadsides, advertisements and playbills. This takes us from the supernatural at one end of a scale, via the fantastic, to the bizarre at the other: the bizarre tends to be neither super nor natural, it is most often one of Mother or Human Nature’s charming mistakes. Weird is a broad church because normality, in comparison, is rather narrow. It is dependent on expectation, though, and is measured by its distance from that expectation. Thus, while a headline-grabbing murder may be notable for its extremity, a forgotten poet may stand out by his extreme banality.
Weird Belfast contains all of these things: the forgotten, the marginal, the untimely. Things that were normal then – whenever then was – seem stranger now: lectures on spiritualism; public displays of now-debunked sciences; trials for witchcraft. Equally, things that seemed outlandish once, strike us now as unworthy of comment. All the exotic spectacles and foreign nationals, the peculiar cures to common ailments, why did they once spend so much print space and drawing ink on things that we find ordinary?
A trawl through this cultural marginalia teaches us several contradictory things about the past:
It is the last category that interests me the most.
When I used to sit on my grandfather’s knee, it was not his stories of historical or political change that stayed with me, but the stories of people. Standard practice may dismiss them as anecdotes: anecdotes of characters, of sidelined events; mere recollections and vague vagaries. Even in blunt newspaper type, they are no less mystical. The formality of the setting doesn’t diminish them, because the stories themselves are so small and oddly-formed that formality cannot straighten them out. Indeed, they demand that the storyteller embellish and stylise and the writers happily oblige.
It was these kinds of stories that, during hours of other unrelated research, I noted down for later. I didn’t want to forget them. They were not relevant then – may never be relevant at all, in fact – but they seemed to add or accumulate into something: in this instance, one volume of what could be infinite volumes.
RCK