By Joe Graham

The ‘Rock was the older more settled area to us kids growing up in Ballymurphy in the 1950’s, it had all the shops, the established characters and had already made its mark in Belfast folklore. The estate was built in

 the 1920’s and was then considered to be the model estate of West Belfast there were 333 houses in all and shortly after its opening the Junior Minister for Home Affairs, in 1929, had this to say,... “To walk along the roads in summer time is to see a sight which must gladden the heart of every lover of well-kept home gardens these houses are perfect for three or four children, a clean and tidy wife, and a father who does not want to go out either to a public house or to a Local Option meeting, he wants his “Evening Telegraph” and after patted his children on the head and said goodnight to them he sits down in that house which is his own or becoming so more and more every day.” For starters the reference “perfect for three or four children” is a good indication as to who the houses were intended for.... Catholics at that time had an average of seven or eight kids, and even more.! The rent in the early days was 13 Shillings a week, almost half of a working man’s wage.. so there was little chance for the man “To go out to a public house”, in fact before long people were being evicted left, right and centre because they could not afford to live in the “Model Estate”.. and the oul gardens went downhill too. By the 1930’s the estate became known as “The Moving City” because there were so many families moving in and out of the houses, even though the rent by now had been reduced to 8 Shillings(40p) a week.., they wtre hard times. The area became quite religiously polarised in 1935 due to hundreds of catholic families being burned or intimidated from their homes in other parts of the town, Sailortown and the Docks area in particular, families crowded into the Whiterock and the new Glenard estate at Ardoyne from these area’s. By the late 1930’s the area began to settle and and before long took own its own identity and character, it was surrounded by ancient Fairy Hills and folklore and bordered on one side by the “Bleachy River” and “Dan O’Neill’s Loanan” on the other..- this ‘Loanan’ is said to be part of the route of the original Falls Road and at one time part of the main track to Dublin, called ‘The Rocky Road To Dublin. Much of the original land on which the estate was built on belonged to a Catholic family by the name of “Britton” whose large house originally stood near the old “Giant’s Foot” road and whose name is given to some streets in the estate. During the 1940’s and ‘50’s, at the right hand side of Britton’s Parade, at the rear of Sammy Riddel’s house(Our Lady’s Hospital) was a stretch of land used rented as garden Allotments, or “The Plots” as we called them, they mostly belonged to peelers in the early days, and they grew all sorts of vegetables and flowers there. Many a kid earned his “Picture Money” by jumping over the fence to raid a few cabbages, carrots or potatoes to be sold round the doors, aye and many a family were afforded a decent meal by such raids... for they were hard times. Working class people throughout Belfast suffered terribly during the infamous 1930’s Depression, but Catholic people in particular came in for some scathing as regards those larger families I mentioned earlier. Lily Coleman, who was the “Chairman” of the Belfast City Guardians, was written into local folklore when she made an insulting remark as she announced that’inore than 60% of the people claiming ‘Outdoor Relief were Catholic., it seems there is no poverty under the sheets!’.., most people thought she was more to be pitied... but it does give a good insight into the thinking of the Unionist mind. It was years before things began to improve, I remember, even in the 1950’s when a piece of bread covered with syrup or treacle passed as the ‘norm’ for a sandwich, and people today would say, “The kids today are spoiled”.. Jez.. isn’t it great that we have it to spoil them.?., pile it on them and in them.., and they won’t have hard oul times to look back on. sure many a poor oul parent would have given their right arm for a chance to ‘spoil their children’. A regular visitor to the old ‘Rock’ was the famous peeler, “Pig” Minelly and there are many stories of him in the area, my favourite concerned the 1940’s when he accompanied the Bailiffs who were up to evict a family for non-payment of rent, a large agitated crowd gathered to watch, a wee man who was selling fish of a handcart parked to sadly watch, The first few bits of furniture was carried out onto the pavement and the crowd grew more agitated and were surprised to hear the “Pig” murmur, “It’s a sad day when the people of the Rock stand by to watch a neighbour being evicted”., well, they say a wink is as good as a nod to a blind donkey... the crowd surged forward and grappled with the Bailiff, some grabbed fish off the handcart and ‘bate them up the bake’ with the wet slippery fish and within seconds the Baiif1 fled down the street with “Pig” Minelly running alongside.. and some say he was smiling But he wasn’t smiling a short time later for he got an awful sore toe on the road when someone shot him in it... the follow up search led to Paddy Corrigan being shot off the road of a house in the estate and serving time in Crumlin Road. Another republican folk hero of the area was big Ned Maguire and a funny story I remember concerning him was during the world war, when he was quite a young man, he was watching some British soldiers digging in the nearby fields and filling sandbags with earth to use downtown for fortifications against German Bombing. All the soldiers had laid down their rifles in a neat pile whilst one held onto his to act as guard over the weapons... the boul Ned struck up a conversation with this soldier and after a while asked to see the soldiers rifle, the silly brit eager to cement his friendship with his new found friend handed Ned his rifle., silly boy... Ned promptly held the nozzle of the rifle to him and ordered him and his other comrades to sit on the grass with their hands under them, suddenly a couple of other members of the I.R.A appeared and they bundled up the other rifles and walked off with the lot, leaving the embarrassed brits sifting on their hands. Big Ned seemed to get a kick out of embarrassing the authorities for a while later he and three others climbed over the wall of Crumlin Road prison and in his by now familiar fashion.... dandered off.