The political books about Belfast and the current troubles throughout the North are many. But probably as numerous are the books, often softback, heavily illustrated, which show the basic story of the people of that city, as it grew and grew in the last century, and as it existed earlier this century. And much about the rural scene around. Hardship for the people as industrialisation leaped forward; there is ugliness in the housing in the mean streets of the workers, but there is also buoyancy and cheer, and in the surroundings of the city, a beauty of its own.
Jonathan Bardon is the historian of Belfast most of its know, but these little volumes from the Friar's Bush Press, Blackstaff and others, with their absorbing photographs, have an immediacy that moves us. The Making of Irish Linen by Peter Collins (Friar's Bush) shows photographs of the work in the fields, growing flax for linen; hard manual labour in harvesting. Then photographs of workers in the mills, mostly women, where the carding and combing process meant that the workers constantly inhaled dust. The certifying officer reported in 1877 that "When about thirty years, their appearance begins to alter, the face gets an anxious look, shoulders begin to get rounded . . . and the greater number die before forty five years of age."
The same publisher gives us Return Journey 1936-39 by Arthur Campbell, brother of George the painter. Wonderful photos of that cliff topping Giant's Causeway tram, long gone; in Belfast he snaps a donkey cart hugely laden with bales of crap, within yards of the City Hall. Many drinking troughs for working horses in those days. Again, in Farming in Ulster by Jonathan Bell and Mervyn Watson of the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum, we get the drudgery of field work before mechanisation. It includes one of R.J. Welch's most reproduced photographs two women with spades, one with shawl over her head, putting the last touches, on a highly sloping field in Glenshesk, Antrim, to lazy beds. At the top of the field, three thorn bushes of some size have carefully been given space to themselves.
Paul Hamilton's Up the Shankill (Blackstaff) gives us children in bare feet, clergy, Orangemen marching, the words of "The Sash" and Joe Tomelty, and the McCooeys. Then, a solitary thatched, whitewashed cottage at the foot of the Black Mountain, which stands over the city.