The Belfast Bank Buildings - Reflection And Revelation

In the local Belfast press over the past few weeks there have been some very interesting nostalgic and analytical opinion pieces alike regarding the destruction by fire of the Bank Buildings on Castle Junction - both as to where this event sits in the linear narrative of our metropolitan history or amidst the ongoing architectural deconstruction of the city.

As was the case for tens of thousands of other people at home and abroad the Bank Buildings fire - and the near loss of the Kelly's Cellars pub below with its priceless human heritage of late 18th Century European liberalism and non-sectarian republicanism - brought back many memories for myself of not just years of bitterness and waste but also a deeper lost Belfast.  From the North Street Arcade to the Elephant Bar near Smithfield Market,  the Group and Arts theatres, disappeared bookshops such as Harry Halls and Just Books and Mullans, Gresham Street's pet shop, the Curzon and ABC cinemas, the Grand Central Hotel and GPO on Royal Avenue or even the long derelict Garfield Street where Caroline Music traded in the Eighties.

I remember walking into the latter one late afternoon in 1981 for a few minutes as an earnest sixteen-year-old to buy a cool Jimi Hendrix compilation double album and seeing loads of Stiff Little Fingers fans hanging around in the half-light for a signing session of the Go For It album - the fantastic and empowering instrumental title track blaring out ahead of their arrival. Over thirty years later and I tend to listen to North Belfast's finest a lot more than the Seattle guitarist if truth be known - I should have gotten real and stayed for a while longer that day until they came along.

Even though there has been long-term engaged public attention focused on the future of the Art Deco Bank of Ireland at the once thriving junction of North Street and Royal Avenue - a part of the city which looks so fundamentally North American and modernist in some photographs from the Fifties and Sixties - the scale of what has gone before is deeply sobering. You can see this when looking at  old images of the Queens Elms Halls of Residence houses facing the university (as below) or the stunning Northern Bank premises on Donegall Square West. Both of their brutalist replacements being aesthetically questionable in extremis. Only last week I heard in turn that the Masonic Hall on Rosemary Street which contained a mural by the extraordinarily talented Belfast artist John Luke has been sold for commercial development.

In particular there are two moments from Belfast history linked in my mind with the Bank Buildings. There is an interior photograph taken of an upper floor window on Victory in Europe Day on 8th May 1945 with BBC commentator Lt Commander Harry McMulllan broadcasting his observations on the crowd scenes below: "Belfast is letting itself go, that's plain fact - below me the population of this city, laughing cheering and dancing is surging past in great waves of colour and sound in brilliant sunshine." Then from not even a decade later on 27th February 1954 the bittersweet images captured as the last electric trams were seen off by a huge amount of spectators on their final journey from Castle Junction in front of the department store up to Ardoyne depot in North Belfast.

The loss of such cultural cornerstones and social points of reference as a building which has stood on the same site since 1765 - and existed in its modern form since 1900 - is understandably headspinning and certainly reinforces the insecurity which defines our own deeply uninspiring times. Sometimes approximating a daily battle to survive the end of everything good no less. Of similar emotional content to the historical shadowlands above I recently read some reflections on an internet forum of the cross-channel Belfast Steamship Company services across the Irish Sea to Scotland, the Isle of Man and the North West of England:

At the time I lived in Holywood, and could watch the nightly procession of cross-channel steamers going down Belfast Lough. The Liverpool service was first, leaving Belfast at around 8.30. Then came the Glasgow service about 30 minutes later, and finally the British Rail service to Heysham about an hour after that (it had a much shorter journey, as it had no river or locks to negotiate at the other end). And during the summer there were daytime sailings to Ardrossan and the Isle of Man as well.

I travelled often in the post-war years. I liked the Ulster Prince best, she seemed bigger than the Monarch. The Ulster Duke looked as if she had been refloated from somewhere. You could see what looked like tide marks on her walls. The first class in these ships was wonderful: all panelled walls, linen table cloths, soft lights and respectful stewards. The steerage was dreadful: a semi-circle of seats around a broad bare floor stinking of stale Guiness and piss. There was always a sense of travel, especially of departure. An older generation ( before the first war) could remember when a man used to go round the decks with a bell, shouting 'any more for the shore?' It was above all very pleasant to get up early, go on deck, and watch the Ulster coast slowly emerge out of the dawn.

Did you know that although most of the captains who sailed on the Belfast / Liverpool route were not not from Northern Ireland and would take the long way round the Copeland Islands. Those with local knowledge of the waters would take the shorter route between the Islands and the Mainland during the better weather. On its last voyage to Liverpool the Captain of the vessel, a local man whose name i have forgotten, sailed between the Copeland Islands and the Mainland to allow a last view of the ship and people on shore flashed their lights to say farewell.

So on August 28th 2018 a chapter in Belfast civic history came to closure in a matter of hours over the course of a working weekday - the tragic incident at Castle Junction clearly providing a tipping point for public consciousness into all that the city has physically lost to commercial development and urban regeneration outside the parallel context of international conflict and violent domestic discord. It also elicited an outpouring of genuine heartfelt communal love for a great European port that has had way more than its fair share of heartbreak and hardship.

Back in 1981 as Thin Lizzy's hard rock music morphed gradually into generic heavy metal, the album Renegade would yet conclude with the wonderful and still utterly overlooked  It's Getting Dangerous. Alike Van Morrison's Madame George the lyrics are obscure but clearly point to the patterns of change, growth and transition we have all experienced. The song also talks about the dangers constantly arraigned around us in life - be that personal corruption or by default immersion in societies guaged to venality.

The Bank Buildings fire opened up rare and fleeting space for reflection about past days of momentous industrial flux and political fraction, of who we are today as a community still beset by cultural division and where tomorrow will take us  in a period of highly credible short-term risk. As interfacing with Northern Ireland's grotesque institutional political stasis - and against the background of a still stagnant economic landscape in the North - the public reaction clearly was redolent of  deep respect and affection for an old friend who we suddenly realise is not going to be around forever if things progress the way they are going. Indeed neither may the political frameworks that put our now "branded" troubled times into their albeit qualified and edgy endgame.

Strangers Abroad In An Ulster At War - Niedermayer And Heubeck

Consideration of the historical associations between the island of  Ireland and Germany tend to devolve to the two global conflicts of the 20th Century - the 36th Ulster and 16th Irish Divisions on the Western Front, Sir Roger Casement's attempt to forge a revolutionary Irish Brigade from prisoners-of-war on the continent prior to the Easter Rising, Abwehr spying missions in Eire, County Down's working farm for the children of the Kindertransport at Millisle, the Luftwaffe triple blitz of Belfast and the Glencree German War Cemetery in the Wicklow Mountains.

From what I can garner from the order of battle my maternal great-grandfather was in the second wave of Ulstermen attacking the Schwaben Redoubt on 1st July 1916 at the Somme - all the Irish soldiers of a then British Ireland would return to a deeply unsympathetic future. Twenty five years later both of my grandparents' houses in the Oldpark  and Woodvale districts of North and West Belfast would be destroyed in the Easter 1941 air raids.

However as outlined here by the Goethe Institut, the cultural links between the two countries do extend well beyond this particular  adversarial remit. They include Franconian patron saint Kilian being born in County Cavan, the decisive role of King William's Commander-in-Chief Frederick Schomberg at the Battle of the Boyne, the emigration of German Protestants from the Rhenish Palatinate to southern Ireland at the start of the 18th Century and the premiere of Handel's The Messiah in Dublin in 1742. There was also the permanent residency in Ireland of Twenties cabaret singer and Allied black propagandist Agnes Bernelle while the country left huge cultural impressions on writers Friedrich Engels and Heinrich Boell.

In the historical context of Belfast there would also be the enormous contributions made to the civic and industrial life of the city in the Victorian and Edwardian eras by Otto Jaffe and Gustav Wolff of Hamburg. The lives of two West German businessmen meanwhile - Thomas Niedermayer and Werner Heubeck - fall within the long grim narrative of the modern Ulster Troubles and both are well recalled to this day by very many Northern Irish people for very different and deeply unsettling reasons.

Niedermayer was the 45-year-old managing director of the Nuremburg-founded Grundig electronics factory in Dunmurry on the outskirts of West Belfast and honorary West German counsel for Northern Ireland. He came to live in the province in the late Sixties and resided in the Glengoland district. The industrialist was kidnapped on 27th December 1973 by two members of the IRA. The abduction was witnessed by his daughters and it is believed the rationale behind the operation was to bargain for the release of Republican prisoners jailed after a mainland bombing campaign.

Although the choreography of events remains unclear Niedermeyer was murdered soon after by his captors - possibly in the context of an escape attempt - and buried in an illegal rubbish dump near Colin Glen which was a short distance from the family home.  His body was found only seven years later - face down, bound and gagged. The degrading nature of Niedermayer's killing was compounded by the suicide of his wife in the sea off County Wicklow in the Irish Republic an exact decade following his funeral and then that of both his daughters in the Nineties. His eldest daughter's husband also killed himself subsequently.

Niedermeyer's grave to my knowledge is at Christ Church in Derriaghy south west of Belfast. The shame of his murder and its mortifying repercussions - alike the French, Italian and Spanish fatalities of the 1974 Dublin and 1998 Omagh bombings  - remains a deep stain on the honour of Ireland and the life affirming folk soul it embodies for so many people around the world.

Five years after the end of the Great War Werner Heubeck was born in Nuremburg. During the Thirties he was a member of the Hitler Jugend and during the Second World War served in the Hermann Goering division of the Luftwaffe and the Afrika Korps. After a period as a prisoner-of-war in the USA he worked as a proofreader at the war crimes trials in his home city where he met his Welsh wife who was a translator. They moved to the United Kingdom and Heubeck became a British citizen. In 1965 he came over to Northern Ireland  to manage the Ulster Transport Authority buses - this the year before the first three political murders of the conflict were carried out in West Belfast by Loyalist paramilitaries.

The running of the rebranded rural Ulsterbus and then the metropolitan Belfast Citybus services  from 1973 were to be transformed during his 23 years of management. Heubeck remains an especial figure in the social history of the Troubles with respect to his actions in personally boarding hijacked buses during the worst years of the conflict to singlehandedly remove bombs planted by terrorists. Also for driving along routes that the company staff had been intimidated from, taking the first service run of the day along roads that had experienced overnight disorder, moving vehicles with explosive devices still on board or returning burning buses to depots for salvage. Heubeck was on first-name terms with the full raft of his company staff and counselled colleagues who had been affected by security incidents.

When I think of this kind of vintage stoicism I often recall the headmaster of my old Belfast primary David Russell who previously had worked at another school situated at a notorious and literally deadly flashpoint in the north of the city very near my paternal grandparents' home.  He had been in a Japanese Prisoner of War camp and underscored to Anthony Bailey - who authored the 1980 Acts of Union - that after his experiences in the Far East that "it's hardly likely that anything that happens on the Oldpark Road is going to worry me". Shortly before he died Mr Russell revisited Japan to meet a former miner who had treated him kindly during a serious bout of illness while imprisoned there.

Despite the widespread targeting of buses during the years of civil disorder Heubeck's leadership and belief in keeping services running to schedule represented a fundamental toehold on normality for a country spiralling on the brink of blanket societal collapse. Estimates suggest that over 800 of the 1300 fleet were destroyed during the Troubles while several staff  lost their lives including the horrific murders of Sydney Agnew in 1972 as a witness to a republican hijacking, four Ulsterbus workers at Oxford Street station on Belfast's Bloody Friday IRA blitz and Harry Bradshaw in 1977 for simply working a shift in public service during a Loyalist strike. In Lagan bus station in Belfast's Marlborough Street there is a memorial dedicated to all the victims of bombs on buses during the Ulster conflict while the Ulster Transport Museum at Cultra houses an original Daimler Fleetline Citybus in honour of the murdered drivers.

Werner Heubeck was awarded the OBE (like Niedermayer) and then the CBE for his services to civic life in a Northern Ireland at war with itself. He retired in 1988, moved to the Shetland Islands and died of cancer in 2009 at the age of 85. With his heavy accent, thick glasses, raincoat, trilby and fastidious Northern European fitness regimes in a nation not then particularly renowned for any form of holistic life management, Heubeck remains an unforgettable and truly charismatic figure from very dark times in Ireland.

In old Celtic and Hibernian parlance the term "blow in" is used to describe a person or group of people with no deep roots to either the physical locality or generic neighbourhood culture. It can be used in a dismissive or bantering fashion and overrides any quantitative length of actual settlement in an area. It is intriguing to consider the fateful course of life that brought such highly competent North West European professionals as Niedermayer and Huebeck to Ireland's shores in the late sixties - let alone to the political fragility of pre-Troubles Ulster with its potentially explosive ethnic makeup. Both men would experience the same daily tribulations which affected all the working people of the North for an unforgivable period of time - glowering tension, stark danger, rank strangeness and often utter insanity.

Ireland must never ever forget these two men and the lives they lead.