February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
By Jack Holland
History is made up of countless small events that happen to individuals and that, woven together, become the "historical event" that actually gets into the history books. It’s fairly rare for the people who experience the events to be able to tell their story. In the documentary "A Million Bricks," the story of Springfield Park in West Belfast, they do.
The street nestles under the Black Mountain, between the Catholic Moyard and the Protestant Springmartin housing estates. Producers Frank Martin and Seamus Kelters thought the story worth telling not only because, since they grew up there, it is the story of their childhood, but because it was a "mixed" street of Catholics and Protestants — one of the last to be built before Belfast was engulfed by the Troubles.
Essentially, the story is a simple one, and it is simply told, consisting mainly of reminiscences from a group of neighbors, now mostly in their 60s. They are Billy Clark, Peggy Irwin, Jim Kelters, Margaret and Tom Tully, Molly and John Martin, Andy and Sarah Ellis, Margaret and Gerry McCaffrey, Jacky and Ellen Burns, Paddy Grimes, Eddy and Caroline Withers, Dorry and Jim Henry, Paddy and Ruby O’Neill, and Frank Martin.
It is very much a 1960s story. It tells of working-class people in flight from the cramped Victorian row-houses where they had until then spent their lives, ambitious for a better life, owning their own homes for the first time. The snapshots from those years capture their upbeat mood. On a night out, at the end-of-the year dinner dance held by their tenants association, the women of Springfield Park are in mini-skirts and tight white plastic boots, with Dusty Springfield hairdos, the men in sharp, well-fitted suits, their wavy hair greased and swept back, imitating British rock-star imitations of Elvis.
The fact that they were Catholic and Protestant seemed incidental and not very significant in 1963 or 1964. While conscious of each other’s differing "persuasions," as they put it, it was not a determining factor in their lives. Catholics waved as their Protestant neighbors left to go to the 12th parades. Ellis remembers wondering whether to conceal the flag as he walks down the street, not wanting to offend anybody. But differing flags and emblems seemed irrelevant compared to what bound them together, their common goal — and it was, by any standard, a very modest one.
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"It was a transition from a one up, one down, to a three up two down," says Andy Ellis, a Protestant who moved to Springfield Park from the Shankill with his wife, Sarah.
"You never seen a garden in Saunders Street," Sarah Ellis adds.
"The Black Mountain was my attraction," says Peggy Irwin.
Seamen, shipyard workers, milk men, plumbers, a clerk in the tax office: the old black and white footage shows where they come from — the grimy streets of red-brick row houses, the trolley buses running along the main roads, passing horse-drawn carts, the factories looming behind through the dark wintry evenings. Their new lives would unfold under the green slopes of the mountain, with spacious gardens — "paradise," as one describes it — equipped with indoor toilets and a parlor to entertain guests.
This would have remained a story like so many others from the 1960s, when the working classes in Britain and Ireland did enjoy improved circumstances, and a certain dissolution of the class barriers. But in Northern Ireland, ordinary goals, humble plans, the most matter-of-fact schemes are liable to be engulfed by murder and mayhem. And this is what happens to Springfield Park.
Within a few years of moving into their new, middle-class surroundings, they would find themselves crawling through the nearby fields at night as bullets struck the ground beside them or running up the street dodging snipers, they’d watch as mobs looted their homes or stare in horror as a Catholic priest waving a white handkerchief is cut down by automatic fire before their eyes.
Just after August 1969, as riots erupt, the Ellis family decides to move after a Catholic mob comes into the street and howls abuse at them as they hide upstairs. A group of Protestant vigilantes arrive carrying handguns "to help them" and are told they’re not needed. The men of Springfield Park set up their own patrols "so that our women could sleep safely at night" but end up sitting around in a house drinking tea and playing cards into the wee hours.
Though 1969 was a trauma, the street held together.
"We were apprehensive," says Caroline Withers, "but it didn’t seem to interfere with our lives." That would change two years later with the introduction of internment without trial on Aug. 9, 1971. "It was the beginning of the end of the Springfield Park that we knew," says one. Protestant gunmen use the street to open fire on the Catholic streets of Moyard. Gerry McCaffrey is shot as he flees with his wife and falls to the ground wounded, cradling his youngest child. Billy Clark tries to escape through the field at the back of his house.
"The ground I was lying on was trembling (as the bullets struck it)," he says. He is wounded. Fr. Mullan comes over to anoint him, waving a white handkerchief but is hit by automatic fire.
"I heard him scream," says Billy. "His screams got lower. After 15 minutes there was no more sound."
Fr. Mullan was one of six people who died as a result of shooting that night in or around Springfield Park. One of them, Joan Connolly, a mother of eight, on her way to Springfield Park, where she had relatives, was shot in the face, hip, leg and hand, according to the young constable Ian Phoenix, who found her later and brought her to the morgue.
Most of the victims were caught in the intense three-way gun battle involving the army, the IRA and loyalists. It would appear, however, that the army was responsible for most, if not all, of the deaths there that night.
Most of the residents of Springfield Park moved out within days, leaving the remains of a former life, wreckage of homes strewn about the street. Many would end up as squatters.
Now the peace wall runs across the street — a million bricks, separating the Catholics and Protestants who once shared a common, simple goal.
(A copy of "A Million Bricks" can be obtained from Celtic Videos Inc., New York, 141 E. 33 St., New York, NY 10016.)