The Mill for Grinding Old People Young
Page 22
Dr Gordon brought the journal, folded open, round to where we stood and indicated a blot on the left-hand page. It appeared from the final entry that Sir Gilbert had awoken in some discomfort “a quarter of an hour past, at ten after two”, and being unable to get back to sleep had attempted to write more. The blot, occurring some four lines later, would have been consistent with a sudden, perhaps fatal attack, giving a time of death of around half past two. (The doctor told me later that he had thought by this ingenious piece of detective work to obviate the need for taking a rectal temperature to determine algor mortis.) Mrs Mawhinney it was who – recovered from the shock of seeing her own name written into the narrative – drew our attention to the curious device on the page facing. I thought it at first a larger, less defined blot, caused by the pages somehow coming in contact with one another, but straight away discounted that, seeing evidence of intentional draughtsmanship in its twists and swirls. Mrs Mawhinney asked me if I thought it might be a plan of some description and explained to the doctor that although many years retired from business, Sir Gilbert had never truly ceased working.
I asked, in my turn, if I might be permitted a closer look, and having taken the journal from Dr Gordon rotated it through ninety degrees then through one hundred and eighty, rotations matched by the movements of our heads as the three of us tried to put a name to what we were looking at. There were people, I could see now, somewhat rudimentary, but clearly people, falling into . . . “A fiery pit,” was Mrs Mawhinney’s suggestion, and I worried that she would collapse again. Fighting back the tears, she declared that no man living had less to fear from fires in the next life than Sir Gilbert, a sentiment with which I could readily concur. When I arrived in Belfast in 1846 as a boy of fourteen I carried nothing but a change of clothes and a letter from Sir Gilbert (although he had not been “Sir” then) to my mother, promising me employment if ever she was unable to provide for me, which was the harsh reality of those Famine years, even in County Antrim.
I tried to reassure Mrs Mawhinney, although my own first impression – a volcano – had not been too many miles from hers, until I realised that the cone was inverted, with the widest section uppermost, like a funnel, or a hopper, perhaps.
I remembered then our meeting the night before, at the Reform Club, to hear an illustrated talk, by my nephew, on The Time Machine of Mr H. G. Wells, and wondered whether this was not in some manner connected.
Dr Gordon, however, having seen his original hypothesis thrown into doubt, now asked Mrs Mawhinney to withdraw to allow him to complete his examination. I elected to go with her to spare my friend the added indignity of my presence.
The doctor came out of the room again some twenty minutes later. His preliminary findings, which you will have received, were that the cause of death was most likely a cerebral stroke, or rather a pair of strokes, the first comparatively mild, corresponding to the blot in the journal, possibly inducing a state not far removed from trance, the second, and fatal, occurring, as best as he could estimate, at 4 a.m.
Mrs Mawhinney, the while, had draped the glass on the landing with black crêpe, produced with a housekeeper’s genius from who knows where inside her apartments at the far end of the landing. She and I now returned together to the bedchamber where we found that Dr Gordon had drawn a sheet over the face of the deceased. I am conscious that this is the first occasion in the course of this report that I have referred to Sir Gilbert in this way: a function perhaps of the sheet. In any case, without forward planning or any communication that I can recall, Mrs Mawhinney and I each took a corner of the sheet and folded it back. We were greeted by an expression of infinite calm. Again without a word passing between us, we got down on our knees and prayed that his soul too might be granted such repose.
As I struggled afterwards to my feet I laid my hand again on the journal, which Dr Gordon had left at the bottom of the bed. I could make no sense finally of the drawing, but whatever it was intended to represent or convey it seemed to me worthy of preservation, for it had occupied the final minutes of Sir Gilbert Rice’s life on this earth.
I handed over the book to Mrs Mawhinney for safe keeping, then descended to the hallway, from where I telephoned to Mr James McLorie, manager of Melville & Co., to initiate the funeral arrangements.
David Erskine, Esq.
Lark Ridge
Belmont Road
Belfast
IV
Friday, 31st December 1897
The death was announced in Belfast at the end of last week of Sir Gilbert Rice, manufacturer and philanthropist. The son of Mr William Rice, of Ballyfinaghy, and Laetitia née Semple, he was orphaned while still an infant and raised thereafter by his grandfather, Mr Samuel Dawe Semple, which remarkable gentleman was the subject of fulsome tributes in this and other newspapers on his own death in the cholera outbreak of 1832. (The posthumous publication of his idiosyncratic study of the poems of Keats was made possible by his grandson’s diligence and painstaking.)
Having joined at sixteen the Corporation for Preserving and Improving the Port and Harbour of Belfast, or “Ballast Board”, where he was to begin with, by his own account, “wholly unremarkable”, Sir Gilbert then underwent something of a “sea-change” in his next decade, enjoying considerable advancement at a crucial juncture in the Board’s activities, and indeed the town’s development. In recognition of this he was invited by the 3rd Marquis of Donegall to join the platform party that welcomed the Queen, Prince Consort and Prince of Wales to Belfast in 1849, a month after the opening of the Victoria Channel, built after long delay on the plans of Mr James Walker. With a modesty that was characteristic of him, Sir Gilbert declined the invitation.
On leaving the Ballast Board a short time afterwards, he established an engineering firm on Dargan’s (later Queen’s) Island, specialising in the design and production of the precision marine drawing instruments that made, and bore, his name. He was, according to those who worked for him, an enlightened employer, who thought nothing of taking off his coat and joining in a game of handball on the courts he had had built in the yard of his works. Guests on occasion were treated to a tour of the harbour improvements in a rowboat, with Sir Gilbert combining the roles of tour guide and oarsman.
Following the partial destruction of his premises in the party riots of 1857, at the hands of a mob incensed by his employment of Roman Catholics from the neighbouring Short Strand district of Ballymacarrett, he came in person to assist the bricklayers and masons engaged in the rebuilding.
He was raised to the Baronetcy in 1882, accepting the honour on behalf of all those who had been in his employ over the years, and granting his staff at that time two days’ paid holiday as an expression of his gratitude. A year later, aged seventy, he withdrew from day-to-day management and although he remained on the board was unable to prevent the sale of the Rice Company to the London firm of Groves and Morgan in 1885, whereupon he tendered his resignation.
He saw out his remaining years at Myrtlefield Park in Malone.
A man of undemonstrative religious beliefs, he was nevertheless a lifelong benefactor of the Castlereagh Presbyterian Church, whose architect was his friend, Mr John Millar (d. Dunedin, New Zealand, 1876), and in particular paid for the upkeep of its “Bassae” Ionic columns, which, as he delighted in pointing out to visitors from England, had been employed in that rather remote location five years before their supposed first use in the more celebrated Ashmolean Museum.
Sir Gilbert passed the early hours of the evening before he died in the company of several old acquaintances at the Ulster Reform Club, enjoying dinner and a lively discussion on the subjects that had informed his entire professional life. He had several times been asked to publish as a monograph a memoir of his early days, but these invitations too he declined, or at least deferred, saying that perhaps if he lived to be a hundred he should consider it.
That so extreme an old age eluded him may, therefore, be considered by the people of Belfast a loss, but he neverthele
ss exceeded by an admirable distance the Biblical “three-score and ten”. His passing will be greatly mourned by all who had the privilege of knowing him.
Sir Gilbert Rice never married and had no other family surviving. On instructions left with his housekeeper, however, his remains were conveyed to Liverpool as the nearest city where a cremation might be performed, and his ashes then scattered from the stern of the ship bringing them back up the Lough to Belfast, in hopes, as he had told that lady, that whatever the waters did not consume the winds would carry as far as those Polish lands, to the east of Warsaw, for which he had developed such a fondness and to which he returned on numerous occasions throughout his long life.
To speed them on their way, his executor, the noted industrialist, Mr David Erskine, read the closing lines of “L’île inconnue” by Théophile Gautier, best known from its setting by Berlioz: “Où voulez-vous aller? La brise va souffler!” Where do you wish to go? The breeze begins to blow!
The urn will stand atop the family plot in the “New” Burying Ground at Clifton Street, Belfast.
V
POSTERITY know ye that I a son of dust do cause this tablet to be here inserted that you may not attribute the design of this Building to others than myself which I designed in my Eighteenth year and third of my studentship 1829 During an absence from my native Belfast the superintendency was entrusted at its commencement to two quacks Duff and Jackson self-styled architects who so mutilated my designs as to make me almost disown them that portion of the dross you People of refined taste which I can foresee you must be can easily distinguish from the refined on my return I fostered my own child until it grew to what you now behold having begun and finished the Peripteral Portico under my own personal superintendence in the year 1831 JOHN MILLAR ARCHITECT
[Slate recovered from the ruins of Third Presbyterian Church, Rosemary Street, destroyed by German bombs on the night of 15–16 April 1941.]
Author’s Note
This book owes a particular debt to “Belfast Sixty Years Ago: Recollections of a Septuagenarian”, by Rev. Narcissus G. Batt (Ulster Journal of Archaeology, second series, Vol. II, no. 2, January 1896); to “Belfast Fifty Years Ago”, a lecture by Thomas Gaffikin, delivered at the Working Men’s Institute, Belfast, on Thursday, 8 April 1875, and published by James Cleeland’s Bible Warehouse, Arthur Street, in 1894; to The World Turned Upside Down; or, No News, and Strange News, printed in York by J. Kendrew, c.1815; and to The Time Machine of Mr H. G. Wells (London, 1895).
Other books that have proved valuable include:
Belfast: An Illustrated History, Jonathan Bardon (Belfast, 1982)
Belfast: the Making of a City, J. C. Beckett et al. (Belfast, 1983)
A History of the Town of Belfast, George Benn (Vol. I, 1823; Vol. II, 1880)
The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz, translated and edited by David Cairns (London, 1969)
Buildings of Belfast: 1700–1914, C. E. B. Brett (London, 1967)
Georgian Belfast 1750–1850, C. E. B. Brett, with Raymond Gillespie and W. A. Maguire (Dublin, 2004)
Studies in Hysteria, Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud (Vienna, 1895)
The Man from God Knows Where: Thomas Russell, 1767–1803, Denis Carroll (Dublin, 1995)
Heart of Europe: The Past in Poland’s Present, Norman Davies (Oxford, 1984)
At Day’s Close: A History of Nighttime, A. Roger Ekirch (London, 2005)
“The Sports of Easter Monday”, John Gray, Irish Pages, Vol. V, no. 1
Twenty-one Views in Belfast and its Neighbourhood, ed. Philip Dixon Hardy (Dublin, 1837; reprinted with notes and introduction by C. E. B. Brett, Belfast, 2005)
Religion, Politics and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Belfast, Catherine Hirst (Dublin, 2002)
A Social Geography of Belfast, Emrys Jones (London, 1960)
County Antrim: A Topographical Dictionary, Samuel Lewis (London, 1837; Belfast, 2002)
The Story of Belfast and its Surroundings, Mary Lowry (London, no date)
McComb’s Guide to Belfast, the Giant’s Causeway, and Adjoining Districts of the Counties of Antrim and Down, with an Account of the Battle of Ballynahinch, and the Celebrated Mineral Waters of that Neighbourhood, William McComb (Belfast, 1861)
The Life and Times of Mary Ann McCracken, 1770–1866: A Belfast Panorama, Mary McNeill (Dublin, 1960)
Living Like a Lord: The Second Marquis of Donegall, 1769–1844, W. A. Maguire (Belfast, 1984)
Keats, Andrew Motion (London, 1997)
As I Roved Out, Cathal O’Byrne (Belfast, 1946)
“From Perikles to Presbyterian ‘Temples’”, Suzanne O’Neill, in A Further Shore: Essays in Irish and Scottish Studies (Eastbourne, 2008)
History of Belfast, D. J. Owen (Belfast, 1921)
A Short History of the Port of Belfast, D. J. Owen (Belfast, 1917)
Central Belfast: A Historical Gazetteer, Marcus Patton (Belfast, 1993)
Tavern Singing in Early Victorian London: the Diaries of Charles Rice for 1840 and 1850, ed. Laurence Senelick (London, 1997)
Port of Belfast: 1785–1985, An Historical Review, Robin Sweetman and Cecil Nimmons (Belfast, 1985)
In Belfast Town: Early Photographs from the Lawrence Collection, 1864–1880, Brian M. Walker and Hugh Dixon (Belfast, 1984)
Decency and Disorder: The Age of Cant, 1789–1837, Ben Wilson (London, 2007)
Historical Notices of Old Belfast and its Vicinity, Robert M. Young (Belfast, 1896)
Of websites consulted none was more eclectic or consistently informative than Joe Graham’s “Rushlight”.
(http://joegraham.rushlightmagazine.com)
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the Lannan Foundation for the award of a Literary Fellowship, without which this book could not have been written.
A version of Part I appeared in Five Points, the journal of Georgia State University (Vol. XIII, no. 2, “Belfast Imagined”). The Easter Monday passage appeared (as “Cave Hill”) in Edinburgh Review 133 (winter 2012).
By the Same Author
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About the Author
Glenn Patterson is the author of seven previous novels and a memoir Once Upon a Hill: Love in Troubled Times. He has written plays for Radio 3 and Radio 4 and is the co-writer of Good Vibrations (BBC Films), based on the life of Belfast punk impresario Terri Hooley, which is due for release in 2012. A collection of his journalism, for among others the Guardian, Sunday Times and Irish Times, was published in 2006 as Lapsed Protestant. He lives in Belfast.
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