Local stories from the age of science, technology and empire
Although Britain had been a successful maritime power since the 16th century, the 19th century saw a huge expansion of its empire. This was especially the case during the reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 until 1901. A foundation for success was the industrial revolution which enabled Britain’s factories to churn out new goods at a phenomenal rate. At one stage during the Victorian period, Britain truly deserved the title ‘Workshop of the World.’
Success was accompanied by rivalry with other ‘great powers’ like France, Turkey, Russia and ultimately Germany. Ireland was part of that empire and the north of the island was the most economically advanced area of Ireland.
Imperial Britain possessed a sense of superiority and many Britons felt they had the right to rule vast areas of the world and to carry Christian values and teachings to ‘the heathen’. While we can criticise such an attitude nowadays, we can still admire the energy, skill and desire for progress which characterised men and women who contributed to this story.
THE BRILLIANT DESIGNER AND ENGINEER
Charles Lanyon was born in the English town of Eastbourne in 1813 and died in Whiteabbey in 1889. He had had an illustrious career during which he designed signature buildings that still grace Northern Ireland today.
Perhaps the most visible and romantic of these is Belfast Castle which can be seen from miles away on the lower slopes of Cave Hill and whose building began in 1862. One of the other best-known buildings he designed is in the city centre. It is the handsome red-brick and sandstone structure which bears his name, the Lanyon building at Queens University. It was completed in 1849.
Nearby is the Palm House in the Botanic Gardens which he also designed. It was constructed to adorn the park we know now as the Botanic Gardens. It bore testimony to Victorian enthusiasm for the natural world and the desire to collect exotic plants from all around the expanding British Empire.
Next door stands the Union Theological College, built in 1853. It catered for the education of Presbyterian clergy in age when Presbyterians had become fervent supporters of the union with Britain and few were any longer prepared to be hanged for sedition!
Across the city centre, the Crumlin Road Gaol and Courthouse were constructed between 1846 and 1850. All these buildings are testimony to a Belfast which was expanding as an industrial centre, and gaining civic self-confidence. Belfast was now a thriving port with a commercial life that spanned the globe and the graceful Custom House which was completed in 1857 was another of Lanyon’s projects.
Lanyon was responsible for courthouses, viaducts, church buildings and other structures across the north of Ireland. He designed two elegant alms houses in Carrickfergus, built to house those in need. One of these buildings is on the road to Whitehead, and the grounds possess trees and shrubs brought back from all over the world. Throughout Northern Ireland there is plenty of other evidence of his work. He redesigned Killyleagh’s ancient castle and was the architect for Castle Leslie in County Monaghan. And as Antrim’s county surveyor he was involved in construction of the beautiful coast road that stretches north from Larne.
One of his striking achievements as a practical civil engineer was to work out how the road from Ballymena to the north coast could pass over an area of very boggy land known as The Frosses. It was made more secure by planting a series of pine trees whose roots would stabilise the thoroughfare. Only a few of those trees exist today.
Lanyon was a man of many parts, interested in educational reform, the linen industry, and everyday politics.
THE MARQUIS IN CHARGE OF GOVERNING INDIA
It is maybe quite easy to tell from Frederick Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood’s complicated surname that he belonged to the Irish aristocracy. Descended from 17th century Scottish settlers, his family took possession of land at Clandeboye in North Down. At his birth he inherited the title, Lord Dufferin.
Born in 1826, he was educated at Eton and Oxford. When 30 years of age, he set forth on a sailing ship to explore the North Atlantic coastline. This trip formed the inspiration for his best-selling journal entitled Letters from High Latitudes.
He decided on a career as a public servant in the realm of global politics. This career began in Syria in1860 where he worked to curtail a civil war there and counter the influence of Britain’s old imperial rival, France.
In 1872, Lord Dufferin became Governor General of Canada. His was a popular appointment. His reputation was enhanced by his ability to converse fluently with Canada’s French-speaking population. During his tenure, Canada developed as a dominion and the Canadian Pacific Railway was completed.
In 1878, he returned home then served as an ambassador to two more of Britain’s imperial rivals, spending a term in the Russian capital, Moscow, and after that serving in the Turkish capital, Constantinople.
He visited Egypt in 1882, in preparation for a British invasion which was motivated by the urge to establish control over a country the Turks had regarded as theirs. Egypt was now vital to British interests, given the importance of the Suez Canal for connection by sea with Australia, South-East Asia and India.
It was to India that Dufferin was sent in 1884. He remained there for four years. He engaged in a series of reforms including establishment of a military corps that formed the basis of an Indian army that served Britain well in two world wars.
He was also occupied with the tense relationship between Britain and Russia in Afghanistan and he ordered the occupation of Upper Burma, as the Burmese regime had shown a great reluctance to establish a friendly trading relationship.
On his return from Asia, Lord Dufferin was ennobled as the 1st Marquis of Dufferin and Ava. The new addition to the title was a reference to the ancient capital of the Upper Burma region.
Lord Dufferin was given fresh roles as ambassador to Italy then France and was honoured as president of the Royal Geographical Society. Before his death in 1902, he lost his eldest son in the Boer War in Southern Africa, a conflict which cost the British dear in terms of casualties and morale.
The empire which Dufferin served with distinction was beginning to lose its grip however victory in two world wars during the following half century postponed its collapse.
THE KING OF IRISH CIVIL ENGINEERING
William Dargan was born in County Laois in 1799 and during his career he gained a reputation as the father of the Irish railway network. He was responsible for the first track on the island between Dublin and Queenstown. It opened just three years after the first inter-city line in the world was created between Manchester and Liverpool. By the time of his death in 1867 he had been responsible for over 800 miles of railway line throughout Ireland.
During his lifetime he not only constructed railway lines, he financed their construction from the considerable sums of money that he made as an entrepreneur. He took an interest in coastal reclamation schemes, steamboat travel and the flax-mills which played a key role in the linen industry. He is one more of these fascinating figures who often had their ‘fingers’ in ‘many pies.’
Belfast was home to his most notable civil engineering achievement. The era of Belfast shipbuilding could be said to have begun in 1841 when the port authorities commissioned him to cut a wide, deep channel, 4 miles long, from the city through the slob lands at the mouth of the Lagan river, to the deep water of the lough. It was a task that involved 1,500 men and spoke volumes about the city’s aspirations as a port and a feasible ship-building centre.
Dargan utilised the excavated material to make an ‘island’ in the lough and this new piece of Belfast was given the name, ‘Dargan's Island’. It was laid out as a public pleasure ground with trees, a green-house, walkways, pools and bathing places.
When Queen Victoria visited in 1849, the pleasure ground was re-christened Queen’s Island and soon it changed its function. Iron sailing ships were built there and by 1862, Harland and Wolff were beginning to operate their busy shipyard on ‘the island’. In the decades that lay ahead this would become one of the great shipyards of the empire.
Dargan also played a role in the construction of one of the most ambitious canals to traverse the Ulster countryside, constructing a considerable section of this ‘Ulster Canal’ waterway during the 1830s and then again in the 1850s.
Dargan also devised solutions for traffic flow, even in the pre-motorcar age. At the heart of the busy market town of Banbridge he fashioned ‘The Cut’, an underpass that enabled a central crossroads to operate more effectively.
Much of Dargan’s work was undertaken against the backdrop of extreme Irish poverty and distress. Having visited the Crystal Palace Exhibition in London in 1851, he underwrote a similar project in Dublin two years later, spending £ 80,000 on it. This constituted his own attempt to stimulate regeneration in the immediate aftermath of the Famine.
THERESA LONDONDERRY, THE UNIONIST MARCHIONESS
The future Marchioness of Londonderry was born the daughter of the Earl of Shrewsbury in 1856. By 1875 she had married the 6th Marquess. Although the family owned English properties. Theresa was fond of her husband’s mansion, Mount Stewart on the Ard’s Peninsula.
Nine years later, her husband became Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, a post he held for three years. Theresa exercised her role as Ireland’s premier hostess with considerable aplomb. She also occupied the role of political hostess at her London address in Eaton Place. She and her husband were Tory party supporters, dedicated to the Empire and opposed to the plans of Liberal Prime Minister, Gladstone, for a Home Rule parliament in Ireland. For Theresa, this felt like dismantling the Union and maybe threatening the solidity of the Empire.
The great British statesmen of the day came to Mount Stewart. So too did King Edward VII, Victoria’s successor, who stayed during an Irish visit in 1903. The Unionist leader Sir Edward Carson said he felt he was ‘born to lounge’ at Mount Stewart, hiding from the pressures of his public role.
Theresa Londonderry’s enthusiasm for politics led to involvement in opposition to a new Home Rule Bill that was about to be passed at Westminster in the years before the First World War.
So she took an active role in management of the Ulster Women’s Unionist Council, founded in 1911. She helped create the document known as The Declaration, available for Unionist women to sign. It expressed refusal to accept a Dublin parliament. This was the equivalent to the Ulster Covenant, signed by men in September 1912.
Theresa Londonderry had no time for the campaign for the female vote. She feared it would divide women who should be focused on the salvation of the Union. Nevertheless, her campaign led to the political engagement of many women. On one occasion she called out–
‘I earnestly appeal to the Loyalist women all over Ireland to…begin work at once, to canvas voters…and to bring every voter to the polls during elections …’
By 1913 there were 200,000 members in the U.W.U.C. and many were involved in public speaking roles and distributing pamphlets. An Ambulance and Nursing Corps was developed. It contained ambulance drivers, dispatch riders, nurses, signallers, and others in charge of supply stores or first aid classes. There were plans for Mount Stewart to be used as a hospital in the event of civil war.
Theresa Londonderry emphasised support for the Union on ‘social and economic grounds’ thus avoiding, as she hoped, the frequently heard charge of ‘Ulster bigotry.’
She was formidable and known for a dignity that some described as haughtiness. She once advised another woman – ‘My dear, always enter a room as if you owned it.’
JOHN TYNDALL, FATHER OF CLIMATE SCIENCE
John Tyndall is the father of climate science. No wonder that the centre for climate change research at the University of East Anglia is named after him.
Tyndall was born in County Carlow in 1820 and came from a humble background. His father was a policeman in the days when modern policing was in its infancy and he also worked as cobbler or shoemaker. On his father’s side there was a strong Protestant identity and a support for the Orange Order. There were clashes with local Catholics over religion and politics.
As a boy, John Tyndall worked for the Irish Ordnance Survey for a meagre wage but as a young adult he moved to England, working as a land surveyor, then a science teacher, saving money to enable him to move to Germany for no less than three years to improve his knowledge of science, a subject that fascinated him.
By 1853, he had returned to Britain and his emerging brilliance as a researcher and lecturer led to appointment as professor at the Royal Institution in London. Tyndall’s fame grew and by the 1860s he was one of the best-known physicists in the British Isles. His greatest achievement was to have discovered the way that earth’s atmosphere traps the sun’s heat and enables the planet keep warm enough for life to flourish.
Nowadays we refer to this as the greenhouse effect and we know that carbon dioxide emitted by humans adds to this warming effect, heating the planet to an alarming degree. Tyndall was responsible for other scientific achievements including ground-breaking work with the French scientist Louis Pasteur on microbes and disease. He also showed the way in which light refracts various colours in the spectrum which is why we see a blue sky overhead and a sunset that is often red.
Tyndall was a mountaineer who climbed peaks in the Alps such as Mont Blanc and the Matterhorn, a pursuit that enabled him to study glaciers. He was well-known for his views on the importance of keeping science and religion apart. He believed the Catholic Church tried to suppress the impact of any modern scientific discoveries that it disliked, such as the ancient age of the earth and the biological evolution of human beings.
One of his famous lectures was delivered in Belfast’s Ulster Hall in 1874. He claimed from the platform that science was the route to true, objective knowledge. Religion should be restricted to the realm of faith and emotion.
His opposition to the Catholic Church’s teaching and his own Protestant Irish background are probably key reasons for his vehement opposition to a Home Rule parliament in Dublin. He maybe thought it would lead to a backward, church-dominated Ireland.
MARGARET BYERS AND THE ADVANCEMENT OF WOMEN.
Margaret Byers was born in Rathriland, County Down in 1832, one of the key years in British history because it featured the Great Reform Act which, among other things, increased the male electorate. Byers would witness further extensions to the male electorate in the 19th century but by the time she died in 1912, women had still not been given the vote. However, what she was able to do was work hard at increasing the standard and extent of education for women; it would become ever more absurd for well-educated women, doing responsible jobs, to be denied the vote.
At just 18, Margaret married a clergyman called the Reverend John Byers and the couple went overseas to engage in missionary work in Asia. A feature of the Age of Empire was the growth of Christian missions to the ‘unconverted.’
However, her husband took ill and died within months of leaving Ireland. By 1854 she had returned to Belfast and then began her long career in education. In 1859, she opened a Ladies Collegiate School in Wellington Place in the heart of the town. The curriculum was an ambitious one including subjects not usually found in the education of girls. These included modern history, natural science, Latin and Greek.
Four years later a new school was built which survives today as the Crescent Arts Centre. By 1887, on the fiftieth anniversary of Victoria’s ascent to the throne that school was renamed Victoria College, joining several other local features such as parks, hospitals and streets named after the sovereign.
Margaret Byers also created an orphan’s home in Ligoniel. She was involved in the campaign for women’s suffrage along with her friend Isabella Tod, although she disapproved of the violent tactics which ‘suffragettes’ eventually employed.
By 1881, the Royal University of Ireland had begun to offer degrees to women and in 1905 she became the first Ulsterwoman to obtain one of its honorary degrees – the first woman to do so from any Irish university.
She was also involved in the widespread temperance movement, which strove to reduce alcohol consumption. She campaigned for better opportunities for women who had ended up in gaol, often because poverty had led them into prostitution.
Her politics were pro-Union and she was a ‘Liberal Unionist’, wary of the Tory party and supportive of the Liberal Party’s program of social reforms, although opposed to its support for the Home Rule Bills.
Although her marriage was tragically short, she had a son who went on to become a distinguished medical man. Professor Byers was a professor of midwifery and an expert on local folklore and the Ulster dialect.
B. DUNLOP, VETERINARY SURGEON AND INVENTOR
John Boyd Dunlop was born as a farmer’s son in Ayrshire, in 1840. He went to a school of veterinary science in Edinburgh. After practising in his native land, he moved to Ireland, working in a practice in Downpatrick with his brother. Their business lay at the heart of fertile area of farming land, so his work focused on local farm animals.
Dunlop moved to May Street in Belfast where he tended to horses which were employed in very large numbers on the town’s tram system, pulling freight at the docks and delivering goods.
Whilst rail travel had come along way by the 1880s, the invention of an automobile was some way off, but bicycle technology was developing. The ‘pedal bicycle’ replaced the ‘boneshaker’ but even on the surfaces of Belfast’s central thoroughfares, solid rubber tyres made for bumpy rides. Nonetheless, cycling as a sport was popular and Bell knew of the Belfast Cruisers Cycling Club which held races at the North of Ireland Cricket Club on the Ormeau Road.
So, as someone who mingled with the city’s engineers, Bell had an interest in technology and utilised his workshop to experiment with a pneumatic tyre - a tyre consisting of a tube filled with air so the ride would be smooth. The first experiments involved fitting tyres to his son’s tricycle. Then, he fitted them to a bicycle and acquired a patent for his invention. In 1889, a cyclist called Willie Hume, captain of the Belfast Cruisers Cycling Club, purchased a bicycle fitted with newly patented tyres. On 18 May, he won all four cycling events at the North of Ireland Cricket Club Grounds.
The entrepreneur Harvey du Cros was present and he was so impressed that he acquired the rights from Dunlop for £3,000 and went on to float the pneumatic tyre company on the stock market. Dunlop and du Cros discovered that an earlier manufacturer had obtained the patent and their firm was ‘reinvented’ to fit with this.
The advent of the bicycle led to social transformation, expanding the physical horizons of those who lived rural Ireland and granting more freedom to women who used it to get about independently.
Then by the dawn of the 21st century, Dunlop Rubber became involved in the manufacture of car tyres as the automobile revolution began.
However, worldwide motor transport led to a hunt for rubber. This led to horrendous suffering when tens of thousands of native workers were enslaved and killed in the rubber plantations of the Belgian Congo. It took another man with Ulster roots, the consular official Roger Casement, to record these abuses so that the Belgian monarch who ‘owned’ the Congo could be stopped in his tracks.
CONCLUSION
Of the fourteen people chosen for this and the first paper, eight were born in England or Scotland but made their biggest impact while resident here. Three were born in Ireland but made their greatest mark in England or Scotland. Only three of the fourteen combined being born here with doing the vast majority or all of their life’s work in Ireland.
This constitutes an argument for a history of Ireland that emphasises the interconnectedness of the two major islands which lie off Western Europe’s Atlantic shores. It is also an argument for a history that does not narrate the damage done by Britain to Ireland at the expense of talking about the contribution made to Ireland by individuals like Richard Robinson and Charles Lanyon and the contribution made to Britain by individuals like John Tyndall and Hans Sloan.
There is also an argument to be made for a politics that focuses on the interconnectedness of these islands. A good name for this politics might be ‘Unionism’; a useful name for those who feel loyal to this inter-connected identity could be ‘Loyalists’.
However, the climate change discoveries of John Tyndall are as valid for the rest of the world as for here. And the pursuit of female education that characterised Margret Byers is, if anything, even more valid today in a world where educating girls is a key to reducing poverty and enhancing the quality of life in developing nations.
William Dargan’s vision for railways or John Dunlop’s role in unlocking bicycle transport are more valid than ever in a world where better public transport and facilities for cycling are crucial for ecological sustainability in a world of mega-cities and pollution.
The balance of Swift’s scepticism and Hutcheson’s optimism about human nature is surely valid for anyone engage in policy decisions anywhere in the world - or simply for anyone trying to understand themselves and their fellow human beings.