A Titanic Experience
“An amphitheatre more grand,
Graces no part of Europe’s land”
- Mary LowryWhilst I was growing up, it was definitely the TV which had given me all of my views of Northern Ireland and of Belfast in particular. It was a dangerous place, soldiers roamed the streets, people got shot through the kneecaps, others got blown up, this was not a place to visit. Belfast and Northern Ireland are not like that, they are wonderful.
You can’t know that until you visit, though, even if the place seems strangely familiar to you. Places I’d never been to were names I’d heard so often: the Falls Road; Ardoyne; Crumlin Road; Shankill. All places linked to “The Troubles”.
Is there a more British example of understatement than that? During “The Troubles” around three and a half thousand people were killed; more than in the 9/11 terror attacks. Yet, for us, it was “The Troubles”. It’s like calling lung cancer “The Chesty Cough” or ebola “The Achy Joints”. This was the picture of Belfast and of Northern Ireland that I grew up with.
Of course, like everywhere else, the view I’d been given by TV was two-dimensional in so many ways. Belfast in the early twenty-first century was nothing like the TV Belfast of my childhood and teens. The city was terrific. The countryside around it marvellous. The people were friendly and funny. However, even this sometimes gave reminders of the recent past. I was being shown around one day and the person leading the way said: “We’d better walk side-by-side, you can’t be too careful, if we walk one behind the other, it’s a parade.” There had been reminders on the way into the city, too.
The bus left the airport on the A57, passing bright green fields which showed me why this had been named the emerald isle. Draught horses, one grey, one bay, graze in a bountifully, beautifully, buttercupped meadow in front of the low, grey Clady Water Baptist Church. I imagined the people who looked after these horses, the people who filled this church, people I’d never know with a faith I’d never quite share.
We went through Templepatrick, along the Antrim Road before joining the M2 towards the city. Shanks and Bigfoot sang Sweet Like Chocolate on the radio and the steady beat was in time with the speed warning signs on the motorway: dum, dum, dum, dum, sweet like chocolate. As we entered the city I could see the rows of terraced streets that I’d seen on the TV as a child, growing up in streets that looked much the same. The obvious differences here today were the murals, visible from the bus, painted on gable ends of houses. Many celebrate Irish history and culture. There is even one which remembers C.S. Lewis, who was born in the city, it features a lion, a witch and a wardrobe. There is another mural on Dee Street, dedicated to the sinking of the Titantic.
The Titanic was, of course, built here between 1909 and 1912. The area around the docks is now, as with so many previously industrial areas, being regenerated and here is known as The Titanic Quarter. There is a Titanic Museum and a Titanic Studios, where they filmed Game of Thrones. There’s a Titanic Quarter railway station, a Titanic Hotel and Titanic Boulevard runs past the famous, yellow Harland and Wolff cranes known as Samson and Goliath.
Clearly the original Titanic was such a success that they’re keen to roll out the brand. The website for the Titanic Experience – which I would think you can get by putting ice cubes in your bath – says that there was no greater ship. Personally, I prefer to go on ships that make it to their destination, I specifically like ones that you can use at least twice. I never found out what was so great about a ship that didn’t complete its maiden voyage as, at £24.95 for one hundred and a bit years of history, it comes nowhere near to passing the Herculaneum Test.
In the middle of Queen’s Square in the city centre is a huge clocktower. It looks like a steeple missing a church but it is the Albert Memorial Clock. A 113-foot-high sandstone edifice with flying buttresses and a gigantic statue of Prince Albert. It’s amazing how often you find memorials to the man scattered around the country. Quite often, like this one, they are somewhat phallic in nature. Of course, the most interesting question about Victoria’s consort was did Prince Albert have a Prince Albert? We’ll never know for sure but being that proud of his little prince might explain why they had nine kids and why Victoria was so grief stricken at his early death. Perhaps the Prince Albert Memorial Cock would have been more apt.
It has been rumoured that the piercing actually owes its name to Albert’s grandson, Prince Albert Victor, who would have been king had he not died a week after his twenty-eighth birthday. Officially he died of influenza and pneumonia and not, as some later rumours had it, of syphilis and gonorrhoea. There were certainly many rumours during his short lifetime which indicated that the young prince may have been more likely to contract a sexually transmitted disease than might have been expected of your average Victorian. He is certainly known to have fallen in love quite easily, sometimes with ladies who would not be considered appropriate for the second in line to the throne, such as Lydia Miller.
Lydia, known on stage as Lydia Manton, was a chorus girl at the Gaiety Theatre who, sadly, took her own life by drinking half a pint of carbolic acid; which is bound to smart a bit. The newspapers of the time speculated that she was the petite amie of the prince but that this was hushed up. Whatever the truth, His Most High, Mighty, and Illustrious Prince Albert Victor Christian Edward, Duke of Clarence and Avondale, Earl of Athlone, Duke of Saxony, Prince of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, Knight of the Most Noble Order of the Garter, Knight of the Most Illustrious Order of Saint Patrick died on 14th January 1892 at Sandringham. If he had lived, he was due to be appointed Viceroy of Ireland.
Viceroy is an interesting title, vice is used, not in the way young Prince Albert Victor may have appreciated, but in the same way as today it is used for vice-president. The second in command. Roy is not anything to do with the long-standing character of Roy Cropper from Coronation Street but is from the French “roi” meaning king. So, a viceroy is the monarch’s representative in a territory. As with the Viceroy of India during the British Empire and the Spanish Viceroy of the Indies, the first of whom was Christopher Columbus.
Having a Viceroy of Ireland was, I think, a bit of cheek; either Ireland was part of the United Kingdom – as Northern Ireland is today – and therefore it already had a monarch, or it wasn’t and had nothing to do with us at all. You can’t just go stamping around various countries saying: “Right, I don’t care if you’ve lived here for millennia, it’s ours now.”
As I may have already mentioned, the idea of countries is clearly ludicrous anyway. They are just stories we tell each other that everyone believes, as if they were fact. The Painted Lady butterfly can migrate over four thousand miles from the Sahara to Ireland. Do you think it gives a chimpanzee’s chuff about lines that one idiotic species has drawn on a piece of paper? Of course it doesn’t and that’s not because we are more intelligent. Many species from butterflies to primates will fight for the right to mate, there are many animals who will fight for food, but humans are the only species stupid enough to fight and kill and die for stories they made up in the first place.
Once you’ve made up a story like this and had people die for it, you then have to make up another story about those who have died being in some way special. You have to promise them seventy-two virgins in the afterlife or build monuments to the glorious dead. They are not the glorious dead, they are just dead. You also have to make up more stories about those in charge of your country being chosen by God or brainwash your children with a pledge of allegiance to a nation you made up. It’s a story, nothing more. I love stories, they are my life, but I wouldn’t die for one.
Next week my paid subscribers can learn about the Hippopotamus Olympics. Everyone else can join them in two week’s time when I avoid most of Leeds.