Introduction to 'Historic Pubs of Belfast

There’s an old trick question that still does the rounds of Belfast’s bars. A bloke propping up the counter winks at his mates and asks an unsuspecting know-it-all how many pubs were once serving drink along the length of some well-known city street. The know-it-all will mentally progress along the street in question and start counting off the bars on his fingers. Eventually he will arrive at a total, and the questioner will smile knowingly and then tell him he’s wrong. The answer – in practically every case – is none.

As the questioner will then point out, almost all the old bars of Belfast were located on street corners and their addresses were not that of the main road, but that of a side street, so it could be easily identified which corner they were on. And that’s the easiest way to single out the city’s most historic pubs. If the bar is on a corner, no matter how modern it may appear to be, the chances are that it has been around for quite a while. Of course, it is a rule with exceptions. Pubs that were formerly hotels may not necessarily have been on corners and some of Belfast’s oldest pubs are to be found in the middle of narrow alleyways, but generally it’s a good rule of thumb for the discerning drinker in search of a watering hole with a past.

In many ways it is remarkable that any of Belfast’s old bars have survived at all. Social changes, economic factors, wholesale redevelopment, the 1941 Blitz and the bombing campaign of the 1970s have all played a part in whittling down the city’s plethora of pubs. Here’s a striking example of how the number of bars has declined. An irate Temperance supporter wrote to the Belfast News Letter in 1900 complaining that ‘a man from Queen’s Island with wages in his pocket has to pass 67 public houses on his way to the head of the Shankill Road’. How many bars would that route take him past today? Certainly nothing like 67.

There was a time, however, when Belfast had just one pub, but that was when the city wasn’t a city; in fact, it wasn’t much more than a small collection of houses. Belfast’s first recorded inn was called Sir Moses’ Cellars, an alehouse named after Moses Hill, a young officer from Devonshire who came to Ireland in 1573 in the service of the Earl of Essex. It was mentioned in a report by the Plantation Commissioners in 1611, which noted that Belfast had ‘one inn with very good lodging which is a great comfort to the travellers in these parts’. Some say that the Sir Moses’ Cellars was still serving Belfast folk at the beginning of the 19th century.

The steady growth of Belfast’s licensed trade in the 1600s was directly proportional to the city’s population expansion. As the number of inhabitants topped the 1,000 mark, more taverns joined Sir Moses’ Cellars to meet the demands of a thirsty clientele. By 1665 the town fathers were sufficiently alarmed by the increase in drinking establishments and associated boisterous behaviour to decree that ‘no inn-holder or ale-seller within the borough shall suffer any person, unless a lodger in his house, to drink or play at any game whatsoever after the hour of nine at night’.

The curfew did little to diminish the popularity of Belfast’s alehouses, however. Within a century the population had grown 18-fold and one in every 17 houses was occupied by a licensed publican who dealt in beer and spirits, although most of them supplemented their incomes with other trades. At this time, many of the premises relied on travellers for their business. Passenger and mail coaches usually started and finished their journeys at well-known inns, taverns and hotels and a number of them became official booking offices as well as providing refreshment and accommodation for passengers.

By the time Queen Victoria ascended the throne in 1836, there were 346 tavern keepers in the city. Many of them were concentrated in small areas – in Barrack Street, for example, there were 15 pubs out of a total of 53 places of business. Others were exploring a new source of customers. The railways were beginning to spread out across the land and just as inns had developed a relationship with the coaching industry, so the pubs of the mid-19th century began to foster links with the new train companies. By the middle of the century, however, they were also being seen not just as places for drink, food and a bed, but also as venues for entertainment. Some of the city taverns began to develop into singing saloons, chiefly aimed at the working class, although a few encouraged the gentry as well. The Star Saloon, which opened at 21 Ann Street in the 1850s, was one of the earliest examples of this type of establishment, although some of its competitors were rough, bawdy places with ‘disreputable female vocalists who dared to show their brazen and drunken faces before the very lowest audience that could be collected in Belfast’.

It was at this time that snugs began to be a regular feature of pub interiors. In the singing saloons they allowed the upper classes to enjoy the entertainment without having to distastefully mingle with the common folk, or be subjected to their ridicule and insults; while in taverns without entertainment the snugs were ideal places for ladies to seat themselves, since most bars around the city were still very much male dominated and the presence of a woman at the counter would have been regarded with scandalised horror. Indeed, some bars maintained a men-only policy until well into the 20th century – in the 1940s, Kelly’s Cellars had a sign denying admission to unaccompanied women while McGlade’s Bar in Donegall Street was challenged in the courts over its men-only policy in the public bar as late as 1979.

But in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, women were rarely seen in the spit and sawdust environment of the working man’s pub. These bars were often located at the end of a row of terraced houses and would support whole families, who usually lived in rooms above them. The Old Lodge Road, for instance, had 17 of these family pubs at one time. They formed a well-trodden local triangle, the other two points of which consisted of the bookie’s and the pawnbroker. Women, if they were permitted in the bar at all, used a snug or a small side bar with its own door, and would have often beaten a path from there to the pawnbroker; while in the main public bar the bookie’s runner, who took bets for the customers and collected their winnings, would have had his own reserved seat at the counter.

The Introduction to Historic Pubs of Belfast continues here.

Author’s Note

This book is not intended as a definitive guide to all of Belfast’s historic hostelries, rather as an entertaining selection of pub descriptions from across the city.
Also from Appletree: Irish Pub Songs.