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Tag Archives: Balmoral Cemetery (Belfast)


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Death of Hugh Hanna, Presbyterian Minister

Hugh Hanna, nicknamed Roaring Hanna, a Presbyterian minister in Belfast known for his anti-Catholicism, dies in Belfast on February 3, 1892.

Hanna is born on February 25, 1821, near Dromara, County Down, the eldest among three sons and two (possibly three) daughters of Peter Hanna, of Dromara farming stock, and his wife Ellen (née Finiston), whose father served in the Black Watch regiment during the Napoleonic Wars. In the 1820s, leaving their children behind, his parents move to Belfast, where his father establishes a business turing out horse–cars. Hanna does not join them until the mid-1830s. His education reflects the modest nature of his upbringing. It is patchy and always combined with paid employment. In the 1830s he attends Bullick’s Academy, a privately run commercial college in Belfast. In the 1840s, seemingly with the intention of preparing for the Presbyterian ministry, he takes classes at Belfast Academical Institution. In 1847, he enters the general assembly’s newly established Theological College and, after some absences, obtains his licence to preach in 1851. During this time he works, first as a woolen draper‘s assistant in High Street and then, after 1844, as a teacher in the national school associated with Townsend Street Presbyterian Church, where he is a member. He resigns his teaching post in January 1852, only a month before being ordained to full-time ministry. On August 25, 1852, he marries Frances (‘Fanny’) Spence Rankin, daughter of James Rankin, a Belfast salesman. Together they have four daughters and two sons.

Hanna’s first, and only, pastorate is in a congregation that emerges out of the evangelistic efforts he and other Townsend Street members had conducted among the working people of north Belfast. In 1852, they begin meeting in the old Berry Street church and quickly grow from 75 to over 750 families. By 1869 a new building is essential and in 1870 the foundation stone for St. Enoch’s church is laid in Carlisle Circus, on property purchased from the Belfast Charitable Society. Opened in 1872 at a cost of nearly £10,000, it seats over 2,000 people and has two galleries. With 800 families and 2,500 Sunday-school scholars, it is one of the largest congregations in Belfast.

Hanna’s influence as the leader of such a large flock is not translated into advancement within the Presbyterian church. Although he serves as the Presbyterian chaplain to the Belfast garrison (1869–91) and as moderator of the presbytery (1879) and synod (1870–71) of Belfast, he does not achieve any position of note within the denomination as a whole. This is most likely because of his penchant for public controversy. Letters to the newspapers, calls for action in presbytery, and public platform debates over issues such as public-house licensing laws, Sabbath observance and property rights, brand him a destablising force. It is no doubt for this reason, rather than for his open-air preaching, of which he does very little, that he acquires his famous sobriquet, “Roaring Hugh.” His aggressive manner in debate is noted by the Belfast News Letter early in his career.

Hanna’s political views contribute to his reputation as an intolerant firebrand. He is part of a small group of Presbyterian clergy, led by the Rev. Henry Cooke, who are staunch defenders of the Protestant interest and active supporters of the conservative cause. He hosts ”anti-popery” lectures in his church and joins the Orange Order, serving briefly, in 1871, as the deputy grand chaplain for Belfast (County Grand Lodge). His determination to uphold the “right” of Protestants to preach in the open air sparks a series of violent sectarian riots and a government inquiry in Belfast in 1857. As the century progresses, and as the Presbyterian community’s political allegiances begin to shift, he becomes one of a group of prominent figures associated with two populist campaigns: opposition in the 1860s to the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland and subsequently to the introduction of home rule. In 1886, as one of the honorary secretaries of the Ulster Constitutional Club, he helps to found the Ulster Loyalist Anti-Repeal Union, a forerunner of what eventually becomes the Ulster Unionist Party.

Such activity overshadows Hanna’s impressive contribution to education. Within St. Enoch’s he establishes an enormous network of Sunday schools and evening classes, including a training institute for teachers. As a former teacher, and later as a commissioner of national education (1880–92), he is a firm advocate of the national system, and sets up six national schools in north and west Belfast.

Hanna receives only two honours: a Doctor of Divinity (DD) from the theological faculty of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland (1885) and a Doctor of Laws (LL.D.) from Galesville University in Galesville, Wisconsin (1888). In good health throughout his life, he dies suddenly of a heart attack on February 3, 1892. Buried with much fanfare in Balmoral Cemetery, Belfast, he is clearly held in high regard by surviving friends and colleagues. In 1892, the Orange Order approves the naming of LOL 1956 as the “Hanna Memorial,” and in 1894 a bronze statue depicting him in full ecclesiastical garb is erected in Carlisle Circus. Since then, his achievements have fallen on hard times. In March 1970, an Irish Republican Army bomb blast topples his statue from its plinth; several high-profile attempts to re-erect it fail. After an arson attack in 1985, and with falling numbers, the decision is taken in 1992 to demolish St. Enoch’s and unite with the neighbouring Duncairn church in a new, much smaller, building on the site.

(From: “Hanna, Hugh” by Janice Holmes, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009 | Pictured: Portrait of Reverend Hugh Hanna by Augustus George Whichelo in 1876, which is part of the collection owned by the National Museums Northern Ireland and is located in the Ulster Museum)


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Birth of John Edgar, Minister & Professor of Theology

John Edgar, minister, professor of theology, moderator of the Secession Synod in 1828 and moderator of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland in 1842 is born near Ballynahinch, County Down, on June 13, 1798. He is Honorary Secretary to the Presbyterian Home Mission during the Great Famine in 1847.

Edgar is the eldest son of Samuel Edgar (1766-1826) and Elizabeth McKee (1771-1839). He attends the Royal Belfast Academical Institution where he excels as a student. He is ordained a minister in the Presbyterian church in 1820. He becomes D.D. of Hamilton College in Kirkland, New York, in 1836, is elected moderator of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland for 1842–43, and obtains LL.D. of New York in 1860.

Edgar is known as the origin of the Temperance movement in Ireland because he pours alcohol out his window in 1829. On August 14, 1829, he writes a letter in the Belfast Telegraph advocating temperance.

Edgar forms the Ulster Temperance Movement. In 1834, he tells a parliamentary committee inquiring into the causes and consequences of drunkenness in the United Kingdom that there are 550 “dram shops” in Belfast and 1,700 shops selling intoxicants in Dublin as well as numerous illicit distillers “even in the most civilised districts of Ulster.”

Edgar is also the founder of the Ulster Female Penitentiary in 1839 which is a residential home for prostitutes. He is also instrumental in getting the Deaf, Dumb and Blind Institute set up in Belfast. A meeting which leads to the establishment of the Presbyterian Orphan Society is held in 1866 in his drawing room.

Edgar is also involved in the relief effort by the Presbyterian church in Connacht during the Irish famine. The church is accused of proselytizing during the famine period. In the May Street Presbyterian Church he says, “I hope soon to have an opportunity of directing public attention to spiritual famine in Connacht, but our effort now is to save the perishing body … Our brother is starving, and, till we have satisfied his hunger, we have no time to inquire whether he is Protestant or Romanist.”

Edgar is interested in Gaelic language and culture, and is critical of other Protestant faiths particularly the Church of Ireland (Anglican) for not preaching in the Irish language.

Edgar dies at the age of 68 on August 26, 1866, in Cremore, Rathgar, Dublin, where he had gone to get medical treatment. He is survived by his wife Susanna, and is buried in Balmoral Cemetery, Belfast.


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Death of Isabella Tod, Women’s Rights Activist

Isabella Maria Susan Tod, Irish women’s rights activist, dies at her home at 71 Botanic Avenue in Belfast on December 8, 1896. She is a formidable lady who uses her political skills to great advantage in order to further many causes.

Tod is born on May 18, 1836, in Edinburgh into a well-known Irish Presbyterian family, her uncle being the Rev. Hope Masterton Waddell, one of the earliest Irish Presbyterian missionaries who served with the Scottish Missionary Society in Jamaica and whose great grandfather is the Rev. Charles Masterton, one of the most distinguished minsters of the General Synod of Ulster who ministers at Connor and Rosemary Street, Belfast. She is very proud of her Presbyterian heritage and of her Scottish ancestry.

The daughter of James Banks Tod, an Edinburgh merchant, Tod spends her early years in Edinburgh. She is educated at home by her mother, Maria Isabella Waddell, who comes from County Monaghan. The family moves to Belfast in the 1850s following the death of her father. She and her mother join Elmwood Presbyterian Church. Her Presbyterian background no doubt contributes to her radical views on social issues and women’s rights. She earns her living from writing and journalism, contributing, for example, to the Dublin University Magazine, an independent literary, cultural and political magazine, and to the Banner of Ulster, a Presbyterian newspaper.

Tod becomes one of the leading pioneers in the fight to improve the position of women. She is the only woman called to give evidence to a Select Committee of Enquiry on the reform of the married women’s property law in 1868 and serves on the executive of the Married Women’s Property Committee in London from 1873 to 1874. She successfully campaigns for the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864, 1866 and 1869 which enacted that a woman suspected of being a prostitute could be arrested and forced to undergo medical examination for venereal disease. She sees this legislation as an infringement of a woman’s civil liberties.

Tod is also a strong supporter of the temperance movement and, along with her friend Margaret Byers, forms the Belfast Women’s Temperance Association in 1874. Perhaps she is best known for her tireless campaign to extend the educational provision for middle-class women. For example, in 1878 she organises a delegation to London to put pressure on the Government to include girls in the Intermediate Education Act of 1878. The Ladies’ Collegiate School in Belfast, Alexandra College in Dublin and the Belfast Ladies Institute owe their existence largely to her. She writes a paper entitled “An Advanced Education for Girls in the Upper and Middle Classes” which is presented in 1867 at a meeting of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science and is among the pamphlets held in the Presbyterian Historical Society of Ireland library.

Tod is also an active campaigner for women’s right to vote, embarking on her first campaign in 1872 and addressing meetings in Belfast, Carrickfergus, Coleraine and Londonderry. Following a meeting in Dublin a suffrage committee is established that later becomes the Dublin Women’s Suffrage Society and in 1873 she forms the North of Ireland Women’s Suffrage Society. She extends her meetings to London, Glasgow and Edinburgh and is a frequent visitor to London to lobby politicians during the parliamentary session.

Tod is very much a staunch opponent of Home Rule, establishing a branch of the London-based Women’s Liberal Federation in Belfast and the Liberal Women’s Unionist Association. She sees unionism as the way to progress. “I knew that all the social work in which I had taken so prominent a part for 20 years was in danger and most of it could not exist a day under a petty legislature of the character which would be inevitable,” she says. “What we dread is the complete dislocation of all society, especially in regard to commercial affairs and organised freedom of action.”

Tod suffers from ill-health in her later days and dies in Belfast of pulmonary illness on December 8, 1896. She is buried in Balmoral Cemetery in South Belfast.


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Birth of Minister William Dool Killen

william-dool-killen

William Dool Killen, a minister of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland and church historian, is born at Church Street, Ballymena, County Antrim, on April 16, 1806.

Killen is the third of four sons and nine children of John Killen (1768–1828), a grocer and seedsman in Ballymena, by his wife Martha, daughter of Jesse Dool, a farmer in Duneane. His paternal grandfather, a farmer at Carnmoney, marries Blanche Brice, a descendant of Edward Brice. A brother, James Miller Killen (1815–1879), is a minister in Comber, County Down. Thomas Young Killen is his father’s great-nephew.

After attending local primary schools, Killen goes to Ballymena Academy around 1816, and in November 1821 enters the collegiate department of the Royal Belfast Academical Institution, under James Thomson. In 1827, he is licensed to preach by the Presbytery of Ballymena, and on November 11, 1829 he is ordained minister at Raphoe, County Donegal.

In July 1841 Killen is appointed, by the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, its professor of church history, ecclesiastical government, and pastoral theology, in succession to James Seaton Reid. He concentrates on history. When Assembly’s College, Belfast is set up in 1853, he becomes one of the professors there. In 1869 he is appointed president of the college, in succession to Henry Cooke, and undertakes fundraising for professorial endowments and new buildings. In 1889 he resigns his chair but continues as president.

During his career Killen receives the degrees of D.D. (1845) and of LL.D. (1901) from the University of Glasgow. His portrait, painted by Richard Hooke, hangs in the Gamble library of the college.

William Dool Killen dies on January 10, 1902, and is buried in Balmoral Cemetery, Belfast, where a monument marks his resting place.