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 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.
Ford stands unsuccessfully for Antrim Borough Council in 1989 and enters politics full-time when he becomes general secretary of the Alliance Party. In that role, he is best known as a strong supporter of the then-leader John Alderdice and an advocate of better political organisation and community politics. He is elected to Antrim Borough Council in 1993, 1997 and – after leaving the Council in 2001 to concentrate on Assembly business – again in 2005.
In 2001, Seán Neeson resigns from the Party leadership following poor election results. Ford wins the leadership election on October 6 by 86 votes to 45, ahead of Eileen Bell.
Ford gives Alliance a stability which it has lacked since the departure of John Alderdice, but the Party has declined seriously in the late 1990s and all he can do is stabilise the situation. Within a month of taking over the leadership, however, he has a chance to establish Alliance’s relevancy in the post-Good Friday Agreement environment. On November 6, 2001, the Northern Ireland Executive is to be re-established. Due to defections within his own Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), First MinisterDavid Trimble has insufficient support within the Unionist bloc in the Assembly to be re-elected to his post. Ford and two of his five colleagues re-designate as Unionist for just 22 minutes in order to secure Trimble’s position and thereby enable the devolved institutions to operate for another year. However, Alliance fails to make any political gains from their move, and the UUP and Sinn Féin fail to reach agreement on the decommissioning issue, ensuring that the institutions collapse again in October 2002.
In the 2003 Northern Ireland Assembly election, Ford’s seat in the Assembly is perceived to be under severe threat from Sinn Féin’s Martin Meehan, with many commentators expecting him to lose it. However, his expertise in nuts-and-bolts electioneering stands him in good stead. Although Alliance’s vote almost halved, his own vote in South Antrim increases from 8.6% to 9.1%. Meehan’s vote increases dramatically, from 7.3% to 11.5%, and he starts the election count ahead. Ford has much greater transfer appeal and finishes 180 votes ahead of Meehan at the end of a dramatic three-way fight for the last two seats, with Thomas Burns of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) just 14 votes ahead of Ford. Despite the dramatic fall in vote, Alliance holds on to its six seats in the Assembly, which remains suspended.
In 2004, Ford makes good his leadership election pledge to work with other parties, as Alliance joins with the Workers’ Party, Northern Ireland Conservatives and elements of the Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition to support Independent candidate John Gilliland in the European elections, achieving the best result for the centre ground for 25 years.
Ford’s greatest triumph comes in the 2007 Northern Ireland Assembly election, when the party achieves its highest vote share since Alderdice’s departure and picks up a seat in what is an otherwise poor election for the moderates. Despite media predictions once again of his demise, Ford himself is elected third in South Antrim, with over 13% of the poll.
On April 12, 2010, Ford is chosen by the Assembly to become Northern Ireland’s first Justice Minister in 38 years. He is supported in the Assembly by the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), Sinn Féin, the Alliance Party, the Green Party and the Progressive Unionist Party (PUP). Separate candidates for the position are put forward by both the UUP and the SDLP, being Danny Kennedy and Alban Maginness respectively.
Ford announces his resignation as Leader in October 2016 on the fifteenth anniversary of his election as leader noting, “The team is working well, and I think it’s an appropriate time to hand over to a new leader who will lead the party forward in the next stage of its development and growth.”
Ford and his wife Anne have four grown children and live in rural County Antrim. Until the spring of 2013, he is an elder in the Second Donegore congregation of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland. He is removed from his role as a ruling elder over differences with fellow congregants on the subject of same-sex marriage. In a 2016 interview he says he is still hurt by the decision by his fellow elders who chose not to work with him because of his support for equal marriage. “It saddened me that there was, if I may put it, a lack of understanding from some people about the role I had as a legislator, compared to the role I have within the church.”
Dickson is born on December 25, 1744, the eldest son of John Dickson, a tenant farmer of Ballycraigy, in the parish of Carnmoney, County Antrim. His mother is Jane Steel and, on the death of his uncle, William Steel, on May 13, 1747, the family adds his mother’s maiden name to their own.
In his boyhood, Dickson is educated by Robert White, a Presbyterian minister from Templepatrick and enters University of Glasgow in November 1761. Following graduation, he is apparently employed for a time in teaching, and in 1771 he is ordained as a Presbyterian minister. Until the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War, he occupies himself mainly with parochial and domestic duties. His political career begins in 1776, when he speaks and preaches against the “unnatural, impolitic and unprincipled” war with the American colonies, denouncing it as a “mad crusade.” On two government fast-days his sermons on “the advantages of national repentance” (December 13, 1776), and on “the ruinous effects of civil war” (February 27, 1778) create considerable excitement when published. Government loyalists denounce Dickson as a traitor.
Political differences are probably at the root of a secession from his congregation in 1777. The seceders form a new congregation at Kircubbin, County Down, in defiance of the authority of the general synod.
In 1771 Dickson marries Isabella Gamble, a woman of some means, who dies on July 15, 1819. They have at least eight children, but he outlives them all. One of his sons is in the Royal Navy and dies in 1798.
Dickson enters with zest into the volunteer movement of 1778, being warmly in favour of the admission of Roman Catholics to the ranks. This is resisted “through the greater part of Ulster, if not the whole.” In a sermon to the Echlinville volunteers on March 28, 1779, he advocates the enrolment of Catholics and though induced to modify his language in printing the discourse, he offends “all the Protestant and Presbyterian bigots in the country.” He is accused of being a papist at heart, “for the very substantial reason, among others, that the maiden name of the parish priest’s mother was Dickson.”
Though the contrary has been stated, Dickson is not a member of the Volunteer conventions at Dungannon in 1782 and 1783. He throws himself heart and soul into the famous election for County Down in August 1783, when the families of Hill and Stewart, compete for the county seat in Parliament. He, with his forty-shilling freeholders, fails to secure the election of Robert Stewart. But in 1790 he successfully campaigns for the election of Stewart’s son, better known as Lord Castlereagh. Castlereagh proves his gratitude by referring at a later date to Dickson’s popularity in 1790, as proof that he was “a very dangerous person to leave at liberty.”
In December 1791, Dickson joins Robert White’s son, John Campbell White, taking the “test” of the first Society of United Irishmen, organised in October in Belfast following a meeting held with Theobald Wolfe Tone, Protestant secretary of the Catholic Committee in Dublin. According to Dickson himself, he attends no further meetings of the Society but devotes himself to spreading its principles among the volunteer associations, in opposition to the “demi-patriotic” views of the Whig Club.
At a great volunteer meeting in Belfast on July 14, 1792, Dickson opposes a resolution for the gradual removal of Catholic disabilities and assists in obtaining a unanimous pledge in favour of total and immediate emancipation. Parish and county meetings are held throughout Ulster, culminating in a provincial convention at Dungannon on February 15, 1793. He is a leading spirit at many of the preliminary meetings, and, as a delegate from the Barony of Ards, he has a chief hand in the preparation of the Dungannon resolutions. Their avowed object is to strengthen the throne and give vitality to the constitution by “a complete and radical reform.” He is nominated on a committee of thirty to summon a national convention. The Irish parliament goes no further in the direction of emancipation than the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1793, which receives the royal assent on April 9, and remains unextended until 1829. While the passing of Lord Clare‘s Convention Act, still in force, makes illegal all future assemblies of delegates “purporting to represent the people, or any description of the people.”
In March and April 1798, Dickson is in Scotland arranging some family affairs. During his absence plans are made for an insurrection in Ulster, and soon after his return he agrees to take the place of Thomas Russell, who had been arrested, as adjutant-general of the United Irish forces for County Down. A few days before the county is to rise, he is himself arrested at Ballynahinch.
Dickson is conveyed to Belfast and lodged in the “black hole” and other prisons until August 12 when he is removed to a prison ship with William Tennant, Robert Hunter, Robert Simms, David Bailie Warden and Thomas Ledlie Birch, and detained there amid considerable discomfort. On March 25, 1799, Dickson, Tennant, Hunter, and Simms join the United Irish “State Prisoners” on a ship bound for Fort George, Highland prison in Scotland. This group, which includes Samuel Neilson, Arthur O’Connor, Thomas Russell, William James MacNeven, and Thomas Addis Emmet, arrives in Scotland on April 9, 1799. He spends two years there.
Unlike the more high-profile prisoners like O’Connor and MacNeven who are not released until June 1802, Tennant, Dickson, and Simms are permitted to return to Belfast in January 1802.
Dickson returns to liberty and misfortune. His wife has long been a helpless invalid, his eldest son is dead, his prospects are ruined. His congregation at Portaferry had been declared vacant on November 28, 1799. William Moreland, who had been ordained as his successor on June 16, 1800, at once offers to resign, but Dickson will not hear of this. He has thoughts of emigration but decides to stand his ground. At length, he is chosen by a seceding minority from the congregation of Keady, County Armagh, and installed minister on March 4, 1803.
Dickson’s political engagement ends with his attendance on September 9, 1811, of a Catholic meeting in Armagh, on returning from which he is cruelly beaten by Orangemen. In 1815 he resigns his charge in broken health and henceforth subsists on charity. Joseph Wright, an Episcopalian lawyer, gives him a cottage rent-free in the suburbs of Belfast, and some of his old friends make him a weekly allowance. His last appearance in the pulpit is early in 1824. He dies on December 27, 1824, having just passed his eightieth year, and is buried “in a pauper’s grave” at Clifton Street Cemetery, Belfast.
Sinclair’s parents are Thomas (1811–1867), merchant and ship-owner, and Sarah Sinclair (née Archer) (1800–1849). His father goes into business with his brother John (1808–1856), setting up a provisions and general merchant store at 5–11 Tomb Street, Belfast. John marries Eliza Pirrie, a relative of the prominent ship builder William Pirrie, 1st Viscount Pirrie. After the death of his father in 1867, Sinclair inherits £35,000 as his mother, brother and sister are all deceased.
In 1876, Sinclair marries Mary Duffin of Strandtown Lodge, Belfast. They have a daughter, Frances Elizabeth Crichton, and a son. She dies in 1879. He marries Elizabeth Richardson in 1882. She is the niece of John Grubb Richardson and the widow of Sinclair’s cousin, John M. Sinclair. They have three sons and two daughters.
Sinclair attends Royal Belfast Academical Institution and Queen’s College Belfast, graduating with a BA with gold medal for mathematics in 1856, and an MA with gold medals in logic, political economy, and English literature in 1859. After his father’s death, he takes over running the family business. He expands and grows it by merging it with another large provisions business with American branches, Kingan & Co. He is related to the Kingans through his cousin Sarah, who is married to the owner, Samuel Kingan.
Despite numerous requests, Sinclair never stands for parliament, instead serving as deputy lieutenant, justice of the peace, president of the Ulsterchamber of commerce in 1876 and 1902, and privy councilor in 1896. Having been a supporter of William Ewart Gladstone, he joins the Ulster Liberal Party in 1868, supporting the land acts of 1870 and 1881. Following the home rule bill of 1886, he convenes a meeting in the Ulster Hall of liberals on April 30, 1886, which passes a resolution in condemnation of the bill. Forming the Ulster Liberal Unionist Association, of which he is chair, he organises the Ulster Convention in Belfast. Held on June 17, 1892, it sees 11,879 Ulster unionists meet to protest home rule. Nine months after the convention, he is appointed to the executive committee of the new unionist clubs, which are founded to protect the union. The defeat of the British Liberal Party in 1895 significantly decreases the threat of home rule, leading to the unionists’ clubs being suspended, and Sinclair returning to his activities in liberal reform. He is the leading Ulster member of the recess committee from 1895, which is founded by Horace Plunkett. He supports Plunkett’s backing of T. P. Gill as secretary of the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society (IAOS) in 1899, in the face of strong protest by conservative unionists.
Despite his unionist politics, Sinclair is nonsectarian, and during his time as chairman of the convocation of the Queen’s University he defends the core non-sectarian principles of the institution and refuses to allow any form of denominational teaching. Through his work with the recess committee, he ensures that the new Department of Agriculture’s vocational and technical education will remain secular.
By 1904 and the devolution crisis, Sinclair sides with conservative unionists, being of the 30 members of the standing committee of the Ulster Unionist Council on its foundation in December 1904. He proposes that all suspended unionist clubs be reestablished in January 1911, with the purpose of increasing their membership and responsibilities. This results in the clubs taking up arms, with over 80 groups drilling by April 1911, which goes on to form the core of the Ulster Volunteers. On September 25, 1911, he is appointed to a five-man commission tasked with writing a constitution for a provisional government of Ulster. He is one of the contributors to the 1912 collection of essays from the unionist party, Against home rule. He identifies the six county Ulster, proffering the idea of a two-nation island, warning that Ulster will never form part of an independent Ireland. Later in 1912, he is tasked with drafting Ulster’s Solemn League and Covenant, a pledge for signatories to oppose and defeat home rule and never recognise an Irish parliament.
Sinclair dies from kidney failure on February 14, 1914, at his home, Hopefield House, Belfast. His funeral procession on February 18 is headed by 200 UVF officers. The Ulster Museum holds a portrait of Sinclair by Frank McKelvey, and QUB holds one by Henrietta Rae (pictured above). A memorial window at Church House, the headquarters of the Presbyterian Church, is unveiled in his memory on June 8, 1915, and there is a Sinclair Memorial Hall opened in his honour on September 10, 1915. A blue plaque is erected to him on the Duncairn Centre for Arts & Culture.
The Sinclair Ward in the Royal Victoria Hospital, Belfast, is originally funded by Sinclair’s father, in honour of his wife Sarah under the Sinclair Memorial Fund. The surgeon and politician Thomas Sinclair is also a relative.
The Society of United Irishmen is formed in October 1791 by leading citizens in Belfast who seek a representative government in Ireland based on principles they believe have been modelled by the American and French Revolutions. At their first meeting they embrace the argument of Theobald Wolfe Tone for a “brotherhood of affection” between Irishmen of all religious persuasions. Tone argues that in Ireland the landed AnglicanAscendancy and the English appointed Irish executive employ division between Protestants and Catholics to balance “the one party by the other, plunder and laugh at the defeat of both.”
Despairing of reform, and in the hope of French assistance, in May 1798, the United Irishmen take up arms against the Dublin government and the British Crown. Beginning in Kildare, the insurrection spreads to other counties in Leinster before finally reaching the Presbyterian districts surrounding Belfast. On June 5, the Antrim societies of United Irishmen meet in Templepatrick where they elect textile manufacturer Henry Joy McCracken as their General. The next day McCracken issues a proclamation calling for the United army of Ulster to rise. The initial plan meets with success, as the towns of Larne, Ballymena, Maghera and Randalstown are taken and the bridge at Toome is damaged to prevent the government rushing reinforcements into Antrim from west of the River Bann.
According to the memoirs of James Burns from Templepatrick, Dickey commands the insurgents at Randalstown and kills Samuel Parker, a “traitor, with his own hands, while standing at his own door, where he went for the purpose.”
McCracken leads a body of about 6,000 rebels in an attack on Antrim town. As promised, Catholic Defenders turn out, but in the march upon the town tensions with the Presbyterian United Irish causes some desertions and a delay in McCracken’s planned assault. McCracken’s men are defeated, and his army melts away. On June 15, Dickey, together with McCracken, James Hope, James Orr and about fifty other rebel survivors from Antrim, arrive at Slemish, near Ballymena. There they set up camp for three weeks before leaving under threat of attack from Colonel Green of the Tay Fencibles.
Dickey is captured by the Sutherland fencibles on Divis, a hill northwest of Belfast. He is court-martialed and hanged at Corn Market, Belfast on June 26, 1798. Famously, before his hanging he refuses to wear a black hood saying to the hangman, “Sir, don’t cover my face!” According to local legend he shouts, “Don’t think gentlemen, I am ashamed to show my face among you, I am dying for my country!” However, a loyalist source hostile to the United Irish cause, Henry Joy of the Belfast News Letter, has Dickey on the scaffold recanting his commitment to the “brotherhood of affection” between Catholic and Protestant. He supposedly warned the assembled that had “the Presbyterians of the north succeeded in their [republican] designs, they would ultimately have had to contend with the Roman Catholics.” It is testament to the sentiment that in the north is to largely expunge the memory of his, and McCracken’s, sacrifice.
Dickey is 22 years old at the time of his execution. His head is placed on a spike outside the Market House on Belfast’s High Street.
Dickey’s brother, John Dickey of Crumlin, is also implicated in the rebellion. He is informed on by neighbours who had noticed that he was making pikes and attending secret meetings of the United Irishmen late at night. Arrested and court-martialed, he refuses the terms granted by the government to the “State Prisoners” in Dublin. He is transported to the West Indies for penal servitude but manages to escape and makes his way to the United States.
Stewart is born in 28 Henry Street, in Dublin’s Northside. He is the second and only surviving child of Robert Stewart (the elder) and his wife Sarah Frances Seymour-Conway. His parents marry in 1766. He has recurring health problems throughout his childhood, and is sent to The Royal School, Armagh, rather than to England for his secondary education. At the encouragement of Charles Pratt, 1st Earl Camden, who takes a great interest in him and treats him as if he is a grandson by blood, he later attends St. John’s College, Cambridge (1786–87), where he applies himself with greater diligence than expected from an aristocrat and excels in his first-year examinations. But he then withdraws, pleading an illness that he admits to Camden is something “which cannot be directly acknowledged before women,” i.e. something sexually transmitted.
Stewart organises and finances the alliance that defeats Napoleon, bringing the powers together at the Treaty of Chaumont in 1814. After Napoleon’s second abdication in 1815, he works with the European courts represented at the Congress of Vienna to frame the territorial, and broadly conservative, continental order that holds until mid-century. He blocks harsh terms against France believing that a treaty based on vengeance and retaliation will upset a necessary balance of powers. France is restored to the frontiers of 1791, and her British-occupied colonies are returned. In 1820 Stewart enunciates a policy of non-intervention, proposing that Britain hold herself aloof from continental affairs.
After 1815, at home, Stewart supports repressive measures that link him in public opinion to the Peterloo Massacre of 1819. Widely reviled in both Ireland and Great Britain, overworked, and personally distressed, he commits suicide on August 12, 1822. He is found in a dressing room seconds after he has cut his own throat using a small knife. He collapses and dies almost instantly.
(Pictured: “Robert Stewart, 2nd Marquess of Londonderry,” oil on canvas by Thomas Lawrence, National Portrait Gallery)
Born into an Ulster Scots family, Thomson is the fourth son of Agnes Nesbit and James Thomson, a small farmer, at Annaghmore, near Ballynahinch, County Down, in Ulster. His early education is from his father. At the age of 11 or 12 he finds out for himself the art of dialling. His father sends him to a school at Ballykine, near Ballynahinch, kept by Samuel Edgar, father of John Edgar. Here he soon rises to be an assistant.
Wishing to become a minister of the Presbyterian church, Thomson enters the University of Glasgow in 1810, where he studies for several sessions, supporting himself by teaching in the Ballykine school during the summer. He graduates MA in 1812, and in 1814 he is appointed headmaster of the school of arithmetic, bookkeeping, and geography in the newly established Royal Belfast Academical Institution. In 1815 he is Professor of Mathematics in its collegiate department. Here he proves himself as a teacher. In 1829 the honorary degree of LL.D. is conferred upon him by the University of Glasgow, where in 1832 he is appointed Professor of Mathematics. He holds this post until his death on January 12, 1849.
Thomson is buried with his family on the northern slopes of the Glasgow Necropolis to the east of the main bridge entrance. The grave is notable due to the modern memorial to Lord Kelvin at its side.
Thomson is the author of schoolbooks that have passed through many editions including Arithmetic (1819), Trigonometry, Plane and Spherical (1820), Introduction to Modern Geography (1827), The Phenomena of the Heavens (1827), The Differential and Integral Calculus (1831), and Euclid (1834).
A paper, “Recollections of the Battle of Ballynahinch, by an Eye-witness,” which appears in the Belfast Magazine for February 1825, is from his pen.
Abernethy’s father, also named John, a Presbyterian minister, accompanies Patrick Adair on a deputation from the general committee of Ulster presbyterians, who present a congratulatory address to William III in London in 1689, and obtain from the king a letter (November 9, 1689) recommending their case to Meinhardt Schomberg, 3rd Duke of Schomberg.
At the age of 13, Abernethy enters the University of Glasgow and, upon concluding his course there, goes on to the University of Edinburgh, where he soon moves in the most cultured circles. Returning home, he is licensed to preach from his Presbytery before he is twenty-one. In 1701 he is called to accept charge of an important congregation in Antrim. After an interval of two years, mostly spent in further study in Dublin, he is ordained there on August 8, 1703. He becomes a noted debater in the synods and assemblies of his church and a leading evangelist. He has been described as being at this time “the young minister of Antrim … a man of studious habits, heretical opinions, and remarkable ability.”
In 1712, he is devastated by the loss of his wife, Susannah Jordan. Five years later, he is invited to the congregation of Usher’s Quay, Dublin, and also to what is called the Old Congregation of Belfast. The synod assigns him to Dublin. After careful consideration he refuses and remains at Antrim. This refusal arouses disapproval and a controversy follows, with Abernethy standing firm for religious freedom and repudiating the ecclesiastical courts. The controversy and quarrel bear the name of the two camps in the conflict, the “Subscribers” and the “Non-subscribers.” Abernethy and his associates sow the seeds of the struggle (1821–1840) in which, under the leadership of Dr. Henry Cooke, the Arian and Socinian elements of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland are thrown out.
Much of what Abernethy contends for, and which the “Subscribers” oppose bitterly, is silently granted in the lapse of time. In 1726, the “Non-subscribers” are cut off, with due ban and solemnity, from the Presbyterian Church of Ireland. In 1730 he moves to Wood Street, Dublin. It is said of him that, although a “Non-subscriber,” he is a Trinitarian. However, Dr. Cooke states that Arianism “made very considerable progress under the patronage of high names, as Abernethy, the author of a very excellent work upon the Attributes, who gave it a great deal of eclat.”
In 1731 comes the greatest controversy in which Abernethy is involved. It is nominally about the Test Act, but actually on the entire question of tests and disabilities. His stand is against all laws that, upon account of mere differences of religious opinions and forms of worship, exclude men of integrity and ability from serving their country.
Abernethy is nearly a century in advance of his age. He has to reason with those who deny that a Roman Catholic or Dissenter can be a “man of integrity and ability.”
The Magee Campus gains its name from Martha Magee, the widow of a Presbyterian minister, who, in 1845, bequeathed £20,000 to the Presbyterian Church in Ireland to found a college for theology and the arts. It opens in 1865 primarily as a theological college but accepts students from all denominations to study a variety of subjects. It is a college of the Royal University of Ireland from 1880 and later becomes associated with Trinity College, Dublin when the Royal University is dissolved in 1909 and replaced by the National University of Ireland.
During World War II, the college is taken over by the Admiralty for Royal NavyRoyal Navy operational use, becoming with Ebrington Barracks (HMS Ferret), a major facility in the Battle of the Atlantic. A 2013 BBC report describes a secret major control bunker, later buried beneath the lawns of the college. From 1941 this bunker, part of Base One Europe, together with similar bunkers in Derby House, Liverpool and Whitehall is used to control one million Allied personnel and fight the NaziU-boat threat.
In 1984, the New University merges with the Ulster Polytechnic, and Magee becomes the early focus of development of a new four-campus university, the University of Ulster. Student and faculty numbers recover and grow rapidly over the next ten to fifteen years, accompanied by numerous construction projects. Magee grows from just 273 students in 1984 to over 4,000 undergraduates in 2012. In 2012, the University continues to lobby the Northern Ireland Executive for an additional 1,000 full-time undergraduate places, leading to 6,000 students at Magee in 2017.
On September 14, 2013, Magee hosts, for the first time on the island of Ireland, the 23rd International Loebner Prize Contest in Artificial Intelligence based on the Turing test proposed by the renowned British computer scientist Alan Turing in 1950. Turing also works on cracking the Enigma machine code at Bletchley Park which is instrumental in the Battle of the Atlantic.
In October 2014 the University of Ulster is rebranded as Ulster University.
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.
seamus dubhghaill 