The Protestant forces are taken by surprise and there is little fighting, reflected in the term “Break,” a Scottish word for rout. Victory secures eastern Ulster for the Jacobites but they fail to fully exploit their success.
While much of the Protestant population of east Ulster supports the claim of William III to thrones of Ireland, England and Scotland, the rest of Ireland, including the Lord Deputy of Ireland, Richard Talbot, 1st Earl of Tyrconnell, and the army, support James II. As a result, war breaks out in Ireland after James is deposed in the Glorious Revolution. At the start of the conflict, the Jacobites are left in control of two fortified positions at Carrickfergus and Charlemont in territory which is predominantly Williamite in sympathy. The local Williamites raise a militia and meet in a council at Hillsborough. They make an ineffective assault on Carrickfergus. However, this is easily beaten off and a local Catholic cleric named O’Hegarty reports that the Williamite are badly armed and trained.
The Jacobite commander in the north is Richard Hamilton, an experienced soldier who serves with the French military from 1671 to 1685, when he is appointed a colonel in the Irish Army. In September 1688, he and his regiment are transferred to England. When James flees into exile, he is held in the Tower of London. Released on parole by William in February, he is sent to negotiate with Talbot but drops this mission once back in Ireland. Alexander Osbourne, a Presbyterian clergyman, is sent to offer the Hillsborough council a pardon in return for surrender but they refuse, reportedly encouraged by Osbourne. On March 8, Hamilton marches north from Drogheda with 2,500 men to subdue the Williamites by force.
On March 14 Hamilton crosses the River Lagan and attacks a 3,000 strong Williamite force under Lord Mount Alexander at Dromore. Alexander’s cavalry falls back in disorder following a charge by the Jacobite dragoons. Seeing this, Hamilton orders a general advance of his infantry and the Williamite foot flee toward Dromore itself. They are overtaken in the village by the Jacobite cavalry and slaughtered, roughly 400 being killed and the rest fleeing for their lives.
Lord Mount Alexander rides to Donaghadee and takes a ship to England, while many other Protestants leave for Northern England or Scotland. Hamilton’s men capture Hillsborough, along with £1,000 and large stocks of food but fail to pursue their opponents. This allows the bulk of the militia under Rawdon and Henry Baker to reach Coleraine, then make their way to Derry, where they take part in the successful defence of the city.
Following his local education, Lanyon becomes an apprentice civil engineer with Jacob Owen in Portsmouth. When Owen is made senior Engineer and Architect of the Irish Board of Works and moves to Dublin, Lanyon follows. In 1835 he marries Owen’s daughter, Elizabeth Helen. They have ten children, including Sir William Owen Lanyon, an army officer and future administrator of the Transvaal in southern Africa.
Lanyon is county surveyor in County Kildare briefly, a post he exchanges for its equivalent in County Antrim, based in Belfast, when the incumbent, Thomas Jackson Woodhouse, resigns in 1836. By 1842, he has built the Antrim coast road between Larne and Portrush, through spectacular natural surroundings. He designs the lofty three-arched Glendunviaduct on this route near Cushendun, an early example of his versatile talent for monumental display as well as the Ormeau Bridge over the River Lagan. He remains county surveyor of Antrim until 1861 when he resigns from the post to concentrate on private work and other interests.
Lanyon’s other business interests include being director of the Blackstaff Flax Spinning Company and chairman of several railway companies. He is made director of the Northern Counties Railway in 1870 but resigns in 1887 because of ill-health. Alongside his business activities he is an active Freemason and serves as Provincial Deputy Grand Master of Belfast and North Down between 1863 and 1868, Provincial Deputy Grand Master of Antrim between 1868 and 1883 and Provincial Grand Master of Antrim between 1883 and 1889.
Lanyon lives at The Abbey, a grand house in Whiteabbey, County Antrim, which eventually becomes a sanitorium during World War I and is now part of Whiteabbey Hospital. His wife dies in 1858, and his son William dies from cancer at the age of 44 in 1887. He dies at The Abbey on May 31, 1889, and is buried in Knockbreda Cemetery, Belfast, in a tomb also of his design.
Cunningham is born in 1728 or 1729 at Ballymacilhoyle in the parish of Killead, County Antrim, the youngest son in the large family of John Cunningham and his wife, Jane, daughter of James Waddell of Islandderry, a townland in the parish of Dromore, County Down. The extended families of Cunningham and Waddell have interests in farming, linen, provisioning, and overseas trade. By 1752, no doubt with support from his family, Cunningham is in New York City trading near the meal market. Just as the Seven Years’ War is beginning in May 1757, he becomes the local partner of a Belfast merchant, Thomas Greg. While carrying on a wide range of commercial activities, the firm of Greg & Cunningham specialises in the flaxseed trade with Ireland and becomes “the most successful Irish American transatlantic trading partnership of the colonial period.” He amasses a large fortune from trade, some of it illicit, during the war, and becomes one of the largest shipowners in the American port. This enables the partners to purchase a 150-acre estate, which they rename “Belfast,” on the West Indies island of Dominica, just as it is passing, by the Treaty of Paris (1763), from French to British rule. It is possible that the estate is managed by Greg’s brother, John.
Sometime after suffering imprisonment for assaulting a fellow merchant (July–August 1763), Cunningham returns to Ireland, leaving the firm in the charge of junior partners until its dissolution in 1775. In Belfast he enters into a second partnership with Greg in May 1765 comprising all their business activities other than those in New York. In November 1765, he also marries Greg’s sister-in-law Margaret, second daughter of a Belfast merchant, Samuel Hyde. He lives in a large house in Hercules Street, later renamed Royal Avenue, which serves also as the premises for his many business interests, commercial, financial, industrial, and agricultural. In 1767, he and Greg start the manufacture of vitriol at a factory by the River Lagan at Lisburn, 12 km from Belfast. They open up fisheries in Donegal and Sligo, exporting herring to the West Indies as food for slaves. They also trade Irish horses and mules for West Indian sugar and American tobacco, the sugar being processed by them at the New Sugar House in Waring Street, Belfast. During the American Revolutionary War (1775–83), he illegally ships linen uniforms to the insurgent colonists. He becomes a middleman on the estate of Arthur Chichester, 5th Earl of Donegall, by obtaining leases of land in the Templepatrick district of County Antrim, a venture that involves him in disputes with tenant farmers resulting in an attack by the Hearts of Steel on Belfast and the destruction by fire of his home on December 23, 1771.
Despite this setback, Cunningham becomes the foremost Belfast merchant. As well as those mentioned, he has interests in shipping, brewing, glass manufacture and flour milling. When a chamber of commerce is set up in 1783, he is elected president, a position he holds until 1790. In the 1780s, in partnership with William Brown, John Campbell and Charles Ranken, he opens a bank. Known as Cunningham’s Bank, it closes on December 31, 1793, likely as a result of the recession brought on by the outbreak of war between England and France.
A prominent Volunteer, Cunningham joins the movement as a lieutenant in 1778 and is captain of the 1st Belfast company from 1780 until the dissolution of the Volunteers in 1793. Entering politics, he fails to be nominated as a parliamentary candidate for Belfast by its patron, Lord Donegall, at the general election of 1783, but stands for Carrickfergus at a February 1784 by-election on a platform of parliamentary reform and is returned – a rare distinction for a Presbyterian – by 474 votes to 289. A petition against his return is lodged successfully, but he remains an MP until March 1785, when he is defeated in a new election. It is during this period that he, probably the wealthiest, most enterprising merchant in Belfast and having, as he does, Caribbean interests, proposes in December 1784 fitting out a ship to engage in the Atlantic slave trade. The proposal comes to nothing but is the subject of intense debate in the 1920s between two rival Belfast local historians, Francis Joseph Bigger and Samuel Shannon Millin.
Cunningham plays a prominent role on several Belfast boards – those of White Linen Hall, the harbour, poorhouse, and dispensary. He gives money to the first Catholic chapel, St. Mary’s, opened in the town in 1784, and to the First Belfast Presbyterian congregation, as well as providing a site for a meeting house for his own congregation, Second Belfast, in 1767. Staunch in his advocacy of the reform of parliament, he becomes a member of the Northern Whig Club in 1790. He is cautious, however, about Catholic relief, for he fears its possible consequences. On July 14, 1792, an organiser of a Volunteer display to mark the third anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, he balks even at a very moderately worded resolution in favour of the Catholics. Thereafter he becomes increasingly ill-disposed toward reform and when the Belfast yeoman infantry is formed in 1797, he becomes captain of the 4th company.
Cunningham dies on December 15, 1797, at his restored house in Hercules Street. He and his wife have no children. His property in Ireland (worth £60,000) passes to James Douglas, youngest son of his sister Jane, who had married their first cousin, Cunningham’s personal clerk Robert Douglas. His name had already passed to Thomas Greg’s son, Cunningham Greg, who takes over Greg’s business after his death. Cunningham’s portrait is painted by Robert Home. A mausoleum is built over the Cunningham vault at Knockbreda Church cemetery overlooking Belfast.
(From: “Cunningham, Waddell” by C. J. Woods, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)
The hull of the RMS Titanic, is launched at 12:15 PM on May 31, 1911 at the Harland & Wolff shipyard in Belfast, Northern Ireland in the presence of Lord William Pirrie, J. Pierpoint Morgan, J. Bruce Ismay and 100,000 onlookers. Twenty-two tons of soap and tallow are spread on the slipway to lubricate the ship’s passage into the River Lagan. In keeping with the White Star Line‘s traditional policy, the ship is not formally named or christened with champagne. The ship is towed to a fitting-out berth where, over the course of the next year, her engines, funnels and superstructure are installed and her interior is fitted out.
The construction of RMS Olympic and RMS Titanic take place virtually in parallel. The sheer size of the RMS Titanic and her sister ships pose a major engineering challenge for Harland and Wolff. No shipbuilder has ever before attempted to construct vessels this size. RMS Titanic‘s keel is laid down on March 31, 1909. The 2,000 hull plates are single pieces of rolled steel plate, mostly up to 6 feet wide and 30 feet long and weigh between 2.5 and 3 tons.
Some of the last items to be fitted on RMS Titanic before the ship’s launch are her two side anchors and one centre anchor. The anchors themselves are a challenge to make with the centre anchor being the largest ever forged by hand and weighing nearly 16 tons. Twenty Clydesdale draught horses are needed to haul the centre anchor by wagon from the N. Hingley & Sons Ltd. forge shop in Netherton, near Dudley, United Kingdom to the Dudley railway station two miles away. From there it is shipped by rail to Fleetwood in Lancashire before being loaded aboard a ship and sent to Belfast.
The work of constructing the ships is difficult and dangerous. For the 15,000 men who work at Harland and Wolff at the time, safety precautions are rudimentary at best. Much of the work is dangerous and is carried out without any safety equipment like hard hats or hand guards on machinery. As a result, deaths and injuries are to be expected. During RMS Titanic‘s construction, 246 injuries are recorded, 28 of them “severe,” such as arms severed by machines or legs crushed under falling pieces of steel. Six people die on the ship herself while she is being constructed and fitted out, and another two die in the shipyard workshops and sheds. Just before the launch a worker is killed when a piece of wood falls on him.
(Pictured: Launch of the hull of the RMS Titanic with an unfinished superstructure in 1911)
seamus dubhghaill 