McMaster Street

Fragment of private, autobiographical recording by Rev R D Drysdale, remembering his childhood in East Belfast.

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McMaster Street, Belfast

Testing, testing, one, two, three, testing, testing…

I grew up in East Belfast. Our house was in McMaster Street on the lower Newtownards Road, in the heart of Ballymacarrett.

We considered our street superior over the other streets around, because we had houses with attics. McMaster Street opens onto the main road, opposite St Patrick's Church of Ireland parish church. Our family, however, were Presbyterians, and had little contact with the big church at the end of our street.

We lived under the shadow of the shipyard gantries, now sadly gone with the decline in shipbuilding in Belfast. Almost every working man in the local area was employed in Harland and Wolff Shipyard, or the aircraft factory at Short Brothers in Harland. My father worked at Short’s, but being paid off seemed to hang like a cloud over the workforce in those days.

It was hardly surprising, because a worker in the yard or at the aircraft factory could be given their cards at a moment's notice. They could go out in the morning to their work and come home in the evening redundant. Workers had fewer rights in the 1940s and 50s than they do now.

At one end of our street was the Masonic Hall, still there today. As children we played football with goalposts chalked on the Masonic wall. Too often we missed a target and ended up putting the ball through a window.

The caretaker would emerge and send us scattering for home with dire threats of what he would do to us if he caught us playing there again. The next day we were back playing as usual. He never caught any of us. He had no chance against fleet-footed youngsters. 

Outside our house was a streetlight. As evening drew in, the lamplighter came along to light the gas mantle which gave a pale-yellow glow in the dark street. We had to dodge the lamplighter too, who threatened us with all sorts of punishments. The reason we also made an enemy of the lamplighter was because a favourite game was swinging on the lamp with a rope. This shook the lamp's standard and often broke the fragile glass mantle.