Witness to a legion of historical events, both political and artistic, Belfast’s Ulster Hall has been restored to its former splendour in time for its 150th anniversary
THE CLASH provoked a riot outside the building. Charles Dickens read there. Count John McCormack sang there. So did Enrico Caruso. Molly Bloom in James Joyce's Ulysseswas due to sing at the venue. The Rolling Stones triggered mass hysteria among Belfast's finest young ladies. Barry McGuigan fought there. Lord Randolph Churchill thundered there. So did Lord Edward Carson and Ian Paisley and virtually every other unionist of note down the decades.
She’s back. Dubbed the Grand Dame of Bedford Street, where she is located in central Belfast, the newly refurbished and very historic Ulster Hall, owned by Belfast City Council, finally re-opened last night after 15 months in darkness.
A glittering full house of 1,000 people gathered with the ghosts of the past inside the hall to enjoy a programme from the Ulster Orchestra of the likes of Beethoven, Rachmaninov and a specially commissioned piece by local composer Brian Irvine called Big Daddy Motorhead.That's in homage to the very eclectic nature of the people and groups that have performed at the venue – Big Daddy, a very heavy professional wrestler, and Motörhead, a very heavy metal band.
Unfortunately, the hall’s great Mulholland organ, named after a previous lord mayor benefactor, and almost as old as the hall itself, didn’t feature as it needs time to recover from the dust and heavy work of the past year or more.
The Ulster Hall, as historian Eamon Phoenix noted, was politically viewed as a “unionist citadel”. But times have changed, with Sinn Féin Lord Mayor of Belfast Tom Hartley describing the building as “part of the lifeblood of this great city for almost 150 years”.
The Ulster Hall always was much more than a venue for booming unionist oratory – it was a place where Catholic, Protestant and dissenter could enjoy a variety of entertainment together and where, as the notion once took them, they could get rowdy together. That was in 1977, when a concert by punk band The Clash was cancelled two hours before curtain-up. That triggered the so-called Riot of Bedford Street, a non-sectarian, cross-community ruckus: a first for Belfast in those very troubled days.
CHIEF ARCHITECT FOR the makeover is Dawson Stelfox, the first Irish person to climb Mount Everest. Stelfox's great, great grandfather, James, also an architect, attended the opening of the hall in 1862. The Irish Timespaid a preview visit to the hall on Tuesday when the "finishing touches" to the £8.5 million (€9.5 million) refurbishment were being applied. Such was the debris, dust, noise and nerviness, it looked as if there was an awful lot of "finishing" to be done.
A “near miss” when something heavy fell from the ceiling on Tuesday morning, nearly crowning one of the workers, didn’t help the edgy mood. Even the Ulster Orchestra was banned from rehearsals there on Thursday. It was as if the building and everyone associated with the project was suffering a form of first-night stagefright.
But the Ulster Hall was always a frantic sort of a place. Randolph Churchill and Carson railed against the evils of Home Rule within its walls to appreciative unionist audiences. It was there in 1886 that Randolph Churchill first played the “Orange Card” in challenging Gladstone on Home Rule, explains Eamon Phoenix.
“Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right,” said Churchill, warning also of “thieves in the night” that would come to argue for such political change. Such a “thief in the night”, as he was locally and ironically described at the time, arrived in Belfast in 1912 in the form of Randolph’s own son, Winston, who put the case for Home Rule. He was banned from the hall and had to make his arguments in Celtic Park in west Belfast, before a loyalist mob ran him and his beautiful wife Clementine out of the city.
The Ulster Unionist Council, ruling body of the Ulster Unionist Party, held its first meeting there in 1905. It was in the hall in January 1974 that the then UUP leader Brian Faulkner probably realised in his gut that the first Sunningdale powersharing executive was doomed, after the Council rejected the agreement by 427 votes to 374, a vote that also precipitated his resignation as party leader.
But the Ulster Hall first and foremost was a place of entertainment, a building with wonderful acoustics, which in June will become the official home and headquarters of the Ulster Orchestra, which has played many wonderful concerts there.
Most of the big rock bands of the past five decades have performed there too, including The Rolling Stones.
They played in 1964, backed by The Witnesses led by local man Harry "Trixie" Hamilton. Here's a contemporaneous report from the Belfast Telegraph(confirmed by Hamilton): "The fans were fainting like nine-pins. They were screaming, hysterical and some of them troublesome. Some had to be strapped to stretchers. And were they the riff-raff of Ulster teenage society? Not at all. They were well brought up grammar school girls – nearly 100 fainted during the madhouse performance."
Those same lively grammar school girls probably prompted the beautiful open metal balustrade around the balcony of the hall to be boarded up not long after the visit of Mick and the boys. As Stelfox explains, the city fathers of the 1960s were worried that Belfast men would be corrupted by the sight of young women above them in their fashionable mini skirts. Happily, the balustrade has been restored in replica form.
Belfast's Van Morrison, of course, played the venue, while Led Zeppelin premiered their most famous song, Stairway to Heavenin the Ulster Hall. In the worst of times, the late Rory Gallagher never let his supporters down, appearing for his annual bluesy Christmas/New Year gig. Gallagher loved the place, describing a particular 1973 concert as one of his favourites: "There was a lot of trouble out on the streets, but the atmosphere inside was electric, it was a real we-shall-overcome kinda night . . . there was something really special about the crowd in Belfast that night."
SO WHAT WOULD Lord Carson have thought of the new-look hall. Well, for a start he would say its most startling feature is that it is bright, elegant and cheerful. And that’s a huge change because it’s a fair guess that there’s no one alive that would have used such a description for what was a dark, sombre and somewhat dowdy Dame, as Dawson Stelfox agrees.
“It’s always been very heavily painted, the windows closed off at either side with big heavy curtains,” he explains. “That gave off this very gloomy feel to the building. We have transformed that; it’s much lighter and brighter with the re-opening of the windows and lights that are reproductions of the first electric lights in the building back in 1903. Before that it was lit by gas.”
The Ulster Hall was designed by Newry architect WJ Barre, who was also responsible for the Albert Clock. among other buildings in the city. Work started 150 years ago in 1859, and was completed three years later. It was built privately as a music hall, and bought by the then wealthy Belfast City Corporation in 1902 for £13,500.
Stelfox, in attempting to be faithful to Barre’s original concept – which also had a light and airy feel – had for inspiration a “very fine” original drawing by Barre, or by one of his colleagues, of how he envisaged the hall.
One of the main features of the hall are seven large romantic pastoral scenes painted by Nathaniel Clements. Twelve paintings by Joseph Carey – large-scale canvases originally commissioned in 1902 and dealing with the history and mythology of the Belfast region – have been carefully restored and are on display in a dedicated new gallery space. An interpretative display tells the history of the hall.
It’s all pretty impressive and part of the continuing work on improving the face of Belfast. Other major refurbishments due for unveiling this year include Belfast City Council, the Ulster Museum and St Malachy’s Catholic Church.
Stelfox, who has been involved in much of this restorative work, can feel justly proud that he and his team have succeeded in their dual aim, “to restore as much as possible the original character, ambience and quality of the Ulster Hall, and to take it right up to date in terms of facilities, making it fit for the 21st century”.
