WITH the recent echoes of Auld Lang Syne still ringing in our ears, Roamer’s first column in 2013 celebrates the New Year with a short account of a garden party held over a century ago in a busy and burgeoning Belfast - a city then entering an exciting new era.
The story contains references to themes that are regularly mentioned on this page - schooldays, ships, and noteworthy folk from days of yore.
“I visited Bloomfield Collegiate School on December 19,” Belfast reader Lily Foster told me.
She was with a party from the Towell House residential home on the Kings Road, on a tour of the school, and she noticed an old black and white photograph of Bloomfield Collegiate pupils at a garden party in the grounds of Clonaver house in Strandtown on July 7, 1911. Roamer hopes that some readers will share more history about the house, and about some of the forgotten faces in the photo.
“I find it hard to believe that the photograph was taken before I was born in 1924,” Lily explained.
In 1911 Belfast was poised on the cusp of maritime history, and amongst the group of happy party-goers there is probably one of the forgotten instigators of the city’s unmatched industrial legacy. The Bloomfield pupils and teachers were invited to the event by Mr and Mrs AA Hofman (apparently spelt with one ‘f’) and according to the caption on the photograph: “Mr Hofman came from Sliedrecht in Holland to do valuable work on the dredging and deepening of the Victoria Channel which, together with the completion of the Thompson Dock, was necessitated by the size of the Olympic and the Titanic.”
The man generally applauded for this pivotal task in Belfast’s industrial history was the Irish road and railway engineer William Dargan whose ‘first cut’ to straighten and deepen the Lagan was completed in January 1841. Dargan’s dredgings were used to construct Queen’s Island, originally called Dargan’s Island. But Mr AA Hofman’s part in the immense undertaking has, to the best of my knowledge, never been recorded. Is he in Lily Foster’s photograph - perhaps he’s one of the two gentlemen in the second row - and what did his ‘valuable work’ on the Lagan entail?
He is yet another name on the list of important ‘imported’ influences on Belfast’s nautical history, like the Scottish Ritchies who more or less started the ball rolling in the 1700s; or H&W boss and entrepreneur Viscount Pirrie, who was born in Quebec in 1847; or Wolff himself, born in Hamburg in 1834; or Belfast Harbour Engineer George Smith, born in England in 1792.
Whatever else we might learn from readers about AA Hofman via the address at the bottom of the page - the News Letter also had a part to play in his garden party. Clonaver house in Strandtown apparently belonged to the then proprietors of this historic newspaper.
