WE’VE all experienced more than a few of life’s defining moments.
These can be happy times, such as opening the front door of your first new house; or the introductory chords of the Wedding March on a church organ; or hearing the first cry of a new-born baby.
Defining moments can be sad too, as in illness or bereavement, or other physical or emotional hurdles that can be difficult to clear.
Whatever the cause or circumstance, a defining moment always spells change. No one noticed except the seagulls, but on Tuesday there was a poignant defining moment on the River Lagan when a Royal Navy inflatable three-man boat (known as a ‘rib’) was launched. The little rib went into the water almost exactly a decade after Belfast’s last ship, the Anvil Point, sailed away in March 2003. Old shipyard men claim that the Lagan’s seagulls are the spirits of long-departed shipyard workers watching over the river where they sweated and toiled. But the Royal Navy inflatable wasn’t launched anywhere near Queen’s Island, where hundreds of thousands of men built many thousands of vessels over a period of three or four hundred years. Nor was it launched by the biggest yard of them all - Harland and Wolff - once known as ‘Shipbuilder to the World.’ The seagulls had to fly upriver to observe the tiny two-engine inflatable entering the river from a City Council leisure facility near Central Station. Why? Because there are no longer any functional slipways in Belfast. On Tuesday, almost 140 years ago in 1875, the gulls watched one of a dozen of J.P. Corry’s famous Star Fleet ships slipping into the Lagan. She was the H&W-built, 2,000-ton, fully rigged Star of Russia, the newest addition to Corry’s Star Fleet which was the envy of the maritime world.
The following year, seagulls flying over Workman Clark’s ‘wee’ yard observed the 6,000-ton cargo vessel Lossiebank slide into the river on February 12, 1876, and on the same date in 1941 and 1945 consecutively H&W’s 1,000-ton Flower-Class Corvette and a 5,000-ton naval landing ship were launched.
The 80-crew Royal Navy Corvette HMS Aster was one of 34 of her class built in Belfast, personally commissioned by Winston Churchill. The Lagan ‘Flowers’ were famous for their heroic duties escorting vital Allied Atlantic convoys during WWII. So it was surely a defining moment for Belfast, and a confirmation that the city has moved irreversibly onwards, that on Tuesday past a small inflatable three-man Royal Navy craft couldn’t avail of a slipway where the world’s biggest and best vessels once flocked into the Lagan. The seagulls needed only to glance sideways towards H&W’s vast wind-turbine construction units and the city’s countless new buildings and soaring sky scrapers to see that olden times have slipped away for ever.