Thomas and Annie Sullivan’s third son was born in her mother’s home at 71 Wall Street, off Carrick Hill, on 14 June 1877. Named for his surviving paternal uncles, Maurice and James, he was baptised at St Patrick’s, Donegall Street, three days later. James stood for him, alongside Margaret Ann McKavanagh, with Fr Crawford officiating. James lived on Brook Street, off Cullingtree Road; Margaret Ann on Ormond Street, between Ross Street and Raglan Street. Her husband, Patrick, was also a painter. A week later, Ann Barrett, a near neighbour from Woodford Street, made her mark before a deputy registrar who may have been J. O’Sullivan. Both documents record the child as Maurice James O’Sullivan.
That prefix was not, however, an inheritance from his father: Thomas did not have it in Mullingar, nor Martin in Glanmire, nor Jeremiah off Sullivan’s Quay. Neither did it pass to Maurice’s older brothers, John (1874–79) and Thomas Martin (1875–1954), nor his younger siblings: another John (1879–1950), William (1881–1956) and Minnie (1884–1965). It did not carry to the next generation. It was, in all likelihood, a clerical error. Regardless, Maurice Sullivan (1877–1947) lived his life without it. In Milltown Cemetery, the register preserves the name of his birth and baptism; his headstone records the name by which he was known.
Maurice spent his formative years in the Falls district, in the shadow of the mills that had drawn in the grandfather he never met and under the clarion call of the parish church of St Peter. It was a life structured by the working day. The factories called it to its beginning and end; carts clattered over cobbles along crowded streets of back-to-back terraces, shops and public houses; smoke from coal fires and industrial chimneys hung heavy over the Falls Road. Millies—a sometimes pejorative term for the women and girls who eked out a living at the looms—moved through the district in numbers, part of the daily passage alongside labourers, hawkers, horses and weans.
The Falls Road was not simply a route through an industrial quarter. It was a commercial and social thoroughfare, serving households whose incomes were tied, directly or indirectly, to linen. Behind it lay a densely settled Catholic population, for whom the Church supplied another rhythm: school, observance and the sacraments. Its bells signified a different, though equally inescapable, order—and one that offered a route to advancement.
Gifted, Maurice got the tap for further learning, judged worthy. It is reckoned that he first walked up the avenue of St Malachy’s College around 1887. A century later, I followed him. A path well-trodden, now into its fifth generation. Following Daniel O’Connell’s campaign for Catholic emancipation, the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829 removed many of the penal restrictions upon Catholic participation in public life. Four years later, Dr William Crolly, Bishop of Down and Connor, established the College at Vicinage House and on its adjoining farm just north of Belfast town. A Blue Plaque records that the United Irishmen Thomas McCabe (1734–1820) and his son, William Putnam McCabe (1776–1821), had previously lived there. Just as Maurice may have arrived, Eoin MacNeill (1867–1945) departed; John MacBride (1865–1916) had already passed through.
For the child of a Catholic artisan family, the opportunity went beyond mere learning or advancement. Pupils were introduced to a disciplined institutional outlook, sustained by the Church and directed towards examination, occupation and standing. It took a child like Maurice from an industrial quarter and showed him that there was more. Following Thomas into his trade, he established himself as a master painter in 1898, aged twenty-one. His father and uncles had been artisans; Maurice secured the status and independence of the master, building his reputation.
On 21 August 1898, Maurice Sullivan, bachelor, of 29 Plevna Street, walked down the aisle at St Peter’s with Isabella Letson, nineteen, spinster, of 4 Conway Street. Under “Rank or Profession of Father,” Thomas Sullivan was recorded as “Painter”; John Letson as “Dead”. Through their vows, a commitment shared.
The couple were living with Isabella’s mother when their first child, John (1899–1973), was born on 28 May 1899. He may have been named for his maternal grandfather, who had died there the previous year, aged fifty-one. Marianne Letson (née Heyburn) (1838–1915) placed a notice in the Irish News: “The remains of my beloved husband will be removed … on this day (Monday) 14th [March], at two o’clock. Friends will please accept this intimation. American and Australian papers please copy.”
By 1901, the family were living above the shop at 33 Falls Road. The Carnegie Branch Library opened a few doors up in 1908, with the Clonard Picture House opposite five years later. This was the heart of artisan west Belfast.
My grandfather, Maurice James (1901–1982), was born there on 5 May 1901. His siblings—Mary Ann (1904–1907), Thomas Vincent (1906–1990) and Henry Denis (1908–1924)—were all born there too. Around 1915, the family moved a few miles countrywards to Andersonstown. Their new home, Walmer, bore the name of the Kent castle where the Duke of Wellington had spent his later years—an inheritance from the previous occupants, Walter M. Davidson, a Scottish Presbyterian printer, his wife and their five daughters. The house survives, adjacent to Falls Bowling Club, subsumed by an expanding city.