Roamer: New church’s trials and tribulations while setting up in Ulster
During last year’s D-Day 80th anniversary this page focused briefly on Lisburn-born sculptor David Williams-Ellis’s commemorative memorial at Normandy depicting three soldiers going into battle.
A reference was also made to the sculptor’s famous Great Uncle - Sir Bertram Clough Williams-Ellis (1883-1978) - Welsh architect and creator of the enchanting Italianate village of Portmeirion in North Wales and designer of Belfast’s Christian Science Church in University Avenue.
Sir Bertram also designed buildings in Cushendun, including the substantial Glenmona House, and a school in Bushmills.
His Belfast Christian Science Church changed ownership in 2013 but an old commemorative booklet printed for the building’s dedication in 1944 makes intriguing reading.
Entitled ‘Historical Sketch of First Church of Christ, Scientist, Belfast’ (only the ‘mother’ Church in Boston founded by Mary Baker Eddy uses the definite article ‘the’) the booklet’s front cover bears a fine ink and watercolour painting of the building, with more photos and illustrations of the church inside.
After listing details of its early meetings, members and venues the anonymously-written booklet states that the establishment of the new Belfast congregation was “not without its stormy passages”!
The University Avenue premises was built in three phases - a school in 1923, an adjacent house in 1928 and the church itself in 1936-37; presumably WWII held up the dedication until the 30th of January 1944.
The reference to the congregation’s “stormy passages” was something of an understatement as it’s followed by details of their public lectures becoming “notorious, so much so that accounts even reached the American press.”
Ireland’s newspapers carried reports too, and more about those in a moment, but let’s begin at the beginning.
First Church of Christ, Scientist, Belfast, was established in 1904 at various city centre addresses including Royal Avenue, Great Victoria Street and Lombard Street before locating to University Avenue in 1923.
The Church and Sunday School, with distinctive white walls, arches, windows and cloisters, set in a beautiful garden, became landmarks in the University area.
They were, and still are, listed buildings.
According to the booklet the “stormy” opposition came mainly from “medical and divinity students.”
Though church members didn’t ask “the city authorities in those days invariably sent police protection” to their public meetings and lectures.
After the students succeeded in preventing two lectures from being held “it was then thought advisable” to use smaller premises, with admission by ticket only.
This worked for a time until “a party of students, about 40 in number, who had been refused admittance to our lectures, visited a Wednesday evening meeting, presumably with the intention of breaking it up. This they found themselves unable to do. While the meeting was decidedly unusual, nevertheless it was held in spite of some interruptions, and a very happy and friendly relationship was established; so friendly, indeed, was the atmosphere that when the students asked if they might come to our next lecture, the request was granted and the doors of the lecture hall were open to all.”
However, an additional consignment of students who hadn’t attended the previous meetings “took advantage of this invitation, with the result that about 150 students were present at the back of the hall, most of them bent on making trouble.”
But church members were well prepared “and after about 20 minutes during which the students attempted to argue with the lecturer…an officer and four policemen made their appearance on the platform, the students made a rapid retreat from the hall, the lecture was then given in peace and no further trouble was experienced.”
Printed in 1944, the booklet ends its account of public opposition - “today lecturers sometimes comment on the noticeably harmonious atmosphere at our lectures, notwithstanding the fact that approximately two-thirds of our audience are composed of non-scientists.”
Some of the American church’s leading speakers came to Belfast in those early days, including Judge William Gillespie Ewing in 1903, who’d been a close family friend of USA President Abraham Lincoln.
An academic study written in 1991 collating the problems faced by early Christian Scientists across Britain and Ireland cites a report in the Irish Independent of November 7 1907 about a Belfast meeting led by Ira O. Knapp, one of the American Church’s first four directors.
Trouble was brewing in the venue but “the handling by the combined efforts of the Christian Scientists and the police, succeeded in subduing the clamour and no more violence was recorded after this date in Belfast.”