We are delighted to announce our Talks Programme for 2025. Starting on 25 February and running until 11 March, we have a great line-up of researchers and speakers who will discuss a broad range of topics – from Victorian Belfast to Ulster townlands and Civil War China.
Our talks are free and in person, and take place in the museum’s historic Assembly Room. Booking is required. Doors open at 6.30pm for tea and coffee on arrival, and talks start promptly at 7pm. Please note there is no allocated seating for this event.
The programme is as follows:
25/2/2025 – ‘Life in “Linenopolis”: a social history of Victorian Belfast’, by Dr Alice Johnson
This talk focuses on the people who shaped the fastest-growing city in nineteenth-century Britain and Ireland – the place that was known as ‘Linenopolis’, ‘The Manchester of Ireland’, and ‘The Northern Athens’. Booming from the linen industry, Belfast in the 1800s has been neglected by social historians. However, this talk is based on research that has given a fresh and original insight on the history of Ulster’s capital and Irish history in general. The speaker has made a substantial contribution to British and Irish urban history by reconstructing the social and cultural world of an industrial city’s upper middle classes between the 1830s and the 1880s.
Dr Alice Johnson is Head of History at Belfast Metropolitan College and Visiting Scholar at the Institute of Irish Studies, Queen’s University Belfast. A social and cultural historian of nineteenth-century Ireland, her publication on Middle-class life in Victorian Belfast (2020) has been reviewed as ‘a significant and valuable contribution to the … historiography of the city’.
6/3/2025 – ‘Ulster townlands in the seventeenth-century sources’, by Andrew Kane
The seventeenth century was a time of diligent record keeping, which we can access today to better understand where we have come from. Fundamental to this was the ‘townland’. Lisnagarvey, Mealough, and Ballynadolly are just some local examples in the Lisburn and Castlereagh area, but what is a townland? What was their purpose? Why do they matter? This talk explores these questions by considering the use of the ancient network of Ulster townlands in government documents during the 1600s, showing how they remain relevant to us today.
Andrew Kane is a research consultant for the Ulster Historical Foundation. He is the author of the Town book of Coleraine (2016) and most recently The townland atlas of Ulster (2024), a publication mapping all 16,000 townlands in the nine counties of Ulster. Andrew is a regular speaker on local history topics and has been a contributor to several television and radio programmes at home and abroad. He is a Trustee of North of Ireland Family History Society.
11/3/2025 – ‘The Belfast Boys and the Yangtze Incident’, by Andrew Bannister and Raymond McCullough
The true story of the dramatic escape of HMS Amethyst from China in 1949, which inspired the 1957 British war film, Yangtse Incident: The Story of H.M.S. Amethyst. With civil war raging in the country, the ship had been ordered up the Yangtze River to guard the British Embassy in Nanjing. However, it came under heavy fire from communist artillery and, while attempting to evade the shelling, it ran aground. The story revolves around two of the ship’s crew. Both were from Belfast, along with six other men from Northern Ireland. Would everyone get out of China safely?
Andrew Bannister and Raymond McCullough are the sons of two of HMS Amethyst’s crew. The former published a book on the incident in 2023, while the latter has built a model of the ship.