Chapter 4: Town and Country Living

What would you do for twenty-five pence?

Andy Duffield may have been awarded only half a crown when he became the Musgrave Yard’s ‘apprentice of the year’ at the age of thirteen but an indication of its worth can be better understood by a recognition of the average wage of the time.

When he married Sarah (Sadie) McQuoid seven year’s later in 1920 in Sinclair Seamen’s Church she was earning the same two-and-sixpence a week as a stitcher of ladies blouses with the firm of Watson, Malcolmson & Co of Templemore Avenue where she had worked ‘as an obliging girl’ for seven and a half years.

Sadie was one of seven siblings of Samuel and Sarah Donaldson McQuoid of 81 Willowfield Street, Castlereagh Road whose lives typified a work ethic and working class strength that determined the betterment – sometimes the survival, of a generation.

Samuel (an assistant pawnbroker and sometime a member of the distribution staff in the Belfast office of the Daily Express) was a genial and gentle grandfather to the many sons and daughter of his hardworking family.

Mary (Minnie), the eldest, at 27 married a widower, William Bell, an energetic owner of a family grocery shop at the corner of Cherryville Street and Woodstock Road and gave him Leslie and Muriel to add to his existing family of Florrie, Cecil, Stanley, Ossie, and Maurice, who was killed in Italy in 1944 serving with the Royal
Inniskilling Fusiliers, on the way to Monticasino

It was to be the largest family of this generation of the family.

David, an insurance company representative, married Agnes (Aggie) and lived at Ballyregan Road, Dundonald, where sons Lindsay (who became a Methodist minister) and Noel (who followed in his father’s footsteps into the financial services industry and, now retired, lives in Holywood with his wife, Joan.)

Ben, a very handsome son, joined the army and, unusual for a working class boy, became a captain later serving in the Palestine Police. He married Lily during a colourful career and later settled with her in Oakland Avenue, Upper Newtownards Road with their daughter Pearl.

Sadie, as we know, married Andy and had a family of five comprising Dorothy (Doris), Cecil, Lavinia (Lily), Samuel (Gordon) and Ronald.

Meg (also known as Peggy), a beautiful girl, met Jim Lemon, an engineer, who joined the early brain drain to the USA and gained high office in Detroit’s motor industry. Peggy followed and upon marriage, was mother to three children, Sarah, Emily and Jim.

Sam entered the drapery trade and he and his wife, Vi, were undoubtedly the most fashion conscious members of the family with a family of three, Vera, Ian, and Maureen.

John, the youngest of the family was its business success operating, with the support of his wife, Lily, a small estate agency in an upper floor of Royal Avenue, opposite the Belfast Telegraph, which because one of the largest family-run residential agencies in the City.

The business passed down to the two younger sons, John and Alastair, while the eldest, Denis, who had been short listed for training as a RAF pilot, trained as a commercial pilot and joined British Airways and became a flight captain before becoming a trainer.

Life in Willowfield Street must have been as crowded for the McQuoid family as it was for that of the eight siblings of Bickerstaffs in Ballinderry.

The Belfast home enjoyed the proximity of shops and the camaraderie of the street as well as gas-lighting in the thoroughfares and inside the home.

Can this have made up for a family of nine living in a terrace house with three cramped bedrooms and an outside ‘loo’ in a whitewashed yard?

One wonders how much Belfast gas could be bought for half-a-crown in those days.

Would the wood-stove fire of the countryside have been preferable?