While day-to-day life for the McQuoids and Duffields of East Belfast and their country cousins in County Antrim was dominated by the frustrations of rationing and blackout suffered by the remainder of the United Kingdom there were special moments when the war broke through.
Andy Duffield and his eldest son, Cecil, served in the shipyard and his two daughters, Dorothy (Doris) and Lavinia (Lily), exchanged their jobs in retailing (Adlestones and Sinclair’s of Royal Avenue) to aid the war effort in Heaton Tabb’s and Shorts.
On the evening of Easter Tuesday, 15 April 1941, 180 German bombers attacked Belfast and continued for several hours, dropping a total of 203 metric tons of bombs and 800 firebomb canisters on the city.
It was thought that the ship and aircraft yards were the target.
Over a thousand people across the City were killed.
No city, save London, suffered more loss of life in one night's raid on the United Kingdom. The Germans returned on the night of 4-5 May and inflicted devastating damage on the city's industries, but the loss of life was less than before since so many citizens had fled to the countryside. (Sir Wilfred Spender estimated that 100,000 people had left the city before the second raid, and this figure rose to 220,000 by the end of May 1941.)
The Belfast raid did not kill any of the two families but it increased the fear of working in the area and individual members remember clearly the sight of the City ablaze and the tens of thousands fleeing to the countryside along Castlereagh Road. The Duffields could not join them because it was essential for the wage-earners to get to work in the ‘yard’ the following and subsequent mornings.
Younger members, like Samuel (Gordon), remember how his father – a consummate craftsman – led the building of an underground air aid shelter in the back garden. So solid and deep was it in its construction that no subsequent owners were able to demolish it and it exists to this day.
It was others of the McQuoid family who suffered more grievously. Minnie’s youngest stepson, Maurice, had joined up early in the war and was serving in Italy when the battle of Cassino took place. It, was according to one observer. ‘The most gruelling, the most harrowing, and tragic, of any phase of the war in Italy.’ It would take four assaults of the mountaintop monastery and cost 100,000 lives to finish the task of demolition which bombers had begun. Maurice was one of them.
Hitler took its toll in other ways.
Because of the burden of long hours and hard work Andy saw little of his younger children during the wartime years and even at week-ends was occupied at working in growing vegetables and ‘building the shelter.’
His health suffered abominably from a range of diseases and conditions including stomach ulcers, hypertension (for which he underwent an early and experimental cutting of the sympathetic nerve in his back) and emphysema. He died of a tumour of the brain at the age of 59.
One of the saddest features of his later life was the death of his mother, Lavinia, one of the early Bickerstaff sisters. She had remarried after an early divorce and upon the death of her second husband, had returned from Scotland to Northern Ireland as ‘Grandma Shaw’.
The visits of this tall, elegant matriarch to Ormonde Gardens were frequent during which at mealtimes she would often ‘tell the leaves’ from spent tea cups. In one session she told how she would die from being overtaken by a ‘dark, silent shape’ for which no explanation was given.
During her evening visits when she would keep Sadie company she always would await the return of her son from the shipyard to accompany her across the blacked out Castlereagh Road to the number 22 trolley bus. On this occasion, because of the obvious tiredness of Andy she insisted on walking from the house alone. Crossing the main road she failed to notice the ‘dark, silent shape’ which overtook her.
