Phillips Memorial

The Department's description

Exterior description and setting

Gothic revival style memorial of limestone and Carrera marble dating from c.1883 by Cork based architect James John Phillips commemorating the Phillips family and located in the Belfast City cemetery.

Hexagonal plan base of gray limestone engraved with inscriptions and trefoil plaques on a projecting granite plinth. Carrera marble band above the base with an embossed inscription from Thessalonians 4:14 ‘For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him’. The base supports a tall pinnacle of gray limestone decorated with flower and fruit carvings. Square plan Carrera marble obelisk with carved gablets to each face and a Carrera marble decorated style cross to top.

A later modest granite gravestone to rear facing west with the name ‘Phillips’ engraved.

The graveled plot is enclosed by low coved coping stones and square piers with squat pyramidal tops.

Historical information

In the course of the nineteenth century Belfast expanded at a phenomenal rate. As Belfast’s population rose, there was increasing pressure on its existing burial grounds, exacerbated by outbreaks of cholera and the Great Famine. Both Shankill graveyard and Friar’s Bush graveyard were becoming overcrowded, the while the New Burying Ground, Clifton Street, was also filling up. The opening of a new Presbyterian cemetery at Balmoral only partly alleviated the situation.

Responding to this situation, in the autumn of 1865 Belfast Corporation decided to accept Thomas Sinclair’s offer of 101 acres on the Falls Road for municipal purposes. The purchase of the site was completed in December of that year for £12,000 with an annual ground rent of £73 5s. 4d. Of this site, 45 acres would be used as a cemetery, with most of the remainder being given over to what would become Falls Park. On 25 January 1867 the Cemetery Committee of Belfast Corporation awarded the contract to design the new cemetery to William Gay of Bradford.

At an advanced stage in the laying out of the cemetery there arose a dispute between Dr Patrick Dorrian, Catholic bishop of Down and Connor, over the ground reserved for the burial of Catholics. No satisfactory settlement could be reached with regard to the Catholic portion of the Corporation’s new cemetery and as a result a new Catholic cemetery – Milltown – was opened a short distance away on the opposite side of the Falls Road in November 1869. ‘The Belfast Cemetery’, as the name had been agreed on 29 September 1868, opened on 1 August 1869, with the first burials taking place there three days later.

Described by Larmour (p. 40) as ‘eye-catching’ this monument in the Late Gothic style commemorates the Phillips family. The minute books of the Cemetery Committee reveal that on 12 June 1883 the design for the memorial was approved. It was designed by James John Phillips, an architect and draughtsman from Cork who had moved to Belfast by the 1870s and became involved with the Belfast Architectural Association. There is a suggestion that he may have worked in the office of John Lanyon. His antiquarian interests are revealed by the publication of his drawings, some of them in the Irish Builder, of a number of historic monuments, such as Grey Abbey, County Down. From the mid 1880s to the early 1900s he was ‘the preferred – perhaps even the official – architect of the Methodist church in the north of Ireland’ (Dictionary of Irish Architects). His son, James St John Phillips, who had trained professionally as an architect, began working with him around 1896. James John Phillips died on 7 January 1934 in his 94th year; his son James had died on the previous 17 July.

References

Public Record Office of Northern Ireland
Belfast Corporation records: Minute Book of the [City] Cemetery Committee, 1867-87 – LA/7/11/AB/2

Northern Ireland Environment Agency
First Survey Record – HB/26/25/001
HB Records – HB/26/25/001I

Ulster Historical Foundation
Card index of gravestone inscriptions in Belfast City Cemetery
Birth, marriage and death databases

Published sources
Paul Larmour, Belfast: an illustrated architectural guide (Belfast, 1987)
Tom Hartley, Written in Stone: The History of Belfast City Cemetery (Belfast, 2006)

Online sources
Natural Stone Database: www.stonedatabase.com
Dictionary of Irish Architects: www.dia.ie

Criteria for listing: architectural interest

A. Style
B. Proportion
C. Ornamentation
J. Setting
K. Group value

Criteria for listing: historic interest

R. Age
S. Authenticity
U. Historic Associations
V. Authorship
X. Local Interest

Evaluation

Located in the Belfast City cemetery, and described by Larmour as ‘eye-catching’, this prominent monument in the Late Gothic style commemorates the Phillips family. Designed by Cork based architect James John Phillips it dates from c.1883, and consists of a tall, elaboratively carved limestone pinnacle with a decorated Carrera marble cross. It has group value with the other listed memorials in this cemetery.