Fennell-Stelfox Memorial

The Department's description

Exterior description and setting

Gothic Revival style memorial dating from 1876 probably by James Stelfox commemorating the Fennel and Stelfox families and located in the Belfast City Cemetery.

Two marble memorial plaques incorporated in a sandstone pointed arch memorial with elaborate open tracery to top. Column to centre with roses carved into the capital and a triple cluster column to each end. The names of the families are engraved on the splayed sandstone base set on a plain sandstone plinth.

The grass plot is marked by square plan sandstone piers with squat pyramidal coping stones.

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.

The Fennell – Stelfox monument commemorates two families buried side by side in Belfast City Cemetery. The connection is through a third family – that of Macilwaine. In 1869, Jane (familiarly known as Jennie) Macilwaine, daughter of Rev. William Macilwaine, rector of St George’s Church in Belfast, married James Stelfox, a gas engineer. The following year Jane’s sister Mary married John George Fennell, son of Robert Fennell, who appears to have had County Tipperary associations. Both marriages took place in St John’s Church, Malone.

The Fennell-Stelfox monument is in the form of a tall pointed Gothic arch of sandstone, the upper section of which is filled with elaborate tracery, while the lower section contains two memorial marble plaques separated by a central column. The plaque on the left commemorates members of the Fennell family, and that on the right the Stelfox family.

There is a certain poignancy about the first entry on each of the memorial plaques. George Frederick Fennell died on 16 December 1876 aged 5; the very next day his cousin Jennie Stelfox died aged 2. One can imagine two closely-related families united in grief and jointly acquiring, first of all, adjoining burial place in City Cemetery, and then having a single monument erected.

James Stelfox was born in Salford, Lancashire, in 1842 and ten years later moved to Belfast after his father, also James, was appointed manager of the Belfast Gasworks. In 1875, he succeeded his father as manager, holding this position for around 30 years before retiring. He was responsible for some very fine architecture at the Gasworks site prompting Brett (p. 60) to describe him as a man ‘who combined ‘a deep love for classical architecture with a technical talent for up-to-date methods and materials’. He died on 11 September 1910. The family resided at Oakleigh in Ormeau Park, Belfast. His wife Jane had died nine years earlier on 27 September 1901.

James Stelfox’s son Arthur Wilson Stelfox, born in 1883, studied architecture under William John Fennell (whose connection to the other Fennells has not been determined) and established an independent practice in Belfast before moving to Dublin. He was better known as a naturalist and entomologist (his father had also been a member of Belfast Naturalists’ Field Club) and for his contribution to these disciplines he merits an entry in the Dictionary of Irish Biography. He died in 1972 and was buried in the family plot in Belfast City Cemetery.

John George Fennell died at the age of 40 on 27 July 1885 at the Muckross Hotel in Killarney, presumably while on holiday. His wife Mary died in 1932 aged 85. Of their children, William Bertram Fennell studied architecture and established a partnership with John Charles Lepper in 1899, though later gave this up to become a motor engineer. However, on the City Cemetery burial register his occupation is given as architect.

References

Public Record Office of Northern Ireland
Belfast Corporation records: Minute Books of the [City] Cemetery Committee, 1867-87 – LA/7/11/AB/2
Volume containing a history of the Stelfox family, compiled by Jennie Stelfox, 1901 – D2877/1/1A

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

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

Published sources
Belfast Newsletter, 9 July 1856
C.E.B. Brett, The Buildings of Belfast (Belfast, 1967)
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)
1901 and 1911 census returns: www.census.nationalarchives.ie

Criteria for listing: architectural interest

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

Criteria for listing: historic interest

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

Evaluation

The Fennell-Stelfox monument, located in the Belfast City cemetery, dating from 1876 is in the form of a tall pointed Gothic arch of sandstone, the upper section of which is filled with elaborate tracery, while the lower section contains two memorial marble plaques separated by a central column. The plaque on the left commemorates members of the Fennell family, and that on the right the Stelfox family. As a fine memorial it has architectural and historical interest in its own right but also has group value with the other listed memorials in the cemetery.