College Green House

The Department's description

Exterior description and setting

Corner house at end of College Green terrace, with elevations to it and to Botanic Avenue; three storeys of red brick on stone plinth with cream sandstone trims, roughly cubical in shape with hipped slate roof. When it was built in 1870 it was part of the development including nos.2 and 4 College Green, with which it shares many architectural details, but its entrance was from Botanic Avenue. That elevation remains fairly intact, but the College Green elevation was unsympathetically altered in the course of flat conversion in the 1930s.

Botanic Avenue elevation: Asymmetrical three-storey three-bay elevation on stone plinth with several stone bands, and moulded string courses at first floor cill level and shoulders of first and second floor windows. Ground floor with paired round-headed windows in the outer bays and central doorcase, all with sandstone trims and with the doorcase set forward of the elevation. Shouldered gable to doorcase carried on round columns with free Corinthian capitals; with central carved rosette and quatrefoils at sides, and dogtooth ornament round recessed door ope. Traces of painted lettering reading ÒCOLLEGIATE SCHOOLÓ can be seen over two of the ground floor windows. First floor windows seg-mental-headed with stone heads paired under hood mouldings; opes chamfered at sides and head. Second floor windows take the form of aediculed dormers with gabled heads with rosettes, set forward of the wall on stone columns and breaking through the eaves. Double-hung sash windows throughout. Projecting eaves set on ornamental corbels on small moulded string course. Cast iron ogee gutter survives in part of eaves.
Single bay brick extension built c.1930 against the LH end of the building and rising full height.

College Green elevation: Asymmetrical three-storey elevation, originally with similar details to the Botanic Avenue one, but with canted ground floor bay on left and central round-headed doorcase. Bay has stone mullions with palmate capitals and ornamental corbel under gutter; slate roof with lead ridges. Modern horizontal mullioned casement windows inserted at first and second floors and original opes bricked up. String courses at first floor level and cornice at eaves match neighbouring houses in College Green. It would originally have had stone dormers.

Rear elevation: Partly altered three-storey brick elevation with small three-storey return on Botanic Avenue corner and small single storey return at LH (the latter replacing original scullery return). Original windows generally double-hung sash (plain or horizontally divided), but central first floor staircase landing window has margined panes, and there is a later mullioned window above it.

Roof: Bangor blue slates, hipped, with ?lead ridges and central flat portion. Truncated brick chimney to College green elevation. Two stone-corbelled brick chimneys on Botanic elevation, matching similar chimney at junction with 2 College Green.

Site: Dwarf brick wall exists around two sides of the building, with chamfered stone coping and bases for pillars at intervals; railings now missing. At the rear are the coach house and stables for this house and nos.2 and 4 (see below).

Coach house: Tall single-storey red-brick building with gable to Botanic Avenue. Stone trim and kneelers to gable, and circular stone blind oculus in gable, with wrought iron finial. Later sheeted double doors. Sides to mews lane and yard are of older brick. Double door inserted asymmetrically into back gable (facing yard) in place of former WC and coal store. Slate roof and cast iron half round gutters.

Harness room and stables: Two storey building in old red brick, linked by matching wall to the Coach House. Windows generally on yard side, but one barred blocked up window at ground level and a sheeted first floor hoist door exist on the mews side. Several ornamental cast iron vents at first floor level on mews side.

Historical information

College Green was laid out (as part of Fitzroy Avenue) about 1866, but there is no reference to this building in the street directory for 1870. However drawings for it and 2 and 4 College Green exist in the City Hall records (and are amongst the earliest drawings in that archive). They show that the three houses were designed as an entity, with common stables, for Archibald McCollum of Skipper Street. In 1871 Archibald McCollum (who was a general broker and commission merchant) occupied the house, along with stabling and a coachhouse. In the 1877 Directory, it is referred to as Culfeightrin House.

In 1880, it had become a Church of Ireland Collegiate School, with Rev W J Butler its principal, succeeded by John Jackson. In April 1881, Culfeightrin House (house office and yard) was valued at £72-0-0. In 1890, the house was occupied by John MacCormac, physician to Belfast Institution for Nervous Diseases Paralysis and Epilepsy. He was succeeded by 1892 by John McConnell, director of Messrs Dunville & Co, who renamed the building College Green House. He remained there till his death about 1931, and his widow moved a few years later. In 1932 the street numbering changed from 76 Botanic Avenue to 106. In 1934 the house became 1 College Green and was subdivided into six flats.
The City Hall records indicate a number of changes carried out over the years, along with a number of proposals that were never executed. In particular, the original entrance is shown as from Botanic Avenue, with a fireplace in the hall and the staircase running up unusually from an alcove off the hall towards the centre of the house. There was no door to College Green at that time.
When T R Eager RIBA was converting the house into flats in 1933 for William James of Great Victoria Street, his existing drawings indicate that the staircase had already been moved to its present position parallel to Botanic Avenue, and as the entrance was still from Botanic at that time, it is possible that this was in fact the original staircase location. This plan also shows two windows in the Botanic gable of the coach-house. The original plan has neither elevations nor upper floor plans, but these clearly show the fenestration on the College Green elevation to have been a two-bay version of the Botanic Avenue side, with paired mullioned first floor windows and two paired dormers matching the central Botanic one. It also suggests that the top staircase window at the rear had a similar ope to the present one, but with a central division. In addition to the extensive changes to the College Green elevation, Eager was responsible for creating the new entrance there and reducing the size of the original parlour to allow a new hall to be formed. He also added the small three-storey extension between the house and the coach-house.
At the end of 1934, Eager submitted further plans to convert the coach-house and stables, but this was not executed. The following year there is a further application for a concrete floor over the garages, which was also not carried out. In 1944 Mr James commissioned S Galbraith of 24 Arthur Street to move the double doors from the elevation of the coach-house facing the main house into the Botanic Avenue gable, with a pair of RSJs set in concrete over the head of the new opening.
During the period when the building has been divided into flats it has been occupied by a significant number of artists and writers, many staying for short times. These have included the writer John D Stewart and Henry Lynch Robinson the architect. In 1998 an exhibition was held of work by artists who had stayed or lived in the house in recent years, numbering about fifty.

References:
Primary Sources:
1. OS map 1900
2. Drawings in Belfast City Hall bye-law records.
3. Valuation records.

Secondary Sources:
1. UAHS list for QueenÕs University area (describing nos.2 and 4 which were part of the same development).
2. Trevor Carleton, Growth of South Belfast, 1967

Additional information supplied Jan 2002

COLLEGE GREEN HOUSE, BELFAST
HISTORY AND DESCRIPTION OF THE BUILDING
Belfast City Council has bye-law and Building Control records going back to 1870, and amongst the earliest drawings in the archive is a set of ground floor plan and part sections only, for this building and the adjacent two houses as a single development of “3 dwelling houses at Botanic Avenue”, dated August 1870 and prepared for Archibald McCollum of Skipper Street by Jas F MacKinnon of 11 Arthur Street, civil engineer and architect. The ground landlord for the area was William Corry (probably related to James P Corry the timber merchant), and McCollum acquired freehold title under a Fee Farm Grant dated 8 September 1870.

According to valuation records, College Green (which was a terrace on Fitzroy Avenue until about 1893) was first laid out in 1866. Archibald McCollum, a general broker and commission merchant, appears to have been living in Lansdowne Terrace across the road until he occupied College Green House itself in 1871. At that time the house was listed as 76 Botanic Avenue, and its original entrance was on the Botanic Avenue elevation.

In the 1877 street directory the building is listed as Culfeightrin House, and it was under that name that it was noted as a Church of Ireland Collegiate School by 1880. Its principal then was Rev W J Butler, but he seems to have handed over the reins shortly after to John Jackson who is given as the occupier of the building in the 1881 valuation records and as principal in the 1884 directory. In 1877 Jackson had run a Commercial and Grammar School at 1 Caledonia Terrace, Caledonia Street, and by 1887 the school was known under that name. After over a hundred years, the letters “Collegiate School” can still be made out faintly on the stonework over the end ground floor windows on Botanic Avenue.

In 1890 the house, still known as Culfeightrin House, reverted to private occupancy, and became the home of John MacCormac, MD LRCP&S, physician to the Belfast Institution for Nervous Diseases Paralysis and Epilepsy. However he must have been renting the house as his period at College Green was not long, and the deeds do not indicate either the school or MacCormac as being owners at any time. Archibald McCollum mortgaged his title, and on 20 August 1891 it was conveyed to one John McConnell by the mortgagees in exercise of their power of sale. At the same time two sub fee farm grants disposed of the two adjoining houses into separate ownerships.

The 1892 street directory gives the occupant of “College Green House” as John McConnell, a director of Messrs Dunville & Co. He is given as a JP in 1895, and a considerable amount is known about him and his family thanks to information provided by relatives (see next section). McConnell died in March 1928, but his widow stayed on at the house till 1931. The following year the street numbering was changed to 106 Botanic Avenue.

In 1933, John McConnell’s executors sold College Green House to William Bellamy James, medical student, Annie Mary James, spinster, and Walter Joseph James, student as “tenants in common”. In 1934 they subdivided the house into six flats, entered from College Green and now listed as 1 College Green.

The division into flats was unfortunate from an architectural point of view, and meant that what had been a very substantial private dwelling went downmarket into short term tenancies and ultimately to very low value flats. However the original tenants appear to have been very genteel, and as flats were relatively uncommon in that part of Belfast at the time, they attracted interest from academics and retired professionals. In 1954 the occupants of the six flats included Rev R E Turner, a manager called J W Crothers, and two spinsters; in 1966 they included a female doctor and a female PhD, but one flat by now had a multiple occupancy. The outbuildings were used for a furniture repair business until about 1990.

During the fifties and sixties, an artistic element entered into the College Green flats, and during the 1990s it had become a centre for young artists who lived in separate flats but often acted in common. This period is also quite well documented, and a fuller description follows.

John McConnell
John McConnell, who bought College Green House from Archibald McCollum’s mortgagees in 1891, lived in the building for nearly thirty years.
His father, James McConnell (1807-1865) was a muslin manufacturer as might have been his grandfather, James McConnell (1769/70-1844), who was born at Ballynahatty (near Edenderry). Another branch of the family moved from Ballynahatty to a farm at Lisnastraine, near Lisburn. John’s brother James (1840-1926) became managing director of a large Belfast firm, W D Henderson & Sons, insurance agents &c, and lived in Derryvolgie House on the Malone Road.
John McConnell was apprenticed as a clerk to a Belfast firm in 1850; in 1866 he joined Dunville’s Distillery in Belfast, which had been founded in 1808 and was taken over in 1870 by James Craig (father of Lord Craigavon, first Prime Minister of Northern Ireland). Craig closed an associated tea business and built a modern plant at the Grosvenor Road (known as Royal Irish Distillery). He appointed John McConnell as Dunville’s agent in the US in the early 1870s: McConnell soon became a Director, and later Managing Director.
John McConnell married Margaret Neill (1856-1934) of Ballyrobin House, Killead, near Aldergrove, Co Antrim in 1878. Margaret Neill’s parents were James Orr Neill (1817-1884) and Eliza Gregory (1819-1886). In the 1830s Neill had entered the meat business in Chicago, making enough money to return to Ireland. At the time of his marriage his salary was £800 pa. In 1884 they were living in Derryvolgie Avenue, where most of their children were born.
In his private life, he was a Freemason, as is shown in a family photograph from about 1890, and no doubt he was also a Unionist. (William Matthew Hunter (1876-195?) a G.P. in Crumlin who had married his niece Mary Morrison and was to be the executor of McConnell’s will, was a member of the Ulster Volunteers in 1914 and helped transport guns in his car during the Larne gun running.) He was a generous patron of the Masonic Schools in Dublin, and the representative of Alabama to the Grand Lodge of Britain in Ireland.
His granddaughter Edna recounted a visit John made on Freemason business to the US, during which his wife admired an Aga in the house of one of the masons. On their return to Belfast, they were much embarrassed to find that an Aga was shipped to them across the Atlantic as a present from the Freemasons. The Aga stood in the kitchen in College Green House.
The family kept a car (which cost all of £150) in the coach house, and had a chauffeur named George, who had originally been a coachman. He was found at one time to be syphoning whiskey off and replacing it with water in the stables.

John McConnell and Margaret Neill had 5 children: three daughters, Elizabeth (who later changed her name to Eilis), Memi and Mabel; and two sons, Dunville and Villiers. Elizabeth and Memi spent much of their adult lives in Canada, while the boys lived mostly in the USA. The youngest daughter Mabel developed strong Irish connections, which however may have offended her father.
Mabel Washington McConnell was born on 4 July 1884, hence her middle name, and, like her sisters, attended Victoria College (the boys almost certainly attended Inst) and graduated from Queens with a BA in 1906. She and her friends (and sister Eilis) became nationalists and Irish language enthusiasts, and she was a committee member of the Gaelic League. She was also a socialist and supporter of the suffragettes. (The University area was a centre for suffragists, and many of their meetings were held in a house at the other end of College Green. James Craig’s wife was chairman of a local suffragist branch.)
After graduating she took a shorthand and typing course and briefly was secretary to the President (ie Vice Chancellor) of Queen’s University, but moved to London in 1908 to take a postgraduate teaching certificate. In 1909 she was a temporary secretary to George Bernard Shaw for several months, and in March 1911 she did secretarial work for George Moore. In London in 1910 she met Desmond FitzGerald (1888-1947), who was to become her husband.
Desmond FitzGerald was a Londoner. His father, Patrick FitzGerald, had emigrated from a small farm near Mitchelstown, Co Cork, to become a stonemason, and later a builder, in England. His mother, Mary Anne Scollard (1847-1927) from Castleisland, Co Kerry, was a seamstress and met Patrick in London; they married in 1870 and had six children, of whom Desmond (actually christened Thomas Joseph) was the youngest.
Tommy, or Desmond as he had become, had literary interests from a young age. Despite the offer of his brother William (editor of the Wide World magazine) to send him to university, he became a clerk. By 1908 he was part of a London literary group (the Tour Eiffel group) with TE Hulme, Edward Strorer, FS Flint, Florence Farr, Joseph Campbell and others. These were the English Imagists, to whom Ezra Pound was introduced by FitzGerald and Farr in 1908. He also attended the Irish Literary Society, studied Irish in classes run by the Gaelic League and was secretary to the Irish Texts Society, Some of his poems were published in 1917-18 in the New Age, and a collection, La Vie Quotidienne, was privately printed in France in 1925.
When Mabel discovered she was pregnant, she eloped with Desmond in May 1911, moving to St Jean du Doigt in Brittany where their first son was born and Desmond wrote. In April 1913 they moved to West Kerry where Desmond, along with Ernest Blythe and The O’Rahilly, became leaders of the Irish Volunteers in Dingle. The McConnells’ dismay at Mabel’s unsuitable marriage to a London Irish Catholic (not to mention the premarital pregnancy) seems to have been replaced by a pragmatic acceptance: Mabel and Desmond spent Christmas 1913 in College Green House (and had tea with James Connolly after a Republican meeting). In 1914, FitzGerald organized and drilled the Irish Volunteers in Kerry. Their second son as born in Ventry, Dingle, in March 1914.
At the outbreak of the First World War, when Dunville and probably also Villiers were fighting with the British Army, Mabel wrote to George Bernard Shaw in December 1914, trying to get him to support the nationalist movement:

I should be prepared to stake a good deal on the statement that the majority of Ireland outside of Ulster is pro-German in this war. For sentimental reasons, hatred of England and love of a brave fighter, she is necessarily on Germany’s side, and of course for the common sense reason that Germany holds the potentiality of nationhood for us; since the war started Ireland has put aside the shabby little dream of paper freedom that was all Redmond could get from England and has seen a larger vision.

Mabel kept hens, which (for some obscure reason) she fed at night-time, by the light of a lantern. Not surprisingly, the British thought she was signalling to the Germans and the FitzGeralds were forbidden to live near a port, so they moved to Bray, Co Wicklow (not considered a port). In the summer of 1915 Desmond was imprisoned for seditious speech, leaving prison just before the 1916 Rising. Both Desmond and Mabel volunteered at the GPO in Easter 1916, but Pearse sent Mabel home, unwilling to take both parents of young children. Desmond, as adjutant to the O’Rahilly, was in charge of the food supplies, and of evacuating the wounded on surrender. To his surprise he was not arrested (his English accent was always a help), and escaped home to Bray; he was arrested subsequently and given a life-sentence, commuted to 20 years. He was released in mid 1917, then re-arrested in May 1918 and spent another year in Gloucester Gaol.
Mabel orchestrated Desmond’s election campaign for the December 1918 Westminster election on the slogan, ‘Put Him In To Get Him Out.” He was duly elected, but refused to take his seat and joined the first Dail. He became Substitute Director of Publicity for the Dail, publishing a regular Bulletin to counter British propaganda, and making contact with foreign and British journalists, through his poet friend Flint. Ezra Pound was fascinated by the re-emergence of the young poet he had known a decade earlier as a revolutionary (as can be seen in his Cantos (Canto VII). The FitzGerald’s third son was born in 1920. Desmond was arrested again on 11 February 1921, but released in July and as Director of Publicity attended the London Treaty negotiations at the end of 1921. He actually brought the text of the treaty back to Dublin with one of the negotiators.
In January 1922 when attending the Celtic Race Conference in Paris as Minister for Publicity outside the Cabinet, Desmond called on James Joyce and suggested to him that his name be put forward for the Nobel Prize for Literature. Joyce later hinted at this in a part of Finnegans Wake which appeared in the periodical Transition.
Desmond favoured the Treaty and was appointed Minister for External Affairs in W T Cosgrave’s Cabinet in September 1922. Mabel’s sympathies, however, were with the Republicans. This was a painful conflict (their 8-year-old son talked of dinner tables at which the children asked their father to “pass the salt, traitor!”). In 1924 he became Minister for Defence. After the murder of Kevin O’Higgins, Mabel’s position shifted and they reconciled. At 41, Mabel was very keen to have a last child, a daughter, as a symbol of their reconciliation. In 1926 their fourth son, Garret, was born. Mabel went abroad to recuperate her health (and recover from the disappointment), and the baby was sent to her sister Memi in Bangor for several months.
On the death of John McConnell in 1928 they were able to buy a large house near Bray in which they entertained, among others, WB Yeats and TS Eliot. From 1931, Desmond was in opposition, at which time his philosophical Catholicism opened up not only journalism activities but also lecturing as a Visiting Professor of Scholastic Philosophy at Notre Dame University, Indiana. He lost his Dail seat in 1937, but was elected to the Senate in 1938 until 1943. He died of a heart attack in 1947. Mabel lived on until 1958.
Their youngest son, Garret, became an economist, and went into politics, becoming Taoiseach of the Republic of Ireland. His mother’s and grandparents’ connections with Presbyterian Belfast were an influence on his politics and although he was to sign the Anglo-Irish Treaty so strongly opposed by the Ulster Unionists, he did so in a genuine belief that it offered a chance for peace in Northern Ireland. Although he never lived in College Green House, he is aware of its connections to his family and through his niece Jennifer, who lives in Belfast, he has provided the splendid photograph of the house at the turn of the century which is a key source for the restoration of the building.

Although his photographs show a very solid citizen, John McConnell seems to have kept in touch with his scattered and temperamental children. Perhaps he was not without a more flamboyant side himself: in 1927, at the age of 82, he flew from London to Paris and back 48 hours later. Family history recounts that when he initially presented himself at London’s Croydon airport, he was refused because he was in his pyjamas, and that he was going to Paris to visit a mistress.
John McConnell died on 10 March 1928. James Craig, Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, who knew McConnell quite well through the family whiskey business, sent his condolences to his widow.
It is quite possible that James Craig would have visited College Green House. From September 1921 until Stormont was built, Northern Ireland’s Parliament met in the Presbyterian College overlooked by College Green House. Although we have no firm evidence to support the supposition, it seems very likely that at the end of the day’s business Craig may well have called on his friend McConnell. It is tempting to speculate that the Minister for External Affairs of the Irish Free State and the Northern Ireland Prime Minister may even have taken tea under the same roof, albeit perhaps on different days!

What is certain however, is that it is a house that has embraced a wide spectrum of Irish politics under its roof.

The Artists:
The other period of College Green House’s history which is documented is its period as a house with artistic connections.
This seems to go back to the tenancy of Alfred Armentiers Kitchener Arnold, MBE, who was in Flat 6 (the top flat on the corner of College Green and Botanic Avenue) by 1954. He is described in the street directories simply as a civil servant, but extramurally he was heavily involved in artistic life of Belfast, particularly ballet and the theatre. Alfred Arnold also had an unusually large collection of classical records, which was a valuable resource in the days before Radio 3, and his flat was a focus for visiting dancers and thespians. The artists George McCann and Mercy Hunter who lived in a flat further down Botanic Avenue, were regular visitors, as was the painter Dan O’Neill. Louis MacNeice is also recorded to have visited the flat. The architect Henry Lynch Robinson, who was responsible for restoring Kelly’s Cellars as well as designing many modernist buildings in the middle of the last century, is said to have lived (and died) in College Green House. More extravagant stories tell of Erroll Flynn losing his virginity in the house, and even Oscar Wilde visiting it with a male friend.

Latterly artists took over the entire house, the six flats being occupied by groups of art students, young photographers, painters and conceptual artists. Martin Wedge, James Millar, Peter Richards, Alice Maher, Phil Collins and Eoghan McTigue were just some of the artists living in the house in the 1990s.

The artist Susan Philipsz lived at College Green for six or seven years, and became so fascinated by the range of artists that had lived or stayed there that with her Grassy Knoll Productions she organised a show in May 1998, Rev Todd’s Full House, that included work by every artist she could track down that had connections with the building. (The name came from a mistaken impression that the Rev Todd Martin had occupied the house at an earlier time - he had been Professor of Christian Ethics at the Assembly’s College, and actually lived at the slightly different College House, between 26 and 28 Fitzroy Avenue).

Bill Drummond, erstwhile musician and now writer, recorded the event in his book “45”. His piece for the show was a conceptual one called Making Soup, the name of his story based on the event in which he describes arriving at the “crumbling, three storey, red brick Victorian town house” with “no central heating, nothing that could be described as a mod con [and] sacks of coal split and spilling outside the doors of the six flats,” but also of his pleasure at making soup for 42 guests and being back in “Belfast, City of Dreams”. The works in the show included a worthy attempt to tame the wilderness of bushes outside the house, titled “Cutting Hedge Art”.

The house has also been a film star, appearing in the film of Divorcing Jack made in the 1990s. At present the artist Rita Duffy has a caretaker role for the house with a working studio based in it.

Criteria for listing: architectural interest

A. Style
B. Proportion
C. Ornamentation
D. Plan Form
K. Group value

Criteria for listing: historic interest

V. Authorship
X. Local Interest
Y. Social, Cultural or Economic Importance

Evaluation

A fine example of a high Victorian building relating in period and style to the Union Theological College and the remainder of College Green.. Although inappropriately altered on one elevation, the building retains sufficient architectural and historic character to warrant listing.