A DRIVE THROUGH HISTORY


As a seasonal bonus in the Creative category, we bring you various excerpts from a recent book penned by Lee Henry, an author based in Belfast and is entitled “Belfast Taxi:


History, One Fare at a Time” and is based around interviews with 35 taxi drivers, young and old, male and female, Protestant and Catholic, public hire and private hire, primarily from Northern Ireland. You’ll soon see that Lee’s approach to the trade, and those whom he inter- views, is both lighthearted and empathetic. His book is published by Blackstaff Press, Northern Ireland’s leading publishing house. Check out Lee’s website leejhenry.com for more info.


THE ORIGINS OF THE TRADE


“If you’re going to talk about the carrying of people for wages or earn- ings you have to mention that it all started with the sedan-chair carriers,’” ex-driver Joe Graham insisted as we sat for his interview in a room stacked with VCR tapes, self-published pamphlets, piles of dusty documents and dog-eared books (many pilfered from libraries across the city), all relating to the history of Belfast.


He explained that in the early nineteenth century a popular method of transport would have been sedan chairs - wooden cabins, or litters, which were hung from two poles and carried by two strong-armed porters. They were suitable for a single passenger only, and were the preferred method of transport for ladies of leisure, who hired these car- riers to take them around town to avoid having their skirts muddied on the dirty streets. This was really the first bona fide form of public hire vehicle available to the citizens of Belfast, and there would have been a small army of authorised sedan-chair carriers – or ‘chairmen’ – plying for hire in the city centre.


Joe went on to draw further parallels with modern-day taxiing as he related the story of Lord Arthur Chichester and an incident with a sedan chair during a journey through Belfast’s city centre in 1836. “Lord Chichester was going through what we now call Castle Court at Castle Junction, when a bit of a riot broke out,” Joe explained. “He was scooped out of his sedan and the thing was pulled apart. Now, when I read the official account of it I immediately pictured it in a modern set up. You know, a vehicle and somebody dragged out of it and the car turned over and burned or whatever. It’s like nothing changes in histo- ry. But it was a sedan, not a black taxi. Two guys carrying it. They’d have been uniformed and all that. They’d have had their crest on the door and probably powdered wigs and three-cornered hats. That was a taxi. That was the first hijacking of a taxi in Belfast!”


SILVER CABS


As the public taxi trade flourished in the early part of the twentieth cen- tury, the formation of a private hire taxi industry in the late 1930s in Belfast was a natural progression. Ralph McMurray worked for Silver Cabs, the largest private hire firm in the city at the time. “At that time we had a huge clock outside, which you could see up and down the street and that was a favourite meeting place for people,” said Ralph. “During busy times, particularly around Christmas and January, people would come in to the waiting room to wait for a taxi home. Whether they were in rags or silks they just sat and took their time. “The only violence I ever saw was at Christmas, when everyone was drunk and wanted to get home and we hadn’t the cars to accommodate all of them. I remember we had a clerk who used to look out at them all shouting at each other and say, “Look at them: they’re celebrating the birth of Christ!” If Ralph and his crew couldn’t quieten down the punters themselves, they could always rely on others to help. Then, as now, Belfast was never short of a hard man to keep the rowdy mob in check. “Silver McKee was an infamous character, a real hard man; he was a Catholic from the Markets area and was in and out of jail all the time. He had been a cattle drover. We got to know him; obviously he used to come in to use taxis and so forth. Round about Christmas, when people were getting really rowdy, if he happened to come in he would say, ‘Sit you effin’ down there!’ and anyone that knew him did as he said.”


PAGE 30 A Drive Through BELFAST CITY AIRPORT TAXIS


Taxi depot common rooms are much the same across Belfast. No mat- ter their location, whether in a plush, purpose-built building or a single-paned, badly painted former store room above a pizzeria, there are certain conveniences that all good common rooms share in order to meet the needs of the drivers who congregate there. There is the oblig- atory tea and coffee machine, of course, which sometimes works but often could do with a service. Usually an old terrestrial television or radio sits in the corner, surrounded by battered chairs that have seen better days and wonky tables where drivers can rest their boots. Noth- ing needs to be new, just so long as it works. Flyers, notices and naughty sketches litter the walls, providing information on fund-raising initia- tives, staff dos and the perceived figures of certain drivers’ naked wives, while bikini calendars - well-thumbed and out of date - are frequently found tacked to noticeboards.


While many taxi depot common rooms hum with the chitter chatter of drivers and dispatch workers socialising during downtime, one such common room in Belfast veritably vibrates with activity. It is not the gang of drivers in attendance - all of them male - that make the place move, though they come and go with rapid frequency at certain times of the day. Rather it is the thirty-tonne, jet-propelled commercial airliners bar- relling in overhead to land at George Best Belfast City Airport, where this particular common room is located. Robert has worked at the airport for many years, and has experienced the good and the bad. “We have a three-man committee that makes decisions for the good and the welfare of the rank,’ Robert explained, ‘but there’s nothing they can do about the recession. Ninety per cent of our work was all boys in suits. There were a lot of powerful English people came over. The Celtic Tiger and all that. But the gravy train has finished. It’s sad but true. “But it’s not all bad. A high-flying businessman left his iPhone in my cab once. Well I contacted him, and you know what he did? He asked for my bank details and he said: ‘That phone is worth more than £250 to me. It has pictures and phone numbers and all sorts in it. So what I’m going to do is pay you £250 for your honesty, and wish you a very MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR!’”


DAY-TO-DAY GRAFT


Put a bunch of Belfast taxi drivers in a room together, lubricate pro- ceedings with a barrel of beer or a bucket of tea, and they won’t end up talking about bombs and bullets. Instead they talk about the peo- ple they’ve met on their travels, the crazy stories they’ve heard down the years, the frustrations they have with the powers that be (in their case the Department of the Environment, which governs the taxi trade in Northern Ireland) and where they’re going on their holidays. Taxi driving is also not for the squeamish. ‘Just before Christmas I took a boy up to Twinbook and I knew he was in a bad way,’ recalled Ron- nie. ‘I said, “Mate, see if you’re gonna be sick just tell me and I’ll stop the car and you can open the door and be sick.” Wishful thinking. “This is the way he was - picture him sitting like this - being sick into his two hands. It was running down his shirt onto his chest and onto the carpet. There were wee bits of sick on the seat and here’s me, “You eejit, I told you to tell me!” I had to get out and open the door because his hands were full of sick. These are people who either don’t like themselves or they just don’t like taxis.” For Marilyn, however, her job satisfaction comes from the subtle rewards she derives from helping those passengers most in need. “Because public hire taxibuses are now wheelchair accessible it can mean the difference between people getting out from one week to the next and maybe not getting out at all,’ she explained. ‘We help those people to have a life outside of their care homes. “Take the likes of Roy, I’ve been taxiing him for three years now. He had a stroke. He’s in a wheelchair and he’s twenty-three stone. It’d kill you pushing him up and down the ramp into the cab every Friday. He goes to speech therapy. He can’t speak, he just mumbles. But I can understand every word. No one else can. He’ll not use anyone else, only me.”


PHTM JANUARY 2014


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