No Place Like Home Those Were the Days

For more than half a century,

the BBC has captured the changing face of everyday life

in Northern Ireland.

It all seems so innocent today,

but without these moments,

something of who we are now would be lost forever.

These are the archives,

and those were the days.

It's completely invaluable to look back at film,

because they take us back to another time.

Hearing people talk about their lives,

that's priceless, and we should be proud of the footage we have

of our people talking about their lives.

Film in particular,

because to actually drive down the streets

when the terraced houses were coming down,

it just gives you...

It's like finding a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

In 1954,

the BBC's foremost broadcaster, Richard Dimbleby.

was dispatched from London

to journey around what was then an unknown country to many viewers.

What Dimbleby was searching for,

down our highways and byways,

was a traditional Ulster homestead.

Dimbleby himself is... I mean, fantastic.

He's like an intellectual Billy Bunter.

He's vast!

There's a fantastic shot,

as he walks down steps at Belfast Castle with Joseph Tomelty,

absolutely fantastic.

-Let's have a seat. Take the weight off your legs.

-Hmm.

Then, there's that very English,

you know, whatever you do, when you're amongst the mad Paddies,

don't mention religion,

politics,

that kind of very English deference,

not wanting to upset the natives,

which you can't quite tell whether it's sarcasm or good manners.

Joe, what do you think I ought to look for while I'm here?

Richard, that's hard for me to say. I can tell you what not to look for.

You don't need to tell me that, I know already. Religion and politics.

You just watch it and you think to yourself,

poor Mr Tomelty.

He has been told that this legend is coming across from the BBC,

and he's about to despatch him

into the heart of darkness

that is, you know, the Antrim Coast Road.

'Well, I started off in good weather.

'But I can't say that the Riviera came to my mind on the Antrim Road.'

It may not have been the Cote D'Azur,

but this coast road led Dimbleby

to an untarnished tableau of rural Ulster life.

Locals gathered round the fire

to enjoy music, share stories,

and introduce viewers to a lifestyle

free from the modern-day distractions

of television, technology,

and cosmetic dentistry.

'The sound of a fiddle

'told me where I should find the Emerson farm, and the ceilidh.'

FIDDLE MUSIC

The thing that I was really taken by were the smiles of the people.

If you look at the smiles very carefully, they keep the lips down,

and then now and again the lips slip back,

and you see why they keep the lips down.

Their teeth are terrible.

There's one man, a young, sort of 18 or 19-year-old boy.

When you look into his mouth,

it's Stonehenge that you're seeing suddenly, very frighteningly.

What about having a guess or two?

Well, give us one of yours.

All right. There's a wee white woman with a wee red nose,

and the longer she sits, the shorter she grows.

Now, who'll guess that one?

Och, sure, that's a candle. A candle.

Aye, it's a candle all right.

They're doing what people have been doing for hundreds of years.

It's only us, who now, because we've got TV and electricity,

it's only us, very recently, who've stopped living like that,

and have started living a completely different kind of life.

We invite you now to join our Northern Ireland viewers

for a further edition of our television magazine, Ulster Mirror.

Away from the rosy picture of rustic living

portrayed in Richard Dimbleby's journey

was a looming housing crisis

for most ordinary people living in Northern Ireland.

The slums that were present in our towns and cities

had remained unchanged for generations.

'Places where people live merit some attention.

'Lots of us live in houses like this,

'some of us in the Victorian this,

'and in little towns, often in this.

'All very trim, and indeed, at times picturesque,

'but what about this? It was in a country town.

'Green fields were no distance away,

'but the garbage could have been accumulated in the big city.

'The slum terraces reeked of dilapidation and neglect.

'These were the worst we could find in Ulster.'

It's important to put into context

just how bad the housing stock in Northern Ireland was.

100,000 houses, they reckoned in 1945, were required

to house the population in Northern Ireland.

Now, put in context,

they were only building 2,500 a year up until that point,

so there was a serious problem to be addressed.

They set up the Northern Ireland Housing Trust,

and they were given a quarter, 25,000 houses

they were entrusted to build.

'You see, the old houses are quite easy to knock down,

'while new houses are costly to build.

'Yet this sort of thing is happening more all over Ulster.

'This change from old standards to the new.'

New standards would mean the demolition of the old way of life.

Established neighbourhoods and much-loved street names

would vanish off the map.

However, not everyone was progressing up the housing ladder.

In the mid-1960s the BBC went to film with the families

caught between a home and a hard place.

Take one!

Take one!

All I want is a home

for my husband, myself and children,

and surely that's not too much to ask.

In all of those housing films,

you had the people themselves talking directly to camera.

That move during that period to people speaking for themselves

is very, very important.

It's come right through to the present day,

where we have almost a fetishisation of liveness.

We need to be there on the spot, at people telling us what happened.

And that was the start of it, in those films in the 1950s and '60s.

Well, there's 15 of us living in a two-bedroomed house.

My husband has to sleep on a chair-bed,

and I sleep on two chairs put together.

Two of my babies sleep with my mother and father,

and another one sleeps in a cot,

and I have no cot for the child, I'm not able to put one up.

And it sleeps in a small pram.

What's it like to live in this kind of situation?

It's terrible, indeed.

I think the real strength of some of the archive material

is seeing the actual women who were living in these houses.

I can't begin to imagine what it must have been like for those woman.

But you see a real strength in them,

you know, you see woman who made it work, somehow.

Slate 87, take three.

Unfortunately, when we look at films like this,

20-20 hindsight is a great thing. When we know what happened,

one can say, "Somebody should have seen that."

But I think that those conditions were so bad

that somebody should have seen that.

Our house would have been typical.

We had the mother and father, and then 12 children

in a one-bedroomed house.

The mother and father slept in one bed

with maybe the youngest in the house,

and in one of the other beds,

there was eight of us in the one bed,

and it was like a question of,

"Everybody turn to their right!"

And so you had to do a sort of synchronised sleeping,

as opposed to synchronised swimming.

Of course, there was a bit of swimming as well,

because when you're younger, some of us wet the bed.

Our Brian says he slept at the shallow end.

Just as the old heart of the city began to change forever,

BBC viewers were taken on a remarkable drive

through the fading backstreets of North Belfast.

A drive designed to capture the once-vibrant working class community

that was about to disappear.

MUSIC: "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" By Van Morrison

# You must leave now, take what you need

# You think will last

# But whatever you wish to keep

# You better grab it fast.

# Yonder stands your orphan with his gun... #

I thought it was fantastic to see

that somebody in the BBC had gone off at that time

and literally drove around the streets,

giving us a house-by-house, shop-by-shop, pub-by-pub

view of an era.

# And it's all over now, Baby Blue. #

Some of the shots where you're just seeing street after street,

and half-demolished little back sheds,

with maybe corrugated iron roofs,

and great swathes of a city

that were just covered in really high-density housing.

# The empty-handed painter from your streets... #

When you look back on it now,

it's like a packed, dense kaleidoscope of life,

because everybody else's life was being lived on top of yours.

You know, that kind of, like, intensified form of living,

it led to a lot of advantages and a lot of disadvantages,

but I must say, I look back on it fondly.

There was a great spirit in those little terraced streets,

and there had to be, because the people were...

I mean, people talk about poverty now.

Poverty now is nothing to what people were living in then.

People were living on nothing.

MUSIC: "Dead End Street" By the Kinks

A new way of life would rise from the rubble.

High-rise flats and large-scale housing estates

would completely transform the urban landscape of Northern Ireland.

Home would have a new name in the modern world.

# What are we living for?

# Two-roomed apartment on the second floor... #

I can remember the first talk in the house around 1960.

I heard them talking about a new house, and Rathcoole was mentioned.

It was just a big notion for you.

They could have been saying, "Los Angeles."

And then, Turf Lodge was mentioned.

Ballymurphy was mentioned.

Divis Flats was mentioned.

All these locations.

My ma was particularly pushing my father to get somewhere new,

and I think that's probably how we ended up in Turf Lodge.

I think moving from a terrace of back-to-back housing,

to move to somewhere where

there were parks, trees, playing fields

must have been an extraordinary journey for these people.

The trouble was,

there was a street where maybe people had lived for 100 years,

then all of a sudden, you're moving them into a social programme,

they're getting a new house,

their neighbours might be three streets away,

or maybe the neighbours never came.

Broadly speaking, I think they made a real hames of it

in the way they built Rathcoole,

Turf Lodge, Taughmonagh,

and they just split up the inner-city districts

and dispersed people off everywhere.

Looking back on it now, there isn't any reason why

they couldn't have had a phased development,

where they knocked the houses down in one section

and got the people back in round the corner,

kept the same neighbours, broadly speaking,

kept the sense of identity.

Ten years earlier,

at the beginning of this great change,

the BBC captured the optimism of a generation,

who were told they had never had it so good.

Rathcoole, just outside Belfast,

was a mega housing estate

and at one time the biggest in Europe.

It had been designed to solve the city's housing problem

and offer young families a completely new start.

Rathcoole to me was just a name,

but when we came to Rathcoole

it was one of those things

that you said to yourself,

"This is where I want to live."

It was just a world of green,

houses right up the drive,

gardens in front of every house.

MUSIC: "Let The Good Times Roll" By Shirley and Lee

Having your own space outside the house was lovely for me.

We'd never had a garden.

It was great fun learning, of course what to put in them,

and how they would grow.

And at first it was just houses,

and then at the end of the houses

would be another bigger house made into two flats.

That was The Flats.

And then I think there was the flats built, as you see in the film,

on a curve, and they were known locally as the Banana Flats.

I was reared in a house with a yard out the back,

and the toilet was out there.

Getting the house in Rathcoole,

with an indoor toilet, and a bath, was luxury.

To be able to go up and turn the hot water on, have a bath,

close the door and have such privacy, it was brilliant.

It was privacy, it was luxury,

there was never anybody rapping the door to get in to go to the loo,

and all sorts of things,

but the bathroom was the one big luxury, I think,

it was the thing that I appreciated.

The bathroom and then the garden, I think in that order.

BBC PRESENTER: 'We chose to visit the Long family in Rathcoole Drive,

'to go around with them a bit and see through their eyes

'something of what it's like to live on a Housing Trust estate.'

Well, that's the way children were in those days.

They had their wee coats on them,

their hats, their scarves, their gloves.

You didn't go out just whatever way you wanted then.

You went out dressed.

And you had to have your gloves on,

and it was just like my mummy, seeing us out.

'Mrs Miller lives in Ardlea Crescent, in an old people's house.

'Living-room, kitchen, bedroom and bathroom.'

That family would have been the same as most families in Rathcoole.

Their children would have visited their grandmother and grandfathers,

and they would have went and visited friends.

In the house they went to visit, the ornament sitting in the window,

my mummy had one exactly the same. Exactly the same,

so it was just our home, except in a different place.

'Other small houses are cunningly fitted into corner sites,

'like this Type D flat,

'where Anne Murray, the children's friend, lives.'

When we moved in, it was a whole new area being redeveloped,

so the people all moved in together,

and we made friends,

and everybody was in the same boat. Not very much money.

And it was a community.

'And Rathcoole already has a focal point,

'in the big old Georgian house

'where the housing manager's office is to be found.'

That was a big estate at one time,

and it became a home for lots of things.

The doctor had a surgery there in one of the rooms,

and it was just used as a community centre for a while.

'Mrs Long, the children's mother, is on her way shopping.'

However, the optimism of the housing estates was short-lived.

The onset of the Troubles in the late 1960s

meant that many of the early promises

would remain just that.

But for those founding settlers who stayed and raised their families,

Rathcoole would always be home.

Well, I'm still living in the same house that I moved into,

and I've no intentions of moving out.

I still like Rathcoole.

To me, it's home now, and to me, I have my friends,

still the same friends I made 47 years ago.

I fought to stay. I saw the hard times.

I went back with the good times, and I'll probably...

I'll fall off the perch when I get there!

While most of us went about our day-to-day lives,

far removed from a designer lifestyle with all the trimmings,

one Belfast superstar

was living the dream.

A 1971 documentary

gave us a tantalising glimpse

into the home life of a Belfast football legend.

You know, George was, I always felt,

our representative out there in the world that was swinging.

I think there was an awful lot invested in George.

My feeling always was,

insofar that I could express it

at the age of nine, or ten,

you know, "Good on you. A wee bit of that is ours."

BBC PRESENTER: The most obvious symbol of Best's success

is the uncompromisingly modern house

he has had built on a hill outside Manchester.

George's house is so 1971 it's not true.

Now you'd probably drive past

if it was still there and think,

"What an atrocity, what a '70s disaster."

But back then, 1971, that was just the house to have.

The fact you could drive in under the house and park your car,

that's very cool, that's very Persuaders.

I mean, that is a cool house.

Those mad arcing lights

and the incredible touch-button TV,

a colour TV!

To have a pushbutton anything in 1970-71, you know,

changing channels was still, it was a day trip.

You had to get up from the sofa, schlep across the room

and turn it over, and try and get it exactly right.

Opening safes was easier.

He's got this huge snooker table, which fills the entire room.

And it looks like the bedroom hasn't been touched at all.

There's the old quilt, there's the old cover over the bed.

George Best then is not only perhaps the world's greatest footballer,

he's also one of the best-looking blokes in the world,

and he's always happy to get the shirt off.

He's a sex symbol, and happy to show it off.

George had it, he'd flaunt it, and not just on the football pitch.

He's looking good as he goes to the bath, so fair play to him.

He's got it. Flaunt it.

I love the bathroom. I love that he has it in Manchester United colours,

I love the fact he has a footballer's bath as well,

it's like something from Old Trafford,

and he's had transported into his dream home.

It's perfectly of the period.

It's 1971, but I tell you what,

if it was up for sale today, and I could afford it,

I'd move in, and I'd be in that bath in seconds.

We're not sure if George Best took interior design inspiration

from the Ideal Home Exhibition,

but thousands of house-proud locals

couldn't resist the lure of this annual King's Hall extravaganza.

The Ideal Home Exhibition at one time was in everyone's social calendar.

If you didn't go to the Ideal Home Exhibition,

you were missing something.

Whether like me, you're here with no money to have a look,

or whether you've come to buy something,

there really is something for everybody.

It was one of the events of the year. Everybody went, really.

Maybe people had a bit more disposable money for a change,

they were starting to move on from where their parents might have been,

from a lot of that very utilitarian furniture

that there would have been, certainly in the '50s.

That was, sort of round the 1980s, people realising,

"Look, you know, there's a lot of innovation in here now,

"I can do things to my house, make my house more lived-in,

"I want to show off my house,

"I want to show off my avocado bathroom suite,

"my new dining room table," whereas there wouldn't have been that before.

I think people were becoming more aware of style.

I think, more importantly, people also wanted to dream.

They wanted to see those things that they can't have.

There's that through-the-keyhole thing.

They want to see how the other half live,

and have something to dream about or aspire to.

And if you get a bit foot-sore

while you're walking around the exhibition,

you can always have a rest on something like this,

which is a water bed,

for only £499.

It was the first time I had ever seen a water bed, actually.

And it was fun, bouncing around on it, I must say.

£499, I thought that was a fortune.

Imagine spending that on a bed?

No wonder they didn't catch on.

That's the porridge in there.

I've got it very sticky and gooey and messy.

You had, of course, what we call the demonstrators.

The demonstrators always added that bit of theatre.

The egg we've got in the pan there,

that's the egg cooked.

They were always English, and always, "Yeah, come over here!"

I suppose they were like latter-day market traders, you know,

and they were, they made you really,

how did you survive without this apple segmenter or whatever it was?

No tinfoil, no cellophane. It's not required.

There'd be selling something like a special cheese-grater

or those things where you banged up and down,

and it was supposed to reduce your onion to very tiny bits in no time.

You banged it up and down a few times when you got it home,

and the whole thing fell apart.

Just as the 1980s declared the demise of dull

and championed the birth of bling,

Robinsons Builders,

the family business behind the centrepiece show-home,

saw room for improvement and put their money where their house was.

It's very simple. For the last seven years,

we have been involved in building

the Ideal Home house, that's the central feature.

My father was always known as Joe Robinson,

and Joe Robinson was a builder.

In 1981, we were offered

the opportunity to buy the contract for the exhibition,

and we agreed that we would borrow a serious amount of money,

then it was a serious amount of money, to buy the contract.

The basic concept of the show is the same.

We have to consider a lot of the people that like to come,

and don't like changes...

The archive you have of the interview

is a very proud Joe Robinson,

having got this exhibition together

at a time when the exhibition had dipped considerably

and we knew, having been involved with show houses,

that a lot of key exhibitors were going to pull out,

and I say, fools rush in, but we pulled it together.

We pulled together a very credible exhibition,

a very interesting exhibition,

and that's the pride that he shows in the interview.

MUSIC: "Don't Stop" By Fleetwood Mac

We needed to generate publicity. We needed to generate media attention,

and what we looked at

was media personalities, celebrities, if you like,

that might be of interest to the public at the time.

There's a fabulous range of products

on display at the exhibition this year.

You might come up not knowing

if you want a new kitchen knife or a whole new kitchen.

The presenters liked to get involved,

and it suited us to get involved too,

and a very young Noel, I have to add,

was seen sipping champagne in there with a very lovely young lady.

But what you really need is one of these.

A California-style whirlpool Jacuzzi bath.

Invigorating, refreshing, guaranteed to get you perked up

and speed up your metabolism in the morning.

All for a mere £2,200.

And if you happen to know one of the salesmen,

there are some optional extras available

that really do make it an ideal home.

Cheers.

Noel Thompson, God bless him,

sitting there with his glass of champagne, it was just so...

And this girl, this model, in the corner,

who obviously wasn't allowed to speak.

It's a tough job, but somebody's got to do it sometime,

and yeah, there's all sorts of antics like that.

It's all about generating publicity from our point of view,

and that's what made the whole industry fun.

And, as if finding BBC presenters in your hot tub wasn't enough,

the best was still to come.

For sitting at the heart of the King's Hall complex

was the last word in luxury living,

the must-see legendary show house.

The show house was the focal part of the exhibition.

We realised that you just don't put a little,

maybe 1050-square-foot bungalow in the middle.

This has got to create the wow factor.

The difficulty each year

was to go better than the previous year,

and you can never go better, you have to go different.

If it's ultra-modern one year, you go very traditional the next year,

and vice versa. You just keep creating a difference,

and hope that difference is enough

to create the perception it's better than the previous year.

However, as tastes changed,

and new generations of house-owners

found faster ways to create their ideal homes,

there was no longer the same need for the annual exhibition.

Consumers became more discerning.

You had the emergence of shopping centres,

you had the emergence of the retail parks.

I think the internet's made everything instant.

There's nothing new anymore,

whereas the Ideal Home Exhibition was somewhere you could have gone

and got something innovative, taken it home, shown it to your friends.

Now it's like, "Whatever. I've seen that."

To a generation, or to generations that perhaps aren't around any more,

the loss of it would have been quite massive to them.

To younger generations,

they don't even notice its existence having gone now.

What is also gone, and totally unknown to the younger generations,

is the Northern Ireland that Richard Dimblebly explored in the 1950s.

This is a forgotten portrait of our home

that now only exists on film.

When you look at the Dimbleby film made in 1954,

that's the parents or grandparents

or great-grandparents of most people.

They're simple and they're rural and they're deferential

and they're old-fashioned and they're hard-working,

and that's what we've all come out of.

'And that was the end of my Ulster journey.'

-Well, Richard, are you any wiser for your rambling?

-I am that.

It's like a time capsule.

It takes you back to the sort of feelings people had,

and the way they talked.

Looking back at any films of that kind,

I think the real benefit of looking back is hearing those voices,

what I like to call those echoes of the sacred

that are passed down, even though you might not know who said them,

you know what was said.

The story of our homes,

whether in the country,

town or city,

is also the story of how we used to live.

And thanks to a rich archive and the magic of film,

we can bring those bygone days back to life.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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