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The first walking tour that I developed back in 2023 was called “Well Behaved Women Seldom Make History”, but why did I choose that phrase and where did it come from? It was coined by an American Historian called Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, and it was a phrase from an article she wrote in 1976. The phrase has been attributed to many other people over the years including Marilyn Monroe and Eleanor Roosevelt, with even Princess Leia from Star Wars saying “well behaved women rarely

As a footballer mum, many of my weekends are spent at Girdwood and I had often wondered what was there before the pitches. I knew it had been an army barracks as well, but what about before that? As part of the 'Look North' Festival I created a special walking tour about North Belfast Women and on that tour I included a woman named Jane Bruce and Jane Bruce lived at what is now known as Girdwood. I don't know much about her, other than she was described as a great friend to

Did you know there were explosives trials in Belfast long before ‘The Troubles’? In April 1914 two suffragettes, Dorothy Evans and a lady referred to as Maud or Madge Muir were arrested at their flat in University Street on what were described as ‘explosives charges’. Dorothy Evans was head of the Belfast branch for the Women’s Social and Political Union, the WSPU and ‘Madge Muir ‘was an alias for the Scottish suffragette Florence MacFarlane. The two women appeared at Belfast

So there’s a new social media trend about 2026 being the new 2016 and it started me thinking about 2016 and then realising that the Tour Guiding journey really started for me in 2016. 2016 I had a part time job in BHS and a two-year-old. The BHS job was only supposed to be temporary after I had shut my shop but with a toddler and bills to pay I had been there about three years. 2016 if you’ll remember wasn’t a great year for Sir Philip Green and BHS shut its doors permanently

While scrolling through TikTok a while ago (bad habit I know!) I came across a video entitled ‘The Great Forgetting’ and as I watched on the user 4TheLoveof Books described how hundreds of female writers were erased from literary history. She also recommended a book by Rebecca Romney entitled “Jane Austen’s Bookshelf” which outlines how Jane Austen ‘remembered the women who came before her and even lefty little nods to their work in her own writing. If you’ve been on my ‘Dead

Apparently over sixteen thousand people entered the annual Solstice Lottery to get access to the chamber at Newgrange on one of five mornings during the Winter Solstice during the sunrise when the rising sun floods the chamber with light for about 17 minutes before slowly retreating again, if it’s not cloudy (spoiler alert – it was!) Newgrange is a Neolithic monument in the Boyne Valley, County Meath and was constructed about 5,200 years ago (3,200 B.C.E) which makes it olde

If you've been on my 'Dead Interesting Women' Friars Bush Tour you'll know that Rosa Mulholland's father, and some other members of her family are buried in Friars Bush. Born in Belfast, Rosa Mulholland was a novellist, poet and playwright who also wrote short stories for newspapers and magazines. This story appeared in the newspapers in December 1894 and we're pretty sure it hasn't seen the light of day since, so we've reproduced it here in full using the same layout as Rosa

So in Part One we left The Jaffes as involved citizens in the civic life of Belfast, so what happened? Things turned sour for the Jaffe’s after the outbreak of the First World War. In August of 1914 the Government passed the Aliens Restriction Act that allowed them to control the activities of what they defined as “enemy aliens”, particularly Germans. It also covered their movements in that they could not travel more than five miles, and there were prohibited areas where they

Long ago, before I was Wee Walks Belfast I wrote an article on Sir Otto Jaffe for the journal of the East Belfast Historical Society (in 2010!) I then wrote a shorter version for City Matters which was the magazine of the Belfast City Council at the time. I've seen a lot of this information around the internet so I thought I'd reproduce the article in full here as Wee Walks Belfast very first Blog post. East Belfast’s Forgotten Philanthropist   The name Otto Jaffe has long b