Look North Festival and a North Belfast Well Behaved Woman

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 the poor and needy of Belfast. She was born at Donegall Square and her father was a minister at Rosemary Street First Presbyterian Church for fifty years, and his father before him had also been a minister here for fifty years. She was about eighteen months old when the family moved to a property called simply “The Farm” which is where Girdwood is now. Jane was a keen supporter of the Royal Maternity Hospital and the Hospital for Sick Children, although she never married and never had any children of her own, leaving both establishments money in her will. She lived to be 101 and was reported to be in good health in her later years, the newspapers saying in her obituary that she hadn’t even needed glasses to read! Longevity must have run in the family or possibly there was something in the water in North Belfast as she had three sisters who all lived until they were in their 90s. She was on the committee of the Belfast Domestic Mission who met at the Central Hall in Rosemary Street, and she lent the grounds of the farm out for various charitable fetes , having her own stall at the fetes selling garments that she had knitted herself. She died in 1933 at the grand old age of 101 and is buried in Holywood.

Jane Bruce Obituary Belfast Newsletter July 1933

Map courtesey of PRONI