I’m browsing Then, Rob Hansen’s comprehensive analysis of the early history of UK science fiction, and came across the interesting fact that in 1935, one Hugh C. Carswell was appointed as Director of the Belfast chapter of the Science Fiction League, created by Hugo Gernsback for readers of his magazine Wonder Stories. Hansen then reports that this chapter ‘collapsed’ in around May 1937, when Hugh Carswell joined the RAF. Quite possibly there were no other actual members. In any case, Hugh Carswell is the first identifiable participant in science fiction fandom from Northern Ireland (I originally thought he might be the first from the whole of Ireland, but Fitz-Gerald P. Grattan (1913-1993) was writing to Astounding in 1931) and in the UK, the Belfast chapter of the SFL was preceded only by Leeds.
I wondered what else might be traceable about Carswell. From the genealogy sites, it was fairly straightforward to find his vital statistics: Hugh Crawford Carswell, born in Belfast in 1919, died in Waterford in 1985, married to Alice Kervick of Waterford (1916-1990) in Weston-super-Mare in 1946. His address in Belfast was 6 Selina Street, one of the tangle of streets at the bottom of the Grosvenor Road which was demolished to build the Westlink. His appointment as Director of the Belfast chapter of the SFL would have been shortly before his 16th birthday, and his gafiation around the time of his 18th.
Hugh’s father John Carswell (1890-1944) was born in 12 North Queen Place, another vanished street which was just around the corner from Selina Street. (It seems to have been between Stanley Street and Willow Street.) The family are recorded as Church of Ireland in the 1900 census. John’s father, Hugh’s grandfather, Henry Carswell (1858-1906) was born in England; his profession is given as “labourer” in the census. John’s mother, Hugh’s grandmother Sarah nee Veighey (1857-1945) was born in Co Armagh.
Hugh’s mother Elizabeth / Lizzy nee Crawford (1891-1967) was born in Hutchinson Street, between Selina Street and North Queen Place. The family are recorded as Presbyterians. Her father Thomas Crawford (1864-1931) was born in County Down; his profession is given as “brass fitter”. Lizzy’s mother, Hugh’s grandmother Jane nee Moore (1866-1917) was born in County Antrim, which could mean Lisburn or Ballycastle or anywhere in between.
John and Lizzy married at St John’s Church (Church of Ireland) on the Malone Road in Belfast on 5 September 1911; he was 21 and she was 20. It’s an interesting choice of venue; St John’s is a good hour’s walk from central Belfast, and even in these benighted days I count a dozen Church of Ireland churches closer to their birth places than St John’s. His profession is given as Lance Corporal in the 2nd Royal Irish Rifles, based in Dover, so he had a nice shiny uniform. They seem to have had six sons between 1912 and 1924, Hugh being the third, and then a daughter in 1927.
John Carswell is recorded as living in Selina Street in the various online street directories for 1924, where he is described as a labourer, and for 1932, 1939 and 1943, where he is described as a grocer. After his death, Mrs E. Carswell (ie Lizzie) is also described as a grocer in 1951 and 1960. Initially they lived at 8 Selina Street, but later acquired number 6 as well; my guess would be that number 8 was the grocery shop and number 6 the residence.
Hugh made the newspapers in January 1936 when he passed the examination for Aircraft Apprentice with the RAF, though it looks like this didn’t impede his fannish activity for another year. A Facebook comment by Des Carswell, one of his five sons, says, “He was later transferred to South Africa where he trained as a pilot with the RAF and was responsible for flight testing of aircraft that his Squadron assembled in South Africa for operation duties in that theatre.”
He goes on, “Hugh returned to the U.K. in 1946 initially stationed at St. Eval before be transferred to 202 Squadron in Aldergrove outside Belfast where he undertook flying duties carrying out weather flight testing in Handley Page Halifax aircraft as a Sargent Pilot. On retirement from the RAF Hugh continued to work with the services until his retirement in 1979.”
There’s a bit more to say about the end of the story, but I’ll get to that later. Worth noting here that the new tech Air Force is exactly the branch of the services that you might expect a teenage science fiction reader to be drawn to in the 1930s.
(One minor discrepant detail: Hugh’s grandson says that he was based in north Africa, not South Africa, during the war, and indeed northern Africa seems more likely, given that the RAF was very active in that campaign and that South Africa had its own air force. He may of course have done both.)
I had had better luck at a distance of two seas and ninety years than James White, who in 1952 found Hugh Carswell’s own copy of Wonder Stories in a Belfast bookshop, and, as recounted by Walt Willis, decided to track him down at his Selina Street address. (See Fantastic Worlds v.1 no. 1, 1952, reprinted in The Willis Papers (1959) pages 8-10).
The address was one of a long row of identical houses in a working-class street. The door was opened by a middle-aged woman with a truculent expression.
“Mr. Carswell?” asked James, politely.
She gave him a suspicious look and would probably have slammed the door in his face if it hadn’t been for the fact that James is roughly a mile high and wears heavy round glasses which make him look like an electronic brain in its walking-out clothes. She contented herself with gradually reducing the width of the aperture until she was in danger of cutting her head off.
“Which Mr. Carswell?” she asked warily.
“Hugh,” said James.
She reddened, insulted. “What do you mean, me?” she enquired angrily. She was hurt.
”Not you,” said James hastily. He gave her an aspirate to remove the pain. “Hhhhugh. Hugh Carswell.”
Malevolently she seized her opportunity for further obstruction. “Which Hugh Carswell?”
Now, I have the type of mind that mentally falls off every bridge before I come to it. If I had been going to make this call of James’s, I would have cased the joint first. I would have looked up the house in the street directory to make sure the Carswells were still there after 17 years. Then I would have looked up the Register of Electors to see the names of all the people in the house who were of voting age. Finally I would have walked past the house a few times and then had a pint in the nearest pub and seen what dirt I could dig up. Such intelligent preparation and brilliant detective work wouldn’t have made the slightest difference, of course, but it would have been fun.
“Er…..the one who’s interested in science fiction,”, said James at last.
The woman looked at him blankly. It seemed to come naturally to her. Obviously, she was waiting for him to say something intelligible. She didn’t seem to think there was much hope.
“Signs fixin’?” she asked. “What signs?”
I don’t find any other Hughs in the immediate Carswell family, so either the lady was being even more annoying to James White than he realised, or he was making that detail up for entertainment. Personally I suspect the latter. I can also believe that as a relatively recent widow, she could get snappish when a stranger asked where Mr Carswell was. At least, I assume that White met Lizzie, who would have been 63 in 1952; Hugh’s sister Pauline does not appear to have ever married, so was probably still living with her widowed mother, but she was only 24 in 1952, which doesn’t really fit White’s description.
By his own account, White then became alarmed by the presence of sinister men who appeared to be monitoring his presence, so he left the scene rapidly, having first established that all of Hugh’s old magazines had been thrown away the previous summer by his mother.
To bring the story brutally forward by another twenty years, Hugh’s grandson, the Irish Times journalist Simon Carswell, gives some more context to the later part of his grandpartents’ lives in a moving (but graphically illustrated) piece on the 1972 bombing of the Abercorn bar in central Belfast:
One night in September 1973, a loyalist gunman fired six shots through the front window of the home of my grandparents – my Waterford Catholic grandmother Alice Carswell (nee Kervick) and my Protestant-born Catholic convert grandfather Hugh Carswell, better known as Paddy.
Their Catholic house on the predominantly Protestant Cregagh estate had been attacked several times before because of the family’s religion, but the gun attack was the final straw. Nobody was hurt, but the message was clear: it was time to get out.
My uncle Hilary remembers seeing the flashes of the gunshots from an upstairs bedroom and pulling his brother Dick to the ground. The family has photographs of the bullet-holes, including one snap of my cousin Jaimie, then a toddler, with his finger in one of the holes.
The day after the attack, the Irish News newspaper carried a brief, two-paragraph article about the shooting at the bottom of its front page. Within weeks, the Carswells had packed up and relocated to Catholic west Belfast.
“At that stage, there were 12 Catholic families living in the Cregagh estate. That was all that was left. And then there were 11,” says Hilary Carswell.
The fact that Hugh had converted to Catholicism is a new and interesting detail. The Catholic Church, especially in Ireland, perhaps even more so in Northern Ireland, was very demanding of couples in mixed marriages in those days. As it happens, both of my own grandmothers, brought up as Protestants, converted to Catholicism to marry my grandfathers.
By 1973, Selina Street, North Queen Place and Hutchinson Street had all disappeared under the developers’ bulldozers, but Hugh still took his family back to West Belfast when crisis struck, before heading permanently to the Republic where he and Alice lived out their days. His RAF service record, which had not helped him in Cregagh, won’t have helped much in West Belfast either.
I checked in with Simon Carswell, who was only vaguely aware of his grandfather’s interest in science fiction. He wrote to me:
I remember him as a really clever and fascinating man. He repaired and flew Hurricane fighter planes for the RAF in north Africa during the Second World War and I recall him being interested in technology and innovation, and taking an interest in US television programmes about the future so this fits with his interest as a boy in science fiction.
He was a brilliant Grandad who took a great interest in his grandchildren. He died far too young at the age of 65. He had been in poor health from malaria that he contracted in north Africa, which was not helped by a hardened smoking habit. He was much loved and is much missed by his family, even 40 years after his death. Our memories of Grandad remain as vivid today. I hope he is up there reading science fiction novels, comics and books, and pondering what the future might bring to us down here.
Coming full circle, I am tremendously grateful to Hugh’s son Paul Carswell for sharing this photograph of Hugh with his mother Lizzie and their dogs, one of whom was named Rex, at the door of their Selina Street house. From Hugh’s apparent age, it was taken just a couple of years before he became Northern Ireland’s first known science fiction fan.
