ford of James I’s reign to take its place, after Dublin and Cork, as the third port in Ireland. Great quantities of beef, hides, tallow and corn were exported, and imports arrived from the northern ports of Europe as well as from France, Spain and Portugal. Indeed by the beginning of the century Belfast was not only well known on the continent as a place of considerable trade but, in a scale of credit appended by the Exchange at Amsterdam to the names of various commercial towns of Europe, its place was in the first rank.2 The possibilities of this increasing commerce were obvious to the enterprising townsfolk, but it was no less obvious that Irish trade and industry could never be fully expanded so long as the English parliament controlled Irish affairs and continued its policy of strangling any mercantile development that threatened to compete with English interests.
As the century progressed, all the constructive political thought in Ireland centred on freeing, by constitutional methods, the parliament in Dublin from the shackles that bound it to Westminster, viz. Poynings’ Law and the more recent enactment of George I, and in this struggle Ulster gave the lead to the whole country. Not only were the Belfast merchants, by reason of their distance from the capital, more independent of the ruling oligarchy than were the traders of Dublin, but their ideas and convictions had prepared them for just such a situation. Countless were the meetings, declarations and addresses asserting the sole right of the King, Lords and Commons of Ireland to legislate for Ireland, and in all this the family of Francis Joy was to occupy a position of increasing influence.
Francis Joy, the maternal grandfather of Mary Ann McCracken, was born in Killead, Co. Antrim, in 1697, of prosperous farming stock.3 In due course he settled in Belfast as an attorney, and, while still a young man of twenty-four, married Margaret Martin, granddaughter of George Martin, Sovereign [or chief Burgess] of the town in the early days of the Commonwealth. Francis was an able and enterprising person. By his own exertions and by inheritance he was comparatively wealthy, and he and his wife must have occupied a prominent place in the growing professional and mercantile community of the little town. Both of them sprang from strongly Calvinist stock. The Joys had, in all probability, fled to England from religious persecution in France, coming to Ireland with the armies of James I.4 With the same armies came the Martins who settled near Belfast, but in 1649 Margaret’s uncompromising grandfather had had to seek refuge in Britain for refusing to billet Commonwealth troops in Belfast.5 Later he aroused the displeasure of the Lady Donegall [family name Chichester, the wealthy landowners of Belfast and neighbourhood] of the day by retiring on the Sabbath to his Presbyterian place of worship, after fulfilling his duties as Sovereign by attending her to her seat in the Parish Church.6 No doubt Francis and his wife had decided views on the stirring “New Light” controversy centring round subscription to the Westminster Confession of Faith, and just then agitating profoundly the Presbyterian community in Ulster. These were also the years of the Test Act when Presbyterians as well as Roman Catholics were debarred from holding public office. But, in spite of controversies and disabilities, the law business prospered, family life was happy, and in due course Henry, Robert and Ann were born.
It was not, however, till he was forty years of age that the incident occurred which gave Francis Joy the opportunity to exert his enterprising ability far beyond the confines of his legal profession. In 1737, as a result of a bad debt,7 he found himself the owner of a small printing business, and, with no other preparation for a journalistic career, he decided to start the publication of a newspaper. On September 1st of that year there appeared from the sign of “The Peacock” in Bridge Street the first issue of The Belfast News-Letter which, as his grandson briefly but proudly remarks, was “the first newspaper printed in this town.”8 The full title of the paper was The Belfast News-Letter and General Advertiser and undoubtedly its function was to provide not only news, but a medium through which shippers and merchants might announce their goods, an indication of the growing importance of the trade of the town. We know nothing of the immediate motives which prompted the undertaking, but at the very moment when Belfast was awakening to a realisation of its importance Francis Joy provided the organ which welded its thought and proclaimed its views. He was too much of a lawyer to be rash and foolhardy, but if wisdom and foresight directed him towards certain action then obstacles were noticed only to be overcome.
Francis threw himself enthusiastically into the demands of his journal, but no sooner was the venture well started than a paper shortage had to be faced. Previously paper had been imported from France,9 now war on the Continent made this increasingly difficult, so a paper mill was bought in Ballymena. This in turn opened up fresh possibilities, and in 1745 Francis left Belfast and settled in Randalstown not so far from his early home, where he opened a larger mill, installing with the aid of a government subsidy of £200 some up-to-date machinery hitherto unknown in Ireland. The following description of this undertaking appeared in the Dublin Journal shortly after Francis’ death.
A laudable example of spirit and active enterprise in the late Mr. Francis Joy, of the County of Antrim, deserves to be recorded: This person was one of the first who brought to any perfection in Ireland the manufacture of printing and writing papers; after the erection of his paper engines Mr. Joy found himself at a great loss for fine rags in making fine paper, which even that part of the kingdom had not been accustomed to preserve; to remedy this Mr. Joy, at considerable pains and expense, for many years, made and distributed in all the towns and villages in the counties of Antrim, etc. great numbers of strong paper bags, to be affixed to walls in houses, in order to preserve rags – he published advertisements in the Belfast paper, intreating the public to save such rags – and not only gave a generous price for them, but encouraged, by considerable premiums, the gathering of such – he was in consequence, enabled to make annually large quantities of printing paper, clothier’s pressing paper, of from 11/6 to 14/- per ream, a great price at that time. But what deserves to be particularly noticed is the following fact, because it shews how far the intelligence and activity of a single man may promote the manufacturing interests of Ireland: Mr. Joy made ordinary writing paper and good printing paper from the backings or refuse of flax or tow, which article had, for many years, been exported in vast quantities from the North of Ireland to foreign parts.
The quantity and value of the paper made at one time by this truly patriotic man, was more than was made at that period through the whole kingdom, Dublin excepted, in which a Mr. Slater had most laudably distinguished himself in the manufacture of very fine papers, almost equal to Dutch, which at this time was generally used by merchants and others.10
At Randalstown this enthusiast for machinery erected also a flax dressing mill with some new and ingenious appliances – probably not unconnected with the supply of backings for his paper mill.
Though he had moved to the country, Francis kept in close touch with his children in town. His sons and his daughter married, there was an ever growing collection of grandchildren, and he watched the activities of these three families with loving interest. Only two letters written by him have escaped destruction and they are addressed to members of his family circle, – this to his son-in-law, the captain of a merchant vessel and the father of Mary Ann, is on paper bearing the watermark F. Joy:
Treehoge, 26th May 1760.
Son McCrackan
I congratulate you on your safe arrival: it gave me much ease and pleasure, after my reading a Paragraff in the newspaper, of sevl ships from the West Indies being taken by the French, on the coast of this Kingdom, finding the account of your arival inserted: Such good Providences demand our reasonable and religious acknowledgments. I am with affectionate Compliments to your kind and good Mother, my Daugr yr Wife and Child
Yr. Affect father
Frans. Joy11
“Reasonable and religious” – there could be no truer description of his way of life and of the attitude that he bequeathed to his children. Owing to the war with France there was constant danger of attack at sea, and Captain McCracken had already been a prisoner in the hands of the French. Earlier in the very year in which this letter was written, Thurot, with three French frigates, had
