wore on large sections of the employing classes were forced, by continued economic and financial distress, to leave the country. A report published by the Belfast News-Letter in 1773 deplores this increasing emigration, stating that in the previous two years over 17,000 persons had departed, and estimates that “the North of Ireland has in the last five or six years been drained of one fourth of its trading cash and the like proportion of the manufacturing people. Where the evil will end remains only in the womb of time to determine.”9
Such disruption of industry resulted in continuous suffering amongst the poor in town and country. Lack of work in the country districts – and practically all the spinning and weaving was done in rural areas – meant a ceaseless drift of labourers into the town in search of employment, and beggars and destitute people roamed the streets of Belfast. Early in the century provision had been made by act of Parliament for the erection of work houses from public funds in Dublin and Cork, but else-where in Ireland the care of the poor, entirely dependent on voluntary initiative, was extremely haphazard.
In 1752 steps had been taken by the Sovereign and leading citizens of Belfast to form the Belfast Charitable Society and to inaugurate a fund to build “a poor House and Hospital and a new Church in or near the town of Belfast,”10 an ambitious scheme for the still small community. Lotteries, then as now hailed as a means of producing quick money, were found in this instance to have disappointing results, indeed to have landed the promoters in serious financial complications, partly owing to the skilful manipulation of the lottery market by Dr. Mosse who was at that moment building the Rotunda Hospital in Dublin. Not until 1767 were the members of the Society in a position to set out their plans and to request Lord Donegall, to whom all the town belonged, to make over to them the site already promised “on the North West side of the road leading to Carrickfergus … the most convenient place for erecting the intended Buildings, and where they will be most ornamental to the Town of Belfast.”11 By now the care of the destitute was so urgent that the idea of a hospital and church had been abandoned.
Henry and Robert Joy were leading members of the Charitable Society from its early days. Henry’s name is constantly found in connection with the raising of funds – during one gloomy period he was asked to send a messenger every morning and evening to wait upon certain subscribers until outstanding sums were produced – and, when the time came, the lease from Lord Donegall was made out in his name as representing the Society. Later he was appointed one of the “Key Carriers” entrusted with the three keys necessary to open the Society’s chest, the Board directing that the chest itself should be kept in his house “in the small closet adjoining his dining room.”12 The firm of H. & R. Joy undertook the printing and distribution of lottery tickets.13
Meanwhile Robert worked in other directions. Plans of poorhouses and infirmaries were sought from Liverpool, Birmingham, Manchester and Glasgow but failed to give satisfaction. Robert, as he pondered on the requirements of the new institution, set about drawing a plan for himself, though, with the reticence of an amateur, he would not produce it to the committee. Nevertheless some members, seeing it privately, were much impressed. It was then decided that an “Architect of Eminence” should be consulted, and “resolved that Mr. Robt. Joy be requested to take with him to Dublin the three plans now delivered in, & such other drawings as are now in his possession, and lay the same before Mr. Cooley, for his examination, with directions to choose out of those four the Plan which he shall most approve of.”14
Thomas Cooley, then at the height of his fame, received Mr. Joy, studied the plans and amended one of them – at a cost to the Society of six guineas. But doubts persisted and were finally resolved by the unanimous adoption of Robert Joy’s own drawing. We may perhaps regret that a great master of Irish Georgian architecture was not permitted to leave his mark on this northern town, and that his design for the Poorhouse has long since passed into oblivion; but as we survey Robert Joy’s simple but beautiful building, the front of which remains exactly as he conceived it, we stand amazed at the extraordinary ability, versatility and public-spirited endeavour of its originator. In the words of David Boyd, later a schoolmaster in the institution,
All labour’d freely in the bless’d employ,
But the most active Mr. Robert Joy;
He took to Dublin with th’ utmost respect,
The various plans, [that] the skilled Architect
Might one approve – the work of choosing past;
His was the plan they voted best at last.
Through the whole business still the active man; –
Here stand the Poorhouse built on Robert’s plan.15
It is even more creditable when one recalls that all this was accomplished at the very time when the brothers were building the great paper mill at Cromac which necessitated the damming of the Blackstaff River to insure an adequate supply of water power, and in which, no doubt, the most up-to-date machinery was being installed; to say nothing of the day to day work of the Belfast News-Letter.
It was sad for Robert that the year 1771 that witnessed the auspicious ceremony of laying the foundation stone of the Poorhouse building was the year in which his second son died at the age of 15 – another Robert, a lad greatly loved and of much promise.
All through the building operations Henry and Robert were continually active, Henry concerned with funds and “debentures”, Robert interviewing workmen, buying materials and keeping his eye on every detail of the rising walls; both of them spending apparently hours of time at long and frequent meetings of committee. To the end of his days the Poorhouse and the people in it occupied a foremost place in Robert’s thoughts. His niece, Mary Ann McCracken, remembered with affection how, as a dying man, he was taken to visit it for the last time in a sedan chair.16 Indeed it was his great practical concern for the welfare of the poor both inside and outside “the House” that caused him to embark on another far reaching achievement, for, writes his son Henry:
no sooner were any of his various plans for public utility brought to perfection than the activity of his mind led him to new Objects; which he never failed to prosecute to completion. So early as the year 1777 [Hargreaves and Arkwright had patented their spinning inventions in 1764 and 1769 respectively], on a tour through North Britain, he conceived the scheme of introducing into this then desponding Kingdom, the most intricate Branches of the Cotton Manufacture which had proved unfailing sources of Industry and Opulence to our sister country. In this he was principally prompted by a desire to serve the lower orders of the working poor, particularly linen weavers and spinners whose livelihoods are often precarious, where a nation depends, as ours did, almost solely on a single manufacture sometimes as much depressed as at others prosperous. He possessed himself of the rudiments of a business foreign from any former pursuit of his life. He traced it through its remotest parts at a time when no incentive presented itself in the commercial prospects that have since opened upon Ireland, unaided by that protection which was shortly to be given by the legislature to those very springs of wealth of which indeed he may be called the parent and which he lived to see brought to considerable degree of Perfection.17
Robert Joy inspired his friend Thomas McCabe and together, at their own expense, they installed in the Poor-house the machinery necessary to teach the children in the House to spin and weave cotton, so that they could later be employed, without further apprenticeship, in the mills that he hoped would soon be started in the town. Young Mr. Nicholas Grimshaw was also interested, and though the mill that he built in Whitehouse in 1779 for spinning cotton thread was actually the first in the country, it was followed in 1784 by that of Messrs. Joy, McCabe & McCracken which included weaving also and was the first mill in Ireland to be operated by water power.18
Thus the spectacular era of cotton manufacture in the North of Ireland was started. So rapid was its development that in 1790, only thirteen years after Robert
