How a catastrophic hotel blaze unearthed lost history of 1798

IT’S hard to believe today when it boasts precisely none, but the hotel business in Antrim was once booming.

There was Hall’s. The Lough Neagh. The King’s Arms. The Commercial. The Antrim Arms - all packing them in on High Street.

But the grand-daddy of them all was the Massereene Arms.

Founded in 1754, the hotel was justifiably proud of its ability to stable eight horses - quite a draw in the days when the carriage was still king.

Aside from its well-heeled guests who relaxed out front on the colonial style cane furniture, the hotel served as the headquarters for the military officers at the time of the Battle of Antrim. More on that later.

But on a cold January morning in 1954, two centuries of history was very nearly wiped off the face of the earth.

The alarm was raised before dawn. The hotel was on fire - and it was spreading fast.

Tourist guide Patrick Avington had woken with a start shortly after 5am, but by then the flames had already taken hold. He could hear them crackling in the distance.

“I became conscious of a smell of smoke in my bedroom, and when I got up and switched on the light there was what appeared to be a slight mist in the room,” he said.

“I hurried out and, rushing downstairs, discovered that some of the lights would not go on.

“There was stifling smoke then all through the place. The seat of the fire appeared to be in a small office or cloakroom on the first floor.

“I felt I was in something of a predicament as I stumbled about in the darkness.

“The smoke was getting worse. I could see that the fire was gaining a hold over the cloakroom or office, and I immediately thought of the waitresses sleeping just above me.

“The fire was increasing in intensity. The linen rooms, in which there was stock worth over £200, was burning. Some of the wet linen came down through the floor.”

Water pipes had burst as a result of the intense heat and Mr Avington tried to stop the flow through the main building. He failed, though the water may have slowed the relentless march of the fire.

Five terrified waitresses escaped in whatever they were sleeping in. Irene McCormick, Pam Doole, Mary McCarroll, M Murray and Vera Lockhart found shelter - and some clothes - from Antrim folk living nearby.

Owner Jack Stewart and his wife had to fight their way through a wall of flame. This was serious. Deadly serious.

Speaking later that morning, he said that the fire had broken out in the upper portion of the building - though it was too early to say what could be salvaged.

“Thick smoke hampered the firemen for a period,” he said.

“Lights would not go on for a time and it looked as if the entire building would be destroyed.”

Firefighters from Antrim and Ballymena battled the blaze for hours. Ironically, they used the fire escape at neighbouring Hall’s next door for a better vantage point.

Some were inside too, methodically smashing down doors with hatchets to make sure the guests were safe, and to make sure collapsing ceilings had not spread the blaze.

For a time there was a frantic search for receptionist Mary Walls. Mr Stewart had searched her smoky room, but there was no sign of her. Thankfully, it later emerged that she had left late the previous evening to stay with family in Magherafelt.

They eventually doused the flames and turned their attention to salvaging furniture and draining away the water, which was more than a foot deep in some of the rooms.

As the smoke finally cleared the full scale of the devastation was laid bare. A dozen bedrooms were destroyed and 14 more were damaged by fire and water.

Nevertheless, the owner reckoned ‘with some cleaning up’ it would soon be business as usual - though he conceded, sadly, that ‘the dances this week would be cancelled’.

“With a good effort we might be able to re-open to tourists for the late summer months.”

When he had bought the hotel in 1945, Jack Stewart knew nothing about its links to 1798, when troops had used it as their headquarters during the Battle of Antrim.

He discovered it quite by a chance when he read a novel centred on their ill-fated rebellion.

And it piqued his curiosity. Yes, his beloved hotel lay largely in ruins, but the rebuilding work had inadvertently handed him an opportunity to investigate further...

The novel had mentioned cells in the cellar. Could they still be there?

Then, beneath the floor of what had been the bar, workmen noticed something rather odd. Entrances to two small rooms had been blocked up and forgotten.

The cellars were real.

Each room was 12 foot long, 16 foot wide and just six and a half foot deep. The walls were more than three feet across and built of stone and mortar.

Among the rubble in one corner was part of a pike, similar to those used by the United Irishmen. It was thought it may have been forged by Templepatrick blacksmith Hope, who made the weapons in secret.

Other discoveries among the rubble included a well-preserved half penny bearing the year 1788, various other pieces of metal and a wine glass in perfect condition.

Mr Stewart and delighted and revealed that he hoped to open the cellars as a ‘showpiece’ for curious tourists.

He planned to put the historic finds on exhibition too on the grand old walls of the Massereene.

“I am hoping for some more valuable discoveries,” he said.

But don’t go looking for it in the guide books.

Sadly, fate would soon conspire against the unfortunate Mr Stewart again.

In August 1956 the Massereene Arms burned again.

This time it was the ballroom, which jutted out over the Sixmile, that bore the brunt.

Again, the flames were first reported at around 5am - and soon they were licking at the windows at Hall’s Hotel too, where 45 people, including visitors from Australia, Canada and Germany, slept.

Indeed it was Sarah Sheridan, a barmaid at Hall’s, who raised the alarm after smelling smoke in her room which overlooked the Massereene annexe.

Her room was filled with a red glow and when she glanced out the window she noticed that the glass was cracked.

She hurriedly pulled on a dressing gown and raced along a corridor to cook Molly McBreen’s room.

Both were on the fourth floor and Miss McBreen set off to the telephone to call police, but had to turn back because of the suffocating smoke.

The cook went to the back garden using the fire escape and ran through the rain to the police station about 50 yards away.

In the meantime, Miss Sheridan woke Joan McCreary, daughter of Hall’s proprietor RJ Wilson - and she began ‘quietly and calmly’ waking the 45 people staying with them that night.

They all reached the lounge on the ground floor, and car owners moved their vehicles to make way for the emergency services.

Firemen from Antrim and Ballymena were quickly on the scene and hose pipes were run through Hall’s to the top floor and the flames were fought from windows and the fire escape.

After an hour the blaze was ‘subdued’, though by then it had almost ate its way through to the front of the Massereene.

Job done, the fire crews nipped next door for a cooked breakfast at Hall’s.

In time, following the opening of the new airport at Aldergrove, the two hotel giants merged - but it was the Hall’s name over the door.

But by the end of the 1970s it was gone too. The opening of the M2 had directed a lot of traffic - and business - outside of Antrim town.

People’s tastes had changed too. With cheaper air fares, the charms of Antrim and Lough Neagh were no longer the draw they were.

Which left the Deerpark as the last hotel standing. It was derelict when it burned down, like the Antrim Arms had in 1938, in the Millennium year.

Truly the end of an era.