30 YEARS OF DERRYVOLGIE HALL - MY HAND IN IT!
25/01/2025
(Derryvolgie Students in Cape Town in 2008, having planted a tree for a former student Lindsay Emerson who died too young...)
January 1995. It’s a world of East 17 and Boyzone. The Blur verses Oasis standoff was toe to toe. At the cinema Dumb and Dumber is all the rage. Blackburn Rovers were challenging Manchester United at the top of the Premier League. John Major was Prime minister. I was the new Dean of Residence at Derryvolgie Hall, part of the Presbyterian Chaplaincy at Queens University, opening the doors for the first time.
January is a strange time to open University Halls of Residence. I had moved back from Dublin after leaving my job as Youth Development Officer for PCI in the Republic Of Ireland in August hoping to begin moving students in by September. That was the plan.
At the end of August the IRA had announced their Ceasefire but not before a bomb had damaged our shiny news Halls. A rocket attack from the car park across the road on Derryvolgie Avenue aimed at the British Army base behind the Halls had gone off prematurely and damaged the buildings. We were delayed.
I was employed by The Social Witness Board of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland in collaboration with the Education Board who had built a brand new Hall of Residence for students in Belfast. The building was funded by the War Memorial Hostel Trust. That had been the name of a residence on Brunswick Street from 1925 to the late 60s. Belfast city centre wasn’t a place for students to live at the start of The Troubles and so rooms were rented out and the accumulation of that money was invested in news halls on Derryvolgie Avenue.
The original trust deeds stated that the rooms were for Presbyterian students and young workers and for as long as possible we kept to that. In the first couple of years, young teachers and accountants lived in flats beside students from Queens, UU, the Art College, Stranmillis and even at one stage a young woman from Kilkenny coming up to do a year at Victoria College.
This delay cost us residents and we opened with 18 that increased to around 25. The next year we were way over subscribed and an extension was built for 30 more students which was opened in 1996.
I emphasised community at the heart of the ministry. I am delighted to say that there are still little groups of friend who met in Derryvolgie who are still close and regularly meet up decades later. I am in touch with so many on social media.
When I arrived I was aware of a plethora of opportunities for young Christians at Queen’s. The CU had their Thursday teaching meeting and Departmental small groups. I didn’t want to repeat that so we went for a Sunday evening event that was more multi media. I was keen for faith to be connected to the world and prepare minds and vocations. So we had guests who were doctors, lawyers, artists. We had a month where we had the Moderator, a member of the House Of Lords and the Lord Mayor. How had they applied their faith in their jobs?
There was also teaching and reflective times to pray and search the mind and soul.
There was also a lot of music and even a play. Juno and the Paycock was performed to parents and friends. I was managing and encouraging a lot of singer songwriters at the time so Iain Archer, Brian Houston, Duke Special, Juliet Turners were regulars. Halcyon Days too. It gave the place quite the vibe and I still meet people who tel me that they were in Derryvolgie at events in those years.
When it came to the turn of the Millennium I began to think about an overseas trip. We had had some Habitat For Humanity staff stay with us that first year when we were not full so I asked about somewhere to go. Janice and I had been to Cape Town on honeymoon and we decided to go there. What was to be one trip lasted almost a decade. We went every two years and after only 14 on the first trip we had over 50 on the next four trips, the most being 68 in 2004.
The Assistant Chaplain Lynn Ferguson and my family would stay in Cape Town for weeks bringing teams in and out. Three teams over almost two months in 2004 perhaps proved too much! We cut the next two to two teams over 5 weeks.
We created what I called a Bible Study on the field programme around building houses with HFH on the townships around Cape Town. As well as the house building in very impoverished areas we would check out the AIDS pandemic with JL Zwane church, how Fair Trade worked with help from Christian Aid and the Co-op as well as some peace study with Alex Boriane’s International Centre for Transitional Justice. We’d work all this out in evenings spent looking at the Sermon On The Mount. I think we worked on over 50 houses that families moved into at the end of our work.
There is of course too much to say. Janice and I got married while in Derryvolgie. Residents made up the choir. We had our reception in the Art N Soul Room with the residents as our waiters and waitresses. We had our two children Caitlin in 1998 and Jasmine in 2000. Two small children meant Janice couldn’t be as involved as much as she could have been but she still added a pastoral role.
We lived with 88 students. Nothing was private. Yet, when in 1999 the committee decided we needed to build a bigger house I preferred to extend where we are rather than buy us a house somewhere else. Living on site gave me access to students and them to me that we unique and so wonderful.
I had students at my door telling me they were doubting their faith, they weren’t sure about their degree, they wanted help with an essay, their relationship had just broken up, or they had just started going out with someone, or they’d been asked to join Duke Special’s band!
In it all, it allowed me into the lives of so many students at a formative time. Still today, I meet with many of them who tell me the influence of those days, how it helped them shape their faith or know what God want of them.
Two stories. The first time students broke the no alcohol rule they foolishly threw the beer cans out their window. Evidence in the back garden. The young man whose room I found so easily was the first to be voted an elder!
I have also gotten to do so many of their weddings. The first? Well the first happened to be the daughter of the co-chair of the committee that decided to build the Halls. As I said at the wedding - a million pounds well spent to get your daughter a husband. That couple and their children are valued members of Fitzroy today.
I am always thrilled when I ponder the return on investment. Oh there are church planters, ministers, leaders in NGOs but I also see artists, doctors, teachers, nurses, lawyers, dentists, architects, researchers, engineers and more being particles of Jesus light across Belfast, N, Ireland and indeed to the ends of the world. I remember lives transformed by their few years in the community of DV.
Glorious times. God taught me so much. We were blessed. Thanks to Janice and my girls, Lynn Guiney my assistant Chaplain and my administrators Andrew Kyle, Lorna Dunlop and Carol McMahon and all those students who gave us the privilege of opening their lives to us.
By 2009 I was tiring and knew that I wasn’t giving it what I had that first month in 1995. It was time to move on. In November Fitzroy came calling and opened an amazing next chapter. I have to say that I was surprised after 3 years when my congregation didn’t graduate and move on!