Ballycastle\'s Mini-Folk Museum

Ann Street, Ballycastle, as it was in 1907. The shop which also had the name “An Tuirne Beag” (The little spinning wheel) was the home of Ballycastle’s once famous toy industry. It was founded by a Belfast philanthropist, Mrs Frances Riddell in 1904 "...to give employment to the poor boys at their homes in the winter evenings, and in the workshop and to impart technical education." Mrs Riddell had other aims and objectives, some of them quite ambitious e.g. "to make the boys more skilled with their hands and more accurate in their observation and so to fit them to better their position… and above all to help to stem the tide of emigration that is fast depopulating our native land." When the small industry had been in operation for twelve months, Mrs Riddle was able to comment "The progress the boys have made fully illustrates the natural aptitude of Irish children to so good work when any favourable opportunity occurs."

But I think the success of the venture was due to more than "the natural aptitude of the children." Much credit was due to the instructor, Mr Stephen Clarke, who subsequently became manager. Clarke, a native of Murlough, Co. Antrim, was a carpenter by trade with an interest in furniture making. He was also a visionary. In 1905, he persuaded Mrs Riddell to send to Bavaria, then the home of Europe’s finest woodcarvers, for a carving teacher. The following spring, Anton Lang, a native of Oberammergau and a skilled woodcarver arrived in Ballycastle, where he was to remain for two years training local boys. Land would have been happy to stay in Ballycastle but he kept receiving messages to return to Oberammergau where he was to play the part of Christ in the world famous Passion Play in 1910. He had played the part with great success in 1900 and was to play the part again in 1922 and 1930.

The toys produced at Ballycastle were in the main models of simple cottages of the countryside and their appurtenances – tester-bed, cradle, arm and runged chair, settle bed (a seat by day and a bed by night), kitchen table, dresser with bowls, plates cups, creepies or stools, griddle, bake board and rolling pin, churn and churn staff, piggin, butter-tub, pats and print, spinning wheel, reel-winder and so on. Outside furnishings included models of donkey and low backed car, slide-car with creel, horse and jaunting car, pig and trough, goat, dog, fowl, potato-washer, turf spade, currach etc; these model cottages and their contents were on show in America at the Great Exhibition of St. Louis in 1904.

In order to display these products in a proper setting, Stephen Clarke decided to remodel his shop in the form of a traditional cottage kitchen complete with mantelpiece, fire on the hearth and swinging crook or crane. The kitchen was furnished with authentic pieces of the period. Soon the shop became a mini-folk museum containing items no longer in use today. In addition there were display cases containing stone hammers, axe-heads and flints found in the locality, geological specimens, shells, querns, photographs and banners carried in the first Feis na nGleann. The list is endless.

Stephen Clarke died in 1931 but his wife and nieces maintained the shop and museum in the original form. When the shop closed in December 1982 Stephen Clarke’s two nieces, the Misses Sadie and Bridie Kelly, donated the entire contents of the museum to the Moyle District Council on condition that they be kept and displayed in Ballycastle. Here is the nucleus of a splendid local folk museum and it is hoped to give further details of it in a future article.