Whitehead: the town with no streets

I have greatly enjoyed browsing through PJ O'Donnell's 1998 book on Whitehead: the Town with no Streets over the past few weeks. Limestone was plentiful in the area in the early part of the nineteenth century; hence the name White Head. One early land owner whose name caused me to sit up and pay attention was a man called David Stewart Ker. He had a harbour built to carry the limestone to its markets in Co Down and Scotland in small vessels.
  This David Ker seems to have been quite a philanthropist as well as a major businessman in the town. He paid to build a schoolhouse close to his harbour to accommodate the children of his employees. The Whitehead National School opened on March 1st 1857 with 18 male and 12 female pupils.
  Mr O'Donnell has quite obviously a great affection for Whitehead that just spills out all over this copiously illustrated book. This is a real labour of love. I found it hard to sit down and read it from cover to cover. I much preferred dipping into individual sections where I found much to whet my appetite. I loved the 1944 story of the local boys who stopped a train by pelting the engine driver and his foreman with apples after scrumping them from a local orchard. The lads ended up in the Petty Sessions court where they were each fined 40 shillings for their part in this escapade.
  Mr O'Donnell overlooks no part of town life.  You can read potted histories of all the local churches; the importance of the railway line to the town; hotels, the cinema and all the various sports clubs and associations.
  Two organisations prominent a century ago caught my attention: the Ulster Volunteer Force and the Irish Women's Suffrage Federation. Whitehead had been visited by militant suffragist campaigners who spoke to packed halls in the town. One militant local suffragist was Madame Charlotte Despard. The sister of the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Lord French; Madame Despard was an ardent Sinn Féiner and social reformer. This unlikely upper class republican died in 1939 at the age of  95 after falling downstairs in her Donegall Avenue home.
  The Ulster Covenant was signed in Whitehead in St Patrick's parochial hall.  In the next year a UVF company was formed in the town, attached to the Carrickfergus battalion of the Central Antrim Regiment. Whitehead and Islandmagee Volunteers took a full part in arming Ulster when the gunrunning vessel the Clyde Valley (alias Mountjoy) landed guns in Larne in April 1914. Once armed, the local volunteers would practice the use of bayonets and rifles on the golf course.       
  When the Great War broke out in August 1914 these men enlisted in the British army.  Seventeen young men from the town never came back. Their names appear on the town's war memorial.
  No feature of town life is overlooked in this fascinating book. It has me spellbound. I intend to come back to this wonderful book again in a future Kerr's Corner.