News Letter

Well, we're more into the war now.

We're going to the Belfast Newsletter on the 3rd of June, 1940.

Argentina's demand.

Compensation for U-boat action.

So the Americans are in and they've clearly been planning this for a long time.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So to the Belfast newsletter then on the 7th March 1942.

Bombing of Palermo.

It wasn't as hardline as some papers.

The Belfast Newsletter?

No.

What would a Belfast newsletter have been seen at

the time? Well, the old thing is the Irish News, the Catholic paper, and the newsletter would be a Protestant Unionist paper.

The Telegraph would be seen as slightly more, but, you know, Unionist with a smaller U, shall we

We were back in to produce, uh, a paper, which was really a huge tribute to everybody.

I, I spoke to one of the, the, the guys in, in the print s- situation last night, and he was saying that Telegraph had offers of help from a lot of people, including the, the Andytown News, the Newsletter, the Irish News.

A lot of other papers rallied round to give help.

But the paper was produced and printed by the Telegraph, which was amazing.

Her father was a city merchant.

Her mother's family owned the Belfast Newsletter.

Hers was a family who believed in radical politics, Christian values, and in educating their daughters as well as they did their sons.

Mary Anne was schooled alongside her brother Henry, to whom she was particularly close.

When she was six years old, her family hosted parties in Belfast to celebrate the success of the American revolutionaries in their quest to create a republic independent from the British Empire.

Aged 19, Marianne had joined in the celebrations and Belfast parties that greeted news of the fall of the Bastille prison to rioters in Paris, hoping that France's new revolution would be an inspirational step towards the end of tyranny everywhere.

Marianne first became truly aware of the issue of slavery when she was 11 years old, and her mother was mortified, enraged even, when her family-owned newspaper, the Belfast Newsletter, posted an ad for a runaway slave who had escaped the house where he was being kept when his masters brought him with them on a visit to Belfast.

In conjunction with the ad, a hunt was organised throughout Belfast for the escaped young man, described in the newspaper as an Indian Black, which meant in the nomenclature of slavery somebody with Native American and African ancestry.

You said about the different newspapers now, but there was different newspapers then as well that people were reading.

So if you were reading the Belfast Telegraph or Belfast Newsletter in 1921, you weren't aware of what was happening in Belfast.

Unless you saw it outside the street, which you should have been seeing something not very positive on your streets.

But the news you were reading was often telling you something that was not true.