Reconstructed almost entirely from a single spring’s worth of the local newspaper, this is what one ordinary week in Portrush actually looked like, a century ago.
The lights finally come on
On Thursday 13 April 1922, Portrush’s first electricity substation opened off Dunluce Street — the end of a debate that had run since 1892, formally approved by the Board of Trade in 1913 at an estimated £6,000, then delayed for years by the First World War and the inflation that tripled its cost. Chairman Andrew Kelly and his wife performed the opening; a contractor presented Mrs Kelly a silver key, and an electrician handed her a lamp she plugged in to switch the town’s power on “for which Portrush had waited 30 years.” At launch, 2.5 miles of underground cable served the principal streets, another 1.5 miles of overhead cable reached Dhu Varren and Glenmanus, and 140 residents had already signed up.
The rest of the week
The same spring’s Chronicle recorded a genuinely full week of small-town life. Stormy Easter Saturday weather cancelled a Royal Portrush golf competition, even as visitor numbers hit their highest level since before the war. A contentious Golf Club general meeting saw a proposed subscription increase voted down and the Ladies’ Branch refused both greater autonomy and an extended clubhouse. Portrush’s hockey club won the Braddell Shield after their opponents were found to have fielded an ineligible former international player — the team came home to a heroes’ welcome after midnight, greeted with fife, drum, bagpipes and bonfires. Clarke Memorial Methodist Church recorded its highest Easter congregation since 1914, marking its first Easter service under electric light, while the former Hotel Metropole reopened that same season as a Presbyterian Health Society rest home — described at the time as the first of its kind in Ireland.
It’s a small, ordinary snapshot — but that’s exactly what makes it interesting: not a single historic event, just one real week, fully reconstructed from what the town’s own newspaper happened to record.