May Hezlett, golfing champion
In the summer of 1899, a crowd gathered at Portrush railway station to welcome home a 17-year-old who’d just won back-to-back titles — the Irish Ladies Open and, two weeks later, the Ladies (British) Open — both played at Newcastle, Co. Down. May Hezlett had learned the game from her mother from the age of nine and was playing to a scratch handicap by 11.
She went on to win four more Irish Championships (1904, 1905, 1906, 1908) and two more British titles (1902, 1907). In 1913 the Ladies’ Golf Union awarded her a lifetime scratch handicap in recognition of her skill — she became the inaugural President of Royal Portrush Ladies in 1922, a position she held until The Open first came to Royal Portrush in 1951. She died in 1978, aged 95, having lived to see the golf course she’d grown up on become genuinely world-famous. A portrait of her by artist Harry Douglas hangs in the Royal Portrush Ladies clubhouse today.
Henry Hamilton and The White House
Henry Hamilton (1851–1910), a Portglenone-born former apprentice draper, opened a small shop on what’s now Main Street on 21 May 1891, after returning to Portrush from 17 years working in the American newspaper business. He called it The White House — reportedly a nod to the country that had given him his start. Business boomed almost immediately: the shopfront grew from 21 feet to 66 feet within seven years, and to a full 100 feet by 1906. By the early 1900s the store was fulfilling mail-order requests from remarkably far afield, including a December 1896 order from Queen Victoria herself (dress-material samples for Windsor Castle), one from the Princess of Wales in 1903, and one from the Rajah of Pudukkottai in South India, for 26 suits.
Hamilton died on 28 December 1910, aged 59, but the store stayed in family hands for three generations before selling to Crowe Wilson & Co. in 1965. The building is still there on Main Street today, though long since under different ownership.
Derek Mahon, poet
The internationally acclaimed poet Derek Mahon (1941–2020) lived in Portrush for a time in the late 1970s while writer-in-residence at the University of Ulster, in a house overlooking Dunluce Castle and the coast toward the Skerries and, on a clear day, Scotland. His poem “The Chinese Restaurant in Portrush” is a quiet, atmospheric portrait of a spring day in the town, built around a real Chinese restaurant Mahon used to sit in — the poem’s own imagery places it somewhere with a view of the old Northern Counties Hotel, seen partly through the eyes of the restaurant’s homesick proprietor. It’s worth tracking down in one of Mahon’s collections (Poems 1962–1978 is the classic edition) — not reproduced here, since it’s still very much in copyright.
Mahon grew up in Belfast alongside two other major poets, Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley — all three born within a couple of years of each other, all shaped in different ways by the politics and landscape of Northern Ireland. Portrush gets its own small but genuine place in that literary story.
The Traill brothers
Anthony and William Atcheson Traill, of Ballylough near Bushmills, are the two names most responsible for connecting Portrush and the Giant’s Causeway by rail — see our full history of the Giant’s Causeway Tramway for the whole story, including their unlikely backers: Lord Kelvin and the Siemens engineering family.
W.R. Knox, the town’s civic backbone
William R. Knox CBE MM JP (1893–1976) enlisted in 1914, rose to Sergeant in the Machine Gun Corps, served in South Russia in 1918, and was awarded the Military Medal and the Russian Cross of St George. Back in Portrush, he opened a grocery business at Kerr Street in 1921 and went on to an extraordinary record of civic service: secretary, then President, of the Portrush Royal British Legion from 1922; a Portrush Urban District Council member from 1929 until its 1973 dissolution, serving as Chairman across multiple terms spanning three decades; RNLI Portrush Branch Secretary for 35 years from 1938 (his wife deputised during WWII and earned her own RNLI Silver Badge); and a Royal Humane Society Certificate holder for pulling a man from drowning off Curran Strand in 1925. He was awarded the MBE in 1951 and the CBE in 1961, and Knox Park is named in his honour.
Henry Anderson Macaulay, the tenant farmers’ lawyer
Henry Anderson Macaulay (1848–1925) built an extensive solicitor’s practice in Coleraine representing tenant farmers under the Land Law (Ireland) Act 1881 — reportedly acting for “fully 95 per cent of the tenants in the district” by the time of his death. He moved to Kerr Street, Portrush in 1886, stood in the town’s first-ever local election in December 1892, and was unanimously elected the first Chairman of the Portrush Town Commissioners at their inaugural meeting — the founding moment of what became Portrush Urban District Council. He was also a director of the Portrush Harbour Company and an original member and long-serving Treasurer of Royal Portrush Golf Club.
Rebecca Rice, the town’s quiet philanthropist
Rebecca Rice, daughter of a sailing-ship owner and salt manufacturer, used her considerable inherited fortune to shape Portrush directly: she built Craigvara House and Strandmore House, the wall between Craigvara and the sea, and personally planned, financed and supervised the construction of the town’s first promenade — from the East Strand to the Salmon Fishery — as a relief scheme for local fishermen during hard times. She funded a school for local children and brought in a teacher from Coleraine, and continued supporting local charities until her death on 16 January 1874.
Jim Edmundson, Ireland’s first professional golf champion
Born in 1886 in Carnglass, a townland a few miles from Portrush, Jim Edmundson became the first-ever Irish Professional Golf Champion in 1907 at age 21, winning at his home club, Royal Portrush, and repeating the title in 1908. He finished 11th of 180 entrants at the 1908 Open Championship, taught golf at Royal Portrush before moving to England, and coached Gladys Ravenscroft to her 1912 British and 1913 U.S. Women’s Amateur titles. After WWI service in the Royal Artillery, he emigrated to the United States, settling at North Hills Country Club near Philadelphia, where he won the 1923 Pennsylvania Open and became a founding member of the PGA of America — a genuine Portrush-to-America golfing dynasty, fitting neatly alongside our page on Portrush as an Emigration Port.
James Hewitt, the last of the Light Brigade
James Hewitt, born near Ballyshannon in November 1831, rode with the 13th Light Dragoons in the Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava on 25 October 1854 — one of 673 troopers sent into a catastrophic chain of miscommunication that left 118 dead, 127 wounded and 60 captured. Hewitt himself was shot through the leg, his horse fell, and he was dragged by a stirrup before freeing himself and making it back to his own lines; he later recovered under the care of Florence Nightingale, remembered, by his own account, as “a terror to the nurses but loved by the wounded.” He went on to serve in India during the 1857 Mutiny, returned to Ireland in 1910, and settled at 15 Hamilton Place, Portrush, where he died on 19 July 1926, aged 94 — reportedly the last surviving veteran of the Charge. His funeral was attended by British Legion members led by Sgt W.R. Knox MM, and a portrait of him by Belfast artist Kathleen Isabella Metcalfe Mackie survives today.
(For Sir Charles Lanyon, who designed Portrush Town Hall, and railway engineer Berkeley Deane Wise, see our page on Portrush and the Railway. For geologist John Playfair’s role in settling a major 19th-century scientific controversy on Portrush’s own foreshore, see The Rocks That Made Portrush Famous.)