Another of the backroom jobs at Humber Street Gallery that you may not realise exist but are so important. As Matt explains.

Librarian Tom reports from the Freedom Centre Library on his favourite flights of sci-fantasy.

Behind this slightly confrontational question is a fascinating tale of the contribution of immigrants, reported by our Celtic diaspora correspondent Angus Young.

When the Romans rocked up in this neck of the woods – around 70AD – they steered clear of the marshland that would eventually become Hull and instead established a settlement in Brough. As a result, we can’t really answer the question about what they ever did for us. However, we can say with some degree of certainty that Hull owes a considerable debt to the Irish. As local historian and writer Rob Bell puts it: “The Irish came to Hull for the harvest, then to dig the docks and lay the rail tracks.”

Much of the city’s key infrastructure was originally put in place by Irish migrants, working in construction gangs who moved from one building scheme to another. Millions left Ireland after the 1840s Famine and while the majority headed to America and, closer to home, Liverpool, the lure of work in the rapidly-growing port of Hull eventually led to the establishment of an Irish community here.

Some of the navvies who came to Hull lived in temporary camps. One was set up in Pearson Park for workers hired to construct the nearby Hull to Barnsley railway line. Once the docks were built, many navvies stayed on to become the first generation of dockers. The first residential neighbourhood – known as Little Ireland – developed between Paragon railway station and Spring Bank and included a warren of terraced streets, many of which were eventually swept away with the development of Ferensway in the 1930s. The Irish influence even led to a pub in Brook Street called the Acorn being re-named the Dublin Hotel in 1882.

A reminder of those days can be seen in Spring Street where the former St Patrick’s Roman Catholic Church, built in 1905, still stands. The larger, more grandiose St.Charles Borromeo in Jarratt Street is also still in use as a church having first opened in 1829. Two Irishmen who settled in Hull in the mid-19th century also played a key part in improving public health in the city.

Originally from County Meath, Dr Owen Daly came to live in Hull in the 1840s when he became a physician at Hull Royal Infirmary. He also worked as a lecturer at the Hull and East Riding School of Medicine and was a founding member of the Hull Medical Society. Daly led the public health response to a deadly outbreak of cholera in the city and was joined by fellow Irishman Edward Collins who, as editor and owner of the Hull Advertiser newspaper, campaigned to clear long-standing slums where the disease thrived.

Collins called for physical improvements such as surfaced roads, new drains, street lighting and the opening of more public baths as well as advocating measures to control and eradicate disease such as regular collections of refuse and tougher regulation on certain trades. He was considered a radical by campaigning on behalf of the poor, many of whom were Irish cotton spinners working in mills near the River Hull.

Unusually for the time, he put the importance of public health ahead of religion and was duly criticised for his stance. In one editorial he wrote: “We cannot but regret that, whilst so many of the clergy of Hull take great trouble to inoculate the minds of the people with uncharitable and ignorant prejudice  against the imaginary danger of the Popery, not one of them has come forward to organise a movement against the prevention of sickness by the frequent use of excellent public baths.”

The work of Daly and Collins would pave the way for a public health revolution in Hull. As Rob Bell observes: “Hull’s Irish contribution – navvies, infrastructure, education and above all the earliest campaigners for public health – is an object lesson in how the challenge of absorbing a migrant community translates into being an essential ingredient for innovation and progress.”

Angus Young

Playwright Maureen Lennon takes us on a lesser-used footpath to the place where the history of Hull is revealed.

Burnsy nipped down Preston Road for us to take a look at one of the most modern libraries in the city.

The city is flat, we all know that. But Dr Robb Robinson of University of Hull has found a hill. And a reason for it.

The city apparently lags well behind in the history of painting. Until one man took up the brush, reports our maritime arts correspondent Angus Young.

When it came to applying paint to canvas, Hull was comparatively slow off the mark. The Renaissance period between the early 14th century and the mid-16th century is typically described as the artistic and cultural rebirth of Europe. Painting, sculpture and the decorative arts all flourished across the continent. However, as former Ferens Art Gallery curator Victor Galloway once memorably observed, Britain – and Hull in particular – were late to the party.

Writing in a programme for a 1951 exhibition at the gallery organised as part of the Festival of Britain, Galloway noted: “Whereas art had earlier attended divine worship, embellishment and edification, it was now an end to itself, and where formerly life was too solemn a thing to be devoted to pleasure, no other preoccupation later restrained the artist from an obsession with nature which would afford that intimacy necessary to find beauty and satisfaction in the natural order, and make it the object of one’s veneration and the motive of life’s labours.

“Britain, always on the fringe of cultural progression from the centre of things, was slow to adopt this art for art’s sake. It was, in fact, nearly a couple of centuries, in spite of royal patronage of foreigners, before this new religion had permeated the people and begun to take effect at the end of the 17th century.”

Even then, the idea of picking up a brush and making a living from art was slow to take off in Hull. When it finally did, the town’s maritime setting would be key. Galloway suggested Hull’s historical role as an isolated but important trading port initially held back the development of homegrown artists but eventually provided the inspiration behind an almost unique local school of marine painters who turned their talent to the sea rather than landscape painting.

“Hull steered a course always out of step with common trends and strangely independent in politics, religion and even loyalty,” he wrote “In a place so important and individualistic, and prosperous as it always was – the home to some of the wealthiest and influential in the land – and pleasant and impressive as it certainly must have been, strange to say Hull produced practically no-one of national renown and no picture of it is known to exist that could be called important. There is, in fact, almost a total absence of local views of any class earlier than the 19th century. All we know of its appearance is derived from maps, of which there is an abundance. Hull has been well served by historians and cartographers, but few places of its size owe less to art.”

The earliest surviving marine artworks completed in Hull are a couple of paintings on panels by Martin Beckman, a Swedish engineer came here in 1681 to oversee construction work at the town’s military defences. However, it wasn’t until just over a century later that Hull’s first homegrown artist who would eventually be regarded as nationally important was born. Even then, it took another century for John Ward’s fame beyond his home town only spread after his death from cholera in 1849.

The son of a master mariner, Ward served an apprenticeship with a house and ship painter before setting up a business in High Street in the same trade. The young artist and draughtsman exhibited his first original work in Hull in 1829. Four years later he painted the large whaling picture Swan and Isabella which now hangs in Trinity House.

Another Ward painting now in the Hull Museums’ collection called Hull Whalers in the Arctic suggests he made at least two trips to the frozen whaling grounds, capturing what he witnessed on canvas while there. As such, he was one of the first British artists to actually see and paint an iceberg.

Ward was almost certainly prolific but a full catalogue of all his works doesn’t exist as many of his paintings were neither dated or signed while most changed hands on a frequent basis once they had been sold. The fact that he was little known to the arts world outside of Hull before his early death at the age of just 51 meant there was no national interest in his passing or his pivotal role as the founding father of the so-called Hull school of marine artists.

In fact, it wasn’t until Victor Galloway curated the Ferens’ exhibition of early marine paintings in 1951 that Ward and his local contemporaries and successors in Hull received any significant national attention at all. “Ward was the only truly local marine artist of any great importance, who painted much, and who can be regarded as of professional calibre and warranting national recognition,” he wrote at the time. “That such recognition has not already been accorded to him is a matter of surprise in consideration of the widespread demand for his work while he lived. He was forgotten completely and his name is only beginning to be known outside his home town.”

Today Ward’s paintings feature in the Ferens Art Gallery, the Hull Maritime Museum, Trinity House in Hull and the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC.

Angus Young

There’s much more to running a gallery than just hanging a few pictures, as Dave Windass of Humber Street Gallery explains.

Certainly more than 3, but more than 300? more than 3,000? The answer may surprise you as much as it did us.

The exact wheres, whens, whos and hows are covered by our experienced election corespondent Angus Young. The whys, you’ll have to work out yourself.

A new chapter in the region’s political history will be written this Thursday, May 1, when votes will be cast in the first ever Hull and East Yorkshire mayoral election. It’s a chance for people to decide who will be the leader of a new combined authority which is being created as part of a devolution deal with the government. The new mayor and the authority will be responsible for strategic issues such as economic development, transport, housing, planning and skills.

Six candidates are standing in the contest to become the new mayor. In alphabetical order they are: Luke Campbell (Reform UK); Rowan Halstead (Yorkshire Party); Anne Handley (Conservative Party); Kerry Harrison (Green Party)); Margaret Pinder (Labour and Co-operative Party)) and Mike Ross (Liberal Democrats).

On election day, the candidates’ names will appear in the same alphabetical order on each ballot paper. Polling stations will be open across Hull and East Yorkshire between 7am and 10pm on May 1. Every registered elector should receive an official poll letter before polling day itself which explains where, when and how to vote.

Details of your local polling station are included in the letter or by contacting your local council election office. You can also find out the location of your local polling station by visiting wheredoivote.co.uk

It’s probably worth remembering you can only vote in person at your local polling station. However, you do not need to take the poll letter with you in order to vote. What you do need to take is a photo ID such as a passport, driving licence, disabled driver blue badge or an OAP bus pass.

When you arrive at the polling station you are required to give your name and address to the polling staff as well as producing your photo ID before a ballot paper is issued. Voting requires a simple X being placed next to the name of your preferred candidate. Any other mark or words written on the ballot paper will invalidate it and your vote will not be included in the count.

If you registered for a postal vote and were unable to post it on time, you can still physically hand it in at your local polling station on May 1. You will be asked to fill in a form when you do.

You get one vote and, like local council and general elections, the first past the post voting system is being used so the candidate with the highest number of votes will be elected as mayor.

The votes will be counted on Friday, May 2, so there will be none of the late-night drama usually associated with local and national elections. Instead, the process of validating and counting all the votes will start at 9.30am on Friday. Counting will take place at both the Guildhall in Hull and the Haltemprice Leisure Centre in Anlaby with the final result expected to be declared either later that morning or in the early afternoon.

Angus Young