While trawling through the multitude of fantastic sources on the poor of Belfast at the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland, I came across a very seasonal plea for help a couple of weeks ago. Included in the letters of distress received by the Belfast Corporation Relief Committee in November 1933 was a letter by an eight-year-old boy to Santa Claus (click on the picture below to read the letter). It is difficult to know how the letter came to be included in the files of the Corporation; it is believed that Santa maintains his own archive of letters from boys and girls across the world. So how did such a letter end up in PRONI? Well, the manila folder which contained the ‘Santa letter’ included multiple letters of distress written to the city’s Lord Mayor in the winter of 1933. At this time many of Belfast’s residents were experiencing severe hardship; the previous year thousands of unemployed people had taken to the streets to protest at the rate of outdoor relief they were receiving from the Belfast Board of Guardians. The collective action of the Outdoor Relief Riots of October 1932 had achieved some increase in the rate of relief granted but many remained in dire straits; the letters from Belfast residents to the Lord Mayor throughout the 1930s are testament to this.

There are multiple explanations for why this letter appeared in the archives. Could it have been the cynical yet desperate ploy of a parent who foresaw only a poor and hungry Christmas for her children? Given the season it was written, and the preoccupations of many a poor parent in Belfast that year (and indeed probably also today), it is possible that a mother or father thought this might be an emotive and successful format for making a plea to the Lord Mayor for assistance.

The street from which the young boy wrote (Hartley Street) I am not including the number to preserve anonymity) has since disappeared in the redevelopment of Belfast. In 1911 it had a mixed population of Catholics and Protestants, generally skilled and unskilled labourers living in houses that were categorised as ‘second class’. The houses themselves were not tenements with multiple families, but appear to have been small, housing a single family each. Belfast went into a period of economic decline after the Great War (1914-18) and it is likely that families such as this one, with a disabled ex-serviceman at the head of the household, would have found it very difficult to survive.

I like to think that this letter was written by the young boy himself, the cursive in the original letter is quite good, and it is not impossible that it was written by a careful eight-year-old. Perhaps his mother, following instructions from her son to post the letter to Santa, took a sneak-peak and overwhelmed by the simplicity and practicality of the gifts he requested, was afraid it would get lost on the way to the North Pole and decided to try sending it nearer to home, to the Lord Mayor, Sir Crawford McCullagh, DL, JP. Whether his plea for new boots was successful we have no way of knowing, like the appearance of the letter in the archives it remains a mystery. But ruminating on its author and its recipient prompts all sorts of questions about a child’s experience of poverty, as well as the creative strategies parents used to alleviate suffering at this time of year.