The congregation of First Dunmurry has existed since around 1676. The first meeting house was an old lime kiln, later a meeting house was built in 1714, and this was eventually replaced with the present remarkable building of 1779. So the congregation is almost 350 years old and the building itself is 245 years old. Since 1839 the church’s nearest neighbour has been the railway. That is a long time to be neighbours. The railway has run alongside the Church for all that time. Of course, it has been run by different operators over the years, steam trains have been supplanted by diesel, it has even changed gauge at one point, but the Belfast to Lisburn line was created back in 1839, the station at Dunmurry being added at the same time.

Because of this proximity the railway has inadvertently helped create for First Dunmurry a small footnote in film history. In June 1897 the cinematographer Alexandre Promio came to Ireland on behalf of the famous Lumière brothers to make the first moving film in Ireland. He filmed in Belfast, including street scenes in Castle Place and on Queen’s Bridge, fire-fighters practising, and a few seconds of the first football match ever to be filmed, which was Glentoran v Cliftonville at the Oval in East Belfast.

He also filmed short sections of the rail journey between Belfast and Dublin. Cameras were cumbersome and had to be hand cranked. To capture movement they had to be pointed at crowds or some human activity or placed on a moving platform like a train or a tram. So the train was an obvious place to go and filming the view as the train pulled out of a station was a good way to catch a local view.

As the steam train chugged out of Dunmurry station, sometime in the Summer of 1897, Promio filmed the view and the result was a 37 second burst of film called Départ de Dunmurry. The opening few seconds shows an intensely industrial scene based around the long demolished mill, not immediately recognisable as the modern Dunmurry. By the end of the film we are into open countryside.

This new video enables us to compare the trail blazing film of 1897 with a contemporary film of the same view in 2024. Départ de Dunmurry 2024 enables the viewer to make that comparison:

We can reflect on what has changed over those 127 years between 1897 and 2024. In one way we have to marvel at the technological progress that has taken place. In 1897 film was in its infancy, cameras were cumbersome, very expensive and required a lot of skill to use. Alexandre Promio was an expert who had filmed all over the world, one of only a handful of people who could do that. Today I am just one of literally millions of people who has a phone that is also a camera which can take digital films in colour with sound merely by pointing it in the right direction.

Imagine if you could show Alexandre Promio a modern phone or a digital camera. He would be more astonished than we could imagine. So we might ask what will technology be like 127 years from now? It is impossible to imagine.

But in the film what do we see today that is different? Today there are cars, lots of cars, there is a significant quantity of graffiti, but actually more trees and more houses. We can notice too that the old steam train takes a bit longer to get up speed than the modern diesel one. You wouldn’t know just looking at the videos though that the railways were much more extensive in 1897 than today. There were around 5,630 km of railway lines in those days, more than twice what there is today, and you could go virtually anywhere in Ireland by rail then. You are restricted to very limited routes today, particularly in Northern Ireland.

But when you compare the two films from 1897 and 2024 one thing has not changed and that is our church. Indeed it has not changed in any big way since 1779 when it was built. As the train curves to the right you can look up Glebe Road and see the church in its prominent position on top of the hill.

It represents our faith, our witness,  and though the world changes around us in so many different ways, what we stand for and what we do is always equally important. As we look out of the window of the railway carriage we can see the changes and notice too our Church, the one constant in an ever changing world.

We also have another new video uploaded to YouTube. Non-Subscribing Presbyterian Reflections on Spring, Pentecost, and Psalm 104 from the newly refurbished Session Room and the grounds of First Dunmurry (NS) Presbyterian Church. With the Rev Dr David Steers, minister, and Allen Yarr, organist: