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Here is the full text of full-page editorial feature recently published in Belfast Telegraph: S I G N S o f  a  b e t t e r f u t u r e . . . JOHN REA relates how Ulster’s top ‘For Sale’ signboard company now thrives in the former stables of the Blitz Night Mares.

IT WAS a bright, moonlit April night in 1941. A crowd of laughing mill-girls with arms linked, were walking back home to the Crumlin Road from a dance in the Ulster Hall. They were soon to experience one of the most bizarre episodes in Belfast’s turbulent history.

It was nearly midnight when they were joined by a party of young air-raid wardens who had also been at the Ulster Hall and were returning to duty at the ARP base in Clifton Street.

Delia Murphy, the 39 year old Irish ballad singer had topped the bill at the dance and had brought the house down with her latest hits, Courtin’ in the Kitchen and The Spinning Wheel. The girls sang the choruses as they marched together through Belfast’s wartime blackout. The city had only once been attacked; just a week earlier on April 7, six German bombers had raided the docks and shipyard.

The singing ended abruptly when the banshee wail of the Air Raid siren suddenly caused them to run for cover as they crossed into Crumlin Road. Within minutes, the skies over Belfast were lit up by hundreds of flares as 180 Luftwaffe bombers tried to pinpoint their prime targets -- Shorts aircraft factory, Harland & Wolff and the other industries vital to the Allied war effort located around the Port of Belfast.

Tragically, the pathfinder bomb-aimer in the first assault mistook the reflections from the Cavehill Waterworks for the Lagan. That was why the civilian population of north Belfast bore the brunt of one of the worst attacks ever to be inflicted on a British provincial city.

When the All Clear siren sounded after five nightmarish hours of devastation that reduced whole streets of north and east Belfast to brickdust, nearly 800 men women and children were dead and 2,000 wounded. Among the casualties were the wardens who had followed the mill-girls as far as Clifton Street. A direct hit destroyed their base.

The girls were much luckier. All of them survived unhurt, including my Aunt Minnie who, in later years, told me how she witnessed an astonishing sight she was never to forget during her lifetime: The Stampede of Wild Black Horses on Crumlin Road.

The freakish episode began when the stables and funeral parlour of the city’s most celebrated undertaker, William Wilton, were almost completely destroyed by a parachute bomb during the second phase of the raid.

The stables were home to more than a dozen specially-bred black draught horses. With their coal-black plumes and shining leather harness, ‘Willie Wilton’s Night Mares’ had been pulling the hearses at the funerals of the Belfast well-to-do for years. Many of the animals were killed outright by the bomb; others , maddened by the noise and injured by shrapnel, stampeded through the stables’ Archway and along the main road until struck down amid the shambles of the Lower Crumlin.

Different scene today

GO THROUGH that imposing Archway today and you will find a very different scene. What was once a derelict stableyard is now the two-storey HQ of thriving businesses that are breathing new life into an area that never really recovered from the war.

“With typically black Belfast humour, some people called this area the Crumblin’ Road. We’re helping to change that image,” says Brian Barrett, the 33 year-old boss of two companies that bear his name.

Brian Barrett Signs is now Northern Ireland’s leading specialist firm in the manufacture and erection of estate agents’ For Sale signs. His Joinery business specialises in shopfitting, customised counters, display units and the refurbishment of garden structures. It was during the days that Brian’s team was transforming my eyesore of a shed into a beautiful summerhouse that I discovered that they had a direct link with the wild horses of Aunt Minnie’s story, which I had only ever half believed, even as a child.

Brian took over the old funeral premises seven years ago when the boom in the domestic and commercial property market prompted him to expand the business beyond a cramped workshop nearby. With an urban renewal grant,help from the First Trust Bank and the skills of his team, he gave the place a vital new role in the economic future of the Crumlin Road.

Now, a growing fleet of five vans in the smart silver livery of the company bears witness to his success. The vehicles’ vinyl signage is a product of the firm’s own digital imaging machine, a sophisticated printer which also reproduces the weatherproof billboards of artists’ impressions that announce building developments all over Northern Ireland.

“I reckon that nearly everybody in Ulster sees examples of our work as they travel around every day, though they don’t know it,” says Brian. “We now erect and maintain signboards for 95 estate agency branches including the Halifax, Eric Cairns Partnership, Ulster Property Sales, Gerry O’Connor and lots of smaller agents.

“ Within the past few days we have acquired our seventh new client agency since Christmas. That makes us the biggest firm in our business,” he says with pride. He celebrated by acquiring a towable cherry-picker crane which makes it possible for his own squad, or hirers, to erect big signs on buildings and scaffolding safely and easily.

Brian has come a long way since he left the Boy’s Model School with a love of woodwork and rugby football. Headmaster Ernie Davidson, who was also one of the great stalwarts of Ulster rugby, encouraged him to keep up the game while serving his time as a joiner.

He plays for Instonians and trains when his increasingly busy work schedule allows. Even in his leisuretime he is constantly at work in the house at Glengormley which he has improved beyond recognition for his wife Heather and two sons, Curtis, 9 and Corrie, 4.

“I met Heather at Albertville Drive -- not far from where our workshops now are -- when I was hanging doors for her mother. The people of that street used to talk a lot about the Blitz and the amazing scenes when Wilton’s black horses became the forgotten casualties of war. Now the only evidence left of the stables is the high Archway and an old weighbridge which was used to check supplies of hay and fodder.”

Brian concludes: “Albertville Drive has been bulldozed to make way for urban renewal. There is a better era ahead and we’re proud to be a part of it.”