Crawfordsburn takes its name in Ulster Scots, meaning Crawford’s stream, or in Irish: Sruth Chráfard.

Before the Plantation of Ulster, the area of Crawfordsburn was known as Ballymullan (Irish: Baile Ui Mhaoláin); it is still a townland.

Crawfordsburn and the uninhabited lands of Helen’s Bay were in the possession of Bangor Abbey until the dissolution of the monasteries around 1540. In 1555, the O’Neills of Claneboye asserted that the land was theirs. Con mac Neill was imprisoned by the English, at Carrickfergus Castle. It is said he came to an agreement with Sir Hugh Montgomery, a Scotsman, that if Hugh agreed to help him escape, he would give him half his land. Con did escape in due course. To secure the land, Con and Hugh joined up with another Scot, Sir James Hamilton. Hamilton and Montgomery are seen as two of the founding fathers of the Ulster Scots. They brought settlers from Ayrshire, with the initial arrival from Portpatrick at Donaghadee in May 1606 and then in greater numbers thereafter. It is believed that Andrew Crawford, who gave his name to the village of Crawfordsburn, came from Kilbirnie in North Ayrshire. William Crawford later purchased the Crawfordsburn Estate from Lord Clanbrassil around 1670.

Thus, Crawfordsburn originated in the 17th century as a small settlement on an important route along North Down. It has retained aspects of its 17th century history along its Main Street including the Old Inn.

The Sharman-Crawford family developed the village in the 18th and 19th centuries, and lived in Crawfordsburn House until the 1930s. Given, its importance in the background to Crawfordsburn Country Park, This article summarises their family history and that of Crawfordsburn House.

William Sharman Crawford

The Sharman Crawford family were not as aristocratic as their land-owning neighbours at Clandeboye, the Blackwoods, (later the Marquesses of Dufferin and Ava), but they played a significant role in shaping the political landscape of Ireland in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries.

William Sharman was born on 3 September 1780 at Moira Castle, which the family rented from the Earl of Moira. William’s father was fairly wealthy, having inherited estates in Banbridge, Rathfriland and Staleen in County Meath, as well as farming the castle demesne and being the collector of taxes and revenue for the Lisburn district. He played a prominent part in the volunteer movement and sat in the Irish Parliament from 1783-1790. (The portrait by Thomas Robinson is of William’s father against the backdrop of Moira Castle.)

In 1805 William married Mable Crawford of Crawfordsburn. (The portrait of William is by John Prescott Knight.) Their fathers were prominent during the Volunteer period, and in July 1792 when the Volunteers of the outlying districts of Belfast marched to the town to celebrate the fall of the Bastille, Major Crawford deputised for Colonel Sharman.

In October 1829 William and Mabel were summoned to Crawfordsburn following the death of her brother in an accident. Her father was determined to have a successor to whom he could transfer the family name and estates. The following year Major John Crawford died and in compliance with his will, William Sharman assumed the Crawford surname in addition to his paternal one and the ‘House of Sharman Crawford’ was born.

At the age of 47 William Sharman Crawford found himself the owner of landed estates, including the Crawford Estates at Crawfordsburn and Rademon near Crossgar. His income amounted to in excess of £8,000 per annum.  He was a liberal protestant and unlike many of his class, had the conviction that landed property imposed a moral responsibility upon its possessor.

He stood for Down in the 1831 General Election and for Belfast in 1832, but was unsuccessful on both occasions. His radical views on Land Reform, the securing of legal recognition for the Tenant Right Custom, which he described as ‘the darling object of my heart’, brought him to the attention of ‘the Liberator’ Daniel O’Connell who helped him win the seat for Dundalk unopposed in 1834.  (He eventually fell out with O’Connell over his stance on Tithes and repeal of the Union.  Crawford favoured the idea of a federal Ireland based on the Canadian model and wrote extensively on the subject.)

Crawford’s activities on behalf of the Irish tenant farmers brought him to the attention of English radicals and in 1841 he was elected the MP for Rochdale.  He later wrote; ‘I stood a contest the electors paying all expenses and I, an Irish landlord was elected for the special purpose of contending for free trade in corn’. Crawford was the MP for Rochdale for 11 years and continued to campaign for Irish tenant farmers. In 1852 he returned to Crawfordsburn so he could fight the Down seat once again.  The 1852 election was one of the most hotly contested of the century.  It was also one of the most violent as radicals and conservatives clashed over the issue of tenant right.  Because of his unrelenting campaigning on the tenant right issue most of the local press did everything in their power to denounce Crawford.  The Belfast News Letter in April 1852 described him as: ‘.. the upholder of a desperate democracy, a striker at the roots of property, a secularist in education, a papist in disguise and besides all a man in his dotage.’

The local landlords also did their utmost to prevent Crawford’s election by influencing tenants’ voting and he again failed to take one of the two Down seats. He died at Crawfordsburn on 17 October 1861 aged 81.  James McKnight, a former editor of the Belfast News Letter, made the greatest tribute to Crawford in a speech in 1852 at Raloo near Larne:

‘When the story of Crawford comes to be written, that story would afford one of the most extraordinary instances of self-denial, devotedness and unswerving rectitude that had ever been known, for what was the fact?  Crawford a member of the aristocracy, richer a great deal than four fifths of the titled persons around him, came forward nobly to advocate the abolition of the great social grievance which he saw destroying his native country.  Men of his own class treated him with the utmost contempt and this might have been tolerable if he had the sympathy of other classes, but they too joined in the ridicule that was heaped upon him and his motives.  He persevered however, caring nothing for their sneers until the whole country was aroused in his favour.’

The Sharman Crawford Children

William and Mabel Sharman Crawford had 11 children, the majority born at Crawfordsburn House. Correspondence during 1857-1861 highlights strain over the family’s finances caused by a large dependent family, falling rents and crop prices after the Famine. Consideration was given to selling the Crawfordsburn Demesne as a building site and so raising a considerable sum for the settlement of the family’s debts. The arrival, in the mid-1860s, of the railway to Bangor, which passed through the Estate, coupled with Lord Dufferin’s scheme for the development of Helen’s Bay, undoubtedly increased the potential value of the land.  In later years the Estate did sell Strickland’s Glen to Bangor Council. There is a photograph of the former Crawfordsburn House, taken just prior to its demolition in 1905.

Following the death of Major James Sharman in 1884, the estates passed to the third son, Arthur Johnson Sharman Crawford who was a lawyer and a director of the Belfast Bank. He married Louisa Alicia Crawford, the youngest daughter of William Crawford of Lakelands, Co. Cork, a founder of the famous Beamish & Crawford brewery. It was this marriage that largely rejuvenated the finances of the family.

However, of all the Sharman-Crawford children the one who most inherited their father’s passion for Liberalism and reform was Mabel Sharman Crawford (1820-1912. Educated by a private governess at Crawfordsburn, Mabel travelled extensively throughout Europe and was an accomplished travel author having three books published in both London and New York: Life in Tuscany (1859), Through Algeria (1863) and The Wilmot Family (1864). A great believer in the virtue of travel to woman, Mabel wrote in Through Algeria, ‘If the exploring of foreign lands is not the highest end of the most useful occupation of feminine existence, it is at least more improving, as well as more amusing, than crochet work’.  Mabel’s work is still quoted in articles on 19^th century women’s feminism, and her letters in the Public Record Office to Lord Dufferin cover a range of women’s issues including the eligibility of women to stand as Councillors and Aldermen, and demonstrate her life-long devotion to women’s rights.

The later Sharman Crawfords

The family’s other great passion was sailing. The architect of the present Crawfordsburn House (built in 1906) was Vincent (elder brother of James, later Viscount Craigavon, the first Prime Minister of Northern Ireland) Craig who was also responsible for the design of the Royal Ulster Yacht Club (RUYC) in Bangor. The members of the RUYC in 1867 included Colonel Robert Gordon Sharman Crawford’s father, Arthur, and uncle, John, as members. Robert Gordon became member 164 on 15 August 1871 aged 18 giving his address as the Glen House Crawfordsburn, which was then part of the Estate. The Colonel owned many yachts during his sailing career including Mollie 1 & 2 named after his daughter, and the famous ‘Red Lancer’ named after the 16th Lancers in which he served. Red Lancer in 1893 won 24 flags in 34 starts. The remains of the private quay from which the Colonel sailed can still be seen at low tide on Crawfordsburn beach directly below the house.

The highlight of his sailing career came in 1899 when the RUYC took up the challenge for the world’s most famous race the ‘America’s Cup’, on behalf of one of the millionaire grocer Sir Thomas Lipton. Colonel Crawford, travelled to New York to undertake the negotiations for the Club’s first entry. Sir Thomas Lipton went on to challenge for the America’s Cup on five occasions in 1889, 1901, 1903, 1920 and 1930 and was beaten on every occasion. All the yachts were named the Shamrock and RG Sharman Crawford crewed on Shamrock 1 (1889) and on Shamrock 3 (1903) and was on the committee boat for the 1901 race.

Colonel R G Sharman Crawford was the last of the family to live in Crawfordsburn House. He was a career soldier, in first the 15th Hussars and then the 16th Lancers. Following his retirement he became the Hon. Colonel of the 3rd Battalion Royal Irish Rifles, which recruited in County Down. In the 1890s, his elder brother died and left Robert Sharman Crawford a sum in excess of £100,000. It was this inheritance, which provided the capital for him to build the current house, completed in 1906.

Robert Gordon was a major figure in the Unionist movement, as a member of the Ulster Unionist Council. He was also appointed to the five-man Commission, which drew, up the provisional constitution of Ulster – had Home Rule been implemented. Sir Edward Carson was staying at Crawfordsburn House on 24 July 1913 when a telegram arrived via Helen’s Bay railway station bringing the news that Robert Gordon’s son, Lieutenant Terence Sharman Crawford serving with his father’s old regiment the 15th Hussars, had been fatally injured in a motorcycle accident at Aldershot when an Army horse ran out in front of him.

That evening Carson and Sharman Crawford were to have addressed the North Down Division of The Ulster Volunteer Force at Six Road Ends. Before Sharman Crawford left for Aldershot that afternoon, Carson said to him, ‘You will bear up as a man’. Sharman Crawford replied, ‘Sir, I will certainly try,’ and went on to tell Carson,

‘Let nothing interfere with your meeting this evening, because we are engaged in a struggle that is so important and so grave, with results so far reaching to each individual of us, that even the greatest sorrows as passing events cannot and ought not to deter us from the path of duty which lies before us.’

In memory of his son he erected in 1914 the Terence Memorial Hall on the Cootehall Road in Crawfordsburn, now renamed Sharman Lodge, as a community hall. A plaque in St John’s church, Helen’s Bay, also commemorates the life of Lieutenant Terence Sharman Crawford.

Sharman Crawford played a major role in the UVF. As well as being the North Down Battalion Commander he also controlled the UVF finances, which amounted to over £100,000, held in the Belfast Banking Company in 1914, plus sums lodged in London and Paris banks.

The Colonel, and his wife, had a close interest in spiritualism. A County Down Spectator article of 2 December 1933 recorded that he chaired a lecture at the Ulster Hall by Mr Shaw Desmond entitled ‘You can speak to your dead’. Introducing the speaker, he said that spiritualism was the dominant question of the day. He himself had ‘had a personal communication with my dead son and since that time he has been in constant communication with me. Last week he spoke to me for an hour in London, and said he would be here tonight. As sure as you are sitting in the hall, he is present with me on the platform’. He concluded ‘I did not come here to make a speech but to testify to the truth of this great religion’.

The Colonel died in 1934.

After the Sharman Crawfords

The Independent Unionist MP Mr W J Stewart leased Crawfordsburn House, until his death in May 1946. In 1938 Stewart founded the Progressive Unionist Party. The firm of Stewart and Partners in which he had joined his father were builders of Parliament Buildings at Stormont.

During the War, especially in the run-up to D Day, the grounds were home to large numbers of American troops housed in Nissen huts in the field below the windmill, adjacent to Windmill Road. After they left, the accommodation was used for several years as ‘Tin Town’ – to house returning servicemen and families from Belfast, some who had lost homes in the blitz, and were waiting for other more permanent housing.

The House and 152 acres of the 510 acre Estate were transferred in 1948 to the Northern Ireland Tuberculosis Authority. The official opening of the hospital and the adjacent nurses’ home was performed by Dame Dehra Parker, the Health Minister in March 1950. It was a sanatorium for the treatment of non-infectious children, holding up to 80 invalids. At that time, Northern Ireland was suffering the highest death toll from TB anywhere in any part of the UK.

At Crawfordsburn hospital, ‘they could not have anything better for the progress and recovery of children’, the Minister said. The nurses’ home was reconstructed from the out-offices and stores, to include a dining-room, recreation room, and snackery. The first matron was Miss Ann Porter. Dickie McBride worked at the hospital, as the caretaker, while his wife Annie was a cook there. In the 1950s, its walled garden was run by Lindsay Finney who sold produce on a Saturday morning. A range of activities was provided for the children, including a visiting ornithologist, as well as walks in the beautiful grounds.

When the scourge of TB had been virtually removed, the children’s hospital was extensively altered, in 1961, to cater for geriatric patients, under the management of Purdysburn Hospital. The first patients arrived on 15 January 1962. Two and a half years later, its role was changed again, by the North Down Hospitals Management Committee, to accommodate geriatric and post-operative patients, as a nursing home. A disconcerting headline was carried in the County Down Spectator, when the hospital pioneered a new form of mobility for those in its care: ‘At Crawfordsburn Hospital – electric chair for patients’. This was honoured by a mention in Private Eye!

In the mid-1990s, the nursing home closed. The current Crawfordsburn House development was completed in 1998.