I contributed the Thought for the Day on Radio Ulster on Sunday 21 February.
You can listen here, or read it below:
Saidie Patterson
In February 1940, two thousand women workers from Ewart’s Linen Mill on Belfast’s Crumlin Road were deep into strike action. On the first day, dressed in their Sunday best, they had marched through the city. But the euphoria of that day soon gave way to hardship. Their leader, Saidie Patterson, recalled: “We were hungry all the time and we lived on bread and potatoes.”
After seven weeks, the women secured improved working conditions, a 33 per cent pay rise, and paid holidays. Today, the strike is regarded as ground-breaking for the way it transformed industrial relations in Northern Ireland.
Saidie Patterson was no stranger to hardship. At the age of fourteen, she witnessed her mother die in childbirth. It is likely her mother could have survived, but the family could not afford a doctor’s fees. With an invalid stepfather, responsibility for her seven younger siblings fell to her. She later explained:
“As I stood in my dear mother’s blood, I didn’t shed a tear, but I felt a cross being put on my back and, at the same time, a strange warmth coming into the room. Looking back now, I’m convinced it was the Holy Spirit. From that day on I put my hand to doing what I could for what was right.”
Her experience echoed that of John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, who famously described his heart being “strangely warmed” during a meeting on Aldersgate Street in London—an encounter that inspired his lifelong concern for those neglected by the rich and powerful.
Saidie’s faith was nurtured in a Methodist church on the Shankill Road, where she encountered a Jesus who stood alongside the poor.
The success of the strike established Saidie Patterson as a respected civic and trade union leader. In 1950, she was invited to Germany by the Moral Re-Armament movement, a Christian organisation promoting dialogue and reconciliation as an alternative to post-war military re-armament.
She did not want to go. Her own home had been “wrecked” during the German bombing of Belfast in 1941, and a nephew had been killed. But she went anyway. Her encounters with German people later shaped her work during the Troubles with Women Together and the Peace People.
Saidie Patterson died in 1985, more than a decade before the Good Friday Agreement. Yet her words still ring true: “You need more than a gun in your hand. You need an idea.”