by Sipping a pre-dinner martini by the window of the Europa Hotel’s first-floor Piano Bar, looking down on locals and tourists wandering into the Crown Liquor Saloon over there for the obligatory pint of Guinness, it’s almost impossible to imagine the past. .
A past where the scene was the same, apart from a busy, vibrant city, full of rubble and broken glass. The streets echoed not with happy chatter but with the screeching of tires.
The Europa, which has just undergone a five-year, £15 million refurbishment, was bombed 33 times between 1971 and 1994, tying it for the title of the world’s most bombed hotel with Holiday Inns in Sarajevo and Beirut. The windows were broken so many times, which local glaziers managed, that the ones at the front were almost permanently boarded up.
As a result, it became known as the Hardboard Hotel – and rooms at the back with proper windows cost an extra £10 a night. In the bar on the top floor, drinks were served by the Penthouse Poppets, Northern Ireland’s answer to Playboy Bunnies, but journalists tended to congregate in the Piano Bar on the first floor.
I was a reporter for the Daily News in Belfast at the time and although the Piano Bar often served mainly the local and international media who stayed in the hotel to report on the Troubles, from time sometimes local journalists would wander in. Interesting work, but of course this was a terrible time for society.
Since those were the days before cell phones, when a bomb went off, everyone would run down to the phones in the lobby to file their stories to copy takers. Our running joke was that those stories always started with: “Hello, copy? Ready? Right, mark this Belfast bomb. Yes, I know, same as last week. OK, here goes. ‘As I stand here in the burning rubble … take a PA.’
Of course, PA is the news agency of the Press Association, whose correspondent Deric Henderson was always first on the scene of any disaster. He looked so tired that we wondered if he went home and slept.
On a particular night in Europa, a slightly illegal shortwave radio on the police frequency was playing discreetly in the background as usual when it burst into life with reports of a riot on Republican Falls Road. Someone went downstairs to call McGlade’s, where the photographers were drinking, and tell them to go up there. “They’re all drunk,” he said when he came back just in time to buy another round, “so they’ve put the least drunk one up.”
When nothing was heard for an hour, he went down to call again and returned with the news that the photographer had taken shelter in the doorway of the shop and captured several shots of the rioters hurling bricks by the police, then he was gone quietly.
He shook his head to see why, was knocked unconscious and woke up to find a frozen salmon lying next to him. The silence happened because the rioters ran out of bricks, so they smashed the window of the local fishmonger and started hurling assorted seafood at the police instead, only the wayward salmon dropped the unfortunate photographer.
We laughed so hard we almost forgot whose it was, but at least the photographer had a nice salmon to take home for dinner.
Today there is a painting hanging behind the reception by local artist Colin Davidson on the 71 bus he used to take him home from school, and to commemorate the year the hotel first opened – 1971 express. now featuring muted earth tones from dove gray to blue marble and slate white bathrooms.
In 1995, Bill Clinton stayed at the Europa when he became the first US President to visit Northern Ireland. Her entourage booked 110 rooms and the security team was there for months in advance, wearing sharp suits with mysterious bulges, speaking into their curls and checking every nook and cranny in sight.
The week before he arrived, all the journalists who had undertaken the visit were gathered in one of the conference rooms at the Europa for a briefing. Someone stood at the head of the room and said: “Hi, my name is Don Williams, and I’m a secret agent.” “Well, you’re not anymore, are you?” said a voice behind him.
So there were as many laughs as there were bombs, but the last one went to Sir Billy Hastings, who bought the Europa from Grand Metropolitan Hotels in 1993 and spent £8 million restoring it before reopening the following year.
Billy was a great character who drove a Rolls-Royce with a personal number plate ending in 1066. I was sitting behind him at the re-opening when I noticed his wallet sticking out of his back pocket and he pointed out to him after that I was. very tempted to grab it. “Geoff, are you kidding? After all the life I’ve spent on this place, there’s nothing,” he laughed.
Sadly, Billy is no longer with us, having passed away in 2017, but his son Howard has just overseen the latest refurbishment of the hotel, bringing tastefully refreshed bedrooms and air of understated elegance throughout.
Billy would have approved, and as I sit here in the Piano Bar looking down on the happy, prosperous scene below, I raise my glass to him before going down to dinner, then going to bed in a room with real windows.
Geoff Hill traveled as a guest at the Europa Hotel (028 9027 1066; hastingshotels.com/europa-belfast), which offers doubles from £160.
