[...] Young was a prolific and once well-known author of books on music, cars, flying, sensational trials and the sea. Sensation and the sea combined in his prompt and excellent Titanic (it was in the bookshops three weeks after the disaster), which is reportage with the rhythm of a novel. His two novels, the once scandalous Sands of Pleasure (1905) and When the Tide Turns (1908), also employ the sea as setting and symbol.

A recurring image and idea in Young’s work, fiction and nonfiction alike, is that of the tidal flow and cross-currents in human affairs. In When the Tide Turns, the literal version of this idea is the unnamed but clearly recognizable Narrows of Strangford Lough. (One character is called Lady Killard, a name taken from Killard Point.) The notion of cross-currents takes a figurative turn in Filson Young’s eloquent and thoughtful 1903 book about Irish society and politics, Ireland at the Cross Roads. An Essay in Explanation (1903), the results of a two-month tour through the island in 1901.

That Young’s central metaphor derived from the Narrows of Strangford Lough is hardly surprising. He was born in Ballyeaston, County Antrim, son of Rev. William Young, but his connection with the Lough is revealed in P. J. McHenry’s article in the inaugural issue of the Journal of the Upper Ards Historical Society: ‘No. 8 Ferry Street, Portaferry - the History of a House’ (1977). There we learn of a fee farm grant from Andrew Nugent to Dr Alexander Bell Filston (sic) in 1810 for No. 8, which in 1866 passed to the Filston Youngs (clearly an interrelated family) who held the property until 1923 when it was bought by Dr McDonald. (P. J. McHenry bought the house in 1948.) McHenry recalled an essay he had to read at college by one Filtson Young. By then he was Filson Young, so that either he changed his name or McHenry misread the name on the house deeds and misremembered the name of the essayist.

The essay McHenry had to read as a schoolboy, ‘Going Away and Arriving’, recounts the long journey from Belfast to Portaferry in an Irish long car (presumably in the middle and late 1880s) and McHenry quotes a passage (no doubt from his copy of his old school reader). I traced this essay to Filson Young’s Letters from Solitude and Other Essays (1912) from which it is clear that when the writer was a boy the Filson Youngs made the journey every summer from their London townhouse to their large home in Ferry Street, Portaferry, with its sprawling garden and orchard, now as I write under development. The essay celebrates the glory of going away for the holidays and the joy of arriving at where the holiday would be spent. And arrival was consummated when alongside the walls of Portaferry Castle the family glimpsed the lough and the ‘swift sliding tide’.

Leaving and arriving, going and coming: here again is the tidal movement that dominates Young’s writings. He writes the essay, he tells us, ‘in the mid-sea of life’ and anticipates his ‘arrival’ in later years, an allegory of life inspired by those boyhood summers in Portaferry. One can only surmise that like [Joseph] Tomelty and [Arthur] Mason, Filson Young would have written, and thought, differently had he not, as we have, enjoyed the privilege of familiarity with Strangford Lough, its Narrows and bar mouth, in the ceaseless wax and wane, both in our days and our lives.