Not every piece of Portrush’s history comes from a newspaper archive. Some of the best of it survives only in family memory.
The beach donkeys
For much of the mid-20th century, the Edgar family ran donkey and pony rides on Portrush’s beaches — eight donkeys and six ponies between them, four working the West Strand and the rest the East Strand, stabled overnight in fields where the Catering College later stood. Fern Gibson (née Edgar) was put in charge of the West Bay animals as she got older, and family memory preserves at least one genuinely funny character among them: a donkey named Joey, sourced from a Coleraine horse dealer who once tried to get him racing at the Coleraine Show donkey derby by feeding him corn mixed with Guinness — Joey simply refused to move. He was notorious for chasing street preachers for their handbags, and once chased two elderly visitors up the beach, convinced their picnic basket meant it was feeding time. He lived to 13, and Fern eventually left the family business for the Civil Service in Belfast — though she kept coming home every weekend.
The excursion train
Before cars made day trips easy, whole families travelled to Portrush by excursion train — a tradition remembered vividly by contributor Kate Murphy through a child’s-eye recollection of one such journey: a smoke-belching steam engine frightening sheep in the fields, a crowded station with little gates, a mother’s instruction to “stand below the big clock” if lost, sandwiches gritty with sand, and a formal café tea afterward with waitresses in black dresses and white aprons — fancy cakes carefully pocketed for the train ride home. It’s not a dated, sourced account, but it captures something real: the once-common experience of an entire inland family, arriving by train for one big day at the seaside.
A street of sailors
The Logan family of 15 Princess Street had an unusually deep connection to the sea. On 10 April 1931, brothers Robert and Reginald Lee drowned when their canoe overturned off Curran Point; 17-year-old Jack Logan made two attempts to save them, an act of bravery reported in the local press at the time. It wasn’t the family’s only rescue: O’Hara Logan pulled a bather from a dangerous tidal pool near the South Pier, and his sister Daisy went into the sea fully clothed to rescue another, later awarded a Royal Humane Society Certificate for it. A generation on, Victor Logan dived beneath an overturned sailing dinghy with a knife to free a trapped skipper during a race in West Bay. It’s the kind of family story that doesn’t usually make it into an official record — but on a street like Princess Street, in a town like this one, it was simply what people did.