The Faithful Tribe: An Intimate Portrait of the Loyal Institutions

From bowing unto Baal.

‘I think we have to deal with the image of secrecy,’ says William Bingham. ‘Too many people see the Black as being almost masonic, which it isn’t. As a group of people who have hidden agendas and secret meetings and people fishing for jobs for the boys. So I think the institution has to become more open. It has to be prepared to come forward and say, you know, this is what our degrees are about without going into great detail. We should explain to people the meanings of the degrees.

‘We’ve tried to do this in Markethill District where about four years ago we started public meetings once a month during the months of November through to March where the scriptures related to each of the degrees were read and explained. And when we’d gone through the degrees we brought in the banners – one banner a night from each preceptory – and looked at the picture – usually a picture relating to one of the degrees – and explained to people the significance of the emblems and the signs. Things which if they are good and proper and shed light on life from scripture, are not to be kept in the dark but to be brought in the open.’

The Apprentice Boys

The Apprentice Boys, though Protestant, are essentially secular and their club meetings therefore are primarily social. ‘I’m not a member of the Orange,’ said one. ‘But we get called “Orange bastards” anyway.

‘I joined for traditional reasons. My father was in it and my son’s in it. It is a city-based organization with the headquarters here in Londonderry. People join to keep up tradition. Most Protestants in Londonderry are now Apprentice Boys, though the business and professional people have mostly opted out over the last thirty or forty years. It’s now mainly working class. People with a shop wouldn’t want to be seen as one tradition only and perhaps lose custom from the majority of the citizens who are about 70 per cent nationalists.

‘The ABs believe that the siege was one of the most historic events in the British Isles and all citizens should be proud of it. We see ourselves as keepers of the true tradition of that siege, because no one else has bothered down through the years. And in that remembrance, what basically we’re doing is remembering the triumph of spirit and the supreme sacrifice made by up to 10,000 of those defenders. The tercentenary of that event in 1989 was really basically only celebrated here although it should have been celebrated all over the British Isles.’

There are no masonic overtones among the Apprentice Boys, no secret signs or grips. Essentially, it is historically rather than religiously driven, with its activities centred on its two main parades in August and December. With about an eighth of the number of members of the Orange Order, it means that the vast majority of Apprentice Boys would be Orangemen, but many Orangemen would not be Apprentice Boys. ‘We think we’re more unique than the Orange,’ observed a senior Apprentice Boy. ‘Wherever you live, you can only be initiated as a full member in Derry. And we believe that we have more companionship and are that wee bit more special than the Orange.’

What members of the Northern Irish loyal institutions go home to after meetings of their lodges, chapters, preceptories and clubs

‘Their houses are like little palaces,’ used to be said of the Belfast Protestant working class. Protestants said it with pride; Catholics with a kind of patronizing contempt. Certainly, if you had no other clues, you could tell a Protestant from a Catholic street by the state of most of the gardens and what is visible of the front room, as you can tell which church they are going to from the neatness and formality of their Sunday-morning clothing.

A passion for cleanliness as an adjunct of godliness is as strange to my culture as our cheery indifference is to theirs. To the most bigoted Protestants, Catholics are dirty and untidy; to bigoted Catholics, Protestants are obsessively house-proud and fail to understand that life is for living and that it is more important to have fun with your friends than to polish the furniture. And if both the stereotypes are uncharitable in their application, there is nevertheless a lot of truth in them. Since I began to stay in Ulster Protestant, mostly Presbyterian, homes, I look about my house with a new and rather depressed eye.

The sheer fact of cultural separation means that differences in living conditions are so great as to provide a culture shock. ‘George is going over to London,’ observed my friend Henry to me a few months ago, assuming, I realized, that I would offer a bed if one were free. I decided to confront the matter head on. ‘Henry,’ I said, ‘I’ll get him a bed but, as things stand, I can have no Presbyterians in my house. He’d die of shock.’ ‘But he’s a lax Presbyterian,’ said Henry. ‘Not when it comes to houses, he isn’t,’ I said. ‘I’ve been to his, and it’s as clean as everyone else’s.’ So as I do with all bedless Presbyterians, I found George quarters with an English friend whose house would not frighten him and I continue to invite to my disorganized and dusty house only Irish Catholics and assorted bohemians.

There is a certain uniformity about the Presbyterian home. I’ve never been in one without being reminded of the centrality of family life, of ordered relationships, of industry and of thriftiness – which is, however, tempered by tremendous generosity and hospitality. The people of Northern Ireland, Protestant and Catholic, nationalist and unionist, republican and loyalist, have many characteristics in common, of which the most agreeable is tremendous warmth and kindness to any stranger who is not thought to be the enemy.

There is a difference of degree about the generosity. My mother, who grew up in the south of Ireland as a game-keeper’s daughter on an Anglo-Irish estate, was an inveterate observer of cultural differences between southern Protestants and Catholics. ‘You go into hospital,’ I remember her explaining, ‘and a Catholic friend will arrive laden with grapes and chocolates and flowers and spend an hour with you and never come back because she has run out of money and is ashamed to return empty-handed. The Protestant, on the other hand, will come in bearing a modest gift, will stay for twenty minutes or so and will then come back regularly.’

Presbyterian houses tend to be neat and spotless but cosy, the kind of home where people have slippers and candlewick dressing-gowns; if you go out infrequently and work hard you want to be comfortable at home. In addition to a three-piece suite, the most striking object in the living-room will be the enlarged, framed photographs on the windowsills, the table and the wall – the wedding photograph of the owners of the house, photographs of their parents, their siblings and their children, of big family groups and of their own children and grandchildren at various stages of development and at key moments like graduation and marriage. No child growing up in a house like that can think other than that he is the centre of his parents’ lives. It is that same family-orientation that makes so many Orange parades a happy family event.

Books, other than the Bible, are uncommon except in the houses of ministers and of teachers, but even there they will tend to be tucked away in a separate study. There is no clutter of papers or newspapers and few, sometimes no, objects. There might in some houses be a glass bookcase for treasures, with a heavy emphasis on Tyrone crystal wedding gifts too special to be used. (In the other community you’re more likely to have most of your fragile wedding gifts broken within a year or so of marriage courtesy of the exuberant clumsiness of yourself or your guests.) There will be a plethora of little tables so placed to ensure every person sitting in that living-room can eat and drink comfortably, for from the moment you come through the door, the lady of the house is preparing a tray full of food and drink: tea or coffee, two or three kinds of biscuits and home-made cake.

If you are there at a meal time you’ll be offered meat and potatoes and two kinds of sweet. If it’s not a meal time and they discover that you’ve missed your dinner (one o’clock) or your tea (six o’clock), your hostess will race to the kitchen to make piles of sandwiches, and fetch the home-made apple pie or whatever else is necessary to save you from starvation. Ulster Protestants are terrified lest their guests die of hunger; Ulster Catholics lest they die of thirst. Mind you, while drink is rarely on offer in a Protestant home as a part of normal hospitality, the occasional host might offer whiskey. And if you ever find yourself in a pub with a drinking Protestant, they are as lavish as any of their Catholic counterparts.

By any standards, the kindness is stunning. Arrive at a stranger’s house for a night with no luggage, as I have done, and slippers and a cosy dressing-gown and spare toothbrushes and toiletries are pressed upon you with enthusiasm and efficiency. And people will put themselves out for you to an extraordinary degree. They think nothing of going thirty miles out of their way to pick you up or drive you somewhere. It’s as if the sheer order and routine of their lives makes it possible for you to be accommodated however demanding are your needs.

The perception of Ulster Protestants as dour and taciturn does not long survive spending time in their houses, for they absolutely love talking and stay up late with any visitor. I’ve sat up till two in the morning and later having thoroughly enjoyable conversations with the most upright, temperate and even teetotal of citizens.

Orange, Black or Apprentice Boy meetings can be fitted into an orderly existence. The wives know when the husbands are going out, where they’re going and who they will be with. Reactions to these activities go across the spectrum from an old-fashioned reverence for the man’s important business to a genial acceptance that they’re making a mystery out of a simple get-together. And in the rural areas at least, sanity and tolerance dominate the women’s reaction to their men’s activity; it is understood that men want to be together and that this provides an excuse. ‘How have you stood it?’ I asked one woman whose husband was so heavily involved in the Freemasons, the Orange and the Black that he was frequently out four to five evenings a week. ‘I know he’ll never come back drunk,’ she said.

This is a serious cultural contrast with Irish Catholics, who blaspheme eloquently, imaginatively, profusely, unselfconsciously and with no intention whatever of giving offence. My language improves out of all recognition when I associate with most Orangemen. However, my brother points out that Protestants and Catholics are as bad as each other when it comes to claiming blasphemously that God is on their side.

It is insufficiently appreciated in the Republic of Ireland that while the vast majority of Catholics refused to give their loyalty to the Northern Ireland state, most of those Protestants, including Orangemen, who found themselves on the wrong side of the border after Partition were never disloyal to the new state. I’ve seen on Orange parades in Northern Ireland those brave little contingents from Cavan or Monaghan or Donegal, still stoutly demonstrating their pride in their religion and their affection for the crown, before going home to the state which they have served loyally. Unlike most nationalists in Northern Ireland, southern Orangemen were good losers.

(#ulink_c12c5a30-0439-54ba-949f-232da81387aa) Those Orangemen who worried that I might expose their cherished secrets to the world hadn’t realized that most of this information was published as early as 1835, in appendices to the Report of the Commons Select Committee on Orange Lodges. Tony Gray in his book on the Orange Order also went into considerable detail. The ritual is necessarily rather dull and repetitive; what I am providing here is just a cross-section of what is most important. I am breaking no confidences, and keeping no secrets of any significance.

(#ulink_c12c5a30-0439-54ba-949f-232da81387aa) Goat-rides, however, are a part of ancient rural pagan rituals.

(#ulink_c12c5a30-0439-54ba-949f-232da81387aa) James Wilson in ‘The Making of the Orange Order’, a video which includes footage of preliminaries to an initiation ritual.

(#ulink_71fa0e35-9e75-5de7-94c6-719a70e3096f) They can, however, laugh at their own bigotry. There’s the famous joke about the dying Orangeman who asked for a priest. ‘What do you mean, a priest?’ asked his one of his brethren. ‘You’ve been an Orangeman for sixty years. Why do you want to see a priest?’ ‘I want to become a Roman Catholic.’ ‘A Roman Catholic? Have you gone mad?’ ‘I have not. It’s just that I’d rather one of theirs died than one of ours.’

(#ulink_e182be2e-c724-5cea-a97d-2487eae6e92b) It was sold in spring 2000.

(#ulink_4f942f87-5423-5e13-9922-3bb059b89432) Josias Cunningham tells me that ‘champagne and canapes are foreign to Eldon’s Twelfth; we subsist on beer, tea and sandwiches like the rest! And at least we do stay on the field; one of the unfortunate recent trends at the Belfast demonstration is for lodges to retire for a hearty lunch at an adjacent hall or other centre, leaving the “field” looking very empty for much of the day.’

(#ulink_1bfac11e-0b1d-5c7e-933c-026ddc621d24) Like signs and grips, the original purpose of passwords was very serious: in the revolutionary period during which the Orange Order was founded, it was necessary to be able to tell friend from foe. Passwords do not change much with time. Typical would be one of those disclosed to a House of Lords Inquiry in 1825: “Thus shalt thou say unto the Children of Israel’ is answered with, ‘I Am, hath sent me unto you’.

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Onlookers, Participants and Opponents: the Twelfth (#ulink_8923bc58-6256-5016-b7dd-51917ac82d8f)

Different viewpoints*

THE BIG, BIG COLOURFUL, noisy day that was the Twelfth had a special magic in the grey, sober Belfast of earlier times. Rowel Friers, the cartoonist, remembered sticking his head out of the bedroom window full of excitement:

I peered out to the right and there they were – the flying banners, the glinting instruments of the bands, and the bowler-hatted, white-gloved, navy-serge-suited and brown-booted Orange-sashed gentlemen of the Order, no brother’s tailoring outdoing another, highly respectable, dignified and erect, they march to the rhythm of their bands. Occasionally, one of them might deign to give a regal nod of the head to an onlooker known to him, and no doubt already approved of by his brethren as an acceptable outsider.

The swordbearers and deacon pole-carriers stepped out with all the demeanour of generals, now and then taking a peep at their pride and joy – the banner. Most of these, I was to learn later, were painted by a Mr Bridgett, a craftsman specializing in that particular art form. This knowledge I gleaned from the son of the said gentleman, who I met at art college some years later. Many and varied they were: gold, silver, orange, purple, blue, all the colours and more than could have adorned Joseph’s coat. From portraits of William in battle, to Queen Victoria and her Bible (‘the secret of England’s greatness’), churches, angels, the Rock of Ages, memorial portraits to worshipful brothers who had passed on to that higher and grander lodge in the sky, it was a travelling art exhibition, before anyone dreamed of the Committee for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts or the Arts Council.

William Bingham, now a Presbyterian minister, reminisces about a much more recent period in County Armagh: ‘I first paraded with the institution in 1969 in Markethill, where I was brought up. I was about six years of age when my uncle took me and my brother and my cousin with him to hold the strings of the banner: my grandmother made little Orange collarettes for us.

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‘When you were growing up, you played at being Orangemen. Weeks before the Twelfth, all the youngsters in the town got together and had a ceremony in the yard and formed their own Orange Lodge – you’re talking about six-, seven-, eight-year-olds. And we used to get tin boxes and make banners out of cloth and sticks and we paraded by people’s houses or up and down the yard and we had a really good time together. We were very democratic in electing a worshipful master. We voted on it and usually everyone got their turn at it.

‘We really looked forward to the Twelfth: you used to think that when that was over, your summer was over. The highlight of it was gone. For us it was a day where you met all your friends from school that you hadn’t seen for the weeks of the summer holidays: maybe some of their fathers were on parade or some of them were in the bands playing the cymbal or the triangles or a wee accordion or something. You all met in the field and you had tea and sandwiches and then you played around for a while and then you came home again. It was just a unique occasion. There was nothing like it the rest of the year.

‘I suppose the things that you were mesmerized by were the colour – the paintings on the banners, the crowds of people – and the music – the bands. I really loved the silver bands. My father played the tenor horn and went on parade. My mother would have been making sandwiches: she did the picnic. And my sister, she didn’t get parading, only the boys. She was left out of it a wee bit.

‘For my aunts and great-aunts – many of whom were married to farmers – it was literally the only day out they got in the year. The Twelfth of July came and they worked hard to get the harvest cleared up and the best suits cleaned and looked after their husbands. Rarely if ever would they have been out anywhere else except church. Certainly they’d have had no holidays. I had uncles that wouldn’t miss the Twelfth of July, but they wouldn’t go to their own sons’ or nephews’ weddings.’

Elaine McClure, Worshipful Mistress of a women’s lodge, does not feel part of the community in nationalist Newry.

I do feel very close to my friends in that town, my neighbours, but I feel that’s completely different from, if you like, as a person coming from the community I come from, trying to identify with the symbols of local government in that town.

As T. S. Eliot says: ‘I can connect nothing with nothing’ … But certainly within the company of people who share the same culture as I do, I can connect. I can connect with their outlook, with the music, with the symbols on the banner, with the ethos and the reason behind a social gathering.

I walk on the Twelfth – I don’t march … My blood family … introduced me to the Twelfth and now my Orange family take me along with them on the Twelfth of July. I walk in the road with the men of Sheepbridge.

I know those men. I know their ladies. I know their families, I know who they are and they’re good, they’re decent people. And I walk with them and in the front is the band and my cousin’s in the band and I’m walking in the road and I’m thinking how like my uncle Joe our William is because Uncle Joe was the one who took me first to the Twelfth of July. And I walk in the road with them hoping they’re not going too quick and I’ve got the right shoes on my feet and then we wait at the hall and then when all the lodges come we all walk off again and the drum beat’s given and the banners are hoisted and we start on our way.

And I remember thinking last Twelfth of July how lucky I am to be part of this – and that’s not to deride anyone else who comes from a different culture – but how lucky I am to be walking with such good, kind people and to have the colour and the music that I can listen to. To meet up with people that perhaps I haven’t seen for the last twelve months. All you have to do is just say: ‘Hello, how are you?’ and the connection is made and the friendship is there. And to go back to the hall at the end of the night and have a meal and to sit again in the company of the sisters and the brethren of Sheepbridge – it’s a wonderful warm feeling just of a family coming together. The Twelfth of July is our family occasion.

However, David Cook, Alliance politician and ex-chairman of the police authority, puts forward a view very common among middle-class Protestants whose liberalism doesn’t extend to trying to understand the ordinary Orangeman.

The first thought about the Twelfth each year is how can we get away. I have spent most Twelfths in Donegal (often infuriated by RTE’s [Radio Telefis Eireann] naive view of the Twelfth as no more than a folksy cultural festival). I have been lucky enough to be in Northern Ireland on only a handful of Twelfths in my life. One was a memorably hot day in the middle Seventies when I pushed our baby daughter in a pram from the Ormeau Road along the embankment all the way to Shaw’s Bridge where I saw the drunken crowds in full swing.

I have never actually set out to watch a Twelfth parade. I have never taken my children to watch one. I have never believed that Protestantism needs to be, or indeed, can be defended by the usual public manifestations of Orangeism. And I have never been taken in by the claims that there is no other purpose in them than the display of a much loved cultural tradition. I have always known that one of the historical purposes of those public manifestations, and this remains true today for some Orangemen some of the time, is to annoy and antagonize Catholics.