The Faithful Tribe: An Intimate Portrait of the Loyal Institutions

The claim that the Twelfth is the greatest cultural festival in Europe, with its bands, banners and music, may, I think, be true. But I do not believe the assertion that the Twelfth is no more than a good-natured cultural event and a large family picnic. That is the purest hypocrisy and the biggest lie. The problem which the Orange Order has to face is that very few people outside their community believe the lie.

Marietta Farrell, lecturer and SDLP activist, had never heard of the Twelfth until she went to Northern Ireland from the Republic as a student in the 1970s.

I found the whole thing quite colourful and quaint if somewhat threatening. I was bemused at the sight of so many men, in what was to me, City of London business dress, looking so intent and serious. I admired the skill and the colour of the bands but I found their swagger and the wording of their songs intimidating and offensive. I was also surprised at the lack of women in the ‘celebration’. From what I could see, women stood on the sidelines and cheered the men. I wondered why loyalist women were not more central in their important annual celebration. [Until Drumcree 1996] I neither thought nor learnt much more about the Twelfth. It seemed to have nothing to do with me.

To the best of my knowledge, I was never in the company of an Orangeman.

Decorations and associated festivities

Glen Barr, famous for his leadership of the Ulster Workers’ Strike in 1974 and now a community worker, grew up in Londonderry.

Through all the seasons of marbles, hoops, bows and arrows, cowboys and indians, Easter eggs, Christmas stockings and bin lids to sleigh with, we always knew when the big day was near.

The Craigavon Pipe Band which practised at the top of King Street at the back of Harry McLaughlin’s carpenter shop and which we all joined at ten or eleven years of age, was at it three nights a week instead of the customary Wednesday nights. The men and women of the street were making bows from the wood shavings from Harry McLaughlin’s and dyeing them red, white and blue in tin baths at the back of the band shed. The other emblems on the Arch were cleaned up and painted and all the light bulbs checked and renewed where necessary. Buntings were being rescued from old sacks and tied across the street from downpipe to downpipe.

Weeks before we headed off with hatchets and ropes to hack down branches and small trees in St Columb’s Park, making sure the ‘look-outs’ were well positioned to follow every move of the park warden, and run the gauntlet in the Limavady Road pulling the biggest load imaginable for our ‘Eleventh’ night bonfire. Doing your watch in the back lane to make sure the boys from Alfred Street, Florence Street, York Street and Bond Street didn’t raid the trees and rubber tyres for their fires.

The ‘Eleventh’ night in King Street was like a fairy tale with singing, dancing and spud roasting in the ashes. There was the usual crate of stout for the men and the navy men from the Sea Eagle Barracks next to King Street, could always be relied upon to bring out the rum and show off women from the area known as ‘Navy Dolls’ hanging onto their arms …

This was my ‘Twelfth’. Collecting for the bonfire, roasting the spuds, the dancing, the singing on the ‘Eleventh’ night in The Fountain. Getting up on the ‘Twelfth’ morning and putting on the kilt, shawl, those damned spats, and the rest of the Craigavon Pipe Band uniform knowing the girls from school would be following the band all day.

The flowers must not be forgotten. Orange lilies and sweet william for the adorning of banners and drums and hats and buttonholes are easily procured in the country, but harder in parts of the city short on gardens. George Chittick recalls: ‘For many many years our district always put Orange lilies on the top of the bannerette. Billy, the secretary of the district, says to me: “George, there’s a man coming down – he’s called Nolan – and he’ll give you a bunch of Orange lilies on the Eleventh night.” So this wee man come down and he said to me: “Is your name Chittick?” I said, “That’s right.” He says, “My name’s Nolan. Here’s a bunch of Orange lilies. Now, when you’re up the Lisburn Road tomorrow morning, you look out for me and I’ll wave at you.” So I went up the road with the lilies on the bannerette and there’s this wee man standing. He smiled at me and I nodded and he said, “Dead on.” So that was all right.

‘Billy says to me. “George, you know that wee man Nolan come down to see you.” I says, “Aye.” “He’s an RC.” “Is that right?” “I work with him and him and me were friends and he always said to me he had a huge set of Orange lilies in his back garden and he’d give some for the bannerette.” “Dead on.” So it went on for a number of years. Up to 1994, Mr Nolan come down every Eleventh night with these flowers and I took them off him and thanked him very much and put them on the bannerette. 1995: I was down that night and no Orange lilies arrived. I thought it was because of Drumcree. I said, “Maybe that’s it. Maybe he doesn’t want to.” But then about two months later on the Lisburn Road this lady comes to me and says, “Is your name Chittick? Are you from Sandy Orange Hall?” I said, “That’s correct.” She says, “Well, I’m Mr Nolan’s daughter and I’m sorry to tell you me father passed away last May.” “Oh, I says, I’m very sorry about that.” She says, “I made an awful blunder. Before he died he said to me: ‘Don’t you forget on the Eleventh night to take the Orange lilies down to Sandy Row’, and,” she says, “I forgot.” And I say, “It’s just one of those things. You can’t do nothing about it. Don’t worry about it.” “No,” she says, “but you’ll never get any more Orange lilies.” I says, “Why?” And she says, “It’s a big house and I had to sell it.” So I says, “I understand that, ma’am. I understand that.” But she says, “I have a wee present for you.” And she brought me out four bulbs. She says, “I rescued them.”

‘So they’re planted in my garden now and they will for ever and ever I hope be the lilies that will be carried on the bannerette.’

The clothes

‘What should I wear to go to an Orange parade?’ I asked my friend Janet, who knows about such things because she was brought up Presbyterian in Cookstown and had an Orange father.

‘Frock,’ she said firmly. ‘No rocks.’

For Orangemen, sartorial decisions are a matter for each lodge. Standards vary dramatically. At the most respectable end, particularly in rural areas, clothes are very important. There are Orangemen who would never have bought a suit if it weren’t for the Twelfth and whose brethren would be horrified if they arrived with a speck of dirt on the white gloves or a dent in their bowlers. And there will be strong views about whether flowers should decorate hats and jackets.

Why bowlers? Because they were a mark of respectability for Orangemen’s fathers and their fathers’ fathers, and in a deeply conservative culture there has to be a very good reason to make any break with tradition. That is tough on those who hate and loathe their bowler hats. There is the occasional middle-aged man who is enhanced by a bowler, but on the whole it is an unflattering article and on some people looks downright ridiculous.

At the other end of the spectrum – most likely to be the Belfast semi-paramilitary world – there are lodges where no one cares what you wear. To my eye, trained as I am in the ways of County Tyrone, T-shirts, tattooed arms and earrings don’t go well with collarettes, but then I would be wary of arguing the point with the kind of people who think they do.

Orangewomen have greater problems. For a start, they can parade only if invited formally by the relevant hosts and if the Women’s Grand Lodge agrees. Northern Irish society, especially in the rural areas, has both the virtues and defects of 1950s Britain. My experience of Orangemen is that in many respects they seem to be admirable husbands, but they mostly expect their wives to be admirable housekeepers at home preparing the sandwiches rather than going on parade.

Olive Whitten, councillor and deputy Grand Mistress of the Association of Loyal Orangewomen of Ireland, has no complaints:

I have no regrets at our members not being invited to take part in the parade. I enjoy standing on the sideline, watching the parade from beginning to end although my one desire always was to have been a playing member of a band.

There are some parading ladies’ lodges, however, who face trickier decisions about clothes than do their brethren. Some turn all the sisters out identically dressed in, for example, purple suits and white hats and shoes, but there are few outfits that suit all women, and the results are usually bad news for some. An alternative approach is to have an agreed colour but allow different styles. One lodge produced a enormous collection of different white hats. Others adopt a more laissez-faire approach, but still require suits and hats and gloves. And the most bohemian let their members wear what they like, secure in the knowledge that they will be properly turned-out in their best Sunday attire.

The regalia

When it comes to regalia, there are clear rules. Ordinary members of private lodges of Orange Degree only are entitled to wear an Orange sash or usually a collar (nowadays called a collarette, though many Orangemen still call it a sash) about four inches wide, with the lodge number displayed in front; a few lodges wear blue for historical reasons everyone seems to have forgotten. Having the Purple Degree requires the wearing of a sash or collarette about four and a half inches wide with a purple stripe. Members of the Royal Arch Purple have the colours reversed: purple with orange edging. Blackmen wear their Orange regalia when they parade on the Twelfth. On Royal Black Preceptory parades they wear black collarettes which may have several coloured stripes representing various of their ten degrees and presenting the symbolic connotations of a rainbow; they also wear masonic-style blue, fringed aprons and embroidered cuffs. The Apprentice Boys wear crimson sashes or collarettes to represent the blood spilt by the defenders during the Siege of Derry and the defiant flag flown from the cathedral tower.

The regalia that mean most to members of the loyal institutions, of course, are those handed down from father to son. ‘When I was eighteen, I joined my grandfather’s lodge,’ said one. ‘And my grandmother passed on his collarette, which had been his father’s collarette. I don’t wear his collarette now – it’s getting too old to wear. But it’s in a safe place and if my son wants to join I’ll pass it on to him.’

‘We treat our collarettes well, because they represent something important,’ said another, who has five from three different organizations. ‘It’s important to treat them with respect.’ (I saw a particularly graphic example of this at a parade where a group of Apprentice Boys could no longer contain themselves in the face of republican provocation. Before returning abuse and missiles, they took off their collarettes and put them in their pockets lest they dishonour them.)

District officers get to wear wider collars; county grand officers have silver fringes and Grand Lodge officers have gold fringes. Indications of office appear as, for instance, ‘WM’, ‘DM’, ‘S’, or ‘T’ (or even PWM for Past Worshipful Master) in front of the collarettes.

An Orangeman might wear no adornments on his collarette other than his lodge number and the insignia of his office, but many sport emblems and badges. (Apprentice Boys, being essentially secular, wear no emblems.) Emblems can be acquired rather on the charm-bracelet principle. The two most popular emblems are the self-explanatory CROWN and open BIBLE, which anyone can wear, as they can a representation of King William on his horse. Members of the Royal Arch Purple may also wear several others, including: an ANCHOR, symbolic of a safe arrival in the afterlife; the ARK OF THE COVENANT, ‘the visible evidence of God’s promise to be with and guide his people of Israel safely through life’; a COFFIN, as a reminder of mortality; an EYE, signifying God’s omniscience; a FIVE-POINTED STAR, a reminder of the five wounds of Christ; a LADDER, whose three steps represent Faith, Hope and Charity; NOAH’S ARK, the means by which God chose to save and regenerate life on earth, thus symbolizing ‘a better and purer life’; and a THREE-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK, symbolic of the light which is revealed by the Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

The Royal Black Institution has many more again which relate to the institution and its degrees, and are biblical and have strong overtones of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. Among them are a BURNING BUSH; a LAMB, as in the Lamb of God; a little MAN WITH A BACKPACK, who represents a pilgrim, Joseph in Egypt; a RED HAND, a reference to the cloud no bigger than a man’s hand; a ROD WITH AN ENTWINED SNAKE, which harks back to Moses, whose rod became a snake and then changed back again; a SKULL AND CROSSBONES, which is the institution’s crest, representing mourning for Joseph when he was sold into slavery in Egypt and was given up for dead. The key emblem, however, is the RED CROSS which, since it represents the final degree, shows that you have taken all the others. It is red because Christ shed his blood, it is surrounded by a crown, because he was a king, but as with all Protestant crosses, it is empty, because Christ was resurrected.

Then there are badges or medals, which often relate to notable parades attended by the wearer, such as the Orange tercentenary celebration in Belfast, a Scottish Twelfth, a New Zealand jamboree or Drumcree 1995. ‘Some people stick a lot of rubbish on their collarettes,’ observed a senior Orangeman. ‘I hate that.’ Yet though like most of them he hates show, being by nature a squirrel, he has the largest private collection of badges, emblems and other memorabilia of any Orangeman I know. Most prized of all are service medals, sometimes those of a father or grandfather.

The banners

District, county and Grand Lodge officers are called upon to preside at many services and ceremonies, including the opening-up and closing-down of Orange Halls and the unfurling of new banners.

Banners are a great cause of both pride and worry to lodges. To the ordinary Orangeman, a banner sums up the spirit of his lodge. Although there is a fair amount of duplication of subjects, each banner is unique. Much deliberation will have gone into not just the choice of subject and artist, but the manner in which the lodge’s name and number will be presented and what colour and style and motifs should be used for the borders. The lodge member will know who painted it, where and when.

The downside is that banners are very vulnerable: after maybe a few dozen outings, batterings from wind and rain take a heavy toll. (They take a heavy toll on the standard-bearers too: in bad weather there is a constant battle just to keep the buffeted banner aloft, especially when its silk is weighed down by rain.) A lodge might have to requisition the painting of a new banner every ten years at a cost of maybe a thousand pounds. This will not only impose a financial burden which is serious for poor lodges, but may bring about disagreement between those of the brethren who want a new version of their old banner and those who want radical change.

As that student of parades Neil Jarman points out, while banners go back to the beginning of the Orange tradition, they developed extensively towards the end of the nineteenth century as unionism felt its identity under threat from Irish nationalism. ‘The banners became more standardized, more professional. The painting became of a better quality and the range of images expanded, so you moved away from the old images of a King Billy and the crown and the Bible to include a much greater range of heroes of Ulster unionism like Colonel Saunderson, later Carson, Craig. The elaboration of events from the Williamite wars and the massacre at the Bann in 1641 all appeared at those times along with biblical images which drew an analogy from the position of the Ulster Protestants to the Israelites in the biblical times.’

There is an enormous range of these large, colourful banners and they show pictorially the cultural reference points of the Protestant people. A major grievance in recent years was the BBC’s decision early in the 1980s to scrap television coverage of the Belfast Twelfth because, Orangemen think, of nationalist sensibilities. Even though in recent years there has been truncated coverage, what has been lost is the informed commentary on banners and bands that put the parade and the Orange Order in its historical and cultural context. These days, the media are interested in parades only if they provoke violence.

An Ulster Society survey identified thirteen categories of Orange banner. Many Orange and virtually all Black banners are BIBLICAL, the majority being Old Testament. The BUILDINGS represented are usually of local significance; most often they are churches. A typical example of the secular is Derrymore House, Bessbrook, carried by the local lodge because the Act of Union was signed there in 1800. The HOME RULE category depicts Ulster Protestantism in its most ‘no-surrender’ mode, with paintings of, for instance, the formation of the Ulster Volunteers. The HISTORICAL category covers events relating to the foundation of the Orange Order and the INDUSTRIAL particularly to the proud Belfast industrial past. Both WORLD WARS are there, the most moving image being that of the 36th Ulster Division, so many of whom were slaughtered at the Somme.

You have to be dead to be on a banner: popular PERSONALITIES are Winston Churchill, Oliver Cromwell and Sir James Craig, the long-serving prime minister of Northern Ireland: brethren murdered by the IRA during the TROUBLES sometimes become the subject of their lodge’s banner. Martin Luther is the reformer most often seen on REFORMATION banners and probably Queen Victoria among the ROYALTY; a very evocative banner in the latter category is that of the Great Northern True Blues, a Sandy Row railway employees’ lodge, showing a train festooned with union flags carrying King Edward VII to Belfast.

The largest category, of course, relate to the WILLIAMITE period; for example, the Mountjoy charging the boom at Derry, William crossing the Boyne, or the battle of Aughrim. All Apprentice Boys’ banners are to do with the Siege of Derry. Remaining banners are scooped up under the categories of OLD FLAGS OR BANNERS and MISCELLANEOUS, which include a British bulldog and Britannia.

Banners are as carefully cherished as collarettes. David Jones, who until his teens lived in Carleton Street Orange Hall – home to many Orange lodges, including Portadown district lodge,

Royal Black preceptories and Apprentice Boys clubs – where his father was caretaker, recalled one of the procedures before the Twelfth:

One of his other tasks was to extract the lodge banners from their storage places where they had been carefully laid aside from the previous year. Following the last Twelfth each banner would have been rolled up and placed inside its own long wooden box. These boxes would be taken out of their storage places, by now covered with a liberal sprinkling of a year’s undisturbed dust. When opened the banner would be unrolled, hooked on to the banner poles and carefully rested against the wall in one of the largest rooms in the building. The brass or chromium fittings that sat atop the banner poles would be polished until they gleamed. The early hanging of the banners also allowed time for any creases that had formed during storage in the material to fall out. With mention of the banner poles, quite often one of the problems faced was finding them, depending on who had put them away or where they had been left.

One of my lasting impressions of that era is the banners. I can well remember as a small child looking up at them – somewhat in awe all assembled in the one place, and each with its own unique large oil-painted scene. This was my art gallery. Before me were displayed likenesses of King William III on horseback, or arriving at Carrickfergus. A painting of Queen Victoria being presented with a Bible by one of her colonial subjects, the banner bearing the legend ‘The Secret of England’s Greatness’. Numerous biblical scenes were evident, amongst them Noah portrayed on the Ark with a bird returning with a twig in its beak. Then there were the banners depicting the ‘Bible and Crown’ and past remembered Orangemen of the area with stern emotionless faces. Still and silent they towered above me. In a few days I knew this quiet moment would change as the banners would take on a life of their own when they would leave the hall on parade. Once outside the banners, held high, would float in the breeze and seen from a distance the tops of the banner poles would bob up and down as they were carried in the procession.

The music

John Moulden, a lifelong student of traditional songs, points out that Orange culture can only be understood in the context of a wide range of music, stretching back through the centuries and across much of Britain, Ireland and Europe, belonging to a genre of songs dealing with everyday matters and events. Even the most strongly expressed Protestant sentiments in local Orange songs have at one time or another been voiced in parts of English traditional music.

Orange songs are of different kinds. Some of them are openly objectionable. Some of them refer to elements of Catholic doctrine in an opprobrious way. Some of them refer to party fights and give very very one-sided and objectionable accounts. On the other hand, the accounts of those same fights given by the other side are equally offensive.

Certainly many of the songs have been based – almost parodied – upon nationalist songs. There are some songs that are, for instance, similar in form to ‘The Wearing of the Green’. ‘The Sash’ – although not based on a sectarian Irish song – is based on an Irish song of possibly music-hall origin called ‘The Hat My Father Wore’ … They often see themselves as David, up against the world – the English establishment, the rest of Ireland …

There are large numbers of songs which look at incidents in Irish history … where Protestants were injured, assaulted or killed. And there are large numbers of songs which say, ‘Watch out. If you are not on your guard, these things are going to happen again.’