The Faithful Tribe: An Intimate Portrait of the Loyal Institutions

The ‘Jerusalem Purple Heroes’ was the first of many more

The ‘Loyal Sons of Djeddah’ and ‘The Mecca Shining Star’

And the ‘Rising Sons of Jericho’ who came by motor car.

The banners too were wonderful and some would make you smile

King Billy on his camel as he splashed across the Nile

But the Tyre and Sidon Temperance had the best one of them all

For they had a lovely picture of Damascus Orange Hall.

The Apprentice boys of Amman marched beneath the blazing sun

The Royal Black Preceptory were Negroes every one

And lodges came from Egypt, from the Abu Simbel Falls

And they shouted ‘No Surrender’ and ‘We’ll guard old Cairo’s walls’.

But when the ban was lifted and the lodges marched at last

The Arabs all decided to march right through Belfast

And they caused a lot of trouble before they got afloat

For they could not get their camels on the bloody Heysham boat.

Now camels choked up Liverpool and camels blocked Stranraer

And the Sheikh of Abu Dhabi came in a bloody great big car

But the ‘Easter Magic’ LOL they worked a crafty move

They used their magic carpets and flew in to Aldergrove.

When they came to Castle Junction where once stood the wee Kiosk

They dug up Royal Avenue to build a giant mosque

And Devlin says to Gerry Fitt,

(#litres_trial_promo) ‘I think we’d better go,

There’s half a million camels coming down from Sandy Row.’

The speeches at the ‘field’ that day were really something new

For some were made in Arabic and some were in Hebrew

But just as Colonel Gaddafi got up to sing ‘The Queen’

I woke up in my bed at home and found it was a dream.

‘The Arab Orange Lodge’ (Sung to the air: ‘The Wearing of the Green’)

‘THERE’S A BOND THAT ties us together – something that folk have never fully understood,’ said Martin Smyth, who in his time as Imperial Grand Master and Imperial Grand President has travelled to all parts of Orangedom. ‘One could go to any part of the world and find a relationship immediately. Oh, yes, like any other family, they’ll be cantankerous; there’ll be folk you might love, but you couldn’t like. But it’s a family of nations and it’s fascinating.’

In 1997, the Irish Grand Lodge invited me to the social functions of the Triennial Imperial Council of the World

(#litres_trial_promo) which, luckily for me, was that year meeting in Northern Ireland. Established in 1867, the Council has met thirty-nine times at various locations in the strongest Orange countries: Ireland, Scotland, England, Canada, the USA, Australia and New Zealand. In 1997 it was attended by representatives from those countries as well as from Ghana. There was sadness that because of the illness of Emenyo Mawule K. Aboki Essien, the dominating figure in Togo Orangeism as well as Imperial Grand President, there would be no delegates from his country, for it is there the custom that you do not leave someone who might die in your absence. Essien was well-known to many delegates, having visited almost every Orange jurisdiction in his time.

‘He is a remarkable character,’ observed Martin Smyth to me later, ‘with a remarkable fluency in French, which would have been the language of his area, as well as his native language and English. He and his people have an outward approach that I would like to see more of among our Orange people in Northern Ireland.

‘Where we tend to be fatalistic, the Togo Orangemen [who have only a thousand or so members] say: “There are many hundreds of thousands out there who qualify for membership. We’ve got to reach them.” So they’re going out to actually work among the people and they’ve built up a fairly strong social concern as well, which is why the Grand Lodge of Ireland provided them with a minibus, which allows them not just to transport people to meetings but also to go out into different areas of the country with some social work and evangelistic work with the churches.’

It was not the best timing for a Northern Ireland meeting of the Council. Some delegates had arrived early for holidays or to take part in the Rossnowlagh parade and therefore had been in Northern Ireland through the Drumcree build-up as well as the ensuing riots, and had been fending off phone-calls from home. ‘Drumcree was reported in the American press,’ said the wife of an American delegate, ‘and of course they only saw the violence. So my daughter called up and she was very worried and she thought the whole world was going up in smoke over here and the whole country was at war. We’re fine. We know things have happened, but we haven’t been around it. And of course the people here wouldn’t have us going to places that were at all dangerous.’

‘The media show only the bad side,’ said an Australian delegate. ‘My wife was panic-stricken. “Tell me you’re not there,” she said, meaning Drumcree. “No,” I said, “the only thing we disturbed this morning when we paraded to church was about half-a-dozen cows and a few crows that flew out of a tree as we went past.” ’

However, spirits were generally high. For many of the foreign delegates, to parade in Northern Ireland on the Twelfth and Thirteenth was the achievement of a life-long ambition. ‘It was a thrill for me,’ said the Australian Grand Secretary. ‘Something I always wanted to do. People cheering and waving reminded me of the days when I was a very young member in Sydney and people used to line the streets and wave the Union Jack as well as the Aussie flag and cheer. I felt a little emotional a couple of times.’

He was especially emotional because he had been the one to stop the processing in New South Wales. ‘I felt old men were marching when they shouldn’t have been and shared the feelings with a few others that we didn’t want it on our conscience that someone would collapse in the middle of the parade because they felt they had to march. When I stood up and announced it at the lodge I was visiting, the deputy master cried “Shame, shame”. It was a sad and tough decision: there was a long period of silence before someone had to get up and move the inevitable. It was like someone moving to close a lodge. No one wants to have their name down that they moved the motion to close the lodge.’ Although there were a few areas showing signs of revival, numbers were down to around one thousand and Victoria was now the only Australian state left with a young enough and large enough Orange population to make a parade viable.