Meetings and Marches

 A slightly amended and somewhat longer reflection on my Dad's involvement with the Presbyterian Church and the Loyal Orders. Others who were involved in both with them might have other stories to tell.

My Dad didn’t spend a lot of time in the house. Most of his time there was spent sleeping. Indeed when my then girlfriend Sally first visited Northern Ireland in 1987, she was there 5 days before she met my Dad, early in the morning before he went off to work and she was heading for the early boat back to Scotland. 

When not working long hours he was usually outside in the garden or garage, or, during the winter, after work, he would have a brief refuelling stop and doze in front of the BBC Northern Ireland news, before going upstairs to wash and shave, get into his shirt, tie and suit and head out in a cloud of Old Spice aftershave to a meeting either in one Orange Hall or other, or at Megain Memorial Church where he was on their Committee. 

He had been baptised and became a communicant member of Claggan Presbyterian Church as a child, but on moving to Belfast joined Megain. That was were all of us sons were baptised and my older brothers both took part in the youth activities there, especially the Life Boys and BB. Indeed my eldest brother met his wife Isabel as part of the youth fellowship there and they were married there in But by the time came for me to attend such activities, the “Troubles” had started, and an unreliable bus service from our house to church made it difficult to get to either church or youth activities, given that my dad didn’t have a car at that time and was frequently working or elsewhere in the evenings and on Sundays. 

When they first married they lived in 18 Solway Street, just up the street from my Dad’s mum, and across the road from the church, but in the late 1950s they moved out to a recently built house, 32 Carolhill Gardens on the edge of the Ashfield Estate on the Holywood Road. It didn’t just have a number it had a name “Ivydene” but there was no ivy anywhere around it and no other houses in the street had names so I don’t know where the name of our house came from. 

But the distance from Megain Memorial and the onset of the Troubles meant that it was infeasible for my mum to get two young boys to church on a Sunday or weeknight activities so from around 1974 my mother took us to the second nearest church, Sydenham Methodist, where my brother and I not only attended on Sunday morning, but also were sent to afternoon Sunday school, and beavers, cubs and scouts during the week, subsequently joining the Youth Club and Youth Fellowship. As a former member of the Church of Ireland, my mother had never liked the Presbyterian Church so the excuse of taking us to somewhere we could join in weekday activities was a bit of a “get out of jail free” card for her, but my dad never joined us. Even when Megain Memorial finally closed as a Presbyterian church and became a Nazarene Church, he wouldn’t jump the tracks to become a Methodist, and instead joined Strand Presbyterian. I say that my mother took us to the second closest church because there was at that stage a small and highly fortified/camouflaged Catholic Church at junction of Station Road and the Holywood Road, which we had to pass to get to Sydenham. I actually only learned when writing this that it was Christ the King Chapel. But there was no way on earth that my mother would take us to a Catholic Church, and not just because they didn’t have Cub Scouts!

But loyal as he was to the Presbyterian Church, most of my Dad’s leisure time outside of the house was spent in various Orange Halls as a member of the so-called “Loyal Orders”. Initially it was mostly Templemore Avenue Hall on the Albertbridge Road. He, together with many of my uncles and cousins, was a member of LOL (which for the uninitiated does not mean Laugh Out Loud) 1003 “Harkness Memorial” and every year on the 1st and 12th of July I would join him as a “string boy” to carry one of the 4 silk cords that stretched down from the top of the lodge’s banner to join in the parades of Number 6 District. The 12th was easily the second best day of the year for me after Christmas. By the time I was involved our lodge was too small to be able to afford a band to walk in front of us, though I and the other “string boys” enjoyed it when some of the younger ones carrying the banner (often my eldest brother and a cousin) would start to weave along the wider roads in time to one of the louder bands ahead of us, encouraging us to skip around in front and behind, eliciting cheers from the crowds and incurring the wrath of the sombre marshals. In latter years when the lodge was too small even to carry a banner all the way, we carried a “bannerette” and flags and one of my proudest moments was when my dad asked be to carry one of the flags which I did, all the way to  the field and back. The long walk to the field, first at Finaghy and latterly the even longer walk to Edenderry (the faders today only walk as far as Barnett Demesne), culminated in ham, tongue or corned beef sandwiches (with or without mustard) in greaseproof paper and small bottles of Maine lemonade, or strong sweet tea for the adults. 

My father was treasurer so it fell to him and my mother to coordinate this, including making all the sandwiches the night before. The return walk culminated in dinner in a suitably large hall, organised by whoever the Worshipful Master was for that year. It was invariably salad with cooked ham, chicken or meat pies, and it was then and only then that anyone had any alcohol, and only if the hall wasn’t a church hall, which it often was. This was part of what set that lodge apart from many of those around them in the field at the time and certainly now. Eventually, however that lodge got too small to continue, and rather than join another Belfast lodge my Dad decided to join a “country lodge” down in Ballyrobert, County Down. By that stage I had stopped joining him for the 12th parades, but he never missed one until 12th July 1989, when much to my surprise he came with my mother to Edinburgh for my graduation. This was a particular point of pride for me, since he had never before even visited me in Edinburgh, or attended any of my school prize days.

Before I was born he was involved in the Apprentice boys and there are a number of old pictures of him, such as the one of him here with my Mum and oldest brother, and others posing on the walls of Derry, but these date from the 1940s or early 1950s, and when I first posted his piece I said I wasn’t sure whether he was still a member when the 1969 parade prompted the so-called “Battle of the Bogside”. Subsequent to that it was confirmed that he had left by that point, but I will come back to that later.

He was however, heavily involved in the Black Institution, indeed probably more so than the Orange. Its main parade is on the last Saturday in August, marking the official end of the “Marching Season” and as a young boy I attended that, though with much less enthusiasm than the Twelfth. The shorter more sober parades didn’t hold the same attraction for a young boy. But the parades were not the important thing to my father. He was a “District Lecturer” in the Institution, tutoring fellow “Knights” through their different degrees. In this it is akin to Freemasonry, but with the Black Institution each of the degrees is tied to a different Biblical story, and to help with lectures each lecturer used different objects/prompts and a “lecture book” with appropriate illustrations, which is handed on from one lecturer to another. My dad had been a lecturer so long that his had finally degenerated to an unusable state, and so in my early teens he asked me to draw illustrations for a new one (having seen the “quality” artwork that I scrawled on my schoolbag and the backs of my schoolbooks... I was a passable copiest, with not an original artistic bone in my body as my art teachers would testify). This was probably him breaking all the rules of the order, but in order for me to understand what I was doing he talked me through the different lectures, which were essentially just retelling of predominantly Old Testament Tales... a sort of Sunday School for adults.

That was as close as I ever came to becoming an initiate of either the Orange or the Black. Indeed only my eldest brother was ever a member of the Orange and when LOL 1003 folded he never rejoined. Despite my father’s affiliation he never pushed any of us to join, and indeed, towards the end of his life, in the wake of Drumcree and other events that are not my story to tell, he, in a rare moment of open reflection, expressed disillusionment with the direction of the loyal orders, particularly the Orange. This was not just a development late in life, but had been a feature of his engagement with all of the Loyal Orders throughout his life. In the sixties he and others had confronted some of those who wanted to use the Orange in explicitly political ways, resulting in some significant figures leaving the order. After I initially posted this blog I am told that his withdrawal from the Apprentice Boys/Walker Clubs was as a result of their reluctance to discipline the same figures, and this withdrawal would have been particularly painful, given that he had family links going back to the siege of Derry. He continued to face down the politicisation of the Black Institution throughout his involvement.

This is not to say that he did not see the political dimension of the Loyal Orders or that he was not politically minded himself. He was an intensely conservative, if not reactionary unionist, but resisted the use of the Order for what he saw as the agenda of particular individuals and their political ambitions, and was a unionist rather than what he saw as dis-loyalty to the wider UK.

Some of that came to a head in one incident early in the 1970s. Before he painted “Ivydene” yellow, most people knew it as the house with the flagpole in the garden. Not just a flagstaff projected out from the front of the house, but a full flagpole the height of the house in the middle of the garden in front of what was, in latter days my bedroom. On the first of July every year he ran a Union Flag (not Jack... it wasn’t a ship after all) up the flagpole and it came down again after the parade on the last Saturday in August. The idea of Union Flags decaying on lamp posts never mind paramilitary flags marking territory would have been anathema to my Dad. In the early seventies when the Vanguard Unionist movement was at its height, and agitating for independence, some local “representatives” suggested that he should be flying the Vanguard flag rather than the Union Flag. He told them to clear off. The next day, he found that the Union Jack had been taken down in the middle of the night. Another, larger one was procured and hoisted. A few nights later not only did he find that the flag had been taken down but the pole (a substantial piece of timber) had been sawn through and they had tried to set fire to it in the garden. It hadn’t taken, but couldn’t be put back up. It was only in his later years I asked him what happened next. Apparently he went straight to Bill Craig in the Orange Hall and told him what had happened and threatened to take disciplinary action against him with the Order because of what had happened. And sure enough Mr. Craig paid for the pole to be replaced complete with an even larger Union Flag... And it was never touched again, although I don’t know whether that was because of the word of that particular politician, or the industrial quantity of barbed wire that my dad put around the base of the pole for the next couple of years. The flag pole outlived Vanguard Unionism. I don’t think the people who bought the house from him when he moved into Palmerston ever flew any flag from it.

But a particularly poignant day was when I was minister in Sandy Row and living just off the Lisburn Road, I invited my dad over for the Twelfth. He had recently stopped driving and had moved into a residential home and I thought he would enjoy watching the parade. So I picked him up and brought him over, and got him sat in a deck chair where he could see everything. Lots of those on parade recognised him and came over to greet him. But after No. 6 District had passed he said he had enough. After a bite of lunch I took him home and in the car asked why he didn’t want to stay for the rest of the parade. “It’s not the same,” he said. “What? It’s not the same watching it rather than being in it?” I asked. “No... the bands and all the drunk young people following. There’s no pride... Even the lodges are away to scrapings...” He didn’t want to talk much more about it after that. It was the last time he was ever near anything to do with the Orange or the Black.

And frankly, few of his former “brethren” came looking to see where he was...

Shalom