The Faithful Tribe: An Intimate Portrait of the Loyal Institutions. Ruth Edwards Dudley

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СКАЧАТЬ Neagh: the Blackwater is very fertile, warm ground. The bottom end of the Foyle is good ground too, which is why in Derry there are so many Presbyterian churches along its banks. As the seagull follows the plough, the Presbyterian follows the good land. Not that my people were gifted with the best of fertile land, but slowly we kept labouring on, always trying to improve ourselves.’

      A few miles down the road he had shown me, with unconcealed emotion, the remains of a small building in a tiny overgrown patch of green, which once had been a thatched house. It was there that Henry’s paternal grandfather and at least seven siblings were born between 1880 and 1890. Two boys became farmers, one boy joined the Royal Irish Constabulary, and the girl married. And like so many Ulster Protestants before and after them, three of the boys emigrated, one to Canada and two to the United States.

      In 1932, Henry’s grandfather had taken a huge risk. He had sold this 17-acre small farm to a Catholic neighbour and bought a 120-acre farm near Omagh, twenty miles north, which had been in the hands of a bank for five years. In 1923, it had been sold for £3,500, but farm values had been plummeting and the bank ended up repossessing it. ‘Grandfather gave £1,050 for it – huge money for him – and since an earlier owner had bought it from a landlord under a government purchase act, there was an annuity of £50 a year due on it too. The house was in rotten condition, with rushes six feet high, but grandfather was strong, gutsy and determined.’

      Henry’s maternal grandfather took an equal risk. Descended from a family of small farmers who came from Ayrshire in the 1600s, he moved from Keady in County Armagh, intended by his father to buy a particular sensible property, ‘but he took a shine to a place no one else would take. His father was annoyed and wouldn’t give him any financial help. But he bought the place anyway, stayed there alone for years before he married, farming, making his own bread, washing his own clothes and hanging food off the rafters at night so the rats couldn’t get it.’

      The Second World War put farmers on their feet, so both grandfathers prospered. The maternal grandfather wasn’t as physically strong as the paternal, but he had a gift for figures, so he branched out. ‘He always did his sums first before he attempted anything.’ On retirement at seventy he had a lot more land as well as other businesses. We saw the farms of Henry’s aunt and Henry’s cousin and the house his maternal grandfather was supposed in the first place to buy but had ‘taken umbrage against’. Henry knew every twist in the road. ‘This is home. Even if you had no blood connections to Clogher Valley, you’d feel attached to it: it’s homely. It’s always good to come back to it, irregardless of how far you go in the world. And the fact that it’s green, deep land and that most of your blood comes from it, I suppose is something that endears it to you as well.’

      Then in front of us was Glenhoy church. ‘When Presbyterians were eventually given permission to build meeting houses, there wasn’t much good land left. When we got round to getting our own piece of land around here we drew the short straw. It’s damnable to dig graves here because it’s pure rock a foot down: they have to bring in compressors to bust it.

      ‘My paternal ancestors lie here. And they were all in my Orange Lodge, LOL 908. And there’s the new hall we built last year.’ He stopped at the top of a hill and pointed down. ‘If you stepped back to 1848 (the year the church was built) you would find my great-great-grandfather walking in procession on the same country lane I now walk in one of the glens of the Clogher Valley to our little kirk on the hill. It’s in the blood and calls from deep within us, our little ritual to let the outside world know we’re still here.’

      We were late, too late for Henry to join the assembly a mile down the road and parade like his great-great-grandfather up to the church. But as we waited he talked more about the Clogher Valley and how even though his paternal grandfather had moved away from that area he would always come back to this lodge. One of Henry’s two brothers would be here today. His father would have been along too but he had to attend another Orange service elsewhere.

      Henry’s forebears achieved high office in the Orange Order: his father, grandfathers and great-grandfather were variously Worshipful Masters of lodges and districts and even the county. Henry confined himself to being lodge treasurer for a few years, an office which he said was undemanding: he took the extreme modernizing step of opening a bank account, he collected the dues and kept the very simple books. Although he has an intense emotional attachment to his lodge, which he had joined as a junior, he has no interest in holding office again. This is a sign of the times that in some ways worries him: ‘A hundred years ago, high offices would have tended to be held by Church of Ireland clergy right up to bishops, as well as by the old gentry. Some of those lads had a lot of backbone as well as standing – and some of them were cranky and mad as hell.’

      Henry told me the story of a County Grand Master of Tyrone. The improbably named Anketell Moutray was kidnapped by the IRA in 1922 with forty others and taken across the border to be used as bargaining counters for eleven IRA men from County Monaghan, who had been arrested in Northern Ireland. Moutray, who was eighty, drove his captors crazy by incessantly singing in a cracked voice penitential psalms and ‘God Save the King’.

      Henry talked of how the gentry began to disappear: compulsory purchase legislation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had required many to sell their farms and two world wars had killed off many more. The leadership of the Orange became dominated by the business and professional classes, people like his grandparents. But in Henry’s generation, people like that are busier than in the past and less able to give their time and their effort to what are often the mundane details of lodge work. ‘It’s not that I work physically harder than my ancestors, but life has become more demanding. For instance, they didn’t have to spent their evenings bogged down in paperwork.’ And at higher levels within the loyal institutions, where there are endless meetings, these days people with small businesses are in danger of going to the wall.

      There were very few people in the hamlet, just a few cars, a handful of wives and maybe ten or twelve children. It was a nice day and there was a silver band and it was pleasant to hear the strains of hymn music wafting up the hill and seeing in the distance the advancing procession of Orangemen, many of whom, when they finally arrived, had faces so weather-beaten that not even a townee like me could doubt their occupation.

      There were only about fifty people present. The lodge has only forty brethren, of whom just over half were there and then there were guest Orangemen and other visitors. There was a pause for a chat with families, friends and acquaintances and then it was time to reassemble to walk in formation into the church. With the other non-processors, I followed them in and sat at the back of the little church in a right-hand pew along with women and children: across the aisle was the band.

The young Presbyterian minister wasn’t an Orangeman. Only about 12 per cent of them are, Henry told me afterwards, because, particularly in the rural parts, it was so much a family thing; this minister had no such connections. The service was the usual mixture of hymns and prayers but I was pretty rocked by the sermon, particularly since I knew the guest preacher to be a member of the Church of Ireland. One of the twentieth-century assumptions I have learned to jettison since I started consorting with evangelical Protestants is that Presbyterians are necessarily more extreme than Anglicans. Certainly the Church of England is notoriously woolly and the Church of Ireland in the Republic is self-consciously liberal, but the circumstances of life in Northern Ireland are such that Protestants of all denominations are tougher, more evangelical, less ecumenical and inevitably more political than their counterparts elsewhere. What was on the mind of the Reverend William Hoey (who was later identified to me as the minister who had called Cardinal Daly ‘a red-hatted weasel’)^* was Drumcree, which, being only three weeks away, was on the minds of most people in Northern Ireland.

      Reverend Hoey was certainly a lively and opinionated speaker, lukewarm only in his condemnation of loyalist paramilitaries who at the time СКАЧАТЬ