1 E. Erwin, speaking in support of C. W. Dunbar-Buller, the official unionist candidate opposed by T. H. Sloan in the South Belfast by-election of August 1902, said that he (Erwin) was a friend of Arthur Trew. ‘Eight long years ago at the Custom house steps there was notone of those who were shouting so much now. Arthur Trew and himself took up the cudgels against the socialists who were propagating their doctrines at the steps. Thus the B.P.A. was established.’ (B.N.-L., 13 Aug. 1902.)

2 B.N.-L., 24, 25 July 1901. Crown counsel mentioned that Trew had been engaged in open-air meetings at the ‘Steps‘ for seven years past, that he had visited Belfast each week at first, but ultimately settled there.

William Boyd, retired official of the National Union of Vehicle Builders, recollects attending the ‘Steps’ instead of Sunday school and noting the collection of Trew’s train fare (interview with William Boyd).

3 His claim to be a member of the National Amalgamated Union of Labour was disputed by some delegates to the Belfast Trades Council, but upheld by the chairman (B.T.C. minutes, 7 Aug. 1902). He is described in his nomination paper of 1902 as a ‘cementer’ (N.W., 15 Aug. 1902) and in 1906 as an ‘artisan’ (N.W., 15 Jan. 1906). F. S. L. Lyons, The Irish parliamentary party, p. 136, wrongly describes him as a manufacturer. Alexander Boyd, speaking at Banbridge on 3 Aug. 1905, said that Sloan ‘was adopted as an honest workingman, an independent protestant, to follow in the steps of William Johnston’ ((Irish Protestant, 12 Aug. 1905).

4 Interview with John Jamison, retired shipyard worker, who also stated that Sloan had been upgraded from red-leader to cementer.

5 N.W., 14 July 1902.

6 D.N.B., second supplement, ii. 376-7. The mover of a motion that a letter of condolence be sent to his family from the Belfast Trades Council said that ‘Mr Johnston during his life was one of the very few friends of this council in the house of commons’ (B.T.C. executive committee minutes, 22 July 1902). Other committee members thought the motion unwise, but it was adopted unanimously at a meeting of the full council (B.T.C, minutes, 7 Aug. 1902).

7 Galbraith owed his nickname to his frequent announcements that he had up his sleeve a bubble which he would burst.

8 A group of working-class youths occasionally guilty of petty misdemeanours.

9 N.W., B.N.-L., 2 June 1903.

10 The bill, which was welcomed by anglicans and catholics, met with furious opposition from nonconformists, who said that it would put the cost of sectarian education on the rates. See R.C.K. Ensor, England 1870-1914, pp. 355-8.

11 B.N.-L., 14 Aug. 1902.

12 The reports of Misses L. E. A. Deane and H. Martindale (factory inspectors) for 1905 describe working conditions in the laundries of penitentiaries, houses of mercy and orphanages in Ireland. All the laundries were run as commercial enterprises and took in public washing. The houses of mercy were much worse than the penitentiaries. In the five orphanages inspected (four catholic and one protestant) children, as young as nine in one institution, were employed. Working conditions generally were wretched. (Report of the chief inspector of factories for the year 1905, pp. 260-62 [Cd 3036], H.G. 1906, xv, 405).

13 B.N.-L., 15, 16 Aug. 1902.

14 Ibid., 15 Aug. 1902. According to the Northern Whig (6, 7 Aug. 1902), many lodges had earlier declared for Sloan, who claimed that the ‘working lodges‘ (i.e. lodges with more than a nominal existence) supported him. He was himself Master of St Michael’s Total Abstinence L.O.L. 1890 (The iron heel, p. 11).

15 B.N.-L., 14 Aug. 1902.

16 Irish Temperance League Journal, 1 Sept. 1902.

17 I.T.L.Jn., 1 Nov. 1902.

18 N.W., 8 Aug. 1902.

19 B.N.-L., 14 Aug. 1902.

20 Pirrie made a flying visit to Belfast on the day when the conservative selection meeting was being held (the later liberal-unionist meeting was a mere formality to preserve the fiction of independent existence). In a conversation with a Northern Whig reporter Pirrie said that ‘though not anxious to interfere at all, he would not refuse to become a candidate if nominated by a responsible and representative body of electors of the constituency. That had been his attitude when first approached on the matter.’ (N.W., 6 Aug. 1902.)

The check to his parliamentary ambitions made Pirrie’s relations with conservative leaders even cooler than they had been before, and hastened his departure from liberal-unionism; he ultimately became a liberal home ruler. See Black, R.D.C., ‘William James Pirrie‘, in Threshold, i. 58–67 (Feb. 1957)Google Scholar, and in C. Cruise O’Brien (ed.), The shaping of modern Ireland, pp. 174-84.

21 His brother-in-law, J. A. M. Carlisle (general superintendent of Harland and Wolff), in a letter to the Northern Whig on polling day, announced that he had given his support and vote to Sloan, and went on to make a bitter attack on the conservative leaders.

22 B.T.C. minutes, 7 Aug. 1902. The secretary (a polisher named W. Moore) suggested that if the council could not get an independent workingman to stand, they should ask ‘the manager of the Queen’s Island. He would sooner have Pirrie than any invertebrate person.’ His proposal was greeted by cries of ‘Bosh!‘ and ‘ We have enough of that sort’.

23 N.W., 7 Aug. 1902.

24 N.W., 8 Aug. 1902.

25 N.W., 7 Aug. 1902.

26 South Belfast: T. H. Sloan — 3795; C. W. Dunbar-Buller — 2969; majority 826 (B.N.-L., 19 Aug. 1902).

27 B.N.-L., 19 Aug. 1902.

28 Jurist, The iron heel; or the fight for freedom, p. 8; [R. Lindsay Crawford], Orangeism; its history and progress: a plea for firstprinciples, p. 53.

29 The iron heel, p. 14; Orangeism, pp. 54-5.

30 The letter was dated October 17.

31 Orangeism, p. 56.

32 The iron heel, p. 31.

33 The iron heel, pp. 25, 29; Orangeism, p. 54.

34 B.N,-L., 4 June 1903.

35 The iron heel, p. 28.

36 The iron heel, pp. 27-31.

37 Text in Select statutes, cases and documents, ed. Grant Robertson (8th ed., 1947), pp. 137-8. A bill to modify the declaration was introduced into parliament in 1901, but was not proceeded with. The declaration was finally modified by the Accession Declaration Act, 3 Aug. 1910 (1 Geo. V, c. 29).

38 N.W., 14 July 1903. The Northern Whig gives the fullest account of the demonstration.

39 Lisburn register of births; R. M. Young, Belfast and the province of Ulster in the twentieth century, .p. 588. The B.M. file of the Irish Protestant is complete up to 1910.

40 At the 1905 annual meeting of shareholders the chairman, Colonel Lefroy, referred to the difficulties of the paper’s first year as a weekly. Crawford had to defend his policy of supporting Sloan and the Independent Orange Order against shareholders who resented attacks on the unionist party. Crawford threatened to ‘reconsider his position’ if the policy were changed, and said that they ‘must be prepared to make sacrifices for their principles, if not they had better renounce honest journalism’. The report was adopted. (N.W., 29 Aug. 1905.)

41 They were particularly distressed by his wearing an overcoat with a fur collar. Interviews with Mrs F. F. Patterson, F. Carson, D. McDevitt. A cartoon in the Belfast Evening Telegraph (14 July 1906) shows Sloan wearing a fur-collared coat labelled ‘Conciliation’ with a discarded ‘No pope’ hat lying on the floor.

42 N.W., 14 July 1903.

43 N.W., 13 July 1904.

44 Moore was mainly responsible for the formation of the Ulster Unionist Council in 1904-5 (R. McNeill, Ulster’s stand for union, pp 34-5).

45 Followers of T. W. Russell, M.P. for North Tyrone. Though nominally an official unionist member, Russell’s views on a number of matters, especially on land tenure, were at variance with those of his party. He was in favour of the compulsory sale of land to tenants, and represented them at the land conference of December 1902.

46 N.W., 13 July 1904. Balfour’s licencing act of 1904 compensated brewers and publicans who had to surrender redundant licences out of a fund levied on the trade itself. See R. C. K. Ensor, England 1870-1914, pp. 360-1.

47 In a letter to Crawford dated 15 July 1904, the Rev. D. D. Boyle, presbyterian minister of St James’s Church, Ballymoney, wrote that ‘the public here was deeply impressed by our demonstration and your speech has been received with much favour’. The letter also confirms Crawford’s position as the policy-maker of the new order, for Boyle stated that he had re-read ‘the manifesto’ (i.e. the statement of the order’s position in Orangeism), was delighted with it, and considered Crawford right in making no references to the expulsions from the old order after July 1903. He also thought that the new order’s case should be put to Orangemen in Scotland, the colonies and America, and that Sloan and Crawford should go on a deputation to the Grand Lodge of Scotland, which was likely to prove sympathetic. This and other letters to Lindsay Crawford quoted in this article have been generously placed at my disposal by his daughter, Miss Morna E. Crawford, of Boston, Massachusetts.

48 Orangeism, p. 63.

49 Orangeism. p. 64.

50 Ibid., p. 58.

51 For a detailed account of the origin and fate of the proposals see F. S. L. Lyons, ‘The Irish unionist party and the devolution crisis of 1904-5’, in I.H.S., vi. 1-22.

52 The council was formed in Belfast on 2 December and held its first public meeting in March 1905, when it assumed the name by which it was to be known henceforth.

53 The proceeds of the meeting were given to the lord mayor’s unemployed fund. Sloan at the conclusion of the meeting thanked J. A. M. Carlisle of Harland and Wolff for having Captain Shawe-Taylor as his guest.

54 The meeting is reported in detail in the Irish Protestant, 24 Dec, 1904.

55 See Howard, C.H.D., ‘Joseph Chamberlain, Parnell, and the Irish “central board” scheme, 1884-5’, in I.H.S., viii. 324-61Google Scholar.

56 Cavehill, which overlooks Belfast. On it, in 1795, before his departure for America, Tone, with some Belfast United Irishmen, took a solemn obligation ‘never to desist in our efforts, until we had subverted the authority of England over the country, and asserted her independence’ ( Life of Theobald Wolfe Tone, ed. Tone, W.T. Wolfe, Washington, 1826, i. 128 Google Scholar).

57 Independent Loyal Orange Institution of Ireland; Grand Lodge report, January 1906.

58 Ibid., p. 28.

59 Ibid., p. 29.

60 N.W., I.N.. 14 July 1905. Both papers printed the manifesto in full. It was also printed in the Irish Protestant (22 July 1905) and issued as a pamphlet.

61 It is so described in the summary given in Joseph Devlin’s Northern Star, 22 July 1905.

62 N.W., 15 July 1905. For some weeks following the publication of the manifesto the unionist press carried articles and letters on the manifesto.

63 N.W., 17 July 1905.

64 It reprinted from the Irish Protestant a report of a meeting, under the auspices of the Protestant Federation of Liverpool, at which Crawford read the manifesto to a crowd of over 7,000, and claimed that it had been unanimously approved (I.N., 22 July 1905). The Dublin Irish Daily Independent of the same date gave the substance of an interview with Lindsay Crawford, in which he stated that ‘as an Ulsterman I regret to say that the evil influences of feudalism and clericalism prevail north of the Boyne just as strongly as theydo south’. He considered protestant sectarianism ‘as destructive of national life and progress’ as its catholic counterpart.

65 Letter dated 15 July 1905. Hannay had contributed under the pseudonym Eoghan, ‘A neglected chapter of Irish history, rewritten for Irish protestants’, on the volunteer movement of 1782, to the Irish Protestant.

66 Letter dated 16 July 1905 and headed ‘North west bar’.

67 Two letters dated 22 and 25 July 1905, marked private, and addressed from ‘St Justin’s, Dalkey’.

68 They included Nathaniel Bonar, of the Johnston Memorial Independent L.O.L., No. 13 (N.W., 19, 21 July 1905) and John Keown of the Belfast trades council. Keown, who had spoken for Sloan in the 1902 election, described himself in his letter as ‘member of No. 4 No Surrender Independent Orange Lodge, delegate to the Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland, and Chairman of No. 1 Branch B.P.A.’ Weekly Northern Whig, 29 July 1905. Other letters were signed with pen-names by correspondents claiming to be members of the new order.

69 ‘Grand Orange Lodge of the Independent Order at Belfast, July 29, Independent Orangemen of Belfast, July 31, meeting of Orangemen (Parent Order) of Banbridge and district, August 3’ (inside back cover of the manifesto in pamphlet form).

70 N.W., 28 Aug. 1905. F. S. L. Lyons, The Irish parliamentary party, p. 136, n. 1., assumes that Sloan was the author and gives him too much credit for deploring sectarian animosities. Passages in the manifesto, as well as its leading ideas, can be found in earlier speeches of Crawford. Crawford’s authorship is also confirmed by Robert Matchett, member (1904-5) of the Imperial Grand Lodge (interview with R. Matchett).

71 N.W.. 9 Sept. 1905. Shaftesbury defeated Braithwaite by 1,648 votes to 791 (ibid., 14 Sept. 1905).

72 Interview with Daniel J. McDevitt, a leading member for many years of the Belfast Trades Council.

73 See above, p. 126, n. 37.

74 Interview with Daniel J. McDevitt. Similar details supplied by R. R. Campbell, son of D. R. Campbell, and Samuel Haslett, both members of the Belfast Trades Council. The handbills were addressed to ‘the catholic voters of North Belfast’ and bore the following imprint: ‘Printed and published by Patrick Quinn, Church Street, Belfast’. Handbills of a similar nature and bearing the same imprint were issued against Walker in January 1906, at a time when nationalist leaders publicly supported him.

75 N.W., 11, 12 Sept. 1905.

78 The report to the A.S.C. & J. (Walker’s union) stated that MacDonald, eight days before polling day, advised that the fight be stopped and the seat claimed on petition. ‘Over 1,000 paid canvassers were employed against us on polling day and our opponents used 725 vehicles to convey voters to the poll, besides paying the expenses and first class fares of the outvoters’ (S. Higenbottam, Our society’s history, p. 280).

77 Sir D. Dixon—4,440; W. Walker—3,966; majority—474 (N.W., 16 Sept. 1905).

78 B.N.-L., 1 Jan. 1906.

79 Sloan was at the back of the platform (I.N., 3 Jan. 1906).

80 I.N., 5 Jan. 1906.

81 I.N., 8 Jan. 1906.

82 B.N.-L., 9 Jan. 1906.

83 I.P., 6 Jan. 1906.

84 B.N.-L., 29 Jan. 1906. The well-known liberal, Rev. J. B. Armour, gave him discreet assistance (W. S. Armour, Armour of Ballymoney, p. 181). Dr R. S. Keightley, candidate in South Londonderry, denounced as an ex-Orangeman who had been only a year in the old order, appears to have joined the new institution. He was a member of the platform party both at the Shawe-Taylor meeting (16 Dec. 1904) and at a lecture by Lindsay Crawford on ‘Democracy and nationalism’ in November 1906 (B.N.-L., 5 Nov. 1906).

85 Northern Star, 27 Jan. 1906.

86 B.T.C. minutes, 13 Jan. 1906.

87 Northern Star, 20 Jan. 1906. The meeting was held in the National Club, Berry street, on Sunday, Jan. 14. The badge consisted of a shamrock with a photograph of Devlin in the centre. (Courtesy of John Jamison.)

88 Ibid. This speech of Devlin’s was made at an earlier meeting on the same day.

89 B.T.C. minutes, 13 Jan. 1906. Support for Sloan was unanimous, but the resolution in favour of Devlin was carried by one vote after a tie. Some delegates preferred J. A. M. Carlisle, who intervened in West Belfast as an independent liberal unionist.

Two years later Joseph Mitchell and W. J. Murray, leading members of the Belfast Trades Council, revealed that they had been asked by United Irish League officials to use their influence with protestant working men to secure votes for Devlin, and had done so (B.E.T., 13 Jan. 1908).

90 N.W., B.N.-L., 19 Jan. 1906.

91 B.N.-L., 3 Jan. 1906.

92 Northern Star, 6 Jan. 1906.

93 N.W., 20 Jan. 1906.

94 West Belfast. J. Devlin (nat.)—4,138; Capt. J. R. Smiley (lib. unionist)—4,122; Rt hon. J. A. M. Carlisle (indep. lib. unionist)—153; majority—16 (B.N.-L., 20 Jan. 1906).

95 N.W., 20 Jan. 1906. Lundy was the faint-hearted governor of Derry; his proposal to surrender the city to Jacobite troops in 1689 made him the Orange prototype of traitor. One of the unionist election posters showed Carlisle opening gates to allow Devlin and his followers to enter. It bore the inscription, ‘A modern Lundy’.

96 The editorial of the June 1903 issue referred to the prospectus of the new company; speaking of the duties of Irish protestants, it declared that if they had failed ‘to lead the home ruler into the path of loyalty’ it was because they cloaked the wrongs of English statesmen; ‘Irish protestants should not be satisfied to be a mere “garrison” in their native land or an appanage of the Carlton Club’.

97 See above, p. 126, n. 40.

98 Alice Stopford Green, the widow of the historian J. R. Green, and herself a writer on Irish history, paid this tribute in a letter dated 30 May 1906 to Crawford: ‘You have made a good fight in Ireland and I deeply regret that it is to close in its present form and I sympathise most heartily with your situation especially considering that it was the chairman’s vote only that decided the matter’.

The exact date on which Crawford surrendered the editorship is uncertain. The June 9 issue was undoubtedly his, for it carried an obituary of Michael Davitt written in his characteristic style. It called Davitt ‘the great apostle of democracy’, citing his defence of persecuted Jews in Limerick, his alliance with the Labour Party and his support of a system of state education. Describing Davitt and his Fenian allies as ‘waging a war’ (in Land League days?) it commented: ‘Legally it is indefensible, but morally it may not only be justifiable but a sacred duty’. The September 8 issue was edited by ‘Mr Ambrose U. C. Bury, M. A.’ (I.P., 13 Oct. 1906).

99 In view of later developments it is interesting to note the remainder of the paragraph: ‘This will be good news for Mr Crawford’s many friends and admirers in Ulster, and should be of great assistance to the Independent Orange movement in its efforts to educate the democracy. It is a well-known fact that the directors of the Irish Protestant for some time past have been out of sympathy with Mr Crawford’s democratic principles, and as they are of the landlord class we presume it is their intention to run the paper in future as a tory organ.’

100 Ulster Guardian, 10 Nov. 1906. The lecture was under the auspices of No. 1 District of the Independent Orange Order.

101 Walter Long, William Moore and Charles Craig (brother of James Craig, later Lord Craigavon) were all unionist M.P.s. Crawford said that home rule was a unionist principle established in the colonies and local government. ‘The only country in the empire peopled by the white race in which the principle of trusting the people had been denied to its fullest extent was this country of Ireland.’

102 Above, p. 141.

103 B.N.-L., 12 Nov. 1906.

104 Ibid., 15 Nov. 1906.

105 Ibid., 16 Nov. 1906.

106 Ibid., 10, 15 Nov. 1906.

107 Ibid., 19 Nov. 1906. Crawford declared that liberty of speech and of voting was absent in the election—over 1,000 of his supporters were prevented from voting and at one polling station his agent had to retire four hours before the close of poll under threat of murder.

North Armagh: W. Moore (unionist)—4,228; R. L. Crawford (independent)—1,433; majority—2,795.

108 Ulster Guardian, 1 Dec. 1906. Rev. J. E. Bartley, of nearby Ballycarry, said that the manifesto had given him some hope for Orangeism and Ireland. ‘It was a gospel of peace and love, and if no other monument was erected to the memory of Lindsay Crawford the future historian would hand down the text of the Magheramorne manifesto as a fitting memorial of an Irishman who was destined to play a great part in the life of his country.’ A mob, concealed at the approaches to the railway station, threw stones at the party, and later smashed gates and mobbed a guest who was returning to Belfast.

109 B.N.-L., 2 June 1908. When Crawford was dismissed in May 1908 by the board of the Ulster Guardian, he sent to the press copies of a letter addressed to Hugh Mack, the board’s chairman. It contained a review of his editorship of the paper and the passage quoted from his first editorial.

110 The issue of 29 February 1908 contained reports of the parliamentary debate on the Sweated Industries Bill (its rejection was seconded by Captain Charles Craig) and a lecture on infant mortality in Ireland. It also reported Crawford’s lecture, under the auspices of No. 1 Independent Orange Lodge, on ‘One hundred years of Irish history’, in which he referred to sweating in the Belfast linen trade, and said that ‘the linen merchants of Ulster … were now the last buttress of toryism and Castle ascendancy in Ireland’.

111 One issue of the Ulster Guardian (9 Feb. 1907) contained a report of the presentation of an address to James Lowry, who had lent his land for the Magheramorne manifesto demonstration, and a short biography of an ancestor of his, David Bailie Warden, a colonel in the United Irish army in 1798. A second article reported an address that a barrister, W. H. Davey, gave to the Y.M.C.A. Literary and Debating Society in Deny on Irish poetry. Davey made particular mention of patriotic writers such as William Drennan, Thomas Davis and Sir Samuel Ferguson, and deplored the anti-Irish spirit in Ulster. A third article defended the Christian socialist, Rev. R. J. Campbell.

112 Connolly, James, Labour in Irish history (Dublin and London, 1922), p. 216 Google Scholar. Crawford, (Ulster Guardian, 29 Feb. 1908)Google Scholar said that he himself ‘was not a socialist, nor did he believe in the accepted theory of socialism … But the socialistic theory was preferable to the economic heresy of the linen trusts and monopolists‘.

113 Letter dated 13 Jan. 1907.

114 Cardinal Logue had, in a letter to the proprietors, threatened to ban it in his archdiocese as ‘a most pernicious anti-catholic print’. The proprietors stopped publication immediately. See Brian Inglis, ‘Moran of the Leader and Ryan of the Irish Peasant’ in C. Cruise O’Brien (ed.), The shaping of modern Ireland, pp. 108-23, and W. P. Ryan, The pope’s green island, pp. 7-16.

115 American biography, xxxv. 261-4; letter of Francis Sheehy Skeffington to Lindsay Crawford, dated 24 Aug. 1907.

116 N.W., 13 July 1907.

117 Above, p. 140.

118 B.N.-L., 17 Dec. 1907.

119 B.N.-L., 2 June 1908.

120 Ibid., 21 May 1908.

121 N.W., 11 June 1908. The Independent Orange Lodge Martin Luther No. 56 handed back its warrant and dissolved because it objected to Lindsay Crawford’s expulsion by the Belfast County Grand Lodge and to Sloan presiding unconstitutionally at the Grand Lodge of Ireland (15 June 1908).

122 In spite of fine weather the 1909 demonstration was even less well attended than that of 1908, when it rained. The speakers, apart from Sloan himself, were newcomers (N.W., 13 July 1909). Alexander Boyd spoke at neither of the demonstrations and his name does not appear as an officer of even a private lodge in the Grand Lodge report for 1910.

123 James Chambers, K.C. (unionist)—5,772; T. H. Sloan (independent)—3,553; majority—2,219 (B.N.-L., 22 Jan. 1910). The president of the Irish Temperance League made an attempt to persuade Sloan to emigrate to Canada. Interview with Bulmer Hobson, who was approached by the president for assistance.

124 ‘Your letter made me feel very unhappy. I was trying to believe that something would turn up in Ireland to keep you … If there were a hundred of us like you in Ireland, I think we’d bring about a revolution … If Canada doesn’t suit, try South America. Roger Casement is British consul at Rio Janeiro and might be able to tell you of openings’ (Robert Lynd to Crawford, 25 May 1910). Crawford wrote from Montreal (30 June 1910) to John Devoy, offering to write a series of articles for the Gaelic American on ‘The rise and fall of the Independent Orange movement in Ireland’ (Devoy’s post-bag, ed. William O’Brien and Desmond Ryan, ii. 394-5). Devoy does not seem to have accepted Crawford’s offer.