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Sisters of the brotherhood: female Orangeism on Tyneside in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

D.A.J. MacPherson  and
Donald M. MacRaild
D.A.J. MacPherson
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Warwick
Donald M. MacRaild
Affiliation:
Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
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Extract

The two ‘great unknowns’ of Irish migration history, women and Protestants, have received deserved attention in the decade or so since Donald Akenson first drew attention to them as lacunae in an otherwise growing field of scholarly concern. A review of the literature, however, demonstrates that Irish women have benefited more than Protestants from recent research. Despite pioneering efforts, much of the work on the non-Catholic dimension tends to be general or indicative in approach, with little of the depth and range now associated with Irish women’s experiences of migration.

Type
Research Article
Information
Irish Historical Studies , Volume 35 , Issue 137 , May 2006 , pp. 40 - 60
Copyright
Copyright © Irish Historical Studies Publications Ltd 2006

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References

1 See Akenson, D.H., The Irish diaspora: a primer (Belfast, 1996), pp 157–87Google Scholar.

2 There exists now a rich historical literature on Irish women’s migration. For their experiences in Britain see, for example, Lambert, Sharon, Irishwomen in Lancashire, 1922–1960: their story (Lancaster, 2001)Google Scholar; Walter, Bronwen, Outsiders inside: whiteness, place and Irish women (London, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gray, Breda, Women and the Irish diaspora (London, 2004)Google Scholar; Delaney, Enda, ‘Gender and twentieth-century Irish migration, 1921–1971’ in Sharpe, Pamela (ed.), Women, gender, and labour migration: historical and global perspectives (London, 2001), pp 209–23Google Scholar; Ryan, Louise, ‘Moving spaces and changing places: Irish women’s memories of emigration to Britain in the 1930s’ in Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, xxix (2003), pp 67–82Google Scholar; Kanya-Forstner, Martha, ‘The politics of survival: Irish women in outcast Liverpool, 1850–1890’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Liverpool, 1997)Google Scholar.

3 The experience of the Protestant Irish in Britain is examined in, for example, McFarland, Elaine, Protestants first: Orangeism in nineteenth-century Scotland (Edinburgh, 1990)Google Scholar; MacRaild, Donald M., Culture, conflict and migration: the Irish in Victorian Cumbria (Liverpool, 1998)Google Scholar; idem, Irish migrants in modern Britain, 1750–1922 (Basingstoke, 1999), pp 100–122; Walker, Graham, ‘The Protestant Irish in Scotland’ in Devine, T.M. (ed.), Irish immigration and Scottish society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Edinburgh, 1991), pp 44–66Google Scholar.

4 Two key works on the American dimension affirm this importance: Griffin, Patrick, The people with no name: Ireland’s Ulster Scots, America’s Scots Irish, and the creation of a British Atlantic world, 1689–1764 (Princeton, 2001)Google Scholar; Miller, K.A.et al. (eds), Irish immigrants in the land of Canaan: letters and memoirs from colonial and revolutionary America, 1675–1815 (Oxford, 1993)Google Scholar. Works on the Canadian dimension of Irish migration cannot avoid Protestants, and an early pioneering work on Orangeism there still provides something of a benchmark: Houston, C. J. and Smyth, W.J., The sash Canada wore: a historical geography of the Orange Order in Canada (Milton, Ont., 2000 ed.)Google Scholar. Scholarly attention to the Irish Protestants of New Zealand is a relatively recent phenomenon: see Galbraith, Alasdair, ‘The invisible Irish? Re-discovering the Irish Protestant tradition in colonial New Zealand’ in Fraser, Lyndon (ed.), A distant shore: Irish migration and New Zealand settlements (Dunedin, 2000), pp 36–54Google Scholar, and the sources cited there.

5 McFarland, MacRaild and Walker all mention briefly the role of women in their studies of Orangeism in Scotland and the north of England. See McFarland, Protestants first, p. 112; MacRaild, Culture, conflict & migration, pp 148–9; Walker, Graham, ‘The Orange Order in Scotland between the wars’ in International Review of Social History, xxxvii (1992), pp 203–4Google Scholar. For an analysis of Protestant women’s associational life in late twentieth-century Northern Ireland see Ward, Rachel Joanne, ‘Unionist and loyalist women in Northern Ireland: national identity and political action’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of the West of England, Bristol, 2003)Google Scholar.

6 For the Association of Loyal Orangewomen see Urquhart, Diane, Women in Ulster politics, 1890–1940: a history not yet told (Dublin, 2000), pp 59–61Google Scholar.

7 A recent example of such an approach focuses on the impact of feminist politics on the Communist Party of Great Britain: see Hunt, Karen and Worley, Matthew, ‘Rethinking British Communist Party women in the 1920s’ in Twentieth-Century British History, xv (2004), pp 1–27Google Scholar.

8 The Belfast Weekly News (henceforth B.W.N.) provided a weekend digest of the Belfast News-Letter. The papers’ owner-proprietor was James Alexander Henderson, J.P. On Henderson and the newspapers see Legg, Marie-Louise, Newspapers and nationalism: the Irish provincial press, 1850–1892 (Dublin, 1999), p. 182Google Scholar. For a discussion of this newspaper as an instrument of social communication in what has been termed an Orange ‘diaspora’ see MacRaild, D.M., ‘Networks, communication and the Irish Protestant diaspora in northern England, c. 1860–1914’ in Immigrants and Minorities, xxiii, pts 2–3 (July–Nov. 2005), pp 311–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 The substantive material on Tyneside Orangewomen in this paper derives from manuscript minute books and ephemera from Jarrow and Hebburn District No. 46, Rose of Hebburn Female Loyal Orange Lodge (F.L.O.L.) No. 102 and Jarrow Primrose F.L.O.L. No. 131. For the largely Irish Protestant working-class nature of the Orange movement in the north-east of England see MacRaild, Irish migrants, pp 100–22. These records are held at the Orange and Conservative Club, Hebburn.

10 On the north-east’s political traditions see Todd, Nigel, Militant democracy: Joseph Cowen and Victorian radicalism (Whitley Bay, 1991)Google Scholar and Hugman, Joan, ‘Joseph Cowen of Newcastle and radical Liberalism’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Northumbria, 1993)Google Scholar.

11 This summary data appears scribbled into the minute books of the Consett District lodge. The full listing for these years was: 1,327 (1886); 1,190 (1887); 1,152 (1888); 1,109 (1889); 1,060 (1890); 993 (1891). See Consett District (No. 48), account book (1878–1910), [1891]. No such evidence can be located elsewhere as provincial minutes no longer exist.

12 District (No. 46), minutes and accounts, 1879–1922 (MSS in possession of L.O.L. 264 Johnston’s Heroes, Hebburn, Tyne and Wear).

13 Barrow Herald, 18 July 1885.

14 Loyal Institution, Orange, Report of proceedings of the 40th annual meeting … (Birmingham, 1915)Google Scholar.

15 Male lodges were referred to as L.O.L. (Loyal Orange Lodge). Women labelled their organisations F.L.O.L., i.e. Female Loyal Orange Lodge.

16 For an interesting analysis of the tea-making stereotype see Ward, ‘Unionist & loyalist women in Northern Ireland’, pp 286–96.

17 See, for example, the descriptions in an influential study of working-class political culture: Joyce, Patrick, Work, society and politics: the culture of the factory in later Victorian England (New Brunswick, N.J., 1980), pp 256–8Google Scholar. For a bibliography of aspects of the Orange Order abroad see The Irish Diaspora website, http://www.irishdiaspora.net

18 Paz, D. G., Popular anti-Catholicism in mid-Victorian Britain (Stanford, Calif., 1992), p. 4Google Scholar.

19 While it is difficult to make micro-comparisons of Orange and friendly society activity, the sheer size of the Oddfellows and Foresters, for example, shows that, although it was widespread, Orangeism was not comparatively powerful. For the scale of these friendly societies see Gosden, P.H.J.H., The friendly societies in England, 1815–1875 (Manchester, 1961)Google Scholar. For the most recent perspectives, taking account of much new work, see Cordery, Simon, British friendly societies, 1750–1914 (Basingstoke, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Report from the select committee appointed to inquire into the origin, nature, extent and tendency of Orange institutions in Great Britain and the colonies, H.C. 1835 (377), xv; Second report …, H.C. 1835 (475), xv; Third report …, H.C. 1835 (476), xvi.

21 The two organisations were eventually reunited in 1876, several years after Auty’s death.

22 Auty’s organ was the Orange and Protestant Banner, which appeared for two decades from the early 1850s.

23 McFarland, Protestants first, p. 112.

24 At Rye House, Hertfordshire, in 1885 a riot followed the conclusion of a meeting when Orangemen ‘were joined by a number of Roman Catholics who were also out on their Twelfth of July trip. An altercation ensued, which ultimately resulted in a free fight. The men and women of the opposing forces rushed at each other.’ (B.W.N., 18 July 1885)

25 L.O.L. 503, minutes, 5 Jan. 1901.

26 The class perspective is raised by Frank Neal in his study of the Liverpool scene: Sectarian violence: the Liverpool experience, 1819–1914 (Manchester, 1988), pp 40, 71–2, 170–71, 184. The quasi-military roots and pub-based conviviality is clear from the probing investigation into Orangeism in the 1830s: see the select committee reports (above, n. 20).

27 Senior, Hereward, Orangeism in Ireland and Britain, 1795–1836 (London, 1966), p. 152Google Scholar.

28 See Neal, Sectarian violence, e.g. pp 59–60, for violence between English Orangemen and the Irish.

29 Fitzpatrick, David, ‘Exporting brotherhood: Orangeism in South Australia’ in immigrants & Minorities, xxiii, pts 2–3 (July–Nov. 2005), pp 277–310Google Scholar.

30 The data in this and the following paragraph derive from the cross-referencing of lodge officials’ names from manuscript lodge minutes and published Orange annual reports and census enumerators’ handbooks for 1881 and 1891. In samples, n = 141 (1881) and n = 75 (1901). A fuller discussion of the ethnic composition of these lodges appears in MacRaild, D.M., Faith, fraternity and fighting: the Orange Order and Irish migrants in the north of England, c. 1850–1920 (Liverpool, 2005), pp 141–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 Census 1881, enumerators’ handbooks (P.R.O., RG 11/5023-8).

32 B.W.N., 20 July 1872.

33 Whitehaven News, 15 Mar. 1875.

34 MacRaild, Culture, conflict & migration, p. 148.

35 Various examples of the rules and procedures of the women’s order are in existence. See, for example, Female Branch (L.O.L.), Rules and regulations of lodges of Loyal Orangewomen including the opening and closing ceremonies (London, 1922)Google Scholar and Orange Association of Women and L.O.L. of England, Introduction to the Orange degree (London, 1925)Google Scholar, which provide full accounts of the expectations of Orangewomen and their ceremonies, conduct and ethos.

36 The north-east was not alone in its slow pace of adaptation to the needs of female Orangeism. Manchester, despite its importance in the early history of the Orange Order, had a distinct lack of success in sustaining female Orangeism and in 1909, had only one active lodge of its own. See B.W.N., 9 Dec. 1909, and for the history of Orangeism in Manchester, Neal, Frank, ‘Manchester origins of the Orange Order’ in Manchester Region History Review, iv (1990–91), pp 12–24Google Scholar.

37 ‘Newcastle. Opening of a female lodge’, B.W.N., 9 May 1907; ‘Hebburn-on-Tyne. Opening of women’s lodge at Hebburn’, ibid., 6 Feb. 1908; F.L.O.L. 131, minutes, 28 Apr. 1920.

38 Bro. Fred Neill, District (No. 46), minutes, 14 Feb. 1920.

39 Mentions of a female lodge at Walker occur in both the B.W.N. and in the minute books of the Hebburn and Jarrow lodges. See ‘Hebburn-on-Tyne. Rose of Hebburn’, B.W.N., 14 Apr. 1921; F.L.O.L. 131, minutes, 28 Apr. 1920, which record the visit of ‘W.M. Sis Lewis & Sisters from Walker F.L.O.L. 128’.

40 ‘Hebburn-on-Tyne’, B.W.N., 18 July 1907.

41 Loyal Orange Institution, Report of the annual meeting of the Grand Orange Lodge … 1910 (Manchester, 1910)Google Scholar. Powell was a very respectable sort of Orangeman: a Durham-born commercial traveller and long-serving justice of the peace, he held virtually every local Orange office, including that of Provincial Grand Master, and was a one-time Honorary Grand District Master of England.

42 B.W.N., 14 Feb. 1907.

43 Ibid., 14 Nov., 5, 12 Dec. 1907.

44 Ibid., 8 May 1920, 14 May 1921, 13 May 1922.

45 This was reflected in the title of a book by the town’s M.P., Ellen Wilkinson, referring to the high unemployment level in the town which led in 1936 to the immortalised ‘Jarrow Crusade’: The town that was murdered (London, 1939).

46 District (No. 46), minutes, 13 May 1911.

47 Ibid., May, Nov. 1921.

48 Only three examples have been uncovered: Rules of the Rose of Consett Grand Protestant Association of Loyal Orangemen District Sick and Burial Society (Consett, 1863); Rules and regulations of the benefit society belonging to lodge no. 1322 of the Grand Protestant Association of Loyal Orangemen of England (Consett, 1868); Rules for the Northumberland and Durham [Orange Order] death sinking fund (Gateshead, 1879).

49 L.O.L. 226 Monkton True Blues, ‘Death Sinking Fund’, 1878–93. The last entry for Park occurs September 1881.

50 Ibid.

51 Only a handful of Tyneside Orangewomen can be identified with any certainty in the closest available census to the formation of the female lodges in the area (that of 1901). These include Eliza A. Montgomery, the Worshipful Mistress of F.L.O.L. 102, born in County Tyrone and married to John, one of the leading figures in the Jarrow and Hebburn District, and described in the 1901 census as a ‘copper labourer’. See P.R.O., RG 13/4745, pp 38–9.

52 See B.W.N., 24 Sept. 1908; District (No. 46), minutes, 11 May 1907.

53 District (No. 46), minutes, 29 May 1909.

54 See above, p. 48; also District (No. 46), minutes, 14 Feb. 1920.

55 The popularity of bands at this time is exhaustively examined in Trevor Herbert (ed.), The British brass band: a musical and social history (Oxford, 2000).

56 Only occasionally do the sources allow us to trace this type of family connexion. One example, drawn not from the north-east but from Cumberland, demonstrates a pattern that was probably more prevalent than fragmentary evidence allows us to determine. In 1905 John Nixon, of Scotch Street, Whitehaven, was the seventeen-year-old secretary to Juvenile Lodge No. 21. His father, Thomas Nixon, was a merchant mariner, born in Ireland, who officiated as Deputy District Master for the Whitehaven area. See Report of the annual meeting of the Grand Orange Lodge … 1905, p. 96; Census of England and Wales, 1901.

57 District (No. 46), minutes, 8 Feb., 18 July 1908.

58 Ibid., 18, 25 July 1908 (special meeting).

59 See the special debate on ‘Women’s history in the new millennium: rethinking public and private’ in Journal of Women’s History, xv (2003).

60 Leonore Davidoff, ‘Gender and the “great divide”: public and private in British gender history’, ibid., xv, no. 1 (2003), p. 17; Mary P. Ryan, ‘The public and private good: across the great divide in women’s history’, ibid., xv, no. 2 (2003), pp 10–27.

61 A lodge named after the local Orange stalwart, James Gibson, an Irish-born foreman at the local copperworks who had a lifelong association with the local lodges. See Census 1881 and 1901. For Saunderson’s uneasy life in north-east Orangeism see MacRaild, Faith, fraternity & fighting, pp 100–04, 140, 141, 238, 239.

62 For the importance of claiming physical, and consequently political and ideological, space to the Orange Order see Elaine McFarland, ‘Marching from the margins: Twelfth of July parades in Scotland, 1820–1914’ in Fraser, T.G. (ed.), The Irish parading tradition: following the drum (Basingstoke, 2000), pp 60–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

63 District (No. 46), minutes, 11 May 1907.

64 W. N. Cameron, Worshipful Master of L.O.L. 339 Monkton True Blues, was returned in the 1901 census as a fifty-five-year-old Irish-born shipyard driller, married with no children living at home. See Census 1901 ; District (No. 46), minutes, passim; L.O.L. 339, minutes, 1906–11.

65 ‘Hebburn. Rose of Hebburn F.L.O.L. 102’, B.W.N., 16 Sept. 1909.

66 See, for example, District (No. 46), minutes, 23 Aug. 1913. A piece in Wallsend Herald and Advertiser, 15 Mar. 1912, places her at a political meeting of the Primrose League.

67 District (No. 46), minutes, 10 Feb. 1912.

68 A rather successful social event organised for Christmas 1911 by Jarrow and Hebburn’s temperance lodge, L.O.L. 812, raised £3 and so quadrupled the treasurer’s money in hand: see L.O.L. 812 James Gibson Memorial, Hebburn, minutes, 28 Jan. 1911.

69 Ibid., 11 May 1912.

70 Ibid. Thomas Rowan was a longstanding Orangeman and member and several times Worshipful Master of L.O.L. 432 Jarrow Purple Heroes. In 1901 he was returned in the census as a forty-one-year-old Irish-born steel-smelter who was married with eight children. See Census 1901; District (No. 46), minutes, passim; and also L.O.L. 432, minutes, 1904–18, where Rowan is returned as an office-holder or committee man in each of these fifteen years.

71 District (No. 46), minutes, 11 May 1912.

72 Ibid.

73 Ibid, (original grammar and style).

74 Ibid.

75 Ibid., 8 Feb. 1919.

76 Ibid.

77 Ibid., 5 Dec. 1919.

78 Ibid., 14 Feb., 13 Mar. 1920.

79 Ibid., 13 Mar. 1920.

80 This was announced at a special meeting of the district (District (No. 46), minutes, 13 Mar. 1920).

81 See Hollis, Patricia, Ladies elect: women in English local government, 1865–1914 (Oxford, 1987)Google Scholar; Yeo, Eileen Janes (ed.), Radical femininity: women’s self-representation in the public sphere (Manchester, 1998)Google Scholar. Graham Walker remarks on the supreme organisational skills that women brought to the Orange movement, and it would appear that the ladies of Tyneside were no different: see Walker, ‘The Orange Order in Scotland between the wars’, p. 203.

82 See Thane, Patricia M., ‘What difference did the vote make? Women in public and private life in Britain since 1918’ in Historical Research, lxxvi (2003), pp 269–70Google Scholar.

83 For Scottish opposition to female lodges see McFarland, Protestants first, p. 112; ‘Female Orange Lodges’, B.W.N., 30 June 1910.

84 District (No. 46), minutes, 7 Nov. 1931.

85 Ibid., 18 July 1908, 11 May 1917.

86 Ibid., 9 May 1931.

87 B.W.N., 23 July 1908; ‘Hebburn-on-Tyne. Rose of Hebburn Female L.O.L. 102’, ibid., 1 Apr. 1909; ‘Hebburn-on-Tyne. Rose of Hebburn Female L.O.L. 102’, ibid., 23 Dec. 1909; ‘Rose of Hebburn Female L.O.L. 102’, ibid., 23 Mar. 1922.

88 In some cases, as in Whitehaven in the 1870s, women were banned from marching, though this did not stop some women from immersing themselves in the carnival of the day. The press certainly reported the presence of families at these events, with the Whitehaven Herald offering a typical portrayal of the women and children: ‘The female sex, too, came out bravely in honour of their day; and children, down to infants in arms, were resplendently attired’ (Whitehaven Herald, 18 July 1878). For more on the Cumbria marching dimension see D. M. MacRaild, ‘ “The bunkum of Ulsteria”: the Orange marching tradition in late Victorian Cumbria’ in Fraser (ed.), Irish parading tradition, pp 44—59.

89 ’Hebburn-on-Tyne. Rose of Hebburn Female L.O.L. 102’, B.W.N., 22 July 1909.

90 F.L.O.L. 131, minutes, 15 June 1921.

91 District (No. 46), minutes, 27 May 1911.

92 Ibid., 9 Nov. 1917.

93 F.L.O.L. 131, minutes, 5 Sept. 1923, 23 June 1924.

94 B.W.N., 23 July 1908.

95 ’Newcastle. Female L.O.L. 101’, ibid., 27 Aug. 1908; ’Irwin Female L.O.L. No. 101’, ibid., 22 July 1909.

96 MacRaild, ‘Networks, communication & the Irish Protestant diaspora’.

97 A recent study of north-east female political participation has stressed the interdependence of private domesticity and public politics, dating the emergence of women activists in the area to 1908, around the same time as we see the emergence of female Orangeism on Tyneside. See Hall, Valerie Gordon, ‘Contrasting female identities: women in coal-mining communities in Northumberland, England, 1900–1939’ in Journal of Women’s History, xiii, no. 2 (2001), pp 107–31Google Scholar.

98 For the classic statement of Irish ethnic politics blending into Labourism at the beginning of the twentieth century see Moody, T. W., ‘Michael Davitt and the British Labour movement, 1882–1906’ in R. Hist. Soc. Trans., 5th ser., iii (1953), pp 53–76Google Scholar; Fielding, Steven, Class and ethnicity: Irish Catholics in England, 1880–1939 (Buckingham, 1992)Google Scholar.

99 Jim MacPherson, formerly a postdoctoral research fellow at the North East England History Institute, and now A.H.R.C. Research Fellow at the University of Warwick, gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the A.H.R.C., which funds the institute, and also the British Academy for an Overseas Conference Grant (ref. OCG-39117) which enabled the presentation of an earlier version of this article at the 13th Irish-Australian Conference, University of Melbourne. Donald MacRaild wishes to thank the Leverhulme Trust for a Research Fellowship in 1999–2000 (ref. RF&G/3/9900135) and the Academy of Irish Cultural Heritages, University of Ulster, for a visiting fellowship in 2003–4, both of which supported parts of this research. The authors also wish to acknowledge the perceptive and generous comments of anonymous readers.