The Faithful Tribe: An Intimate Portrait of the Loyal Institutions

Now a friend was taking Gary and Paul and me to a day that a lot of parade-connoisseurs regard as the best spectacle in Northern Ireland: the annual parade of the Armagh Royal Black Preceptories and the Sham Fight.

A Black event is prized by all of those who want to see the loyal institutions at their most disciplined, dignified and responsible. And because of the nature of the Black, a far smaller portion of the bands are ‘blood-and-thunder’. So it’s a splendid outing for accordion, pipe and silver bands. (One of the pleasures of a parade is to see someone I have met socially appear completely transformed. I remember gentle, slightly diffident Eric suddenly appearing in front of me resplendent in his kilt and bagpipes, exuding joy and pride in his band and his community.)

The problem with Scarva is that it has become too popular and the lane down which the parade goes is narrow. If you want to walk along with a band, you have to do so behind the families sitting in their folding chairs or on their blankets, swigging soft drinks and munching sandwiches and cake. Scarva is a bit too respectable and tame to attract yobs although there is sometimes a bit of trouble from the small lager-drinking brigade.

Our day was complicated by my needing to have a word with James Molyneaux, the Imperial Sovereign Grand Master, who was leading the parade. ‘We’ll go through the fields,’ announced our country friend, and took off at speed to lead us over barbed-wire fences and thorn-hedges and across boggy land and through muddy puddles to find Molyneaux before he disappeared into Scarvagh House to dine with the dignitaries. When we finally made it via the back route into the field, it was already full of stalls and Blackmen and bands and families. There was no sign of Molyneaux and the platform was deserted. So I had to climb over yet another fence and go to Scarvagh House.

By this time the Sham Fight between King James II, the loyal institutions’ hate figure, and their hero, King William III, was in train. It is a bizarre and rather touching event, given an emotional context because there is an oak tree in the grounds under which William is supposed to have camped on his way to the Boyne. The following year, when I actually walked the route more or less backwards about twenty yards in front of the parade, I was highly diverted that the leading marshals were a King James and a King William in vaguely period uniform, in green and red respectively, adorned with tricorne hats with appropriate cockades. It rather takes away from the mystique when the two great enemies are engaged in moving bystanders out of harm’s way, but then, except for a little ritual in Orange lodges, mystique is not much prized in that part of the world.

What happens at the Sham Fight is that, when everybody has arrived in the field, King William and his main henchman General Schomberg on the one hand, and King James and General Patrick Sarsfield on the other, appear on horseback to thunderous applause followed by motley footsoldiers more or less dressed for the part. After riding round and round for a while, the kings and generals, still on horseback, fight each other with swords while their followers use swords, pistols with blanks or just generally tussle. The fight – which is supposed to represent the four Williamite Irish battles: Derry, Enniskillen, Aughrim and the Boyne – rages enthusiastically all round the field with much gunshot, shouting, laughter and cheering. By the end of the fight, James’s standard has been destroyed, William’s is held high and James runs away.

That year I couldn’t see a thing. The following year I got the hang of it when I was allowed on the platform. But what I did have was access to the Scarva joke, for I was marooned for quite some time outside the house where Molyneaux was eating, with a Black marshal who was very fond of it. It runs: ‘Who won?’ (or, as he pronounced it, ‘Hee wan?’), a question he addressed to me and about half-a-dozen different people over the next twenty minutes amid his chortles of delighted laughter. I learned that the accepted response is something along the lines of, ‘I don’t know. I’ll have to ask.’

As a spectacle, the Sham Fight is a bit amateurish. ‘They really should call in the Sealed Knot,’ observed a journalist the following year, alluding to a collection of military history buffs who refight the battles of the English Civil War with great attention to accuracy and expertise. But that kind of professionalism would spoil the fun. The Sham Fight is put on by local people for their neighbours and, like them, it is without pretension. It is a homely and reassuringly familiar occasion.

The marshal had been rattled by my request to see Molyneaux, not so much because he was Imperial Sovereign Grand Master and retired Ulster Unionist Party leader, but because he was having his dinner. He was so shocked at the notion that a man might be distracted from feeding even by being passed a message saying, ‘Can I see you when you’re free?’, that though he was a friendly and obliging man, it took half an hour before he could nerve himself to do the deed.

I eventually talked and laughed a bit with Molyneaux, whose public image is dour, but who is a gentle wit, in the hallway of the Victorian house, the light filtering through the stained-glass window representing King William on a white horse; then he and his colleagues decamped to the platform to say prayers, sing hymns, make sensible speeches and move moderate resolutions.

The men were dozing on the grass when I got back. We stayed long enough to listen to Molyneaux’s part of the proceedings and then went off and had some foul hamburgers. Paul looked around the field and pronounced that, apart from the regalia, it was exactly like an English agricultural show. We left early, because if you don’t get back to your car ahead of the parade, it is possible to be stuck behind cars and coaches for an hour. And after all that fresh air and blameless activity, we badly needed beer.

5. The Apprentice Boys, 10 August 1996

I had gone to Derry* the day before with Paul, who had become a parade aficionado, to sightsee and look at the route that was causing such massive arguments. For the preceding weeks and months, horse-trading had been going on to try to gain the agreement of the Bogside Residents’ Group (BRG) to a walk along the city walls by the Apprentice Boys as part of their annual commemoration of the siege of 1689. The institution reveres the thirteen apprentice boys who defied their elders and closed the gates to keep out King James’s army.

Derry is not just the Mecca of the Apprentice Boys, it is their raison d’être. It is a cruel irony for them that it is now almost wholly in nationalist hands: of the 60,000 inhabitants of the city, only 1,500 are Protestant, and they feel vulnerable to what they believe is a policy of ethnic cleansing.

Times were tense. A month before, the volte-face on Drumcree had led to full-scale riots, complete with petrol bombs and plastic bullets, leading to the death of one protester. Alistair Simpson, the Apprentice Boys’ governor, had worked tirelessly to reach agreement with the residents’ group. Unlike the leaders of the Orange Order, who refused to negotiate parade routes with convicted terrorists, he had agreed to meet the leader of the BRG, Donncha MacNiallais.

Simpson and his colleagues had offered various concessions about numbers, about not playing any music as they walked on the part of the walls that overlooked the Bogside, and, in desperation, had suggested that screens be erected so that no Bogside resident would have to see the Apprentice Boys and barbed wire be put in place to ensure no Apprentice Boy could approach the Bogside even if he wanted to. Even so, agreement had proved impossible. As a reporter in the Sinn Féin organ An Phoblacht/Republican News put it: ‘They [the BRG] sought an overall accommodation with the Apprentice Boys involving the acceptance of the principle of consent for all contentious parades, wherever and by whomever they were organized. This the Apprentice Boys were unable to deliver, and talks broke down over the issue.’ From Simpson’s point of view, MacNiallais had moved the goalposts beyond reach.

To pre-empt trouble, on Wednesday the Secretary of State had banned the parade from the contentious part of the walls and had moved troops in to seal them off. In a particularly surreal contribution, a Bogside resident was quoted the following day in An Phoblacht/Republican News. ‘Why are they creating a screened walkway? … The suspicion is that they are to be used to allow the march to go ahead outside the view of residents.’

When I met the gentle and courteous Alistair Simpson on the Friday, he was still depressed by the last meeting he had had with MacNiallais and the insults he had had to endure and he was apprehensive about the build-up of frustration among the Apprentice Boys, but he was confident he would find a way to avert violence.

Friday afternoon was enlivened by seeing in action in front of the Guildhall the legendary Mary Nelis, Sinn Féin councillor and mother of MacNiallais, dubbed by a unionist colleague ‘the republican movement’s answer to Winnie Mandela’.* Less diplomatic than her son, she had recently observed in a speech that the Apprentice Boys should know that those whom she represented had ‘never conceded your right to exist’. Mrs Nelis enjoys drama (she is notorious among journalists for the frequency with which, in front of television cameras during nationalist protests, she appears to faint under the feet of RUC men). She was holding forth to a small audience and a couple of television cameras about the evils of internment (which had ended in 1975) as a warm-up for the big anti-internment march due in Belfast on the Sunday. Behind her was a backing group of a dozen or so youths in black hoods facing the wall with their hands pressed up against the building, adding impact to her rhetoric about the wicked manner in which internees had been interrogated twenty-five years previously.

I waited until Nelis finished telling us of past injustices, tried and failed to catch the words of some doleful song about the wrongs of internment which was wailing over the tannoy and went into the Guildhall to meet the unionist mayor, Apprentice Boy and Orangeman, Richard Dallas. For participating in an Orange demonstration over Drumcree, Dallas had been stripped by nationalist councillors of everything that could be stripped from him and could not use the mayor’s room, so we sat in the council chamber until it was needed for a function and then in the tiny robing-room which we shared with a large vacuum cleaner.

After the meeting Paul and I walked what we could of the Derry walls and then went down into the Bogside. It was dominated by a vast new mural of a circle containing a faceless figure in bowler hat, black suit and Orange collarette with a diagonal red line across. Around the circle were written DERRY, GARVAGHY and LOWER ORMEAU. At the top was NO CONSENT. At the bottom, NO PARADE. (A few months later An Phoblacht/Republican News reported that at a discussion organized during the West Belfast Festival, a visitor from a Christian ecumenical group said ‘nationalists shouldn’t demonize Orangemen’, citing the ‘NO SECTARIAN MARCHES’ poster with the image of a faceless Orangeman. However, John Gormley of LOCC [Lower Ormeau Concerned Citizens], who first produced the poster, said, ‘We use that image because we don’t know what an Orangeman looks like given their refusal to meet with us and discuss the issue.’)

From the estate itself, we looked at the wall. It became clear that only a very few residents could see the walls from their houses and they would be able to see only the tops of tall people’s heads. So what the BRG had been complaining about was that at nine o’clock on a Saturday morning it would be theoretically possible for some residents to see a procession of bowler hats passing silently 100 yards away.

An engagement in Tyrone meant that we could not hang around to see the march in Derry city centre organized by the BRG to demand, according to the subsequent An Phoblacht/Republican News account, ‘equality for all the nationalists of Northern Ireland. At the rally, both Donncha MacNiallais and Martin McGuinness stressed the importance of continuing solidarity with nationalists in small villages throughout the Six Counties who each year had Orange marches forced upon them.’ A protest rally was planned for the following afternoon.

On Saturday morning we arrived in blazing sunshine, left our car near where dozens of coaches were off-loading Apprentice Boys and bands and walked across the bridge and into the city. Derry is a lovely city, much improved in recent years through investment by the British government, the European Union and the foreign-owned businesses courted by John Hume and others. Although in many respects it has blossomed under nationalist rule – it is, for instance, much more cosmopolitan than it used to be – many of those who love it with irrational passion are now wholly out of power. Derry Protestants love every stone in those walls; Derry republicans seem to hate it. Certainly they are still happy to vandalize it whenever there is an excuse. It is almost as if centuries of feeling excluded have made them loathe the very buildings. Tony Crowe, Apprentice Boy and historian, observed to me:

Derry was like a kept woman, a young prostitute, in an ironic way. When she was a young maiden she was loved and feted by the unionists and she was seen as the untaken bride and known as the Maiden City. And then when they inherited her eventually in the late 1960s, the nationalists couldn’t thole her because she still carried some of the vestiges of her early whoredom. Republicans systematically bombed and buggered the city and peaceful nationalists didn’t mind too much because they couldn’t relate to it. Now there’s no refurbishment of fine buildings like you have in the Republic in cities like Limerick: the old St Augustine’s rectory was knocked down and turned into a car park. It was within the walls, so nationalists felt it didn’t belong to them.

On our way to meet friends, Paul and I stopped to take a photograph of some graffiti in a loyalist area and were instantly challenged by a couple of thuggish-looking locals. Who were we? ‘Journalists,’ I said. ‘We don’t like journalists. You never write anything good about us. You’re all biased.’ ‘We’re not. We’re sympathetic,’ I said, having no desire to start the day with trouble. The yobs clearly thought this highly unlikely, but their aggression nonetheless lessened somewhat. ‘Just tell the truth,’ one of them said grumpily and off they went. You can always rely on loyalists to do their best to alienate, just as you can rely on their republican counterparts to woo the press politely and articulately.

We went on to the gloomy Victorian premises of the Northern Counties Club, where many Apprentice Boys were gathering for their dinner. It was 11.30 and their service at St Columb’s Cathedral was now over. The news was that in the middle of the previous night the RUC had agreed to allow thirteen Apprentice Boys to touch each of the gates in Derry’s walls as a symbolic re-enactment of their closing in 1690. At Butcher Gate, the RUC had asked one of the BRG stewards who was on duty all night if they could speak to MacNiallais. ‘When I found that no regalia at all was involved,’ MacNiallais explained to An Phoblacht/Republican News, ‘no bands or singing or shouting sectarian remarks, I told them we had no problem with this. Myself and a group of stewards escorted them to Butcher Gate, to Magazine Gate and towards Shipquay Gate. It was all very respectful on every side.’ For the Apprentice Boys, being patronized like that was very hard to bear.

We supped beer with Chris McGimpsey and several other of his brethren and left him to his big feed while we went to the Apprentice Boys’ Memorial Hall, paint-spattered and pock-marked from the paint bombs and ball-bearings that are launched at it regularly from the Bogside. In a tiny garden beside it is a statue of one of the Apprentice Boys’ heroes, Governor Walker. In the 1970s the tall pillar on which he stood was destroyed by a bomb; more recently another blew his hand off and damaged his face. Alistair Simpson spoke to the media and the crowd to announce that though they greatly regretted being prevented from walking the walls, they would not challenge the ban, but would walk the walls another day of their own choosing. Face was saved. The majority of the Apprentice Boys were relieved; the more militant were disappointed. Like most of the media they had been hoping for a fight.

After chatting with a few Apprentice Boys, we were led off by our friend Henry to the best watching-place, just by the walls at the top of the hill leading to the Fountain Estate, the loyalist ghetto, festooned with a mass of red, white and blue bunting and flags and the remnants of the mighty bonfire of the previous night. He wanted us to experience the sheer emotion that grips the Apprentice Boys as the walls come into view. The drawback was that instead of the usual wide variety of music, most of the bands inevitably broke into ‘Derry’s Walls’ as they approached their Mecca. Among the crowds a woman held up a poster saying ‘ULSTER PROTESTANTS DEMAND PARITY OF ESTEEM’, which showed that some PR lessons were being learned from the enemy.

It was a wonderful parade, full of vigour and brilliance of colour and sound, heightened in its impact when compared to its Belfast Orange counterpart because of the narrowness of some of the streets through which it passed. It’s a strange mixture of spectacle and intimacy and if you are on a narrow street it is easy to spot your friends as they stride past. Pointing at Mike or Graham or Chris or Jim, catching their eye and exchanging waves and smiles is one of the pleasures of parade-watching.

It was with some regret therefore that, in the early afternoon, duty called me to the Bogside to attend the three o’clock protest meeting. There was no IRA ceasefire at the time and there were fears of an organized assault on the RUC and the Apprentice Boys. Violence didn’t seem likely this time, since there wasn’t an awful lot for them to protest about, but one could never be sure.

My unionist friends just laughed when I suggested they might like to come with me, but Paul came along. We had to go by a longish indirect route because I had forgotten my press pass and so could not go through police lines. We got to the ‘Free Derry’ wall that is the Bogside equivalent of Speakers’ Corner just in time to hear MacNiallais uttering the word ‘Finally’, thanking the two or three hundred people present for their restraint and announcing the cancellation of the rally. The pretext was a generous gesture to the Apprentice Boys; the reality was that the turnout was so poor the protest would have presented badly. And then I caught the eye of Mitchel McLaughlin, the chairman of Sinn Féin.

A plausible and likeable fellow, McLaughlin is despised by the hard men because, unlike most other Sinn Féin leaders, he never served in the IRA; his nickname in Derry is ‘the draft-dodger’. He was wearing a smart grey suit and chatting to a young admirer, who told him, her eyes glowing with hero-worship, that he would have her vote. He is John Hume’s main challenger for his Westminster seat.

We had not met for a year, during which time I had frequently savaged IRA/Sinn Féin in print and had defended the Orangemen’s right to walk from Drumcree Church down Garvaghy Road, but McLaughlin, a complete professional, betrayed not a flicker of hostility. We shook hands: ‘Ruth, you are very welcome to Derry.’ Paul was similarly warmly greeted. Rather churlishly, the thought flickered through my mind that McLaughlin sounded as if he owned the bloody place. He then spent the next fifteen minutes or so explaining most courteously how I was completely wrong to have thought that Sinn Féin was behind the anti-parade agitation and expressing genuine amazement that I could have spoken up for the now ‘finished’ David Trimble, whom republicans were convinced had been politically destroyed by the fall-out from Drumcree.

He was called away to sort out some trouble, we nodded goodbye civilly, and Paul and I ambled up to Butcher Gate, where a small disappointed mob were looking for trouble. We returned to the parade just in time to see an alarmingly nasty-looking Ulster Freedom Fighters colour party, who should not have been part of the parade but who were ecstatically greeted by the inhabitants of the Fountain. There were other occasional jarring notes provided by militaristic bands.

The Apprentice Boys, being a mainly urban and working-class organization, attract some people who think the Orange is for wimps and the Black for old men. There have been problems with one or two clubs which are nothing more than fronts for paramilitaries and whose members turn up at parades in dark glasses and strut menacingly. (This was to be more evident the following year when two or three bands carried banners saying: ‘RE-ROUTE REPUBLICANS OUT OF NORTHERN IRELAND’.) Yet these represent a tiny fraction of the participants in a parade which is largely well-disciplined and brilliantly stewarded.

We headed for the Apprentice Boys’ HQ to look at some memorabilia, to find ourselves briefly caught, like the RUC, between drunken bottle-throwing loyalists and stone-throwing Bogsiders. A few minutes later, returning to the centre, we found tremendous RUC and media activity in a side-street. Cautiously peering around the armoured cars I saw the RUC extracting a dozen or so violent drunks from a pub while surrounded by perhaps twenty photographers and cameramen. At one stage a policeman almost fell over a TV camera. The yobs, of course, played up enthusiastically to their audience and obligingly created a small mini-riot with stones, glasses, bottles and anything else they could get their hands on. There was not an Apprentice Boy among them, for they had all marched over the bridge and were on their way to their coaches, but of course the violence was the scene that was shown on most news bulletins.

In 1997, the Apprentice Boys showed they were learning something about PR and began to speak of the parade as a pageant. There were lengthy discussions with politicians and residents and the nationalist SDLP mayor gave the Apprentice Boys his support. Reluctantly, MacNiallais agreed to allow the pageant’s participants on to the wall, so children dressed as King William and Queen Mary and assembled attendants walked along it in the morning. There was a difficulty about the flag outside the Apprentice Boys’ HQ: the union flag would be offensive. So the Apprentice Boys’ historian produced a green flag with a harp in the middle, which symbolized the unity of England and Ireland in 1689. The BRG did not identify it in time to object. They have since deemed it unacceptable.

Still, an accommodation had been worked out and there was no need to put a police line between the Bogsiders and the marchers. McNiallais and some colleagues came up to look at the parade and then some of their number began taunting the most militaristic-looking bands. A few bandsmen broke ranks and there was a scuffle.

I was at the same vantage point as the year before; exaggerated rumours were spreading about the level of trouble. That was a sufficient excuse for a couple of hundred drunks from the Fountain to start throwing stones and bottles and glasses at police: none of them was an Apprentice Boy. Television cameras were there again. Loyalists, as usual, were handing propaganda gifts to the enemy.

Having had the experience craved by all journalists of being hit by a stone that didn’t hurt but nevertheless gave one street-cred, I left that riot as it died down and with my English friend Mark proceeded to the Bogside. There was a crowd of children, mostly between six and sixteen, throwing stones at the police who were sealing off Butcher Gate and guarding the Apprentice Boys’ building. Standing in the middle of the kids, I could see how dehumanized are policemen in riot gear: they looked more like a row of Darth Vaders than human beings. But then you can’t withstand stones and petrol bombs in a woolly cardigan.