secrets to the world hadn’t realized that most of this information was published as early as 1835, in appendices to the Report of the Commons Select Committee on Orange Lodges. Tony Gray in his book on the Orange Order also went into considerable detail. The ritual is necessarily rather dull and repetitive; what I am providing here is just a cross-section of what is most important. I am breaking no confidences, and keeping no secrets of any significance.
† Goat-rides, however, are a part of ancient rural pagan rituals.
* James Wilson in ‘The Making of the Orange Order’, a video which includes footage of preliminaries to an initiation ritual.
* They can, however, laugh at their own bigotry. There’s the famous joke about the dying Orangeman who asked for a priest. ‘What do you mean, a priest?’ asked his one of his brethren. ‘You’ve been an Orangeman for sixty years. Why do you want to see a priest?’ ‘I want to become a Roman Catholic.’ ‘A Roman Catholic? Have you gone mad?’ ‘I have not. It’s just that I’d rather one of theirs died than one of ours.’
* It was sold in spring 2000.
* Josias Cunningham tells me that ‘champagne and canapes are foreign to Eldon’s Twelfth; we subsist on beer, tea and sandwiches like the rest! And at least we do stay on the field; one of the unfortunate recent trends at the Belfast demonstration is for lodges to retire for a hearty lunch at an adjacent hall or other centre, leaving the “field” looking very empty for much of the day.’
* Like signs and grips, the original purpose of passwords was very serious: in the revolutionary period during which the Orange Order was founded, it was necessary to be able to tell friend from foe. Passwords do not change much with time. Typical would be one of those disclosed to a House of Lords Inquiry in 1825: “Thus shalt thou say unto the Children of Israel’ is answered with, ‘I Am, hath sent me unto you’.
Onlookers, Participants and Opponents: the Twelfth
Different viewpoints*
THE BIG, BIG COLOURFUL, noisy day that was the Twelfth had a special magic in the grey, sober Belfast of earlier times. Rowel Friers, the cartoonist, remembered sticking his head out of the bedroom window full of excitement:
I peered out to the right and there they were – the flying banners, the glinting instruments of the bands, and the bowler-hatted, white-gloved, navy-serge-suited and brown-booted Orange-sashed gentlemen of the Order, no brother’s tailoring outdoing another, highly respectable, dignified and erect, they march to the rhythm of their bands. Occasionally, one of them might deign to give a regal nod of the head to an onlooker known to him, and no doubt already approved of by his brethren as an acceptable outsider.
The swordbearers and deacon pole-carriers stepped out with all the demeanour of generals, now and then taking a peep at their pride and joy – the banner. Most of these, I was to learn later, were painted by a Mr Bridgett, a craftsman specializing in that particular art form. This knowledge I gleaned from the son of the said gentleman, who I met at art college some years later. Many and varied they were: gold, silver, orange, purple, blue, all the colours and more than could have adorned Joseph’s coat. From portraits of William in battle, to Queen Victoria and her Bible (‘the secret of England’s greatness’), churches, angels, the Rock of Ages, memorial portraits to worshipful brothers who had passed on to that higher and grander lodge in the sky, it was a travelling art exhibition, before anyone dreamed of the Committee for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts or the Arts Council.
William Bingham, now a Presbyterian minister, reminisces about a much more recent period in County Armagh: ‘I first paraded with the institution in 1969 in Markethill, where I was brought up. I was about six years of age when my uncle took me and my brother and my cousin with him to hold the strings of the banner: my grandmother made little Orange collarettes for us.*
‘When you were growing up, you played at being Orangemen. Weeks before the Twelfth, all the youngsters in the town got together and had a ceremony in the yard and formed their own Orange Lodge – you’re talking about six-, seven-, eight-year-olds. And we used to get tin boxes and make banners out of cloth and sticks and we paraded by people’s houses or up and down the yard and we had a really good time together. We were very democratic in electing a worshipful master. We voted on it and usually everyone got their turn at it.
‘We really looked forward to the Twelfth: you used to think that when that was over, your summer was over. The highlight of it was gone. For us it was a day where you met all your friends from school that you hadn’t seen for the weeks of the summer holidays: maybe some of their fathers were on parade or some of them were in the bands playing the cymbal or the triangles or a wee accordion or something. You all met in the field and you had tea and sandwiches and then you played around for a while and then you came home again. It was just a unique occasion. There was nothing like it the rest of the year.
‘I suppose the things that you were mesmerized by were the colour – the paintings on the banners, the crowds of people – and the music – the bands. I really loved the silver bands. My father played the tenor horn and went on parade. My mother would have been making sandwiches: she did the picnic. And my sister, she didn’t get parading, only the boys. She was left out of it a wee bit.
‘For my aunts and great-aunts – many of whom were married to farmers – it was literally the only day out they got in the year. The Twelfth of July came and they worked hard to get the harvest cleared up and the best suits cleaned and looked after their husbands. Rarely if ever would they have been out anywhere else except church. Certainly they’d have had no holidays. I had uncles that wouldn’t miss the Twelfth of July, but they wouldn’t go to their own sons’ or nephews’ weddings.’
Elaine McClure, Worshipful Mistress of a women’s lodge, does not feel part of the community in nationalist Newry.
I do feel very close to my friends in that town, my neighbours, but I feel that’s completely different from, if you like, as a person coming from the community I come from, trying to identify with the symbols of local government in that town.
As T. S. Eliot says: ‘I can connect nothing with nothing’ … But certainly within the company of people who share the same culture as I do, I can connect. I can connect with their outlook, with the music, with the symbols on the banner, with the ethos and the reason behind a social gathering.
I walk on the Twelfth – I don’t march … My blood family … introduced me to the Twelfth and now my Orange family take me along with them on the Twelfth of July. I walk in the road with the men of Sheepbridge.
I know those men. I know their ladies. I know their families, I know who they are and they’re good, they’re decent people. And I walk with them and in the front is the band and my cousin’s in the band and I’m walking in the road and I’m thinking how like my uncle Joe our William is because Uncle Joe was the one who took me first to the Twelfth of July. And I walk in the road with them hoping they’re not going too quick and I’ve got the right shoes on my feet and then we wait at the hall and then when all the lodges come we all walk off again and the drum beat’s given and the banners are hoisted and we start on our way.
And I remember