I can listen to. To meet up with people that perhaps I haven’t seen for the last twelve months. All you have to do is just say: ‘Hello, how are you?’ and the connection is made and the friendship is there. And to go back to the hall at the end of the night and have a meal and to sit again in the company of the sisters and the brethren of Sheepbridge – it’s a wonderful warm feeling just of a family coming together. The Twelfth of July is our family occasion.
However, David Cook, Alliance politician and ex-chairman of the police authority, puts forward a view very common among middle-class Protestants whose liberalism doesn’t extend to trying to understand the ordinary Orangeman.
The first thought about the Twelfth each year is how can we get away. I have spent most Twelfths in Donegal (often infuriated by RTE’s [Radio Telefis Eireann] naive view of the Twelfth as no more than a folksy cultural festival). I have been lucky enough to be in Northern Ireland on only a handful of Twelfths in my life. One was a memorably hot day in the middle Seventies when I pushed our baby daughter in a pram from the Ormeau Road along the embankment all the way to Shaw’s Bridge where I saw the drunken crowds in full swing.
I have never actually set out to watch a Twelfth parade. I have never taken my children to watch one. I have never believed that Protestantism needs to be, or indeed, can be defended by the usual public manifestations of Orangeism. And I have never been taken in by the claims that there is no other purpose in them than the display of a much loved cultural tradition. I have always known that one of the historical purposes of those public manifestations, and this remains true today for some Orangemen some of the time, is to annoy and antagonize Catholics.
The claim that the Twelfth is the greatest cultural festival in Europe, with its bands, banners and music, may, I think, be true. But I do not believe the assertion that the Twelfth is no more than a good-natured cultural event and a large family picnic. That is the purest hypocrisy and the biggest lie. The problem which the Orange Order has to face is that very few people outside their community believe the lie.
Marietta Farrell, lecturer and SDLP activist, had never heard of the Twelfth until she went to Northern Ireland from the Republic as a student in the 1970s.
I found the whole thing quite colourful and quaint if somewhat threatening. I was bemused at the sight of so many men, in what was to me, City of London business dress, looking so intent and serious. I admired the skill and the colour of the bands but I found their swagger and the wording of their songs intimidating and offensive. I was also surprised at the lack of women in the ‘celebration’. From what I could see, women stood on the sidelines and cheered the men. I wondered why loyalist women were not more central in their important annual celebration. [Until Drumcree 1996] I neither thought nor learnt much more about the Twelfth. It seemed to have nothing to do with me.
To the best of my knowledge, I was never in the company of an Orangeman.
Decorations and associated festivities
Glen Barr, famous for his leadership of the Ulster Workers’ Strike in 1974 and now a community worker, grew up in Londonderry.
Through all the seasons of marbles, hoops, bows and arrows, cowboys and indians, Easter eggs, Christmas stockings and bin lids to sleigh with, we always knew when the big day was near.
The Craigavon Pipe Band which practised at the top of King Street at the back of Harry McLaughlin’s carpenter shop and which we all joined at ten or eleven years of age, was at it three nights a week instead of the customary Wednesday nights. The men and women of the street were making bows from the wood shavings from Harry McLaughlin’s and dyeing them red, white and blue in tin baths at the back of the band shed. The other emblems on the Arch were cleaned up and painted and all the light bulbs checked and renewed where necessary. Buntings were being rescued from old sacks and tied across the street from downpipe to downpipe.
Weeks before we headed off with hatchets and ropes to hack down branches and small trees in St Columb’s Park, making sure the ‘look-outs’ were well positioned to follow every move of the park warden, and run the gauntlet in the Limavady Road pulling the biggest load imaginable for our ‘Eleventh’ night bonfire. Doing your watch in the back lane to make sure the boys from Alfred Street, Florence Street, York Street and Bond Street didn’t raid the trees and rubber tyres for their fires.
The ‘Eleventh’ night in King Street was like a fairy tale with singing, dancing and spud roasting in the ashes. There was the usual crate of stout for the men and the navy men from the Sea Eagle Barracks next to King Street, could always be relied upon to bring out the rum and show off women from the area known as ‘Navy Dolls’ hanging onto their arms …
This was my ‘Twelfth’. Collecting for the bonfire, roasting the spuds, the dancing, the singing on the ‘Eleventh’ night in The Fountain. Getting up on the ‘Twelfth’ morning and putting on the kilt, shawl, those damned spats, and the rest of the Craigavon Pipe Band uniform knowing the girls from school would be following the band all day.
The flowers must not be forgotten. Orange lilies and sweet william for the adorning of banners and drums and hats and buttonholes are easily procured in the country, but harder in parts of the city short on gardens. George Chittick recalls: ‘For many many years our district always put Orange lilies on the top of the bannerette. Billy, the secretary of the district, says to me: “George, there’s a man coming down – he’s called Nolan – and he’ll give you a bunch of Orange lilies on the Eleventh night.” So this wee man come down and he said to me: “Is your name Chittick?” I said, “That’s right.” He says, “My name’s Nolan. Here’s a bunch of Orange lilies. Now, when you’re up the Lisburn Road tomorrow morning, you look out for me and I’ll wave at you.” So I went up the road with the lilies on the bannerette and there’s this wee man standing. He smiled at me and I nodded and he said, “Dead on.” So that was all right.
‘Billy says to me. “George, you know that wee man Nolan come down to see you.” I says, “Aye.” “He’s an RC.” “Is that right?” “I work with him and him and me were friends and he always said to me he had a huge set of Orange lilies in his back garden and he’d give some for the bannerette.” “Dead on.” So it went on for a number of years. Up to 1994, Mr Nolan come down every Eleventh night with these flowers and I took them off him and thanked him very much and put them on the bannerette. 1995: I was down that night and no Orange lilies arrived. I thought it was because of Drumcree. I said, “Maybe that’s it. Maybe he doesn’t want to.” But then about two months later on the Lisburn Road this lady comes to me and says, “Is your name Chittick? Are you from Sandy Orange Hall?” I said, “That’s correct.” She says, “Well, I’m Mr Nolan’s daughter and I’m sorry to tell you me father passed away last May.” “Oh, I says, I’m very sorry about that.” She says, “I made an awful blunder. Before he died he said to me: ‘Don’t you forget on the Eleventh night to take the Orange lilies down to Sandy Row’, and,” she says, “I forgot.” And I say, “It’s just one of those things. You can’t do nothing about it. Don’t worry about it.” “No,” she says, “but you’ll never get any more Orange lilies.” I says, “Why?” And she says, “It’s a big house and I had to sell it.” So I says, “I understand that, ma’am. I understand that.” But she says, “I have a wee present for you.” And she brought me out four bulbs. She says, “I rescued them.”
‘So they’re planted in my garden now and they will for ever and ever I hope be the lilies that will be carried on the bannerette.’
The clothes
‘What should I wear to go to an Orange parade?’ I asked my friend Janet, who knows about such things because she was brought up Presbyterian in Cookstown and had an Orange father.
‘Frock,’ she said firmly. ‘No rocks.’
For Orangemen, sartorial decisions are a matter for each lodge. Standards vary dramatically. At the most respectable end, particularly in rural areas, clothes are very important. There are Orangemen who would never have bought a suit if it weren’t for the Twelfth and whose brethren would be horrified if they arrived with a speck of dirt on the white gloves or a