a duffing-up he had received while dressed in his school uniform: ‘I was walking through some playing fields. Two chaps stepped in front of me, who I later found out were Catholic. One of them pointed to the other and said to me, “He wants a fight!” To which I replied, “Then why doesn’t he fight you?” To which they both landed punches on me…’
Spence knew that he would have to start work in the mill once he left school: ‘The family needed money desperately so there was no question of where you were going.’ He went down to the Labour Exchange with his birth certificate and school-leaving card and received a new set of cards. After presenting them at the mill he began work the next morning. ‘Someone referred to them as “dark Satanic mills”. I wouldn’t disagree with that description. I started work in the spinning room, which was a very, very hot place and a very wet place. You worked in your bare feet in filthy conditions, and there was no recourse to washing, so you returned home from work the same way as you went. The hours were eight o’clock in the morning to six o’clock at night and to twelve-fifteen on a Saturday. All you were supposed to do was keep your head down, keep your mouth closed and earn your sixteen and eight [£0.83] a week.’
However superior Spence might have been taught to feel, his home life hardly felt privileged. ‘My ma was a great pawner. All the women of her generation were great pawners because they didn’t have the course to anything else.’ He describes the Sunday School trip as the only light relief in a grey world. When his mother accompanied the group on one of those trips, she had to borrow a coat to make herself respectable: ‘If a woman had a coat, it was a big deal. I’m not overstating the case. Those things hurt. If people would only realize the indignities and the hurt that people felt at having to borrow some other woman’s coat.’
Spence regrets the fact that for a Protestant to criticize social conditions would – even today – be regarded as disloyalty. ‘You would be called a “closet republican” or a “card-carrying commie”. The continuance of the union would be our main philosophy. However, within that, why does one have to be anything peculiar to articulate a political philosophy?’
The answer lies in the need to express unity. Unionists were not really a homogenous people. They came from all classes of society and they attended a multitude of different churches, from Presbyterian to High Anglican. They had ranged their wagons in a circle to defend the status quo – and they could not encourage self-examination or internal dissent, for fear of showing weakness to the enemy. Safer to present a united front by placing emphasis on shared values, such as loyalty to the Crown and Protestant supremacy. As Sir Edward Carson, the early twentieth-century unionist leader, had once warned, if divisions within unionism ‘became wide and deep, Ulster would fall’.
This united front, and the interests of the Protestant people, have been historically guarded over by the Orange Order. Three hundred years old and named after William of Orange, the Protestant king who defeated the Catholic King James, the Orange Order was formed to unite Protestants against demands for an independent Ireland. Members come from all levels of society and from (currently) eighteen Protestant denominations. When members join, they receive an initiation which spells out the aim of the Order as ‘the mutual defence, support and protection of Irish Protestants’. It is also made clear: ‘You have promised…never to attend any act or ceremony of popish worship.’
The Order borrows freely from the ritual and terminology of freemasonry; members call one another brethren, they attend lodges, they take oaths, and they can attain the position of grand master. The brethren used to wear orange silk sashes, like the one worn by William III at the Boyne, but more recently they have come to wear orange collarettes and bowler hats. Bowlers are Edwardian symbols of respectability, harking back to the period when the Order began to wield its greatest influence. The early years of the twentieth century were a time when dire labour and housing conditions might have created social disorder, but the Orange Order, and its large numbers of working-class members, were concentrating on other issues: fear of Home Rule, and the desire to maintain supremacy. Almost every person of influence in Northern Ireland was a member. In 1932 Sir James Craig announced in Parliament that he was ‘an Orangeman first, and a politician and a member of this parliament afterwards’.
A very rare unionist politician who was not an Orangeman was Samuel Hall-Thompson, a minister of education responsible for post-war educational reforms. In 1949 a meeting was called by the Sandy Row Grand Orange Lodge to protest against his proposals concerning the payment of Catholic teachers. The Prime Minister attended and, under pressure, promised to revise the plans. He then sacked Hall-Thompson, who became a high-ranking victim of the Orange Order’s grass roots. In Britain the working classes came to voice their struggle through the trade unions. In Northern Ireland the trade union movement carried little weight. The unionist working class expressed itself through the Order, and the Order was not overtly class conscious. It is little wonder that in Gusty Spence’s experience it was ‘peculiar’ to articulate a political philosophy. Andy Tyrie, the one-time leader of the UDA, was once asked what he thought was the difference between Catholics and Protestants. The only difference, he replied, was that Protestants couldn’t complain.
However firmly unionists stood together, and however robustly the Northern Ireland government asserted its claim to be master of its own house, there was always one party with the capacity to undermine it: the British government. While Britain was allowing the province free rein, little complaint could be heard from Stormont. But in 1940 a proposal from Winston Churchill’s wartime government horrified unionists, and threatened to end the life of their young state. As Britain and her colonies stood alone against Hitler, and the people of Britain braced themselves for a German invasion, Churchill’s war cabinet offered Eire an undertaking towards a united Ireland, in return for Eire’s abandonment of wartime neutrality. The Northern Ireland cabinet reacted furiously at the perceived treachery. In the event Eire, already keener on reunification in theory than in practice, rejected Churchill’s offer. After only twenty years of existence, Northern Ireland had Eire to thank for its survival.
The incident seemed to confirm the unionists’ worst fears concerning Britain’s attitude to her loyal province. I considered the nature of Britain’s attitude as I wandered around the Stormont Parliament buildings. From the ceiling of Stormont’s Great Hall hangs a huge gold-plated chandelier, which had been a wedding present from the German Kaiser to his cousin King George V. This chandelier had spent a few years hanging in Windsor Castle until it was taken down at the start of the First World War, when German light fittings fell out of favour. Eighty years later an inventory at Windsor found the chandelier to be missing, but there was no record of where it had gone. Much has been said about Northern Ireland’s strategic and economic significance, but its use as Britannia’s informal dump has not been so well recorded.
While the British government had the power to destroy Northern Ireland, another organization had the desire to do so. From the time of the creation of the State until the advent of the modern Troubles, the IRA made sporadic attempts to shoot and bomb its way to a united Ireland, but the organization always remained small and received little support from the Catholic community. Joe Cahill joined the IRA in 1938 in west Belfast. He was one of several men convicted of the 1942 killing of a police officer, and was sentenced to death but later reprieved. Just one man, Tom Williams, was hanged for the murder. Cahill described his experiences to Bobbie Hanvey: ‘There were actually eight of us arrested on Easter Sunday 1942. Easter Sunday was a period when parades were banned. Our idea was to fire shots over security patrols in three areas, to draw all the security forces into those areas, leaving the other two areas free where parades could be held. So we fired shots over a patrol car. When that was finished, we retreated. There was a bit of a problem then; it just didn’t work out as we had planned, and we all finished up in a house. The house was surrounded, there was a bit of shooting, and a policeman was shot dead. We were all arrested and taken to the police headquarters, and brought before the court and charged with murder. We were remanded, and brought before the court on several different occasions right up to the High Court, which lasted three days. Eventually the jury came back in, and six of us were found guilty and sentenced to death.’
For four and a half weeks Cahill shared a condemned cell with Tom Williams. He describes the conditions: ‘It’s fair to say that the food was much better in the condemned cell.