Orangeism and the Irish in Liverpool

Initially the DUP said they intended to stand candidates in local elections but, following a threatened legal challenge by the Liverpool-Irish Democratic Forum, they have recently retreated on this and now they have a ‘wait and see’ policy. What ever eventually transpires from this adventure will not be good for the people of Liverpool.

Liverpool has long had the reputation of being an ‘Irish city’, and in purely numerical terms this was so. The 1841 census recorded 50,000 Irish-born in the city and this was exceeded by the number of Liverpool-born Irish. The Irish population of Liverpool was, therefore, larger than that of most Irish towns — and this was before the period of the Great Starvation (Frank Neill: Sectarian Violence — the Liverpool Experience).

But, numbers aside, it would be more accurate to describe Liverpool as an Orange city. As early as 1798 there was an Orange lodge in Liverpool, and the headline of The Liverpool Mercury on June 19, 1819 read, “Orange lodge procession planned for July 12 will be attacked by Irish”. The prophecy was fulfilled and as the Orangemen, led by bands, entered the city centre they were met by an estimated 2,000 Irish. This was the first recorded clash in Liverpool’s history, but it was only the first of many.

The membership of Liverpool Orange Institution was made up, not of Irish Protestants, but of English ex-soldiers who had served in Ireland putting down the 1798 Rising and had been recruited while there. They had returned to Liverpool and other towns in Lancashire and had set up lodges of their own. The Irish in Liverpool may have been numerically strong but all the levers of power, council, police, local judiciary and the press were in the hands of an unholy alliance of die-hard Tory reactionaries and Orangemen.

Orangemen acted as government spies during industrial unrest in Bolton, and a leader of the Orange Institution, Ralph Nixon, stated “Surely the good policy of supporting those who are sworn to assist the civil and military power in the just execution of their duty cannot be disputed.” Nixon’s words are important because they encapsulate what was, and still is, the Orangeman’s perception of himself as the upholder of ‘law and order’.

There were major disturbances on numerous occasions, particularly on July 12, from 1822 onwards and events in 1835 culminated in 3,000 Irish attacking Vauxhall Road Bridewell (barracks) requiring 500 Special Constables and 200 troops of the 80th Regiment being drafted in.

In the same year the Anglican preacher, Hugh McNeile, founded the Protestant Association to link middle-class Anglicans with the Orange Order and with the Tories. He said, “Who appoints our legislators? We shall have a regenerated House of Commons, a Protestant House of Commons.”

The 1841 general election had the Liverpool Mail sporting the headline, “No Popery on the Rates’, and among the 5,000-strong St Patrick’s Day march was a society called the Sons of Irish Freedom. Also in that year, 60 of the 390-member police force declared themselves to be also members of the Orange Lodge.

The Institution had such influence that it was said that no potential Tory councillor could hope to achieve public office unless he was established in McNeile’s eyes as a ‘sound Protestant’. And the Liverpool Mail’s latest offering was, “One of the many obnoxious vices of Popery is that when it prevails it generates hosts of filthy mendicants — the vermin of the human race.”

1847 saw 116,231 Great Starvation refugees arrive in Liverpool from Ireland. Local ratepayers (rather than central government) had to foot the bill and this was seized upon by Orangemen whipped up by the Tory press: “Our workhouses are full and so are our gaols. We submit that the state of Ireland is intimately connected with the state of poverty and crime. Every Assize Calendar and every list of criminals in the quarter sessions prove this . . . That the scum of Ireland come to Liverpool and die in thousands is true. But whose fault is that? Misgovernment in Ireland — idleness on the part of the peasantry? The people who come here are not labourers . . . they are beggars and paupers. They never were labourers. They never did an honest day’s work in their lives.” (Liverpool Mail)

And in 1848, the Liverpool Mercury launched an extraordinary attack on the Irish character following a fear of an outbreak of rebellion among the Liverpool-Irish: “It is not be forgotten that very much of Irish misery lies quite beyond the reach of any ‘remedial measures’ of a government, being seated in the character of the Irish people. No government, except by a very indirect and gradual process can change the idiosyncrasies and habitudes of a nation, and convert a slothful, improvident and reckless race into an industrious, thrifty and peaceful people . . .” The significance of the article is that it was part of a regular outpouring of fanatical anti-Irish and anti-Catholic copy in several Liverpool papers, which could not avoid inflaming opinion.

With the establishment of 20 Confederate Clubs in Liverpool in 1848, Orange paranoia really set in and the St Patrick’s Day march saw 3,455 Special Constables sworn in along with troops of the 11 Hussars, 60th Rifles and the 52nd Regiment besides the entire police force which was now said to be 70% Orange.

The Liverpool Mercury wrote: “It is an ascertained fact that 75% of the poor rates are expended upon the Irish inhabitants and persons of Irish extraction . . . yet Irish clubs are organising here to threaten Liverpool.” The London Times was worse: “We do not hesitate to say that every hard-working man in this country carries a whole Irish family on his back. He does not receive what he ought for his labour and the difference goes to maintain the said Irish family, which is doing nothing but sitting idle at home, basking in the sun, telling stories, plotting, rebelling, wishing death to every Saxon.” (Times, July 27, 1848)

On July 14, 1851 a 3,000-strong Orange parade attempting to enter an Irish area was intercepted by around 1,000 local residents armed with staves and bricks, and a full-scale battle broke out which lasted over two hours. Dock labourers left their places of work to attack the Orange march and when some of the marchers drew pistols and fired them in the air, the police cheered them on. One Irishman, John Malley, was shot dead that day but no one was ever charged with his murder.

Liverpool Orangeism was probably at its height in 1876 when 10,000 paraded on July 12, and an estimated 60,000 supported them. It was recorded that there were 78 lodges in the city at the time. In 1883 there was an aborted attempt by Irish nationalists to blow up Liverpool Town Hall. James McGrath and James McKevitt were convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment.

In 1885, Thomas Power (TP) O’Connor was elected Irish Nationalist MP for a Liverpool constituency — the only Irish nationalist ever to be elected outside Ireland and, in the 1887 municipal elections five Irish Nationalist councillors were voted in. During this period there were countless large-scale clashes with the Irish having the novel idea of taking to the roofs and raining slates on the police. In almost all cases these disturbances were caused by the Orange lodges insisting on taking their interminable parades through Irish districts. ( L Brady, TP O’Connor and the Liverpool Irish)

Two Protestant extremists, George Wise and John Kensit, emerged in Liverpool in 1888/9, and when a branch of the Irish National League was set up in Everton, the meeting was surrounded by Orangemen and a full-scale battle took place. Another organisation, the Liverpool Working Men’s Conservative Association had also been formed as a connection between the Orange Institution and the Conservative party. It would take over the task of its predecessor, McNeile’s Protestant Association. These connections had sustained reactionary Tories, who stood for Church, State and Empire, in power for some 50 years in a city whose people were overwhelmingly working-class and impoverished.

Pastor George Wise launched what he called his Protestant Crusade and began holding huge open-air rallies in Islington Square. His manner was deliberately provocative to Catholics and to the Irish generally. He used to ask whether Catholics drank holy water and his supporters would yell back, “No, they drink whiskey’.

He waved a crucifix round his head and put rosary beads around his neck. This would infuriate Catholics in the crowd who would rush the stand leading to police intervention. One of his favourite lectures was entitled, “The Jesuits and the Coronation Oath” and he insisted on giving these lectures next to St Francis Xavier’s Catholic Church. During one lecture he said “ I have been warned the Catholics are going to attack me”, and he called on his followers to bring sticks, stones and pokers to the next meeting.

By this time even his friends in the police and the Conservative Party were becoming anxious. The constant street riots were proving to be expensive in terms of police pay, hundreds of injuries and loss of business to the city. Wise was arrested and sent to prison on two occasions but while there, John Kensit would take over where he left off. In fact there was rivalry between them, each one trying to outdo the other in extremism. After one meeting in Birkenhead, John Kensit was hit by a 2lb iron file and died a short time later. A 19-year-old, John McKeever was charged with his murder but was freed for lack of evidence and was carried from the court by a cheering crowd.

At this time Liverpool was gripped by hysteria and George Wise, on his release from Walton prison, was met by a crowd numbering 60,000. Chief Constable Dunning, in a letter to the British Home Secretary had wrote: “I fear it will be some time before the bad feeling on both sides, for which Wise and Kensit are all to blame, will die out.” (Sectarian violence — the Liverpool Experience) The pact between the Orange Order and the Tory Establishment in Liverpool was coming to an end.

Wise continued his mass, open-air ‘lectures’. In one instance, referring to priests he said, “They waste their lives with harlots, they rob the poor to feed their own bastards; they are incarnate devils. They live upon you and you know it. No man likes whiskey more than them. The monks in monasteries are living lives of devils. The monks and nuns live together in impurity.”

Police Chief Dunning said: “Comparison has been made between the city and London, but everybody who knows the two places must recognise the fact that a Protestant lecturer may talk his fill in the latter place and nobody but his followers will listen, while here he cannot do it without danger to the public peace.”

In 1903, Wise founded the Protestant Party and stood four candidates in the municipal elections. Three, including Wise, were elected. At the same time he became Pastor of the Protestant Reformers Church in Netherfield Road, and Chaplain to the Orange Institution. The Protestant Party under the leadership of George Wise, and after that under the leadership of Rev HD Longbottom, is a catalogue of reaction against anything they perceived to be a social advance for their Irish or Catholic neighbours; State funding for Catholic schools, the siting of the Metropolitan Cathedral or a simple religious school procession.

The number of PP councillors fluctuated between three and six. A highlight of Wise’s career was when Carson came over from Belfast to a rapturous reception in Liverpool. This was matched by a rally by Parnell before a crowd of 20,000. The Protestant Party still wielded power far beyond its own strength. Local Tory MP, Colonel Sandys was appointed Grand Master of the Orange Institution, and many councillors though not members of the PP were still members of the Orange Order.

The basic policy of the Protestant Party and its allies in the Council was to blame the Irish for high unemployment, slum housing and high rates. When they demanded immigration restrictions they meant the Irish. Public disturbances were still a constant feature in this period, and following one disturbance Winston Churchill said: “This unrest is the fault of the hooligan class . . . roughs from the Irish districts, always ready for an opportunity to attack the police . . .” (Hansard, official House of Commons records, August 16, 1911)

George Wise died in November 1917, he had been a Liverpool councillor for 35 years. He was replaced as Leader of the Protestant Party by Harry Longbottom who, when he stood as a candidate for the Kirkdale Division, received 7,834 votes though he failed to be elected MP.

By the early 1920s there was a Sinn Féin presence in the city and a Slua of Fianna Éireann, which numbered around 30 members. TP O’Connor was still Irish Nationalist MP for Scotland Division, a position he held until the time of his death in 1929 — a total of 44 years. However, TP was an anti-Republican and not much good as a constituency MP either, spending most of his time in London and in Brighton. The Irish Nationalists continued to have three or four councillors in the city but by this time the Labour Party was beginning to make inroads into their electoral support and when O’Connor died his seat was taken by former Nationalist councillor turned Labour party candidate, David Logan. (PJ Walter, Democracy and Sectarianism: a Political and Social History of Liverpool.)

As leader of the Protestant Party, Harry Longbottom stood as candidate for the Kirkdale Division in the general election of 1931, 1935 and 1945, and although never becoming an MP he received substantial electoral support. He was also the longest serving chaplain to the Orange Order, and Lord Mayor of Liverpool 1950-1. Besides this he was Grand Master of the Order from 1946-56.

The Second World War helped to disrupt the cycle of sectarian politics in Liverpool, but the main reason for its decline has to be put down to the massive, post-war inner city slum clearances which changed the face of the city’s North End and where most of it had been concentrated. Longbottom was expelled from the Orange Order in 1961, and was replaced by Roy Hughes who won St Domingo ward for the Protestant Party as late as 1970. He held the seat until 1972 but the writing was on the wall and in 1974, the PP was invited to join the Conservative Association, and did so.

The Protestant Party may have ceased to exist but Orangism is still a political factor in Liverpool to this day. Just three years ago members of the neo-Nazi group, Combat 18, stewarded a march by the Orange lodges through Bolton town centre. The Order’s links with fascist, neo-Nazi groups has been well established by Anti-Fascist Action (AFA) and by Searchlight magazine.

As recently as March 17, 1986, a gang of Orange thugs backed up by British National Party and National Front sympathisers, blocked a St Patrick’s Day parade organised by Liverpool Irish Centre from going into the city centre. Police refused to remove the protesters who numbered around 50 and, instead re-routed 800 marchers back into the Irish Centre. The latest incident occurred only last September when the Fenian Monument in Ford Cemetery was badly desecrated and the round tower toppled by Orange extremists.

The Orange Institution in Liverpool had split about ten years ago over the issue of the use of sectarian violence. A minority, who now form the ‘Independents’ support the use of violence by the UVF and the UFF, while the ‘moderate’’ majority prefer to leave these sort of things to the ‘Security Forces’.

It is believed that the ‘Independents’ are the people who will form the backbone of the proposed DUP organisation in Liverpool. The chances of restoring the electoral heydays of the Protestant Party are nil, and the concern is that once this realisation dawns the ‘Independents’, with political direction will revert to their old, negative and divisive ways.

The recurring theme of Orangeism down the decades, in Ireland as well as Liverpool, is one of anti-Irish racism and ideological fascism. There has been a reluctance on the part of the British to recognise this uncomfortable fact. The British Establishment have always known this but, because they sustain it for their own ends, have done their best to conceal it from the British public. This will remain the position until such time as the British leave Ireland.

The Orange lodges still manage to get 3,000 marchers onto the streets every July 12, and on the Bloody Sunday commemoration in London, members of the BNP fascists protested with their ‘No Surrender’ banners. Orange fascism is still alive and well in Liverpool and in England. Let’s hope Liverpool doesn’t become their Mecca.
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