Family background: Protestant evangelicals and socialists
Published in 18th-19th Century Social Perspectives, 18th–19th - Century History, Features, Issue 5 (Sep/Oct 2008), Volume 16Virtually no Irish or even Ulster history was taught at the school I attended on Belfast’s Shankill Road. Thus when I left school at the age of fourteen I was completely unprepared for what was to come. I grew up in a devoutly evangelical Protestant home, where I was told stories of our suffering and persecution at the hands of the Roman Catholic Church over generations. I learned that one of my ancestors was a founder member of the Orange Order that defended our hard-won civil and religious liberties. On my mother’s side things were different. Her father was a socialist. One of her brothers claimed to be a Connolly socialist, another supported the Northern Ireland Labour Party (NILP), while a third was a shop steward who claimed to be a communist and took part in the 1930s Outdoor Relief demonstrations. All changed when both parents became evangelical Christians in the 1920s. They left the Church of Ireland and my father moved to an evangelical Christian Orange Lodge, and finally left the Order completely by the 1950s. My parents’ new-found faith was radical. They joined an evangelical movement (the Church of God) that rejected elevated clergy and disapproved of all clerical garb, including ‘collars back to front’. Their church building—a wooden hut beside Divis Street on the Shankill side—was physically built, paid for and run by working-class people in their spare time. Dad, who left school at the tender age of twelve, taught himself to read and write so that he could preach.
Personal Histories
On this Day
June 30
- 1921 The brothers Richard (24) and Abraham Pearson (19) were executed by an IRA firing party on their farm at Coolacrease in the foothills of the Slieve Bloom Mountains. The pair had been court-martialled for firing on IRA Volunteers, who were cutting down trees on their land for the purpose of mounting a roadblock.
- 1690
Above: William of Orange—had a close shave the day before the Battle of the Boyne when grazed by an enemy musket-ball.
Eve of the Battle of the Boyne. Early that morning, William led his multi-national army south from their camp in Loughbrickland, north of Newry, through Dundalk, where he was joined by the Duke of Schomberg, who had wintered there, and on through Ardee, arriving at the Boyne in the early afternoon. Shortly afterwards he had a lucky escape. As both armies surveyed each other across the river, exchanging sporadic fire, an enemy ball killed a soldier and two horses directly beside him, and a second, according to a witness, grazed the king’s right shoulder blade, ‘taking away his outward coat, his chamois waistcoat and his shirt and issuing a spoonful of blood’. At four in the afternoon, having had his wound dressed and his arm placed in a sling, William dined on the field and at nine called a council of war. His chief commanders, Schomberg and his cousin, the Count of Solms, sharply disagreed on tactics. Schomberg proposed that the main part of the army should perform a flanking movement, involving a roundabout march of several miles, to cross the Boyne where it bends at Rosnaree, thus attacking the Jacobites’ left flank. Solms, however, favoured a single frontal attack at Oldbridge. William eventually compromised, allowing 10,000 men to be sent to Rosnaree but concentrating the main attack at Oldbridge. Orders were then given that the troops should be ready to march at break of day, with green sprigs in their hats to distinguish them from James’s men, who, it was understood, would wear pieces of white paper. It was after midnight when William retired to his tent ‘impatient for the approaching day’.
- 1934 Nazi Germany’s ‘Night of the Long Knives’. The leader of the paramilitary SA, Ernst Rohm, and hundreds of his followers, along with dozens of Hitler’s political opponents, were murdered by the SS and the Gestapo in a two-day purge.