Loyalists by Taylor Peter

Author:Taylor, Peter [Taylor, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2014-05-14T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

Heroes and Villains

Every year on 12 July tens of thousands of Orangemen march through the centre of Belfast to a field in the south of the city where they gather to celebrate King William’s famous victory at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, and join together in prayers of thanksgiving. Most then adjourn to the pub. The scene is a colourful and noisy spectacle as the giant Lodge banners sway through streets that thunder to the sound of flute bands and drums. Pavements are lined with thousands of flag-waving loyalists, many of them women dressed from head to toe in Union Jack colours, singing and dancing to the sounds of the ‘Sash’.1

One of the Lodges in the parade is Lodge 633, known as the Old Boyne Island Heroes, the biggest and one of the oldest on the Shankill Road with a history that goes back to 1823. Its old banner was adorned with the giant gantries of the shipyard from which the Lodge takes its name and where hundreds of its members have worked down the years. Today its banner depicts Sir Edward Carson signing the Ulster Covenant on one side and King William on the other. The ‘Island’ in the title refers to Queens Island, on which the Harland and Wolff shipyard has long stood. In its heyday, the company employed 20,000 men and just about every man from the Shankill worked there. Today the workforce is barely 2,000. The Old Boyne Island Heroes is in the blood of most of its members, or ‘brethren’, many of whom joined as junior Orangemen at the age of eight or nine and, if they were lucky, had the honour of carrying one of the four ‘strings’ that balance the swaying Lodge banner in the great parade of the Twelfth. They would have been paid a few shillings for it too. Eddie Kinner, whose family has long been closely associated with Lodge 633, remembers first being allowed to hold one of the strings in 1966. ‘I can remember carrying it and waving at people and at family relatives and friends. You were proud of it and you thought that you were taking part in a tradition that was part of your cultural heritage.’ Eddie McAdam, who was born and reared on the Shankill, and whose father and grandfather also marched with the Lodge, also carried a string at the age of eight and still sees the Twelfth as the greatest day of the year. ‘When you’re walking down the Shankill Road early on the Twelfth morning with the sound of the drums echoing off the walls and you’re with your brethren and all your friends, you know you’re going to have a fantastic day. We are not just a Lodge. We are mates. It’s a very proud moment. No Twelfth ever changes and every one will be the same.’ On 1 January 1999, Eddie McAdam became Master of the Lodge. David Warren, a past Master and still its Secretary after

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