John would likely have grown up in a detached house built of stone or brick, surrounded by a stone bawn twelve-feet high, into which the cattle were herded at night for safe keeping. The men of the house would have been armed against intruders. The evolving ‘siege mentality’, cited by later historians to explain atavistic Protestant loathing and aggression, was keeping every Planter nerve on full alert. At the same time, these second- or third-generation settlers were in the process of acquiring their own complicated variety of Irishness, whether they acknowledged it or not. Ireland was all they had ever known, but Ireland was like a wicked stepmother country refusing to take them to her bosom. And worse: she was only waiting for an opportunity to make away with the lot of them. ... Picture a winter evening in the mid seventeen-hundreds, a Planter house in the townland of Ballynarea; a bitter wind from the north creating an uproar outside; flickering candlelight, and a huddle of children crouched by a smoking fire, avidly taking in horror stories concerning murdered Protestants, a hanged grandfather and the ghosts of the drowned at Edenderry Bridge. Stories carrying a powerful charge of fear and outrage. A legacy of aversion persisting down the centuries. ... Move forward nearly four hundred years, and you get ‘Lynn Doyle’ recalling his country upbringing in An Ulster Childhood (1921), an upbringing infiltrated by sectarian truisms (comically evoked). ‘Home Rulers’, he says, ‘to my childish mind were a dark, subtle and dangerous race.’ They were ready to rise at a moment’s notice, he continues, diabolically poised ‘to murder my uncle, possess themselves of his farm, and drive out my aunt and myself to perish on the mountains.’ Never mind that there weren’t any mountains within easy reach of the farm, ‘in my aunt’s stories it was on the mountains we always died, and I felt that we were bound to get there somehow’.
Ah, but the thrill of atavistically awful anticipations was not confined to one side only. As a counterbalance to Lynn Doyle, consider an episode from the Catholic childhood of the novelist Brian Moore, in the 1930s. The Moore family home in Belfast, oddly enough, was directly opposite the headquarters of the Orange Order in Clifton Street. Each year, on the Twelfth of July, the Moore children gather at a top-floor window to watch the Orange marchers assembling for the long triumphal trek to the Field at Finaghy. They, the young Moores, are the only Catholics in Belfast to have a grandstand view! The noise, the colour, the flute bands, the dignitaries’ bowler hats, the Loyal Orange Lodges each with its treasured banner proclaiming some aspect of Protestantism or enshrining King William at the Boyne, the rousing warlike reverberations from the great Lambeg drums ... all these produce a rare excitement in the little Catholic nationalists, noses pressed to the windowpane, looking down on a vibrant gala occasion which is also a threat to their own well-being. They can’t take their eyes off the massing wild men, thousands strong, strutting and swirling under their window. Knowing all the while ‘that you and yours [are] the very enemy they seek to destroy’.
Between the 1640s and the run-up to the Boyne forty years ahead, Planter families in towns and townlands all over the North would wake each morning gladdened by the fact that no disaster had happened overnight, no sudden uprising, onslaught or outbreak of neighbourhood savagery. A decreasing sense of loss, a measure of confidence about the security of their lives and livelihoods, would slowly have taken them over. They were here to stay – and gradually, it seemed, there were fewer fears to possess them. Even if it should prove to be something of a chimera – which it did – this growing confidence allowed them to get on more or less undisturbed with the basic business of living, birth, copulation and death, and all the embellishments in between. ... I’m now about to return to those redoubtable Poppleton Blackers, and two converging strands of my distant ancestry. Glenn Patterson, in his book about his grandparents, Once Upon a Hill (2008), refers amusingly to the long, long line of ‘begets’ to which everyone’s family history boils down. Taking a cue from him, I am going to go in for a bit of ‘begetting’ myself. You will remember Valentine Blacker, the Royalist officer who settled in County Armagh after the Commonwealth wars and rebuilt Seagoe Church. Valentine begat George, who begat Frances, who begat William, who begat John ... and so ad infinitum – or at least, so on in a straight progression right down to the present.
Valentine Blacker, as we’ve seen, married Judith Harrison of a local Irish Planter family, and ‘begat’ two sons and three daughters. The oldest son, the surprisingly named Ferdinando, led a valiant short life before dying at a young age in some battle or other, leaving his more conventionally named brother George as the sole heir. George Blacker – according to J.S. Kane – ‘served his sovereign, King Charles II, as a major in the army and was later promoted to the rank of lieutenant-colonel in an infantry regiment’. Well, good for George. You can picture this upright soldierly figure in his seventeenth-century army uniform looking down his military Blacker nose at the uncouth Irish population of Ballynaghy and thereabouts. ... Already well placed in the world, George goes on to make an advantageous marriage. His bride is a Miss Rose Latham, the daughter of William Latham and his wife Rosa Young. (J.S. Kane has George marrying Rosa Young, not her daughter, but I think he is wrong about this.) The newly-weds establish themselves with due ceremony at Blacker’s Bawn, paying six shillings tax on the three fireplaces recorded at their home in 1662, and, in due course, after further begetting, raise a family of four – three sons and a daughter. George Blacker is eventually appointed High Sheriff of County Armagh to crown his undeviating career in solid citizenship. He is fortunate enough to reach this position just before the advent of King James II, and consequent shattering of what had passed for peace in the country.
I cannot tell for sure how George was affected by the Williamite wars before his death in 1691. I do have some information about his sons William and Robert, and I’ll return to them, and one or two of William’s descendants, later. But my attention for the moment is focused on George’s daughter Frances, the youngest of his children, born c.1652. … Who was Frances’s mother? J.S. Kane, as I’ve said, claims that George married Rosa Young, not Rose Latham, and dates the marriage to the year 1658 – but this makes no sense at all, especially since Kane then refers to George’s son William’s marriage in 1666, when by this reckoning William would have been a boy of seven. Logically, we can attribute a birth date of 1622 to George, and 1647 to William … but hang on, there now arises a puzzle in connection with grandfather Valentine. If Valentine Blacker only set foot in the province in 1641 or 42, how had he married an Ulster lady many years earlier and fathered five children on her? If, on the other hand, he’d been in Ulster all along, why and when did he arrive here? … These genealogical puzzles and chronological inconsistencies are giving me a headache and I am not going to delve any further into them. I don’t care if long-ago George married Rose Latham, or her mother, or her grandmother. The thing is, to keep a grip as far as possible on pungent and pertinent bits of information, and let the rest go hang. One such fact (it is a fact) concerns George Blacker’s daughter Frances. In 1677 or thereabouts, Frances becomes the wife of young John Tipping and initiates a line of descent that will – eventually – be at odds in every respect with the lordly Protestant Blackers. This much I do know, and it’s enough to be going on with.
For the time being, however – in the years leading up to the Boyne – the Tippings are every bit as Protestant and as strongly allied to the cause of Orange William as John’s august in-laws. (Perhaps more so; the Blackers, we remember, were great Stuart supporters, at least before the advent of Catholic James.)... John and Frances, once married, set up home in a townland called Gallrock, in the parish of Tartaraghan in north Armagh. Did Frances’s family object to her marriage to a Tipping? They don’t seem to have bestowed much of the Blacker wealth on her, leaving her to lead a quiet farming life, which she and her husband do, undisturbed as far as we can tell, for the next twelve years or so, while they go about ‘begetting’ offspring. (The exact number of new young Gallrock Tippings is uncertain.) But d
uring the years between 1685 and 1689 life starts to assume a hazardous character once again. The cause is the accession of an English Catholic king, and consequent conferring of hope for an overthrow of their disabilities on the Catholic population of Ireland. Catholic aspiration is suddenly in the ascendant, while dormant Protestant fears are about to be reawakened.
By the late 1680s, Protestants all over the North are preparing for defence, or, in the last resort, flight to some place of refuge. It’s the nightmare of 1641 all over again. Had you been in a Protestant house in the last month of 1688, you’d have stood all night with a weapon in your hand, poised to repel a rebel onslaught. If neighbours had come knocking at your door, a blunderbuss thrust through a window would have greeted them, with householder nerves in tatters everywhere. ... But beyond the beleaguered houses of Gallrock and Ballynaghy, beyond the agitated towns of Derry, Armagh and Carrickfergus, great events are taking place in the constitutional and in the military sphere. By now, Prince William of Orange has appeared on the scene, with all his regalia, ready to be incorporated into Northern Irish Protestant iconography. Having landed at Torbay in the south of England in the previous month, William holds out a prospect of reinforced Protestantism, with all accompanying benefits, to the three kingdoms – and, for the most part, wins them over.
King James leaves for France in a hurry and sails from there to Ireland, landing at Kinsale in March 1689 with an army of French soldiers. Already, at the other end of the country, the gates of Derry have been slammed shut against James’s Catholic troops, though the town has not yet come down decisively on the side of William. That wholehearted commitment will shortly follow. A Williamite army under the command of Frederick Duke of Schomberg arrives at Bangor in August 1689; and in the following year King William himself steps ashore at Carrickfergus and promptly sits down to take a rest on a chair which some thoughtful person has carried to the quayside. The Prince of Orange is marshalling his resources for a southwards dash, taking in Belfast along the way, towards the immemorial engagement at the Boyne.
But before this, in response to an escalating state of panic, many of the Protestants of Seagoe and thereabouts have left their homes and are hurrying northwards towards Derry, perhaps, and the safety of its enclosing walls. It’s a wrong decision for many of them. The countryside is thick with roving detachments of King James’s army, mostly Catholic, who take it as their mission to prey on Protestants. Terrible things can happen to those who fall into their clutches. And unlike Walter Macken’s hero Dominick McMahon, in Seek the Fair Land, these northern refugees are not always skilled in evasive tactics. They’ve hurled themselves into a win-or-lose situation in which many will go under. Somehow, along the road, in the lethal year of 1689, John Tipping meets his death, and his mother-in-law and brother-in-law follow suit. (The Blacker family historian J.S. Kane includes Frances Tipping among the dead of Seagoe in the same year, but there is evidence to suggest that Frances was still alive as late as 1710 – and we know that at least one, and possibly two, of her sons survived.)
From whatever specific cause, though, John Tipping died, brought low, like his grandfather Edward Allen, by the violence and mayhem of the era. He is buried in Seagoe Church. In the meantime, his surviving brother-in-law William Blacker is undergoing adventures and misadventures of his own. Leading a party of women and children northwards towards Derry (as Kane tells the story), William comes face-to-face with some Irish army recruits. But rather than slaughtering him on the spot as a pernicious Protestant, these soldiers instead engage William’s services as an emissary for King James II, positively encouraging him to press on to Derry – on condition that he carries with him the surrender terms laid down by James for the capitulation of the unruly city. ... You might wonder why these Jacobite soldiers trusted William Blacker to stick to the terms he’d agreed, once he was out of their hands. Had they required him to leave hostages behind? I think it more likely that his family’s long adherence to the Stuart cause had something to do with it. We don’t, of course, know what William had in mind, at the time or later – but he did reach Derry and delivered the compromising missive as instructed: whereupon he found himself imprisoned as a traitor, and one line of the Blacker dynasty nearly took an irregular turn.
But William’s conspicuous survival instincts don’t desert him. The next minute he’s up on Derry’s walls fighting off the besiegers alongside the Reverend George Walker and other luminaries of the heroic event. Did he have a change of heart? When it came to a clash between William’s inherited Stuart loyalties and his Protestantism, I suppose it was never in doubt where his ultimate allegiance would lie. The next glimpse we have of William Blacker shows him fighting at the Boyne under an Orange banner, and thus, in the words of J.S. Kane, ‘establishing the family’s long and glorious connection with the cause of Orangeism’. He acquits himself so well in the battle that King William’s ‘horse furniture’ from the Boyne engagement, including gloves, stirrups and an embroidered saddlecloth, is later presented to William Blacker in recognition of his military services and descends down through the family until it finally ends up with the Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland ‘for safe keeping’.
The Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland! There’s a name to strike a chill into the heart of any young Falls Road republican embracing subversion in the middle part of the twentieth century. Or if not a chill exactly, a strong distaste for its alien and antiquated connotations, its diehard mentality and Sabbatarian stuffiness (when its adherents aren’t draped in Union Jacks and prancing drunkenly around the Field at Finaghy reviling the pope). It’s a quaint and ridiculous institution when it isn’t vicious – and however you look at it, it is mired in the past; whereas we enlightened Catholics and socialists feel a breath from a more expansive future blowing on our forward-looking faces.
I haven’t always been so dismissive of the Orange Order. Before I knew any better – that is, in my pre-school days – I’d been taken by my young Protestant father (now a Catholic convert) down to the city centre to watch the Orange parades pass the statue of the Reverend Henry Cooke, the Black Man on his plinth with his repudiating back for ever turned to the liberal ways of ‘Inst’. Perched on my father’s shoulders, I’d have waved a flag as merrily as any Shankill Billy-Boy, had one been placed in my three-year-old fist. As far as I was able, I responded to the pageantry of the occasion; and something of its dynamism must have stayed with me. Louis MacNeice’s ‘heart that leaps to a fife band’ never leapt any more vigorously than mine did (and does).
My father’s brother, and his uncle Freddie, would likely have been among the marchers glorying in their Protestant heritage and long-ago victory at the Boyne. Uncle Freddie’s Orange Lodge, of which he was Chaplain with the title, ‘Sir Knight F.A. Craig’ (I have no idea what these terms mean), was St Nicholas LOL 782, and I am sure it was fully represented in these early post-war parades. The family’s Orange affiliation was carried lightly, as far as I know, as lightly as the flutters in a summer breeze of the Union Jack flown from the roof of my grandparents’ gate lodge at the end of Dunmurry Lane. It was in this gate lodge that my father grew up with his brothers and sisters in an uncontentiously loyalist atmosphere, enjoying the rough-and-tumble of crowded domestic life complete with horses, hens, whippets, cats, the doings of Captain Charley (for whom my grandfather worked as head groom) at nearby Seymour Hill, a rudimentary education at the Charley Memorial Primary school (founded in 1892), where he’d have been enrolled around 1923, with his older sister Marie (already a pupil at the school) to keep an eye on him.
... You’d have heard no talk of Taigs in my grandparents’ household; no one made a thing of despising Catholics, with whom – I am sure – they were happy to share local amenities. All of them, Prod or Papist, had roots (some roots at any rate) in the same small corner of Ireland. And Ireland was important. My grandparents’ Union Jack hoisted yearly around the Twelfth of July didn’t signify a hankering after an English identity. It just proclaimed a simple pl
easure and pride in belonging to the dominant – well, marginally dominant – culture of the place, unburdened by Papist superstition and Romish regulations. ... I’m trying to say, I think, that my Protestant relations never subscribed to any advanced form of anti-Catholic bigotry. But for all that it was definitely a Protestant, a Church of Ireland, household, that gate lodge at Dunmurry.
The fact that he, my father, had many Catholic friends even before he met his Catholic wife might suggest a refusal on his part to fit into a tribal mould. Or perhaps it was just that his sportive nature chimed in some essential way with Catholic conviviality. He took to mid-Falls life, with its pubs, betting shops, newsagents, greyhound racing, ‘butterfly’ nuns thronging the pavements, neighbours from all points along the social spectrum – took to it like a – I was going to say, an orphan to home life; but ‘orphan’ is not right for someone like my father with his strong family ties. Like a happy-go-lucky traveller to a house of hospitality, perhaps, if a simile has to be proffered here. In his middle years he became an habitué of St Malachy’s Old Boys’ Club, due to his enduring friendship with some St Malachy’s old boys. He fitted in (helped, no doubt, by his capacity for Guinness and his fine singing voice). Nevertheless, his temperament had been shaped by Protestantism, just as my mother’s was shaped by the Catholic church. As for me ... nuns got hold of mein 1947, with an eventual outcome which I’ve recounted elsewhere. (Asking for Trouble, Blackstaff, 2007.) And long before I understood their significance, Orange processions through the centre of Belfast had become for me a thing of the past. Their place was taken by May processions devoted to Our Lady, Corpus Christi processions and Holy Communion dresses. In time, I would add Easter Sunday processions to Milltown Cemetery to commemorate the dead of 1916 – giving my father something to be broad-minded about, just as my mother had been broad-minded about the early Orange parades. She was broad-minded, indeed, about that and a good deal else besides – but what neither she nor anyone else suspected at the time was her own oblique ancestral connection with the Orange Order, which outdid in piquancy that of the Craigs.
A Twisted Root Page 8