LITMIR.BIZ

      The Titanic in Belfast Lough during her sea trials.

       The completed steamship Titanic at Belfast, Ireland (Science History Images/Alamy Stock Photos)

      On her way back into Belfast, Titanic passed the seaside town of middle-class Holywood on one side of the Belfast Lough and working-class Carrickfergus on the other. In both towns, it was time for local chapters of the Orange Order to be out on the streets practising their music, hymns and configurations in preparation for the start of marching season, an annual series of parades held to commemorate the anniversary of King William III’s victory over his Catholic uncle at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 and the ensuing establishment of a legal Protestant ascendancy in Ireland for the next century. The Orange Order, founded as that ascendancy had cracked open in defeat at the end of the eighteenth century, organised itself somewhere between masonic and military lines, claiming nearly one-third of northern Protestant men as members.[58] Each was required, by oath, to ‘love, uphold, and defend the Protestant religion, and sincerely desire and endeavour to propagate its doctrines and precepts [and] strenuously oppose and protest against the errors and doctrines of the Church of Rome; he should, by all lawful means, resist the ascendancy of that church’. A later extension to the formula, added in 1860, prohibited members from ever attending a Roman Catholic religious service.[fn2][59]

      Disruption, intimidation and violence at Order events had resulted in legislation curtailing its parades in the middle of the nineteenth century, and its reputation for disruptiveness had lasted, even among many Protestants, until the 1870s.[60] By 1912, however, its influence in the north of Ireland was enormous. Even politicians and clergymen who were indifferent or hostile to the Order’s aims, like the MP Sir Edward Carson who privately compared it to an ancient Egyptian mummy, a preserved and desiccated corpse of something that had mattered long ago, ‘all old bones and rotten rags’, felt that they had to join if they stood any chance of appealing to working-class voters.[61] Andrews and his brothers came from a family with a long association with the Order who marched with its orange sashes around their necks, every year.[62] Andrews would be back in Belfast by the time of the Order’s parades at the high point of marching season, 12 July.[fn3] Each lodge had their own banner, depicting a vividly rendered moment in Irish Protestant history – a particular favourite was an image of drowning settlers, usually women and children, piously clutching a cross as they were butchered, with the slogan ‘My Faith Looks Up to Thee’, victims of anti-Protestant massacres carried out in 1641. On the reverse of all banners, long-dead King William forded the waters of the Boyne river atop his white steed, his sword already drawn for the children of the Glorious Revolution and their descendants, who would defend its legacy. As the Order’s most famous song proclaimed:

      For those brave men who crossed the Boyne have not fought or died in vain,

      Our Unity, Religion, Laws, and Freedom to maintain,

      If the call should come we’ll follow the drum, and cross that river once more

      That tomorrow’s Ulsterman may wear the sash my father wore!

      By April 1912, the Order had helped rebrand Home Rule as ‘Rome Rule’. On the day the Titanic conducted her trials, a letter to the Belfast News-Letter from a local headmaster opined, ‘Under Rome Rule, there is no possible future for unionists, but despairing servitude or its preferable alternative – annihilation.’[63] Hysteria had trumped civic virtues. Rome was on the march. Upper-class Protestants had forgotten their fears of the radicalised workers and had instead given themselves over to the giddy novelty of Protestants straining together in common cause, as they had in days of old – or so the banners of the Orange Order told them. A paramilitary organisation, the Ulster Volunteer Force, was formed with thousands of recruits training on aristocratic estates as guns were smuggled into the island to arm them. One of Andrews’ compatriots wrote with moist-eyed pride that it was ‘indeed a wonderful time. Every county had its organisation; every down and district had its own corps. The young manhood of Ulster had enlisted and gone into training. Men of all ranks and occupations met together, in the evenings, for drill. This resulted in a great comradeship. Barriers of class were broken down or forgotten entirely. Protestant Ulster had become a fellowship.’[64]

      The sound of these flute-serenaded battle cries followed the Titanic in and out of her home waters. She was born in this heartland of an industrial miracle, with its rich and explosive confusion. We might look back now and think it unutterably bizarre that Ulster was prepared to immolate itself to prevent a quasi-independence that might never have matured to full secession if the north had chosen to be a part of it, but to the participants in this quarrel they were contenders in a Manichean struggle for the very soul of Ireland. In London, the new King was frantically trying to organise a preventative peace conference at Buckingham Palace, hopeful of exploiting unionism’s atavistic attachment to the Crown to force its adherents back into line, and three days before the Titanic left Belfast the constitutional nationalist Sir John Redmond, leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, gave a speech in Dublin, squarely aimed at his compatriots in the north – ‘We have not one word of reproach or one word of bitter feeling,’ he promised. ‘We have one feeling in our hearts, and this is an earnest longing for the arrival of the day of reconciliation.’[65]

      No one was listening. It was a man of action who flourished in April 1912, drowning out men of prudence. Unionism was now dominated by leaders like the lawyer Edward Carson, who had once served as the prosecuting counsel against Oscar Wilde, and the Andrewses’ family friend, the ferociously uncompromising Sir James Craig. To make explicit how far they were prepared to go if Home Rule was extended to Ulster, the Ulster Volunteer Force, the Orange Order and the heads of the north’s major industries were organising one of the largest mobilisations of political sentiment in Irish history, a covenant due to be paraded through the province to an enormous final rally outside Belfast City Hall.[66] Agents were sent out to help those in the smaller towns and countryside who wanted to sign. Tommy Andrews and the men in his family intended to sign this declaration:

      being convinced in our consciences that Home Rule would be disastrous to the material well-being of Ulster as well as of the whole of Ireland, subversive to our civil and religious freedom, destructive of our citizenship, and perilous to the unity of the Empire, we, whose names are underwritten, men of Ulster, loyal subjects of His Gracious Majesty King George V., humbly relying on God whom our fathers in days of stress and trial confidently trusted, do hereby pledge ourselves in solemn Covenant, throughout this our time of threatened calamity, to stand by one another in defending, for ourselves and our children, our cherished position of equal citizenship in the United Kingdom, and in using all means which may be found necessary to defeat the present conspiracy to set up a Home Rule Parliament in Ireland. And in the event of such a Parliament being forced upon us, we further solemnly

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