All over Ulster in villages and in the middle of nowhere there are little Orange Halls built of wood or brick, often with galvanized tin roofs. In Dromore, for instance, Orangemen used to meet in an old army hut that was a rapidly decaying tin shack on wooden stilts. Ulster Protestants are frugal people and the prospect of raising enough money to buy a site and erect a hall was daunting. Alf, the Worshipful Master, decided on drastic action. ‘I said this night, at a lodge meeting: “We must have a hall of our own. I’ll supply the material and I’ll pay the contractor and I’ll get paid some time.” The secretary came in the next morning and he said to me – the only time he ever give me any praise – he says: “Churchill the Second.”’
It took some time to find and buy the right site, and then they built a hall with a stage, which seated about three hundred so it could be used for socials and dances as well as band-practice. It was opened in 1953 in September; in December the north wall of the church collapsed and the church service was held in the hall for three years. Socials ended about twenty years ago; nowadays the hall is a venue for the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award scheme. In the fullness of time, the brethren repaid Alf; building that hall is an achievement which even forty years later he felt was a highlight of his life.
Most halls have been built mostly through jumble sales and sales of work and other unremitting labour by the ladies. Most would be smaller than Alf’s, though large enough to host the dances and conversazioni and teas that made Orange Halls important community centres until the advent of television and other major distractions. The furnishings are of the plainest: mostly wooden benches and trestle tables and the most spartan of spartan fixtures and fittings. There will always be a picture of the Queen and usually some representation of King Billy, and the lodge banner will be displayed on festive occasions.
In towns, the buildings are larger, since they often have to accommodate district or county functions, but austerity remains the norm. Brownlow House, the headquarters of the Royal Black Institution (Orange and Black men often share accommodation), was a fine house until it was torched, though it too was plainly furnished. The two-storey hall at Scarva is as luxurious as it gets, with the stained-glass window featuring King Billy, a spacious assembly-room and portraits and prints of Orange significance.
A 1960s building, the tall, narrow Orange HQ at 65 Dublin Road, Belfast, sets the tone for the whole organization. There are a few adornments, including a portrait of the Reverend Martin Smyth, ??, Grand Master for a quarter of a century, and some William-related pictures. A small room contains an interesting hotch-potch of archives, books and memorabilia, but for the most part the building consists of spartan offices.*
What happens at lodge meetings
Although the ritual and ceremonies in every Irish lodge are the same, the ambience and emphasis and what happens afterwards depend on where and who you are. I once sat in on a conversation between two Orangemen, one from Belfast and one from rural Tyrone, each of whom was amazed by the other’s revelations about his lodge. The Belfast Orangeman reckoned that although all his brethren were believing Protestants, 90 per cent of his lodge hadn’t been to church in years except for Orange services; he would expect churchgoers to join one of the lodges for committed, evangelical born-again Christians. His lodge was almost entirely social – more a drinking-club than anything else – although it kept to the strict rule that alcohol should not be consumed until after the formal meeting is over. Brethren paid about £60 a year in basic dues to cover rates and so on and a levy for Orange widows; any shortfall was made up by a night at the races or a big booze-up.
The brethren of the rural Orangeman’s lodge were Calvinist or Free Presbyterians and 90 per cent would go to church every Sunday. Like most Orange lodges, his was strictly teetotal. The dues were £12 a year and the difference had to be made up by jumble sales; even raffle tickets were not allowed.
For geographical reasons, rural lodges are more likely than urban to be socially mixed. These days very few of the gentry or the better-off would attend lodge meetings, though one of the exceptions is Eldon Lodge in Belfast: ‘It’s the toffs’ lodge,’ said my urban friend, ‘for the great and the good; the one Stormont Cabinet ministers traditionally would have been members of. Today it has people like Josias Cunningham [Ulster Unionist Party president] or John Taylor [UUP deputy leader], who never goes but needs to have a sash available if required.
‘While we shelter under the trees in the rain on the Twelfth with ham sandwiches and warm Guinness, they bring a caravan and drink champagne and eat canapés. One year they had shrubs outside. They only walk to the field. Never walk back. And they all wear bowler hats with an orange lily on the side of it. I don’t know how they’d survive in an ordinary lodge.’*
There are several business and professional lodges like that in Belfast. One was nicknamed the ‘Cripple Lodge’, because they couldn’t walk – being important chaps, most of them were speaking around the country on the Twelfth. Over the years there have been lodges for special interest groups from bakers to shipworkers to soldiers, but deindustrialization has reduced their numbers dramatically. In Belfast, many lodges would have a broadly working-class catchment area. But in most rural areas, lodges have almost always been cross-class, which is one of the reasons for keeping the dues low. James Molyneaux, ex-leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, joined his local lodge in Crumlin, County Antrim, in the late 1930s.
‘It was a watershed year for our little lodge when Colonel Pakenham, who was landed gentry and a member of the Senate, transferred from the toffs’ lodge in Belfast to ours and became Deputy Master. My father was the WM and we were bottom of the social tier as farmers. And I used to think it very odd that this great man who had been through all these battles and all that – and had been in command in Palestine – sat there deferring to the WM and ensuring that everyone else did the same. And as DM he would have gently reproved anyone who spoke out of turn without addressing the chair.
‘They decided to build a new hall and Pakenham offered to go on the organizing fundraising committee: he would bring aristocracy to events – people like Craigavon and the Marchioness of Charlemont on a couple of occasions. We were rubbing shoulders with all that. So you had the top drawer and the bottom drawer.
‘There were ten or twelve workers on the Pakenham estate. And if one was first committee man or something, the colonel would have turned around and said, ‘Brother Dalton, could I ask through the chair what’s your view on this particular matter?’ He wasn’t talking down: he was giving him his place.’
There are far fewer toffs these days, but in many little lodges throughout Northern Ireland there are still farmworkers sitting with prosperous farmers along with shop assistants, bakers, road-sweepers, clergymen and the local solicitor, doctor and teacher. I have also come across several accountants and financial advisers. This may be because in that line of work they particularly need a bit of mystery in their lives, or it may be because, as educated men, like the clergymen, they take a disproportionate number of the senior officerships.
For the routine part of the meeting, the Orange Order has rules and regulations to which officers and foot-soldiers must conform. But first, a run-down of the elected officers’ roles, as spelled out at their installing ceremonies. Private lodges are at the bottom of the Orange hierarchy; next come district lodges; then county grand lodges and at the top is the Grand Lodge.
The WORSHIPFUL MASTER is enjoined ‘to exert your authority to maintain sobriety and good conduct, to use your best endeavours to promote harmony, good fellowship, and social virtues among [the lodge’s] members, to observe strictly the laws and customs of the Institution, and to obey the orders of Superior Lodge authorities’. He is given a mallet ‘as the outward and visible sign of authority to rule this Lodge; this Holy Bible which contains the precepts whereby all men, particularly Orangemen, should govern and regulate their conduct and actions through life; this book of the Laws and Ordinances, whereby you are to govern and guide this Lodge; and lastly, this warrant, which is your authority from the Grand Lodge of