IN MEMORY OF
EDGAR SAMUEL DAVID GRAHAM
ASSEMBLY MEMBER FOR BELFAST SOUTH 1982–83
SHOT BY TERRORISTS ON 7 DECEMBER 1983
‘KEEP ALIVE THE LIGHT OF JUSTICE’
SEVEN He doth protest too much
WHEN the University term resumed in January 1984 many colleagues of Trimble feared that he would be next in line for assassination. But short of leaving Queen’s – where any lecturer working to a set rota of lectures and tutorials would be desperately vulnerable – there was little that he could do. Ian Clark, a Queen’s Ulster Unionist student who was friendly with Graham, recalls an intimidatory atmosphere at the University in those days and remembers Trimble telling him that ‘if he needed any protection’, he could help to provide it: Clark understood this to mean physical muscle, but Trimble says that he meant he would intercede with the Queen’s authorities and the RUC.1 Whatever Trimble actually meant, the one thing which he was determined not to do was to be cowed by the University authorities into relinquishing all political activity: if nothing else he is ‘thran’ (an expression common to Ulster and Scotland spelled in three different ways, meaning in this instance ’obstinate’).2 An opportunity arose in 1984, when his old friend John Taylor – who was running for his second term as a member of the European Parliament – picked Trimble as his election agent. For the first time, he found himself running a campaign from party headquarters. Although personally disorganised, Trimble proved a good organiser on behalf of the party – and Taylor won the third of Ulster’s three seats in Strasburg (Paisley again secured the highest number of first preferences and Hume took the second seat).3
In Lagan Valley, too, Trimble sought to burnish his credentials. In 1983 he became Vice Chairman of the constituency UUP and in 1986 sought renomination for the same post. He found himself opposed for this largely honorific job and assumed that it was a renewed attempt by elements of the local Unionist establishment to be rid of him. Suddenly, the incumbent Chairman of Lagan Valley announced he was not standing again. Since Trimble had put himself forward for Vice Chairman, it could reasonably be inferred that he was prepared to run for the top job. This he duly did and Trimble squeaked by at the AGM, with votes 55 to 53. Thus it was that Trimble became chairman of one of the largest Ulster Unionist associations. More important still, Trimble – one of Molyneaux’s main critics – was now the local party chairman of the party leader. Although Molyneaux could not but acknowledge his abilities, the two men were never natural soulmates – to say the least. In Molyneaux’s eyes, politics and policy were the prerogative of the Member of the Imperial Parliament. Ulster Unionist associations, like their Tory cousins, were supposed to be election-winning machines which collected subscriptions and raised funds, but did not bother themselves with great affairs of state. Indeed, even in times of great crisis, such as in 1985–6, the Lagan Valley Association minute books show that surprising proportions of meetings were still spent on such routine matters as fulfilling branch quotas and the payment for the use of Association facilities for jumble sales. Trimble, by contrast, was keen to ‘politicise’ Unionists and accordingly set up a monthly discussion at the Lagan Valley Management Committee meeting called the ‘Current Political Situation’. For example, the minute books for 11 January 1985 record that Trimble suggested that Lagan Valley affiliate to the National Union (of Conservative and Unionist Associations) to influence the ruling mainland party. This initiative was noted with interest by Workers’ Weekly on 2 February 1985, which stated that Trimble ‘has not been foremost amongst those anxious to bring Northern Ireland’s wretched local politics into the British mainstream. He has been a leading spokesman for the devolutionist wing of the UUP.’
There was one other contrast between the two men. Molyneaux was Deputy Grand Master of the entire Orange Order and Sovereign Commonwealth Grand Master of the Royal Black Institution, the senior branch of the Loyal Orders; whereas Trimble was an Orangeman out of a sense of duty and was rarely concerned with the plethora of meetings which office-holders in the District or County Grand Lodge had to attend. Trimble felt that the Orange Order with its rituals and procedures was institutionally not suited to combating the Kulturkampf which Irish nationalists had launched against the Ulster-British way of life: in consequence of this campaign, many outsiders regarded Unionists as the ’Afrikaners’ of the island of Ireland. Trimble’s view of this matter had been given an extra urgency by the text of the joint communiqué which followed the 19 November 1984 summit at Chequers between Mrs Thatcher and the Irish Prime Minister, Garrett Fitzgerald. At the press conference, Mrs Thatcher had famously ruled out the three recommendations of the New Ireland Forum of the Republic’s constitutional parties and the SDLP – which then became known in ‘tabloid-speak’ as her ‘out, out, out’ pronouncement. Unionists were delighted, but Trimble counselled caution. One of his reasons for caution was that in an attempt to slow down the momentum of Sinn Fein/IRA, the British and Irish Governments had agreed to give greater recognition to Irish culture in the life of Northern Ireland. Trimble could, therefore, see this emerging as the next great battle-ground.
Trimble believed that even the most balanced accounts of the island’s history did not, taken as a whole, accord equality of treatment to Unionism.4 Unless Unionists found an organisational vehicle to rectify this asymmetry, governmental support would go entirely to the Gaelic/Catholic/Nationalist side rather than the Orange tradition. Trimble reckoned that although the Orange Order was an entirely bona fide body, the ‘cultural commissars’ (his words) at the NIO would never dispense funds to it.5 In some ways, he thought the Order was too exclusive a body, for the wider unionist community of Ulster was not coterminous with Orangeism. Likewise, to insert ‘Protestant’ into the title of any new body would also be unsatisfactory, for neither was the British community of Ulster synonymous with Protestantism: some of its most loyal citizens were Catholic. He was also anxious to avoid any hint of anti-Englishness, to which so many loyalists were prone after being let down by successive British Governments. Trimble now thought that anti-Englishness only played into the hands of Irish nationalists, and served to detach them from their natural moorings in the broader, more cosmopolitan community of the British Isles. What, then, would provide the broadest basis for fighting the dilution of Ulster’s cultural identity?
‘Ulster-British’ – hyphenated – seemed the most satisfactory formulation. It implied a community capable of autonomous existence but which was also invested with wider associations in these isles as a whole. So following a seminar at the Park Avenue Hotel in Belfast on 25 April 1985, it was decided to set up ‘the Ulster Society for the Promotion of Ulster-British Heritage and Culture’. On 28 September 1985 (the 73rd anniversary of the signing of Ulster’s Solemn League and Covenant) the organisation was launched formally at Brownlow House in Lurgan. Brownlow House – a mid-19th-century sandstone structure that served as world-wide headquarters of the Royal Black Institution and was also the largest Orange Hall in the world – became its home base. Trimble became the chairman, and a young activist from Fermanagh, Gordon Lucy, became general secretary. The first project focused on loyalist folk music and entailed the collecting of the words and tunes of traditional Orange songs and ballads which were in danger of being lost to posterity (surprisingly or not, Trimble’s musical tastes do not extend to loyalist bands). The second subject concerned Orange banners, with questionnaires to be sent to every lodge. Another study focused on the original UVF and 36th (Ulster) Division, which would trace and interview survivors of the carnage which that unit endured on the Somme. Nor was the international dimension neglected: the Ulster Society also sought to rekindle awareness of the contribution of Ulstermen to the American Revolution.6 Later, he was instrumental in securing a reprint of Cecil Davis Milligan’s Walls of Derry,