Liberalism in north Antrim, 1900–14

Abstract

In the general election of January 1906, R. G. Glendinning, a taciturn baptist linen manufacturer of Belfast, won the North Antrim parliamentary seat. The significance of this event was his success in an overwhelmingly protestant constituency at the expense of the highly articulate and intelligent unionist sitting member, William Moore, the principal architect of the Ulster Unionist Council and the leader of the unionist campaign to expose the devolutionary dangers of ‘Macdonnellism’. Furthermore Glendinning had campaigned as a ‘liberal unionist’, but had been condemned as a home ruler by his opponent and indeed upon arrival in the house of commons took his seat on the liberal government benches. Some years later, in 1913, despite the heightened political temperature, it was still possible for a meeting on 24 October in Ballymoney town hall attended by some four or five hundred protestants to denounce ‘the lawless policy of Carsonism’, and for this same meeting to be addressed by such noted nationalists as Captain Jack White, Sir Roger Casement and Mrs Alice Stopford Green. Their audience was invited to sign an anti-covenant devised by White and closely modelled on, though directly opposed to, the Ulster Solemn League and Covenant. As late as 1925 an independent protestant candidate, George Henderson, representing the Unbought Tenants Association, secured one of the seven County Antrim seats in the Northern Ireland parliament, thus preventing the election of an official unionist, R. D. Megaw. Then there is the interesting phenomenon of the Independent Orange Order which in the years before 1914 had established itself more firmly in north Antrim than anywhere else. The area also threw up in this period a number of prominent individuals who became active in non-unionist politics, of whom the Reverend J. B. Armour, the Reverend D. D. Boyle, John Pinkerton and Samuel Craig McElroy are perhaps the best known. Finally Bally money and the Route was the epicentre of the Ulster tenant-right movement in the last three decades of the nineteenth century.

‘Rotten Protestants’: Protestant Home Rulers and the Ulster Liberal Association, 1906–1918

“…Protestant body with strong grassroots support, a wide-ranging weekly newspaper, and a well-developed branch network throughout Ulster, which adopted an explicitly pro-home rule position in 1910. He fails to distinguish this group from the entirely separate Ulster Liberal Unionist Association, 12 and ascribes liberal unionism to one of the ULA's leading figures, although he adopted a pro-home rule stance from 1910. 13 When assessing a phenomenon such as the Protestant home rule movement, it is important not just to focus on well known, often-charismatic figures, but also to assess the wider associational culture in which these individuals operated.…”

“…Glendinning, a Baptist linen manufacturer who took North Antrim, also joined the Liberal benches. 28 Although the Russellite return was dire, the group took an average of 44% in the constituencies they contested, 29 which demonstrated the viability of a moderate party in Ulster.…”