Abstract
The Orange march in late Victorian Cumbria might appear, at first sight, to have been an isolated, anachronistic and largely harmless expression of devotion to a dead king.1 After all, the region was far from the main theatre of British politics, and lacked the massive early-century Irish immigrations that so influenced the Orange traditions of Liverpool and Glasgow. Yet from the mid-Victorian years, Cumbria, too, developed a large Orange movement that was noted for displays of strength that often occasioned communal unrest. It was the public belligerence of Orangemen, and their sometimes violent defence of the union, which led one Barrow nationalist, F.J. Devlin, to dismiss the movement as ‘the bunkum of Ulsteria’ and ‘a banditti of marauders, committing massacre in the name of God, exercising despotic powers in the name of liberty’.2
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Notes
Frank Neal, Sectarian Violence: the Liverpool Experience, 1819–1914 (Manchester, 1988) is the principal study of English Orange traditions. See also his ‘Manchester origins of the Orange Order’, Manchester Region History Review, 4, 2 (1990–1), pp. 12–24;
W.J. Lowe, The Irish in Mid-Victorian Lancashire: the Making of a Working-Class Community (New York, 1990), Ch. 6;
D.M. MacRaild, Culture, Conflict and Migration: the Irish in Victorian Cumbria (Liverpool, 1997), Chs 5 and 6. For Scotland, see Elaine McFarland’s chapter in this volume.
F.J. Devlin, letter, Barrow Herald, 10 June 1893.
For Murphy’s short but active career, see W.L. Arnstein, ‘The Murphy Riots: a Victorian dilemma’, Victorian Studies, 19, 1 (1975);
Donald C. Richter, Riotous Victorians (Athens, Ohio, 1981), pp. 34–49. For his Cumbrian sojourn, see MacRaild, Culture, Conflict and Migration.
The best attempt to theorise Orangeism, in terms of membership and their aspirations, is McFarland, Protestants First: Orangeism in 19th-century Scotland (Edinburgh, 1990), Chs 2 and 5.
E.R. Norman, Anti-Catholicism in Victorian England (London 1968), p. 20. The historiography of Victorian anti-Catholicism is too great to recount here.
A good starting point is Paz, Anti-Catholicism in Mid-Victorian England (Stanford, Cal., 1992) which contains a rich bibliography.
Rev. J.B. McKenzie, chairman of the Askam Orange Day celebrations in 1877. Barrow Herald, 12 July 1877. This mixing of anti-Catholicism and history was an age-old formula. See, for example, J.A. Sharpe Early Modern England: a Social History, 1550–1760 (London, 1987), p. 1.
This point is illustrated by G.F.A. Best, ‘Popular Protestantism in Victorian Britain’, in R. Robson (ed.), Ideas and Institutions of Victorian Britain (London, 1967), pp. 115–142.
Alan Lee, ‘Conservatism, traditionalism and the British working class, 1880–1918’ in D.E. Martin and D. Rubinstein (eds), Ideology and the Labour Movement: Essays Presented to John Saville (London, 1979), pp. 90–1.
Cumberland News, 18 July 1925. The struggles of the Order were similar elsewhere in the 1920s. See, for example, an excellent study of the Scottish dimensions: Graham Walker, ‘The Orange Order in Scotland Between the Wars’, International Journal of Social History, 37, 2, 1992.
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MacRaild, D.M. (2000). ‘The Bunkum of Ulsteria’: the Orange Marching Tradition in Late Victorian Cumbria. In: Fraser, T.G. (eds) The Irish Parading Tradition. Ethnic and Intercommunity Conflict Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780333993859_4
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