"Up to Our Necks in Fenian Blood": Ulster Loyalism, its Myths and the

Somme in Christina Reid's My Name, Shall I Tell You My Name?

Jim Haughey
Anderson College

On July 1 1916, the first day of the Somme offensive, qlen of the predomi-
nantly Protestant 36th Ulster Division clambered out of their trenches and
began their assault on the "German trenches beside the River Ancre" just north
of the French village ofThiepval (Hall 10). Over the course of the next few
murderous hours, the Division suffered over 5,000 casualties (Orr 192) and
whatever ground was gained was subsequently lost due to lack of support from
other British regiments on the Division's flanks.
What motivated most of these men to fight and die so bravely at the Somme
was their love for King and empire. They were also convinced that the war
against Germany was morally justified to protect the rights of small nations and
that their sacrifice would have other political repercussions. The chief motive
for their empire loyalty was the belief that if Ulster Protestants stood by Britain
in its hour of need, after the war, Ulster would be given the opportunity to opt
out of any subsequent Home Rule deal for Ireland.
The enduring memory of the Battle of the Somme and its importance in
Ulster Protestant folk memory is the subject of Belfast-born playwright
Christina Reid's 1988 radio drama My Name, Shall I tell YouMy Name? which
explores the relationship between Andy, an Ulster veteran of the Battle of the
Somme, and his granddaughter Andrea. The play spans a period of twenty years
from Andrea's childhood in the early 1960s up through her departure for col-
lege and subsequent marriage in the mid-1980s.
In a recent essay about Northern Irish identity, Seamus Heaney notes that
"[e]ach person in Ulster lives first in the Ulster of the actual present, and then
in one or other Ulsters of the mind" (qtd. in Tylee I). Throughout most of her
ten plays to date, Reid examines these imagined Ulsters "in order to find a
means of better understanding the troubled issues of. . . contemporary"
Northern Ireland (Roche 236). We see this interrogation of an imagined past in
her treatment of the relationship between Andy and Andrea which gradually
deteriorates as the old man's glorification of war and violence and his union-
ist/Protestant allegiances clash with Andrea's quest for a "coherent self-vision"
liberated from the burdens of familial and tribal history (McDonough 300).
During the play, tensions emerge as Andrea's involvement in the women's anti-
nuclear protest at Greenham Common in England, her marriage to Hanif, an
Anglo-Pakistani, and her questioning of her grandfather's Great War mythology
inevitably collide with his political intransigence and religious bigotry.
As Andrea searches for an identity unfettered by the constraints of her
Ulster Protestant background, she discovers that in Northern Ireland, "family
and political histories are [irrevocably] intertwined" (Aston and Reinelt 124).
Her grandfather's mythologizing of the Ulster sacrifice at the Somme, rather
8
 than strengthening his relationship with his granddaughter, only serves to rein-
force Andrea's determination to escape a heritage that she perceives as patriar-
chal, sectarian and essentialist.
As the play hurdles narrative gaps and shuttles back and forth across the
years between Andrea's childhood and adulthood, Reid reveals other tensions
that memory of the Great War and the ongoing disputes over Northern Ireland's
political future have largely kept concealed. These unexamined conflicts preoc-
cupy her work as she explores the experiences of those left out of the main-
stream narratives of recent Irish history and strips away the fragile constructs of
Ulster Protestant masculinity in order to expose its hoary orthodoxy. Reid also
demonstrates how the various myths perpetuated by Protestant glorification of
the Battle of the Somme continue to preserve longstanding gender inequities
and stifle a more mature understanding of Ulster Protestant identity.
One way in which Reid demonstrates the war's role in preserving the gender
status quo is her portrayal of Andy the Somme veteran who, with the passage
of time, becomes even more convinced that the sacrifice was worth making to
in order to preserve Northern Ireland's union with Great Britain. But memory
of the Somme also reinforces his notion that masculinity is exclusively defined
by acts of heroism during times of violence. Early in the play,Andy reminds
Andrea that the War "Made a man outa me. That an' the army. . . Man them
were the days with the lads in France. Real men. Heroes. Ulster Protestant
Orangemen" (Reid 214).
Defining masculinity from such a narrow construct inevitably,by contrast,
implies that other qualities like nurturing and passivity are not manly or noble.
When Andrea asks to wear her grandfather's war medals, he tells her that
"Medals is for men" (Reid 215) and that "The men go off to war, and the
weemin' and the children stay behind and keep the home fires burnin' till the
men get back" (216). That war memory relegates women outside "official his-
tory" (Delgado viii) reminds us that both political traditions in Northern
Ireland, nationalist and unionist, share a common pedigree in that their con-
struction of self-aggrandizing heroic narratives are predicated on the mutual
subjugation of women. In an interview in the late 1980s, Reid, who comes from
an Ulster Protestant background herself, noted that in Northern Ireland,
Women are never the leaders, the faces, the voices. Ian Paisley [leader
of the staunchly Protestant Democratic Unionist Party] and the Pope are
basically in total agreement over what a woman's role in the home should
be. (qtd. in Shannon 18)
Another bitter fact about Ulster war memory is that it has helped to preserve
and even exacerbate sectarian tensions in the province. Prior to the dedication
of the Irish war memorial near the Belgian town of Messines in November
1998, the Republic of Ireland's President Mary McAleese noted that Ireland's
war dead came "from every part of this island, [and that] nobody own[ed] their
memory" (qtd. in Sheridan n. pag.). Sadly the tribalizing ofIrish war memory
continues to play its role in alienating Northern Ireland's two main political tra-
ditions as memory of the Somme has been subsequently appropriated by the
9 10
Orange Order, an exclusively Protestant religious fraternity formed back in the
1790s with the aim of maintaining Protestant religious liberties and swearing
allegiance to the British crown. In the immediate years after the war, " 'Somme
Memorial' " Orange Lodges were formed and 1 July came to be marked by
Orange processions" (Jeffery 133).The "mythic power of the sacrifice is fur-
ther illustrated by the 'typical' Protestant family interviewed by a British jour-
nalist in the early 1980s who asserted that Ulster alone 'lost 50,000 men in the
battle of the Somme' " (133).
To this day, wall murals depicting the Ulster sacrifice at the Somme appear
on gable walls in Protestant housing estates throughout Northern Ireland. Most
recently the still-to-be resolved impasse at Drumcree Church near the Mid-
Ulster town of Portadown illustrates how memory of the war still causes fric-
tion between Northern Ireland's two main political traditions. For the last seven
years, a traditional Orange Lodge procession, which purportedly commemo-
rates the July first anniversary of the Somme offensive, has been the flash point
for local sectarian tensions, and the surrounding roIling countryside has been
transformed into a battle zone replete with barricades, trenches, razor wire, and
a flooded moat, all designed to stop the Orange marchers parading down the
predominantly Catholic Garvaghy Road.
In addition to these public displays of war memory, more official forms of
historical appropriation exist. In the play,Andrea recalls how Andy took her
when she was a child to Belfast City Hall to see the famous painting of the
Ulster Division going over the top at the Somme. Underneath the artist's ren-
dering of the famous attack is a placard which describes the Ulster Division's
heroics that day as "one of the greatest feats of arms in the annals of the British
Army" (Reid 214). The painting by 1. Prinsep Beadle effectively celebrates a
defeat: like the Easter Rising, in Irish memory defeat often becomes a synonym
for victory. The son of an English-born Major-General, Beadle was raised in
India and later studied art at the Slade School in London. Chiefly regarded as a
military painter, he often relied on his own imagination and the advice of veter-
ans in the process of painting a Great War battlefield scene ("James Prinsep
Beadle" n. pag.). In the play,Andrea, looking back now as an adult, realizes
that the painting has also helped mythologize the Somme as Beadle celebrates
the testosterone virtues of the Ulster Division.
However, in his rendition of the Ulster Division's attack at the Somme,
Beadle also takes some liberties with the truth. In the painting, prisoners are
escorted to the rear with too much ceremony while some troops lob grenades
rather leisurely at the German lines from a distance of about twenty yards and
in full view of the German machine guns. Amid all the shot and shell, another
soldier, a signaler, serenely jots down notes, completely unperturbed by the
mayhem around him. Years later, Ulster veterans recalled crouching and crawl-
ing among shell holes as the ground before them was swept with machine gun
fire. In some cases "many men. . . were killed by 'friendly fire'" from their
own supporting artillery while "officers had to threaten to shoot some men who
were trying to retreat" (Bowman 50). But such instances of human error and
 frailty get elided from Beadle's triumphalist portrait. The moment is caught in
time, the awful outcome of the battle avoided.
Beadle's fanciful re-creation of the charge of the Ulster Division appears to
give some credence to Thomas Carlyle's half-mocking gibe that history is actu-
ally "distilled rumor." Andy's "version" of the battle is also heavily shaded by
sectarian cant as he recalls how the Ulster Division went into battle wearing
"Orange sashes" and "singing songs about the battle of the Boyne and the siege
of Derry," two other battles celebrated annually by the Orange Order (Reid
216). However, other eyewitness accounts of the attack note that the only
orange evident that day were the handkerchiefs used to signal the next wave of
troops over the top and the orange markers that signalers carried to indicate the
progress of the attack. Ulster historian George Fleming disputes the Orange
Order's claim that many of its members died at the Somme, arguing, among
other things, that there were no Orangemen on the Somme because "King's
Regulations 1912 paragraph 45" forbade members of the British military from
joining politically partisan organizations like the Orange Order or the Ancient
Order of Hibernians (n. pag.). It is also important to note that Beadle's painting
hangs in Belfast City Hall where the city council convenes. To Catholics,
Belfast City Hall symbolizes Protestant supremacy in Northern Ireland as to
this day no Catholic has ever held the city's office of Lord Mayor.
Another tension explored in the play is how Ulster war memory reinforces
sectarian and racist attitudes. In Ulster, sectarianism like racism, calls for purity
of the tribe. Consequently, "racism and patriarchy" develop a "specific histori-
cal conjoining in the Troubles" (Sullivan 222). Andy's glorification of the battle
is certainly reinforced by his sectarianism. Towardsthe end of the playas he
prepares to participate in the Orange Order's annual Somme parade, he takes
his old war medals out of a tin box and proclaims his pride in wearing them as
one of the loyal "Protestants of Ulster" (Reid 221). In this final scene, Reid
crosscuts between Andy marching in the Somme Commemoration Parade and
Andrea being strip searched in prison for her role in the Greenham Common
anti-nuclear protest. Meanwhile, at the parade, the band plays "Marching
Through Georgia," an American song commemorating General Sherman's
march to the sea during the last year of the American Civil War. It is only when
Andy sings the words adapted to the melody that we see the extent to which his
memory of the Great War has become tribalized. As the crowds cheer and the
band music intensifies, Andy sings: "We are, we are, we are the Billy Boys /
We are, we are, we are the Billy Boys" (Reid 222). These lines come from a
Protestant song predictably called "The Billy Boys," a sectarian chant usually
sung from the terraces at soccer games in Northern Ireland and Scotland when
teams with almost exclusively Catholic or Protestant following meet. The song
has several versions but the first verse is usually the same:
Hello! Hello! We are the Billy Boys
Hello! Hello! You'll know us by our noise
We're up to our necks in Fenian blood
Surrender or you'll die
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'Cause we are the Billy Billy Boys. (The Orange Lark n. pag.)
The Billy Boys take their name from their adulation for King William of
Orange, the Protestant monarch whose forces defeated the Catholic forces of
King James II at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. The reference to "Fenian
blood" glorifies past victories like the Boyne while the word "Fenian" is a fairly
common pejorative term used by Protestant extremists when referring to
Catholics. Reid's intent here is to show how Andy's anti-Irish Catholic racism
has been further intensified by his sectarian memory of the war. In this way,
she demonstrates how Ulster racism is sustained by the maintenance of these
exclusive "dual identities" where both sides are divided into antagonistic cate-
gories that remain "'pure' and balanced in their opposition" (Sullivan 222).
However,Reid's play is not without its faults as her portrait of Andy
becomes an "over-simplistic caricature," as though he represents a community
"destitute of features, emotions, or even intelligent life, without existence in
time, a monolithic whose only purpose is to be the granite against which
nationalist aspirations of an Irish people are dashed" (qtd. in Burgess n. pag.).
As the play ends, Andrea sits alone in her prison cell thinking of her grandfa-
ther who has disowned her. She recalls the famous truce which took place
between British and German soldiers during the first Christmas of the Great
War and wonders whether there is a "an hour, a place, where [she and her
grand-father] . . . can meet. A Piece of Common Ground. A No Man's Land"
where a truce can be declared (Reid 223). Sadly,Andrea's desire to transcend
the parochial hatreds of her forefathers demonstrates just how difficult is the
struggle "to live in a society in which sectarian hatred and gendering tropes are
ingrained in the consciousness of the male and female population" (McKenna
1050).Yetwhile some critics have been put off by the overtly didactic nature of
her play, in many ways Reid's treatment of the war and its inherited memories
challenges unionist and nationalist mythography which have seen to it that
Ireland's war dead have become the tribal totems of unionist triumphalism or
the historical orphans of nationalist amnesia. For her part, Reid explores the
"questioning of Protestant traditions by a younger generation of women who
refuse to accept the intransigence and inflexibility of a particular masculine
ideology which would dictate their behaviour" (Delgado xiv). By disturbing the
sectarian readings of Ulster's past, Reid's political theater casts a cold eye on
inherited assumptions and re-presents Irish history in such way that we can rec-
ognize the extent to which it continues to be ideologically processed.
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