Protestant unionist masculinities & the Orange Order in Canada
By Prof. Jane McGaughey
From its beginnings in Ireland in 1795, the Orange Order centred its beliefs on the supremacy of the Protestant faith and the righteousness of the British Crown. The fraternal society spread throughout the English-speaking world in the 19th century; its success hinged on its position as an organised brotherhood, social club, and mutual aid society, as well as a powerfully public expression of Britishness, Protestantism, and imperialism that promoted devotion to the Crown while, simultaneously, causing social division and outbreaks of violence. By the early 20th century, the fellowship of Orange lodges in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Newfoundland, and Ireland had touched all levels of society, including among their ranks artisans, farmers, politicians, diplomats, businessmen, and military officers.
Canada was, arguably, the place where Orangeism achieved its greatest influence. Although Orange lodges had existed in various colonies of British North America since the early 1800s, the Order was not officially established in Upper Canada – present-day Ontario – until 1830 by Ogle R. Gowan, a recent immigrant from Co. Wexford. Gowan’s father, John ‘Hunter’ Gowan, had been a violent opponent of the United Irishmen and the 1798 Rising. Lodges quickly spread throughout the Canadas and the Atlantic provinces so that, by the end of the 19th century, the Order had become both a social and a political force. Toronto was such a bastion of Orange power that it was known as the ‘Belfast of Canada,’ dominating the city’s political life until the 1950s.
19th century migration from Ireland significantly helped Orangeism to gain popularity within English-speaking Canada; well into the 20th century, Canadian Orangemen voiced public opinions about Irish issues while also advancing a distinctly Canadian agenda in their opposition to Catholic education rights and French language instruction in schools. Despite the passage of time and geographic distance, Canadian Orangemen largely felt a continuing connection to Irish Protestants and their perceived struggle against the ‘Rome Rule’ that Orangemen felt was inevitably part of any Home Rule legislation.
By 1912, Canadian Orangemen were deeply aware of the Third Home Rule Crisis and supported Sir Edward Carson and his anti-Home Rule position. Carson had not visited Toronto, but statuettes of his likeness were on sale in the city, and new Orange lodges in Ontario were named in his honour. Mass anti-Home Rule meetings were held in Toronto, where Orangemen took a stand against Irish nationalism, in contrast to a majority of the country’s population who believed that Ireland should hold the same dominion status as Canada. In fact, the Canadian federal government, as well as the provincial legislatures in Ontario and Quebec, had passed resolutions supporting Irish Home Rule in the late 1880s. Regardless of this historic correlation between Irish and Canadian nationalism, over 1,000 Orangemen in September 1912 paraded outside of Toronto’s Massey Hall.
Throughout the period of the Home Rule Crisis, Orangemen made speeches that linked Irish and Canadian issues, and which highlighted the strong emotional connection many Canadians felt toward Ireland. In 1913, the Grand Orange Lodge of British America produced a Report of the Special Committee re Home Rule which argued that ‘the Battle of the Boyne is being fought over again by the Protestants of Ireland’ and that Canadian Orangemen were ‘unalterably opposed to the coercion of our brethren in Ulster.’ A year later, 6,000 men and women joined an anti-Home Rule rally at Queen’s Park in Toronto, although men were asked not to wear Orange regalia in order to make sure it was not mistaken as being a purely Orange event. Instead, nearly every man in attendance wore a badge bearing a picture of Sir Edward Carson.
Despite the presence of women at this rally, and at many other public anti-Home Rule events, this was a highly masculine atmosphere and was intended to be so. Women in Canada, as elsewhere in the empire, did not have the vote. While Canadian Orangewomen had been a notable public presence since the 1890s and took part in Twelfth of July marches alongside members of male lodges, they were not necessarily also part of the suffrage movement. Speakers at the anti-Home Rule events were men. The personification of their campaign to save the empire was not Mother Ireland or even Britannia, but King Carson.
Gendered language had always been a significant element in Orange public discourse, with speeches and published tracts highlighting such terms as ‘brotherhood’ and ‘manliness’ as core elements of an Orange identity. In 1914, a more militant version of the ideal Orangeman was introduced, with Canadian supporters of Ulster unionism contributing funds to arm the Ulster Volunteer Force and Orangemen vowing to send over a thousand volunteers to Belfast to fight the authorities if hostilities were to break out. This threat caused sufficient concern that it was raised in the House of Commons in Ottawa by a Liberal member from Quebec, while another protested the presence of Toronto MPs at pro-Carson rallies. A telegram to Carson from the MP for York Centre in northern Toronto pledged that ‘thousands of loyal Canadians are with you in your magnificent fight to preserve the best traditions of British citizenship…. We are ready, if necessary, to help you with men and money to the last ditch.’
This plan, of course, never became a necessity, as the Home Rule Crisis was suddenly superseded in the summer of 1914 into the Great War, with Germany and Kaiser Wilhelm replacing John Redmond and Irish Nationalists as the enemy of Orangemen across the empire. As an institution that crossed national boundaries, the Orange Order was a symbol of tradition colliding with the modern world. The Great War complicated notions of masculinity, nationalism, religion, and violence throughout the world. In Ireland, the war provided the setting for the Easter Rising and the Irish War of Independence, while in Canada, it was a seminal event that gave the country a sense of national pride and independence that had been lacking since Canadian Confederation in 1867. In Belfast, Toronto, and dozens of places in between, Orange leaders were heavily involved in the mobilisation of tens of thousands of their fellow lodge members into the front lines of the war effort, an action which Orangemen often portrayed as both their greatest triumph and heaviest sacrifice in order to safeguard the empire.
Interestingly, Irish nationalists also used images of manliness in the Irish Diaspora to further their wartime cause. Lieutenant William Redmond, MP, was the brother of the Irish Parliamentary Party leader John Redmond and also an officer in the 16th (Irish) Division. At a speech in Bray, Co. Wicklow, he underscored that men of Irish heritage were doing great work for the imperial war effort. Canada, Australia, ‘and every other portion of the British Empire had done magnificently in rallying to the standard of freedom and of liberty, ‘he contended, and ‘thousands upon thousands amongst the Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, and South Africans were Irishmen either by birth or extraction.’ Belfast’s overtly unionist Northern Whig tried to qualify Redmond’s sentiments as misplaced nationalist propaganda, countering that ‘these patriotic Colonials of Irish birth or parentage are almost to a man Protestants and Unionists’ and that ‘a great majority are staunchly opposed to Home Rule.’
One of Canada’s most notable war-time Orangemen was Colonel Sam Hughes, MP for Lindsay, Ontario, and the Minister for Militia and Defence at the beginning of the war. Hughes was infamous for his bigoted anti-French and anti-Catholic opinions. Some considered him to be a bombastic megalomaniac, while others thought he was certifiably insane. During the war years, Hughes successfully raised troops in English Canada and was lauded by the Northern Whig as being responsible for enlisting the vast majority of Canadian Orangemen, but he was a disastrous politician and military organiser. One of his poorest decisions was to insist upon arming Canadians with the Ross rifle in combat, despite its acknowledged inability to work properly when fired repeatedly and its tendency to jam in wet, muddy conditions. Utterly intractable, Hughes sent thousands of the rifles to the Western Front. By 1916 he had become a severe liability for the government, which had received complaints about his behaviour from George V and Field Marshal Haig. Hughes was fired by Prime Minister Robert Borden from his cabinet post in November 1916 because of his ‘strong tendency to assume powers which [he did] not possess’ and because Borden no longer had the ‘time or energy’ to fix all of the problems Hughes kept creating.
Samuel Hughes in 1905. (Image: Library and Archives Canada, PA-028098)
Despite Hughes’ ignoble wartime career, Orangemen across Canada and the Dominion of Newfoundland strongly participated in the war effort. Estimates of their participation range as high as 80,000 enlisted men, out of which some 8,000 died, a mortality of rate of ten per cent which was in direct proportion to overall Canadian casualties. ‘Never again,’ The Globe argued, ‘could it be said that the Orangemen of Canada were showing lip-loyalty.’ After the war, anti-Home Rule feelings changed to anti-Sinn Féin sentiment so that, in 1920, the Orange Mayor of Toronto, Thomas Church, felt completely justified in banning a Sinn Féin convention from being held on Toronto city property.
While there is an argument that the Great War increased feelings of nationalism and anti-imperialism throughout the British Empire, there was a marked increase in Orange membership in the years following the armistice. Returning from the trenches to Ireland, Orange veterans faced the violence of the Irish War of Independence and the chaos of partition and civil war. Protestant Orangemen in the new state of Northern Ireland found themselves in increasing positions of power and control over the Catholic and nationalist minority in the north. The Great War became a symbol of unionist pride, with a particular northern focus on the achievements of the 36th (Ulster) Division at the Somme in 1916.
Across the ocean, former soldiers in Canada found themselves either colluding or colliding with government forces. Orange veterans were involved in several xenophobic riots on the streets of Toronto and in the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919, the largest strike in the history of North America. Reverence for soldiers returning from the trenches continued to be a key theme for Orange lodges throughout Canada, mirroring the value placed on wartime masculinities by Orangemen in Northern Ireland. Meanwhile, Newfoundland’s focus on imperialism both before and after the war years caused membership in its Orange lodges to quadruple in the first decades of the 20th century.
In 1910, Canada and Newfoundland together had 1837 Orange lodges. By 1920, these numbers had grown to 2205, an increase of 368 lodges. The Order, however, had changed drastically from its roots in the 1830s. It was no longer dominated by Irish immigrants; rather, after the war years, it had a more inclusive membership that transcended class, denominational differences, age, and ethnicity, welcoming Canadians of English, Scottish, German, and Mohawk background along with those of Irish heritage. Fidelity to Protestantism, the Crown, Canada, and the British Empire were the primary characteristics of these Orangemen after the war, rather than placing the greatest emphasis on Irish ethnicity.
In the Dominion of Newfoundland, demobilised Orange soldiers faced the emotional burden of having survived in a military unit, the Royal Newfoundland Regiment, that was known for its 90 per cent casualty rate on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, 1 July 1916. Participation in the Somme and also earlier at Gallipoli served as foundations for the regiment’s masculine construction as disciplined and battle-hardened troops. Newfoundland is a fascinating case study for Orange influence of public life and military manliness, as the dominion of only 250,000 people was divided into descendants of Irish Catholic immigrants and Protestant Englishmen. The Orangemen on ‘The Rock’ were almost devoid of Irish membership, which meant that interactions between Catholic and Protestant soldiers and veterans in Newfoundland had a different quality than those in either Canada or Ireland. Despite being a poor colony financially, Governor Sir Walter Davidson argued that Newfoundland was rich in ‘fine, stalwart men’ who, when the time came to be soldiers, ‘will play their part too like men.’ For many Newfoundlanders, there was also no contradiction between an Irish Catholic background and a loyal imperial identity. A profile of Private Michael P. Murphy of Harbour Grace in the Commercial Annual of 1918 noted that he and his two brothers were of the ‘fighting stock from the County of Cork in Old Ireland’ and that it was therefore ‘no wonder that the three ‘boys’ rallied to the Standard when fighting was to be done in the cause of King, Country, Freedom and the Empire.’
By 1920, despite the losses the dominion had suffered during the war, there were nearly 200 Orange lodges on the island, making Newfoundland the most popular Orange enclave per capita in the entire empire. Newfoundlanders also faced devastating economic hardships immediately following the war, so that veterans with war pensions – administered by Orange politicians at the Colonial Building – became obvious symbols of economic security, a rarity during the 1920s and 1930s. The country’s financial collapse, which eventually caused Newfoundland to renounce Home Rule in 1934 and return to colonial status, was blamed on the heavy cost of financing the Great War, an effort that had been supported and organised by local Orangemen.
Sir Richard Squires. (Image: Library of Congress)
The career of Sir Richard Squires, an Orange member of the wartime coalition government, encapsulated the experiences of Orangemen who rose to prominence in Newfoundland because of the war. Prime Minister of Newfoundland from 1919 to 1923, and again from 1928 to 1932, Squires was one of the most powerful Orangemen in the north Atlantic world. He worked with Lieutenant-Colonel Padre Tom Nangle, a Catholic priest, to create the ‘Trail of the Caribou,’ the collection of bronze statues on international battlefields that have signified Newfoundland’s sacrifice in the Great War for nearly a century. However, Squires also became caught up in the violence and turmoil of the post-war period, at first being arrested in 1923 on corruption charges and later narrowly avoiding being lynched by an angry mob outside of the Colonial Building in 1932.
What does the Orange Order’s popularity in Newfoundland and Canada in the early 20th century tell us about their relationships with Ireland? It draws our attention to the fact that Irish issues were not debated in isolation, but held resonance throughout the Irish Diaspora. It demonstrates that Home Rule and the Great War – including Ireland’s role within it and fighting against it – were important developments that affected how the Dominions of Canada and Newfoundland saw their own place within the empire, and their roles as nations with their own strong Irish communities. Sir Edward Carson might not have been at one of Toronto’s rallies against Home Rule, but he had the support of thousands of Canadians as both a promise and a threat, if needed. During the war years, decades of speeches about imperial loyalty were put into action with tens of thousands of Orangemen enlisting. While the Order may have been more preoccupied with domestic matters in the post-war period, its growing membership demonstrated that imperialism still had a place within national conversations for some time, though not forever.
Orangeism remained a powerful force in both English-speaking Canada and Newfoundland until the 1950s. When Newfoundland joined Canadian Confederation in 1949, the Orange Order was seen as being responsible for rigging the election that changed their status from a British colony to a Canadian province. However, changes in Canada’s self-image after World War II and the adoption of multiculturalism as an official government policy began the Order’s slow death in earnest. Its imperial, Protestant outlook was increasingly at odds with Canadian pluralism. New links developed between Ireland and Canada – trade, tourism, immigration, cultural exchange, diasporic connections, and Canadian involvement in the Northern Irish peace process – that replaced the connective tissue once provided by Orangeism’s style of sectarian, transnational brotherhood.
Jane McGaughey is Associate Professor of Diaspora Studies at Concordia University's School of Irish Studies in Montreal. She currently leads a SSHRC-funded Insight Development Grant, 'Gender, Migration, and Madness: Treating the Bodies and Minds of Irish Men and Irish Women in Canadian Lunatic Asylums, 1841-1868.' She is the author of Ulster's Men: Protestant Unionist Masculinities and Militarization in the North of Ireland, 1912-23 (2012) and the forthcoming Violent Loyalties: Manliness, Migration, and the Irish in the Canadas, 1798-1841.
