Dean Godson – Himself Alone: David Trimble and the Ordeal Of Unionism (страница 3)

Strangely, Dàvid Trimble was quite unaware of his links to the Ballynafeigh District Lodge until he became leader of the Ulster Unionist party. This may owe something to the influence of his mother, Ivy Jack, who regarded the Loyal Orders as vulgar and who appeared unhappy when the teenaged Trimble eventually joined the Orange Order in 1962 (Billy Trimble was never a member, though he was a Mason). Ivy Jack was born in 1911, the only child of Captain William Jack and of Ida Colhoun. The lineage of Capt. Jack (DT’s maternal grandfather) can be traced back at least as far as one Samuel Jack (DT’s maternal great-great-grandfather), a landed proprietor of Lisnarrow in the parish of Donagheady, Co. Tyrone, who lived from 1776 to 1846. His son, also Samuel (DT’s great-grandfather), became a prominent official of the Londonderry Corporation and for over 30 years served as water superintendent. His death notice in the Londonderry Sentinel of 16 February 1897 states that he was ‘a staunch Unionist in politics … one of the electors who suffered “excommunication” from the Covenanting Church rather than forgo his right to vote at the Parliamentary elections’. Formally known as the Reformed Presbyterian Church of Ireland, the Covenanters were quite separate from the much larger Presbyterian Church in Ireland: they were descended from the Scots Covenanters, and did not agree with the Revolution Settlement of 1689 because it did not reaffirm the Solemn League and Covenant of 1643, which swore to recognise Christ as King of the Nation. Since the Revolution Settlement did not provide the reassurance which they sought, the Covenanters held it was inconsistent for their communicant members to vote in parliamentary elections. Most of their flock went along with this ruling, but Samuel Jack was highly unusual in his unwillingness to give up the hard-won right of Dissenters to exercise this democratic liberty.¹³ A hundred or so years later, his Presbyterian great-grandson, David Trimble, would also endure a kind of ostracism – again, risking much for his rejection of what he considered to be the other-worldly purism of some of his fellow Protestants.

Samuel Jack’s son, Capt. William Jack (DT’s grandfather), worked for J. & J. Cooke, timber merchants and subsequently for Robert Colhoun Ltd, the building and construction firm owned by his wife’s family. He was a Derryman all his life – he served on the Board of Guardians – and signed the Ulster Covenant of 1912. Grandfather Jack only left Londonderry during the First World War in his 40s: in June 1915 he was given a temporary commission as a 2nd Lieutenant in the 12th Battalion of the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, a support unit which furnished drafts to the 36th (Ulster) Division. In October 1916, he transferred to the southern-recruited Royal Irish Regiment and was posted to the 1st Garrison Battalion which provided guards for bases and prisoners. He then went to Egypt during Allenby’s campaign in the Middle East against the Turks, but appears not to have left the place during the liberation of Palestine from the Ottomans. Instead, he spent much of his time in the British military hospital in Cairo: the service records in the PRO say nothing of wounds, as they normally would, suggesting he was felled by malaria or some other infection. After the war, he returned to his home at 5 Eden Terrace, in the city’s Northland district.¹⁴ It was some five minutes away from the house in Glenbrook Terrace where Trimble’s fellow Nobel Laureate, John Hume, grew up (although, as John Hume is keen to point out, the Jack residence was in a much more up-market area).¹⁵ It is a neighbourhood from where most Protestants have now fled. ‘The biggest thing that’s happened in Northern Ireland over the last 30 years is the ethnic cleansing of the west bank [of the River Foyle]’, notes Trimble. ‘There were 10,000 there till the early 1970s. The North Ward was Protestant. That’s all gone.’¹⁶

Captain Jack’s wife, Ida, was undoubtedly the most influential of Trimble’s grandparents. Following her husband’s death, she was crippled and came to live with her daughter and son-in-law until her death in 1966. Ida Jack was ever-present during Trimble’s childhood and teenage years and imparted a smattering of loyalist lore to young David. She told him of how the inhabitants of Derry were reduced to eating rats during the Siege of 1689 and of how a forebear, one Robert Colhoun, had been in the Siege. She claimed that he subsequently married a daughter of George Walker, the Rector of Donoughmore and joint governor of the city during the Siege (such claims are, however, not uncommon in many old Ulster families).¹⁷ She also signed the Ulster Covenant in 1912. Family tradition holds that the Colhouns originally came from Doagh Island off the Inishowen peninsula in Co. Donegal. They left in the early 19th century because of deteriorating land conditions and eventually came to Londonderry, via Malins, Co. Donegal, in 1860 (John Hume’s family made a not dissimilar journey from Inishowen).¹⁸ The tithe applotment books show that they settled in Elaghtmore in the parish of Templemore, Co. Londonderry. Ida Colhoun was one of seven children of Robert Colhoun and his wife Anne Walker (DT’s maternal great-grandparents), the daughter of one David Walker, a leather dealer from the Diamond on the west bank of the Foyle (DT’s great-great grandfather). Robert Colhoun had founded the family construction firm: their buildings included the military barracks and Roman Catholic Church at Omagh, substantial tracts of the Bogside, the Guildhall in Londonderry and the Methodist Church at Carlisle Road, also in the Maiden City. The construction firm was eventually run by his mother’s first cousin, Senator Jack Colhoun, a former Mayor of Londonderry, known to Trimble as ‘Uncle Jack’ (prior to the prorogation of Stormont in 1972, the Lord Mayor of Belfast and the Mayor of Londonderry were ex-officio members of the Northern Ireland Senate). The company ran into financial difficulties during the construction of Altnagelvin Hospital, which was to become Londonderry’s leading infirmary. Although he did not have to do so, Colhoun sold up in 1961 in order to ensure that none of his subcontractors was out of pocket. Trimble was impressed by such probity. Indeed, when the Northern Ireland civil rights movement denounced the ‘rotten borough’ practices of the old Londonderry Corporation in the late 1960s, Trimble reacted on both a personal and on a political level. Recalls Trimble: ‘I thought “Well, I know Uncle Jack. And I know he’s not corrupt.” So I started to think about things more deeply.’¹⁹

Billy Trimble met Ivy Jack whilst he was working in Londonderry as a middle-ranking official in the Ministry of Labour; she was a clerk-typist in the same department. They were married in the Great James Street Presbyterian Church in the Maiden City on 7 December 1940. Billy Trimble soon returned to Belfast, where he eventually became the deputy manager of the labour exchange at Corporation Street. Known in the local vernacular as the ‘Broo’ (a corruption of ‘Bureau’), it was the largest such centre in Northern Ireland. The Trimbles settled in Bangor, which had become something of a dormitory town for Belfast and was rapidly expanding because of the post-war baby boom. They resided at an artisan’s house, 1 King Street, just off Main Street, where David Trimble lived until he was four: his first memory is of the relaxing of sweets rationing in 1947. Although Trimble could, by his own admission, often be awkward and gauche in his dealings with his parents, peers and the outside world generally, he was always the dominant sibling. His older sister, Rosemary, born in 1943, was not overly assertive; his younger brother Iain, born in 1948, naturally looked up to him.

Trimble’s mother, Ivy, was, by his own testimony, ‘middle class moving downwards’. Little of the Colhoun legacy came down to her, and she was obliged from the early years of her marriage to bear the burden of caring for her own mother. Moreover, her husband’s career went awry in his 40s: it may have had something to do with his heavy drinking, which became even more pronounced in his later years.²⁰ He would return home from work, listen to the news, fidget and then put on his coat and slip away to the local pub.²¹ Indeed, Trimble’s earliest recollection of his drinking habit was, at the age of six or seven, of finding beer bottles under the kitchen sink – though, fortunately, there were no great public embarrassments nor huge rows in the parental home.²² Rather, Iain Trimble recalls, he was simply not there for much of the time.²³ More obviously problematic was Billy Trimble’s decision to become a guarantor of a loan on behalf of an associate, which then went wrong. In 1960, the ensuing financial difficulties forced Billy Trimble to sell the semi-detached house which he had built himself with a neighbour at 109 Victoria Road, Bangor, and move a short distance up the hill to rented accommodation in a grander Victorian villa at 39 Clifton Road.