Dean Godson – Himself Alone: David Trimble and the Ordeal Of Unionism (страница 4)

Trimble inherited his looks and his argumentative nature from his father. But, he says, they were perhaps too alike to be really close. ‘Like a lot of Ulster Protestant males, Father was emotionally illiterate,’ recalls Trimble. ‘He told me I was “handless” [clumsy and uncoordinated], which was true, but telling you as much doesn’t help.’ Efforts by his father to interest him in football by taking him to Bangor FC matches were also unsuccessful.²⁴ But he bequeathed his son one hobby: music. Not only was classical music always around the house, but Billy Trimble was also a prominent member of the chorus of the Ulster Operatic Company, performing in productions of such Gilbert and Sullivan operettas as Trial by Jury and Patience. David Trimble also did some acting at school – playing the part of Stanley in Richard III – and later for the Bangor Drama Society: he says that these performances probably did as much as anything to increase his self-confidence. During the 1980s, as chairman of the Ulster Society, he also put on several productions of the plays of St John Ervine, the Ulster writer and dramatist. Although Trimble is no singer, and does not play any instrument, music remains his greatest enthusiasm and the family drawing room bulges with several thousands of albums. His first love was Elvis Presley; later, he graduated to Puccini, Verdi and Wagner (his particular favourite). Indeed, in times of crisis, says Daphne Trimble, such as after the setting up of the first inclusive Northern Ireland Executive in late 1999, he will turn to his records for solace.²⁵

Trimble’s relations with his mother were not very good, either. From her, too, he encountered a measure of coldness – the origins of which may owe something to the infant David’s error of throwing her engagement ring into the fire.²⁶ Whatever the reality of their relationship, Ivy Trimble was the dominant personality within the household. She was also determined to maintain appearances and became a pillar of suburban society, both as chairman of the Women’s Institute in Bangor and of the ‘B&P’ (or the Business and Professional Club). David Montgomery – who later became an important Trimble ally as Chief Executive of Mirror Group Newspapers which owned the News Letter and who grew up 100 yards away from the Trimble family – recalls that they ‘epitomised the Ballyholme-Shandon Drive society and were much more visibly upmarket than we were’.²⁷ If so, it was relative privilege, for when Trimble entered Ballyholme Primary School, he was conscious of residing outside that catchment area and of coming from slightly the wrong side of the tracks. He may not have wanted for any essentials, but his home could not be said to have been ‘earth’s recurring paradise’ – to quote Tennyson’s poem ‘Helen’s Tower’, about the folly built near Bangor by the First Marquess of Dufferin and Ava.²⁸

The Trimble household could not, in the old Ulster phrase, be described as especially ‘good living’ – in the sense that alcohol, smoking and theatregoing were obviously indulged. Likewise, profane music and books were allowed on Sundays.²⁹ But certain traditional practices and forms were nonetheless observed. The family worshipped at Trinity Second Presbyterian Congregation of Bangor, whose minister John T. Carson had written several volumes, including a school story entitled Presbyterian and Proud Of It and God’s River In Spate, a study of the 1859 religious awakening known as the Year of Grace; in 1966, he was called to the Moderatorial Chair of the General Assembly. Carson was in the forefront of the moderate evangelicalism of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland in the post-war era and Trimble was an enthusiastic congregant from his teenaged years through to his mid-twenties. Between the ages of eleven and fourteen, Trimble spent part of several Christmas holidays at the interdenominational Belfast Bible College and attended morning and evening services every Sunday and at midweek, as well as special services: according to Iain Trimble, he was undoubtedly the most observant member of the family.³⁰ He was also ‘headhunted’ for a variety of tasks by the kirk authorities, of whom the most influential was Michael Brunyate, an Englishman who worked as an engineer at Harland and Wolff. Trinity wanted to attract more holidaymakers to its services and to that end, the young Trimble assisted Brunyate in rigging up the sound system to blare out hymns on Main Street: because of copyright problems, they had to pre-record their own devotional music.³¹ But this was not just a pastime for an awkward, bookish teenager: Trimble recalls that he was a genuine ‘fundamentalist’, asserting the literal truth of the Bible. Moreover, he was a ‘creationist’ – in the sense of believing it to be an accurate description of the order in which God created the world, though he always entertained doubts about the precise six-day timespan (he remains doubtful about Darwinian evolutionary theory to this day, but on intellectual rather than theological grounds). He would continue to be an ardent church-goer until the late sixties – though he declines to say why he stopped, on the grounds that it would be ‘too complex’ to explain.³² Notwithstanding his often excellent memory, he would make a reluctant, even poor witness for the likes of Anthony Clare.

Perhaps because of the uneasy relationship with his parents, and his lack of coordination, Trimble was thrown back on his own resources at an early age. This self-sufficiency took both intellectual and emotional forms. Certainly, books were the safest refuge of all from family and contemporaries alike. His siblings recall him poring endlessly over war adventure stories: his brother Iain recalls that young David would read by candlelight after his parents switched off the lights at 9:00 p.m.³³ Later, he moved on to Winston Churchill’s The Unknown War, about the eastern front during the First World War, and delighted in mastering the geography and history of the obscure countries described in that volume. Yet for many years, Trimble’s knowledge of the outside world was largely derived from books. Despite his curiosity, he never holidayed overseas – apart from a couple of school-trips to Austria and Germany – until he married Daphne Orr in 1978. His parents could afford only cycling holidays in the Mourne Mountains or the Trossachs, where the entire family would stay in youth hostels.³⁴

Such mastery of detail may have been entirely theoretical, but it served Trimble well in his own home. He established his pre-eminence in the house as much through a natural ability with words and his excellent memory, as through physical force. ‘You could never argue with David because he always retained any information,’ recalls Iain Trimble, who left home at fifteen to join the RAF as an apprentice photographer. ‘He would always know more than you did. Which was quite frustrating. But it had the effect on me that if David said something, I’d believe it.’ Whether the issue at hand was the Munich air disaster of 1958, the Floyd Patterson – Ingemar Johansson fight, or Elvis Presley, the young Trimble acquired an encyclopaedic mastery of the details.³⁵ Trimble is often called an intellectual snob, but this is not quite right: he could more accurately be described as a knowledge snob, whatever the subject. Even today, notes Daphne Trimble, ‘he can be quite happy spending the evening at home reading, without exchanging a word with anybody in the family’.³⁶

Such traits and interests set Trimble apart from his contemporaries at an early age – first at the Central Primary, then at Ballyholme Primary. In consequence, Trimble’s mother entertained hopes that he might attend Campbell College (one of Northern Ireland’s leading independent schools). Such aspirations were short-lived – especially after his father pointed out that they could not afford travel costs, let alone the fees. But he passed the 11-plus – the only one of the three Trimble children to do so – and in the autumn of 1956 he began at Bangor Grammar. Located within 100 yards of home, at College Avenue, it was an all-boys school of 350–400 pupils. Following his successful interview in June of that year, the headmaster, Randall Clarke – a former housemaster at Campbell College – wrote at the time that the young Trimble was possessed of good speech and manners. In appearance, he was neat and red-headed. He added that he was ‘over-studious and over-conscientious. Nice child. Highly intelligent. Precocious.’ He wondered: ‘Has he been pushed too much?’³⁷

The remark may have said something about the Trimble household, but it also said something about the prevailing ethos of Bangor Grammar: Jim Driscoll, who came to Bangor Grammar from Ballymena Academy in 1952 to teach Classics, found that ‘to a certain extent, it reflected the tone of a holiday town’.³⁸ This, of course, is precisely what it was. Bangor, known in the 19th century as ‘the Brighton of the North’, was a quiet seaside resort of faded grandeur; some of the older people then had never even been to Belfast. True, Bangor Abbey, founded in 558 by St Comgall, had been one the centres of learning in medieval Europe – which explains why the spot is one of only four places in Ireland referred to in the late twelfth-century Mappa Mundi.³⁹ By the 1950s any such academic distinction was mostly a thing of the past and university entrants, let alone Oxbridge awards, were then comparatively rare. But such qualifications were not really needed: higher education was the exception rather than the norm and, as Jim Driscoll recalls, most school-leavers had little difficulty in finding jobs.⁴⁰ Its proudest achievements were in sports and to this day, two of the most celebrated Old Bangorians are still Dick Milliken, the former British Lion, and Terry Neill, the football player and manager. Nor does the school appear to make much of its other famous politicians: one was H.M. Pollock, the first Finance Minister of Northern Ireland, and the other was Brian Faulkner, who attended Bangor Grammar briefly before completing his education at St Columba’s in Dublin. Faulkner was the last Unionist politician who attempted an ‘historic compromise’ with Irish nationalism in 1973–4, and destroyed himself politically in the process.⁴¹