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Himself Alone: David Trimble and the Ordeal Of Unionism
Dean Godson
The comprehensive and groundbreaking biography of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning politician, one of the most influential and important men in Irish political history.Please note that this edition does not include illustrations.How did David Trimble, the ‘bête noire’ of Irish nationalism and ‘bien pensant’ opinion, transform himself into a peacemaker? How did this unfashionable, ‘petit bourgeois’ Orangeman come to win a standing ovation at the Labour Party conference? How, indeed, did this taciturn academic with few real intimates succeed in becoming the leader of the least intellectual party in the United Kingdom, the Ulster Unionists? And how did he carry them with him, against the odds, to make an ‘historic compromise’ with Irish nationalism?These are just a few of the key questions about David Trimble, one of the unlikeliest and most complicated leaders of our times. Both his admirers and his detractors within the unionist family are, however, agreed on one thing: the Good Friday agreement could not have been done without him. Only he had the skills and the command of the issues to negotiate a saleable deal, and only he possessed the political credibility within the broader unionist community to lend that agreement legitimacy once it had been made.David Trimble’s achievements are extraordinary, and Dean Godson, chief leader writer of the ‘Daily Telegraph’, was granted exclusive and complete access while writing this book.
DEAN GODSON
HIMSELF ALONE
DAVID TRIMBLE
AND THE ORDEAL OF UNIONISM
DEDICATION (#ulink_577e214d-cb64-5e7c-8b9c-f47bb97943fe)
For my mother above all
but not forgetting Paul, Greta, John, Evelyn, Charlie and Gill
EPIGRAPH (#ulink_d9eb67f2-7880-5b38-9434-38861fb49c24)
I am Ulster, my people an abrupt people
Who like the spiky consonants in speech
And think the soft ones cissy; who dig
The k and t in orchestra, detect sin
In sinfonia, get a kick out of
Tin cans, fricatives, fornication, staccato talk,
Anything that gives or takes attack,
Like Micks, Tagues, tinkers’ gets, Vatican.
An angular people, brusque and Protestant,
For whom the word is still the fighting word,
Who bristle into reticence at the sound
Of the round gift of the gab in Southern mouths.
Mine were not born with silver spoons in gob,
Nor would they thank you for the gift of tongues;
The dry riposte, the bitter repartee’s
The Northman’s bite and portion, his deep sup
Is silence; though, still within his shell,
He holds the old sea-roar and surge
Of rhetoric and Holy Writ.
W. R. Rodgers; from ‘Epilogue’ in Poems,
Michael Longley (Oldcastle,
Co. Meath, 1993), pp. 106–7
‘Whatever an Ulsterman may be, he is certainly never charming, and of that fact, no one is more fully aware than the Ulsterman himself.’
F. Frankfort Moore, The Truth about Ulster
(London, 1914), p. 102
‘I’ve changed, you know.’
David Trimble to his old friend, Professor Herb Wallace,
after signing the Belfast Agreement
‘What do you want for your people?’
‘To be left alone.’
Exchange between Sean Farren, a senior nationalist politician, and David Trimble at Duisburg, in the late 1980s
CONTENTS
Cover (#udf00273a-7711-5d96-82a4-4ea9d2157865)
Title Page (#u4eed21a0-01d7-5810-a72e-55be892ba225)
Dedication (#ub50f7d48-e9af-5b1b-8a16-9b8f7dda6139)
Epigraph (#u01b49454-9682-52ff-82be-26f2c62ee628)
1. Floreat Bangoria (#uc8a2b8d3-9b85-5831-8a67-7fdade424f7f)
2. A don is born (#ua8473915-a50e-54a5-af98-60d34ff8e5b8)
3. In the Vanguard (#ua48d16ca-1ac5-59de-bb2f-7ac88de71546)
4. Ulster will fight (#u8fbac1ba-7e61-5f22-a52b-cbf60fe0f33c)
5. The changing of the Vanguard (#ueb95a73e-0a61-5509-89c9-ab3cbb31d5ec)
6. Death at Queen’s (#ud74356db-bb36-5d50-8239-504dca295f8f)
7. He doth protest too much (#u6e5463c8-f946-5b62-bed6-55c444c945f8)
8. Mr Trimble goes to London (#ud45474d2-8012-5bd5-a2be-4771a92fc383)
9. Framework or straitjacket? (#ufbc02443-7689-509a-9962-ad65e8636e05)
10. The Siege of Drumcree (I) (#u667991cf-055c-5372-a654-67841a77de92)
11. Now I am the Ruler of the UUP! (#u5948bf03-f9ef-5f65-b236-4aa45ed7dbc4)
12. The Establishment takes stock (#ua6aa7a5b-ec7f-5fa4-8e82-bad0783d9e10)
13. Something funny happened on the way to the Forum election (#ucdaf96f1-d5ef-57e9-8109-705735d04a4c)
14. Go West, young man! (#uc05d3774-75a1-58a7-8cec-5a19f70e0957)
15. ‘Binning Mitchell’ (#u0a0c7417-1aa1-5805-9964-4091f12b7179)
16. ‘Putting manners on the Brits’ (#u737dbbb3-b6a6-5770-9700-4d52a8e287d5)
17. The Yanks are coming (#u69c5eef1-f8e9-5962-9a17-4d3766ed5861)
18. The Siege of Drumcree (II) (#u7ce1f546-bbb0-558d-a028-3b5fd9418d47)
19. Fag end Toryism (#litres_trial_promo)
20. The unlikeliest Blair babe (#litres_trial_promo)
21. The pains of peace (#litres_trial_promo)
22. When Irish eyes are smiling (#litres_trial_promo)
23. Murder in the Maze (or the way out of it) (#litres_trial_promo)
24. Long Good Friday (#litres_trial_promo)
25. ‘Let the people sing’ (#litres_trial_promo)
26. A Nobel calling (#litres_trial_promo)
27. The blame game speeds up (#litres_trial_promo)
28. No way forward (#litres_trial_promo)
29. RUC RIP (#litres_trial_promo)
30. By George (#litres_trial_promo)
31. ‘And the lion shall lie down with the lamb’ (#litres_trial_promo)
32. Mandelson keeps his word (#litres_trial_promo)
33. The Stormont soufflé rises again (#litres_trial_promo)
34. In office but not in power (#litres_trial_promo)
35. A narrow escape (#litres_trial_promo)
36. The luckiest politician (#litres_trial_promo)
37. Another farewell to Stormont (#litres_trial_promo)
38. A pyrrhic victory (#litres_trial_promo)
39. Paisley triumphant (#litres_trial_promo)
40. Conclusion (#litres_trial_promo)
Glossary (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Author’s Note (#litres_trial_promo)
Notes (#litres_trial_promo)
Praise (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
ONE Floreat Bangoria (#ulink_665249fa-87ef-591a-833c-f088d4c53c1e)
WILLIAM David Trimble was born on 15 October 1944, at the Wellington Park Nursing Home in Belfast of respectable, lower-middle-class, Presbyterian stock. From his earliest years he was called David, apparently to distinguish himself from his father, William Sr. The gregarious elder Trimble was generally known as ‘Billy’, but his flinty son was to reject all such attempts to turn him into a ‘Davy’ or a ‘Dave’. He remained resolutely ‘David’. This name apparently derives from his paternal grandfather, George David Trimble, born in 1874 and a native of Co. Longford. The earliest Protestant settlement there can be traced back to the reign of James I, though there was an overspill into Co. Longford resulting from subsequent influxes of Scottish Presbyterians into Ulster at the end of the 17th and early 18th centuries. Indeed, at its pre-Famine peak, the Protestant community numbered around 14,000 and the 1831 census suggests that it comprised 9.5% of the population. As late as 1911, in the parish of Clonbroney where the Trimbles lived, Protestants comprised 18.3% of the population.
(#litres_trial_promo) It is not known when the Trimbles – a variation of the Scottish Lowland name of Turnbull – arrived in Co. Longford.
(#litres_trial_promo) But what is certain is that David Trimble’s own line of descent can be traced back to the end of the 18th century (he is not related to the Co. Fermanagh Trimbles, whose descendants own the famed Impartial Reporter and Farmers’ Journal. By coincidence, his wife is part of that extended family). Like most Protestants, the Co. Longford Trimbles and the families they married into – the Smalls, the Twaddles, the Gilpins and the Eggletons – were farmers, with a few ploughmen, stewards and underagents amongst them. The first available record is of one Alexander Trimble (DT’s great-great-grandfather) who farmed in Sheeroe, Co. Longford. His son, also called Alexander (DT’s great-grandfather), lived from 1826 to 1904 and had eight children of whom the above-mentioned George David (DT’s grandfather) was the youngest. According to Griffith’s valuation of property in Ireland, conducted in the 1850s and 1860s, Alexander Trimble (II) rented a plot from one of the Edgeworths, the main landowners in the area, comprising lands of 11 acres, 3 roods and 16 perches. Its rateable valuation was £9 and 5 shillings, with buildings thereon valued at £1 and 15 shillings. But unlike most Protestants in Co. Longford, who were adherents of the Church of Ireland, the Trimbles were staunch Presbyterians: the parish registers show that George David, DT’s grandfather, was baptised at Tully Presbyterian Church in 1875. They were thus a minority within a minority. History does not record how these Trimbles felt about the Ascendancy, in the shape of the Edgeworth family, nor about the Church of Ireland itself. If they keenly felt the disabilities long imposed upon Dissenters, it echoed down the years in odd ways: David Trimble himself never much cared for the traditional Unionist establishment.
The world of the Trimbles, like those of so many smallholders, would have been far removed from the elegiac evocations of ‘Big House’ Protestant life described by Somerville and Ross or Elizabeth Bowen. Especially during the latter half of the 19th century, they became increasingly vulnerable. There were a number of reasons for this: changing patterns in the rural economy, which led to the disappearance of farm servanthood and labouring jobs; difficulty in finding suitable local spouses, sometimes leading to intermarriage with Catholics and to conversion; and the lure of North America. Another, darker explanation for the decline in the Protestant population was the rising tide of Catholic disaffection – which took an increasingly violent form – and the attempts of some of the bigger landlords and of the British Government based in Dublin Castle to appease such anger through a variety of reforms at the Protestant smallholders’ expense.
(#litres_trial_promo) According to J.J. Lee, mid-19th-century Co. Longford was one of the six most disturbed counties in Ireland. David Fitzpatrick further states that in the immediate pre-Partition era, Sinn Fein membership in Co. Longford totalled between 600 and 1000 out of a 10,000 population, the highest of any county.
