‘Faith and Fatherland’: The rise and fall of the Ancient Order of Hibernians in the North East of England, 1904-1918.

On Saturday afternoon 22 March 1908, Tom Kettle, Irish Parliamentary Party MP for East Tyrone, arrived at Shield Row station from Newcastle upon Tyne to be met by crowds of onlookers, a colliery brass band, local politicians and Catholic clergy, regalia-adorned members of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, and Monaghan-born Patrick Duffy, local builder, Stanley town councillor, and president of the Order’s Durham and Northumberland District.^[1] Kettle had first visited Stanley, a coal mining town in north-west Durham, six months before at Duffy’s invitation to lay a foundation stone. Now he was back for the official opening of Stanley’s Hibernian Hall that would, Kettle predicted, become the ‘centre’ of Irish Catholic social and political life in the town.

Today, though long abandoned by Stanley’s Catholic population, the town’s Hibernian Hall remains on Station Road as a reminder of the phenomenal growth and influence of the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH) in the North East of England. In the decade before 1914, the Order grew there from five to forty branches and, as confirmation of the North East’s central role in the Order in Britain, James McLarney of Jarrow had been appointed National Secretary and Patrick Duffy elected as Provincial Director of England.^[2]

This post will explore the rise of the Ancient Order of Hibernians in the North East of England from its origins in the nineteenth century to the summit of its influence in the autumn of 1914, as thousands of Irish Catholic men from across the region enlisted in the British Army in support of John Redmond and Home Rule. Whilst the AOH’s rise had been meteoric, its collapse, however, was even more dramatic, as first the Easter Rising and then the crushing of the Irish Parliamentary Party by Sinn Féin in the 1918 general election left the Order, already critically weakened by a wartime fall in membership, on ‘the wrong side of nationalist politics’ and no longer relevant to the needs of the majority of Irish men and women.^[3]

In January 1914, as the crisis over the exclusion of Ulster from Irish Home Rule intensified, threatening civil war in Ireland, Captain James Craig – MP and future first Prime Minister of Northern Ireland – told a crowded unionist meeting in Jarrow that the stark choice facing Ulster was ‘to stick to the Empire or join the Molly Maguir[e]s and be a republic’.^[4] And Craig’s audience would have known exactly, who the ‘Mollies’ were, as this was the unionists’ derogatory name for the Ancient Order of Hibernians.^[5]

Whilst the AOH, however, may have indignantly rejected outright any comparison with the Molly Maguires, a violent Irish Catholic secret society operating in the Pennsylvania coalfields in the 1870s, the Order claimed, though with little real evidence of continuity, that its origins lay in the secret Catholic Ribbon societies of the early nineteenth century.^[6] These had evolved by mid-century into ‘quasi-legitimate Hibernian friendly, burial, and mutual societies’, and thence by the end of the century into what has been described as ‘both a sanitised version of Ribbonism and a green version of the Orange Order’.^[7] And, indeed, the Irish police in 1890 supported this version of history, recording that ‘the AOH was simply a new name for the Ribbon societies of old’.^[8]

Even within its Ulster heartland, however, the AOH remained small, limited by its continuing proscription by the Irish Catholic hierarchy as a forbidden secret society and weakened by poor central administration. During his visit to the United States in 1902, however, Joseph Devlin, Irish Parliamentary Party MP for North Kilkenny, had seen there a rich and powerful Ancient Order of Hibernians and believed that the AOH in Ireland could be transformed into a popular and widespread organisation that would have a key role in Irish nationalist politics committed to Home Rule.

In 1904, the Church’s ban on membership was finally lifted and the Board of Erin, the AOH’s governing body in Ireland, appointed a national secretary, who set about writing a constitution. The following year, at the Order’s convention in Dublin, the new constitution was approved, Devlin was elected national president, and the expansion of the Order across Ireland and Britain began.

When the convention met in July 1905, there were only 118 AOH divisions or branches in Ireland and Britain with some 10,000 members.^[9] By 1913, the AOH had been approved as a friendly society under the 1911 National Insurance Act, membership was over 130,000, and the Order had become ‘the most important popular political power bloc in nationalist Ireland’.^[10]

The key to the Order’s success, however, was that it was not just a political organisation but combined constitutional nationalist politics with Catholic devotion and ethos and Irish heritage and culture, and all within a communal social life that recognised the growing importance of respectability to many within the Irish diaspora. Added to this, the Order, as a friendly society, offered its members or ‘brothers’, welfare benefits (subject to conditions) of ten shillings per week for sickness, ten pounds for a brother’s death, and six pounds for the death of a brother’s wife. And all for a contribution of six pence per week.^[11]

New members had to be ‘practical’ Catholics, Irish or of Irish descent, and supporters of Home Rule.^[12]  Once approved, brothers could attend regular political discussions and lectures or enjoy concerts, smokers, billiards, dances, and other entertainments. And all, usually, under the watchful eye of the division’s chaplain from the local presbytery, alert to any intemperance. Divisions met in halls, public houses, and school rooms decorated with the nationalist iconography of harps, shamrocks, heroic portraits, and mottoes, especially the Order’s own motto ‘Faith and Fatherland’.^[13] By 1915, divisions in Ireland and Britain had bought or specially built four hundred halls, like Stanley’s Hibernian Hall – the very peak of a division’s achievement.  

The first division of the Ancient Order of Hibernians in the North East of England was formed in 1904   in a County Durham shipbuilding town on the River Tyne that has featured repeatedly in Exiles in England – Jarrow. This town was already home to the ‘Wolfe Tone’ branch of the United Irish League of Great Britain (UILGB),^[14] and to the North East’s first branch of the Gaelic League,^[15] when a demonstration was held in September 1903 to celebrate the centenary of Robert Emmet’s failed rebellion in Dublin.^[16] Organised by the ‘Wolfe Tone’ branch, on the platform were the branch’s officers, including Councillors John O’Connor and John Casey, and Hugh Tierney, who was also secretary of the town’s Gaelic League.^[17] And the main speaker was Joseph Devlin MP, recently returned from his American tour.^[18] What was discussed with Devlin during his visit to Jarrow is unknown, but, when the AOH convention was held in Belfast in October 1904, a delegate from Jarrow was present, evidence  that a division then existed in the town.^[19]

This division met in the Rolling Mill Tavern on Jarrow’s Western Road, and a newspaper report of a smoking concert held there in January 1905 for over one hundred brothers and their guests captured the ethos of the Order:

‘The large club room was splendidly laid out for the occasion, idealism being given to the decorations by a large green flag displaying the harp and shamrock, and having as centrepiece a splendid representation of the Great Liberator [Daniel O’Connell]. The room was crowded to excess, and in a financial, social, and patriotic sense the event proved a most unprecedented success… The proceedings were carried out in a most enthusiastic and orderly manner, quite becoming the traditions of an Irish Catholic assembly.’

In the chair was John O’Connor, who reminded his audience that ‘the dawn of freedom was at hand, and urged them to unite themselves together in the common duty to the cause’. Music, songs, and recitations followed, all ‘solely restricted to the Irish patriotic standard’.

Other towns in the North East followed Jarrow’s lead and formed AOH divisions, and in November 1905 delegates from Jarrow, Newcastle, Wallsend, Walker, and Blackhill (Consett) met in the Half Moon Hotel in Newcastle.^[20] In the chair was AOH National Vice-President, Owen Kiernan, who said that the delegates agreeing to form a ‘county board’ for the Northumberland and Durham District would spur the growth of the Order across the region for ‘the immense social, National, and religious good to their kith and kin’. Kiernan, who was also the UILGB’s Northern organiser, then urged all AOH brothers to join the League in its support of the Irish Parliamentary Party because then ‘they would be true Hibernians, helpful to their country as well as themselves’.^[21]

By December 1906, new AOH divisions had been formed in Stanley, Port Clarence, Bedlington, Leadgate, and Middlesbrough’s South Bank, and new divisions continued to be opened across the North East until 1914.^[22] In addition from 1911, Ladies’ Auxiliaries were formed by some divisions.^[23]

For Joseph Devlin and the Hibernian leadership, Irish Home Rule was the ultimate political goal, but it is likely that for the Order’s rank and file membership in England it was the education of their children. In 1902, the Conservative government’s Education Act, enthusiastically supported by the English Catholic hierarchy, replaced the old School Boards with Local Education Authorities and absorbed the staffing and running costs of voluntary schools, in spite of opposition from the Liberals and their Nonconformist supporters, who denounced this financial support as ‘Rome on the Rates’.^[24] When the Liberals returned to government in December 1905, this favourable settlement was threatened, and the Catholic bishops urged their flocks to oppose any change. The AOH took no urging.

In Bedlington, the local division condemned the Liberal government’s Education Bill as ‘an outrage on Catholic liberty of conscience’.^[25] Whilst in Consett, at a Sunday afternoon meeting in St. Patrick’s school organised by the local division, the following resolution was agreed:^[26]

‘We, the parents of 700 Catholic children attending St. Patrick’s Schools, Consett, require these schools to remain Catholic in every sense of the word, and that they be neither leased, let, nor assigned to any non-Catholic education authority.’

And in 1913, Dean Augustine Magill of Brooms, who was instrumental in the formation of the AOH division in Leadgate and who had previously been headmaster of St. Cuthbert’s School in Newcastle,^[27] told a crowded open-air meeting in Durham that Catholic education was ‘the final issue of the Catholic cause in England’, and advised his audience that, at future County Council elections, all candidates should be asked to pledge themselves ‘to do justice to Catholics’.^[28]

Whilst the original Ribbonmen had remained hidden in the shadows, their Hibernian successors on Tyneside were prepared to show themselves in public. In the 1840s and 1850s, the Newcastle Hibernian Benevolent Society paraded on St. Patrick’s Day with banners and bands to St. Mary’s chapel on Clayton Street, before the Hibernians, wearing scarves of ‘green and white silk’ decorated with shamrocks, dispersed to their own meeting houses.^[29] The Ancient Order of Hibernians built on this tradition, making parades a central part of its life, a visual expression of the Order’s Irish Catholic identity and a demonstration of the Order’s strength, confidence, religious devotion, and, especially, its social respectability. Parades were held regularly, with the grandest held on St. Patrick’s Day (17 March) and Lady Day (15 August).

A Lady Day parade in 1909, organised by the Wallsend division, was supported by divisions from across the North East.^[30] According to the effusive newspaper report, the parade was watched by crowds ‘who gazed with admiration and wonder on the long line comprising the flower of Irish Catholic manhood in the North’. At the head of the parade were two marshals ‘carrying pikes’, followed by the local division’s chaplain and Patrick Duffy, the Order’s Provincial Director of England. A fife and drum band from Jarrow came next, followed by a landau bearing four young women dressed in white and green with headdress of wreaths, representing the four Irish provinces. Then, finally, headed by a ‘splendid’ banner loaned by the Port of Glasgow’s Hibernians, came the marching members of ten Hibernian divisions, headed by their officers.

But parades were also held on Whit Sunday,^[31] in memory of the Manchester Martyrs,^[32] in support of Catholic education,^[33] and to provide a guard of honour for the Bishop of Hexham and Newcastle.^[34] Sisters marched as well as brothers, all in the distinctive green and gold regalia of the Order,^[35] and it was claimed that two thousand marched in South Shields in June 1914 in celebration of the passing of the third Home Rule Bill in parliament.^[36]

In August 1913, the first AOH Convention to be held in England met in the Irish National Club in Newcastle. During an evening reception, Alderman John O’Hanlon, who was president of the Northumberland and Durham District and who had unsuccessfully stood as an Irish nationalist in the Jarrow parliamentary by-election in 1907, said that in the past the Order ‘had been sneered at and attempts had been made to discredit it, but every obstacle had been got over, every libel refuted’, and that now ‘the order had increased its strength and prominence all over the world’.^[37] And indeed, the Order was thriving as never before with new divisions forming and new members joining, many of whom were women and youths. Thus, in South Shields, a ‘juvenile branch’ was formed for boys aged 14 to 16 years,^[38] and by April 1914, fifteen Ladies’ Auxiliaries had been raised in the North East,^[39] whilst new divisions were formed in Ashington and Thornley,^[40] with possibly the last, new division opened in Blyth in August 1914.^[41]

After war was declared in August 1914, ‘recruiting fever’ swept through Britain,^[42] and in the North East ‘recruiting offices… suddenly overflowed with Irish youths, rushing to get a share in the fighting’.^[43] The deleterious impact of this on the Order’s membership was reported in May 1915 by James McLarney, then General Secretary of the AOH’s English province. He said that on average 20 per cent of the membership of the Northumberland and Durham District had enlisted, whilst several divisions in the Durham coalfield had suffered an even greater loss of membership, with Dipton, near Stanley, losing 40 per cent, and in Easington in east Durham, out of a pre-war membership of 85, only six brothers (7 per cent) had not enlisted.^[44] After the war, Patrick Duffy claimed that of the 140 Hibernians in  Stanley in August 1914, 52 (37 per cent) had ‘promptly enlisted in Kitchener’s Army’.^[45]

The UILGB’s annual report in October 1915 also noted with concern the fall in membership and many, if not the majority of the League’s members, would have also been Hibernians.^[46] This report claimed that 150,000 Irish in Britain had so far enlisted, with ‘the outstanding feature of the Irish rush to the Colours’ being the Tyneside Irish Brigade of 5,400 men. The report also claimed that in Scotland ‘several branches of the United Irish League and Ancient Order of Hibernians have ceased to exist owing to the large number of their members who have gone to the army’.^[47]

In early 1916, John Dillon Nugent, MP for Dublin College Green and the AOH’s National Secretary, held a series of public meetings across the North East to boost membership. Whilst stressing that his purpose was to ‘further’ increase an ‘already strong membership’, his bullish confidence had clearly slipped, when he told a meeting in Newcastle that he was there ‘to plead for Irishmen to join an Irish society’.^[48] Nugent was accompanied on his tour of the region by Alderman O’Hanlon, James McLarney and Mary McDermott, a South Shields secondary school teacher, who was also president of her local Ladies’ Auxiliary and the district’s Auxiliary organiser. With so many men away, the Hibernians hoped to increase women’s membership and the newspaper reports of these meetings refer to the number of women present, though how many women subsequently joined the Order was not recorded.^[49]

Nugent’s tour of the North East had barely finished, when the Easter Rising began. On 27 April 1916, as the rebellion raged in Dublin, John Redmond, leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, spoke of his feelings of ‘detestation and horror’ at the unfolding events in Ireland, and informed parliament that these sentiments were shared ‘by the overwhelming mass of the people of Ireland’.^[50] This speech clearly found its mark on Tyneside, prompting the leading nationalists, including John O’Hanlon, president of the AOH’s Northumberland and Durham District, to send Redmond a telegram of support.^[51]

Hibernian divisions hastily met to condemn the rebellion and affirm their confidence in Redmond’s leadership. On Teesside, a combined meeting of Middlesbrough’s and South Bank’s Hibernians passed a resolution expressing ‘our disgust and indignation at the attempt by a (so called) section of Irishmen, who by their revolutionary action have tried to discredit the prestige of Irish nationalism before the world’.^[52] This reaction was echoed in Stanley, where a meeting chaired by Patrick Duffy sympathised with ‘the overwhelming majority of the Irish people on account of the insane disloyal conduct of a section of our countrymen in the present Imperial crisis’.^[53] None of the North East’s AOH divisions publicly condemned the execution of the rebel leaders nor the indiscriminate arrests and deportations in Ireland that followed the Rising.

As the war continued, so its adverse impact on the AOH intensified, causing James McLarney in March 1917 to lament that so many Hibernians had joined the Tyneside Irish that the Order had suffered both ‘the loss of the flower of its manhood’ and ‘its funds’.^[54] As a result of the falling membership, a drive was begun to recruit school leavers, whilst sickness and funeral funds were centralised to support those divisions suffering the greatest loss of members and funds, and weakened divisions amalgamated.^[55]

Meanwhile, in the fallout from the Easter Rising, Irish politics had been transformed. Nationalists were no longer demanding Home Rule but self-determination, and the result of this transformation was the Irish electorate’s rejection in December 1918 of the Irish Parliamentary Party and its supporters, including the Ancient Order of Hibernians, as ‘relics of the pre-revolutionary past’.^[56] In the North East of England, however, the Order did not disappear overnight, but gradually dwindled, as Irish Catholics found it increasingly irrelevant to their needs and turned to other Catholic and political organisations to satisfy those needs.^[57]

These Catholic organisations included the Catenians,^[58] the Catholic Benefit and Thrift Society,^[59] the Catholic Social Guild,^[60] the Catholic Young Men’s Society,^[61] and, especially, the Knights of St. Columba. This was a fraternal, non-political society formed in Ireland in 1919.^[62] By 1924, there were 10,000 members in Britain,and at a dinner that year for Jarrow’s St. Bede’s council (branch), James McLarney, formerly an AOH stalwart, was in the chair, and the guest of honour was John Gorman, formerly of Newcastle’s AOH division,^[63] and now the Knight’s Northern Provincial Deputy.^[64]

As the AOH dwindled, some Hibernians found a home for their nationalism and their labour politics in the Irish Labour Party. Coal miner William McAnany, whose father had been president of Tyne Dock’s AOH division, joined this division in 1913.^[65] He was also a pre-war member of the town’s UILGB branch. McAnany joined the Catholic Social Guild in 1917,^[66] and subsequently was a founding member of the Irish Labour Party on Tyneside.^[67] In April 1919, McAnany was elected to the South Shields’ Board of Guardians,^[68] along with other Irish Labour Party members, one of whom was Mary McDermott, who had formerly been the AOH’s Ladies’ Auxiliary district organiser.

More advanced nationalists, however, found a home in the Irish Self-Determination League (ISDL), which was committed to an Irish Republic. Terence O’Connor was a member of Jarrow’s AOH division,^[69] and was the pre-war president of the town’s UILGB branch.^[70] O’Connor, who was possibly a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood,^[71] joined the ISDL on its formation, and from February 1920 was treasurer of the League’s Tyneside District.^[72] Though the ISDL collapsed following the creation of the Irish Free State, O’Connor remained a leading member of the anti-Treaty rump of the League on Tyneside until at least 1923.^[73]

Following the end of the Irish Civil War in May 1923, the ISDL and, a few years later, the Irish Labour Party ceased to exist. For the majority of the North East’s Irish Catholics, with nationalism no longer an issue, the Labour Party then came to represent their political aspirations.^[74]

After 1918, though the Ancient Order of Hibernians had had its day, the Order stuttered on in the North East and in 1931, two hundred Hibernians, wearing green sashes emblazoned with the old slogan ‘God Save Ireland’, marched to St. Andrew’s church in Newcastle on St. Patrick’s Day.^[75] Then in 1934 Joseph Devlin, whose vision and energy had made the Ancient Order of Hibernians before the Great War the ‘pre-eminent expression of political Irish, Catholic nationalism in Britain’, died.^[76] His requiem mass in Newcastle’s St. Mary’s cathedral was, probably, the last great Hibernian display on Tyneside.^[77] When the last of the North East’s divisions finally closed is unknown.

_{Ancient Order of Hibernians: North East of England Divisions, 1904-1914.}

_{Above table sourced from newspaper reports between 1904 and 1914.}

_{In 1914, there were, at least, 40 AOH Divisions in the North East and 15 Ladies’ Auxiliaries.^[78]}

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[1] Consett Guardian, 27 March 1908.

[2] Weekly Freeman’s Journal, 9 August 1913; Tyneside Catholic News, 21 February 1914.

[3] Martin O’Donoghue, ‘‘Faith and Fatherland’ – The Ancient Order of Hibernians and Home Rule decline in Four Nations’ (2017), https://fournationshistory.wordpress.com/2017/07/24/faith-and-fatherland-the-ancient-order-of-hibernians-and-home-rule-decline-in-four-nations/

[4] Shields Daily Gazette & Shipping Telegraph, 30 January 1914.

[5] A.C. Hebburn, Catholic Belfast and Nationalist Ireland in the Era of Joe Devlin, 1871-1934 (Oxford, 2008), p. 91.

[6] Kyle Hughes and Donald M. MacRaild, Ribbon Societies in Nineteenth-Century Ireland and its Diaspora (Liverpool, 2018), p. 2.

[7] Ibid., pp. 7, 293.

[8] Ibid., p. 21.

[9] Michael Thomas Foy, ‘The Ancient Order of Hibernians: An Irish political-religious pressure group 1884-1975’, MA thesis, Queen’s University, Belfast, 1976, pp. 87-9.

[10] Hughes & MacRaild, Ribbon Societies, p. 298.

[11] Morpeth Herald, 28 November 1908.

[12] From the General Rules of the AOH (BOE) Friendly Society, 1907. Daniel McCurdy, ‘The Ancient Order of Hibernians in Ulster, 1905-18’, PhD thesis, Ulster University, Belfast, 2019, p. 101.

[13] McCurdy, PhD thesis, p. 124.

[14] South Shields Daily Gazette, 11 November 1902.

[15] Sunderland Daily Echo, 10 January 1902.

[16] South Shields Daily Gazette, 21 September 1903.

[17] Irish News & Belfast Morning News, 29 September 1903.

[18] South Shields Daily Gazette, 21 September 1903.

[19] Freeman’s Journal, 8 October 1904.

[20] Irish News & Belfast Morning News, 15 November1905. The Half Moon’s tenant was Hugh McGuinness, who was the first treasurer of Newcastle’s AOH division. Irish News & Belfast Morning News, 1 December 1905.

[21] In 1905, several members of Jarrow’s AOH division were expelled for holding ‘advanced separatist opinions’ (they were reading Arthur Griffith’s United Irishman newspaper), rather than supporting the Hibernians’ approved constitutional demand for Home Rule. Bureau of Military History, Dublin, Witness Statement WS222, Daniel Branniff, pp. 1-2.

[22] A division in Blyth may have been the last formed. Tyneside Catholic News, 22 August 1914.

[23] One of the first Ladies’ Auxiliaries in the North East was formed in Bedlington. Morpeth Herald, 28 July 1911.

[24] Michael Morris and Leo Gooch, Down Your Aisles, The Diocese of Hexham and Newcastle, 1850-2000 (Hartlepool, 2000), pp. 25-6.

[25] Morpeth Herald, 26 May 1906.

[26] Irish News & Belfast Morning News, 7 March 1906.

[27] Tyneside Catholic News, 11 September 1915.

[28] Durham Chronicle, 6 August 1909.

[29] Newcastle Courant, 20 March 1846; Durham County Advertiser, 23 March 1855.

[30] The divisions were from Wallsend, Newcastle, Jarrow, Bedlington, Sunderland, Consett, Stanley, Walker, North Shields, and Hebburn. Irish News & Belfast Morning News, 21 August 1909.

[31] Parade in Bedlington. Morpeth Herald, 5 June 1914.

[32] Parade in Stanley. Catholic Times and Catholic Opinion, 4 December 1908.

[33] Demonstration on Newcastle’s Town Moor. Irish News & Belfast Morning News, 30 July 1906.

[34] Parade in Willington Quay. Irish News & Belfast Morning News, 14 June 1906; parade in Jarrow. Jarrow Express & Tyneside Advertiser, 6 February 1914.

[35] Tyneside Catholic News, 9 May 1914.

[36] Fifteen divisions took part: Bedlington, Ashington, Blyth, Jarrow, Hebburn, Wallsend, Newcastle, Stanley, Dipton, Westwood (Consett), Easington, Horden, Thornley, Seaham Harbour, and South Shields. Morpeth Herald, 26 June 1914; Tyneside Catholic News, 27 June 1914.

[37] Tyneside Catholic News, 9 August 1913.

[38] Notice Book, St. Bede’s RC Church, South Shields, 27 April 1913, Tyne & Wear Archives, Newcastle, C.SS 29/11/13.

[39] Tyneside Catholic News, 4 April 1914.

[40] Tyneside Catholic News, 27 June 1914.

[41] Tyneside Catholic News, 22 August 1914.

[42] Peter Simkins, Kitchener’s Army: The raising of the New Armies, 1914-16 (Manchester, 1988), pp. 64, 89.

[43] Joseph Keating, ‘The Tyneside Irish Brigade: History of its Origin and Development’, in Felix Lavery, Irish Heroes in the War (London, 1917), p. 76.

[44] Tyneside Catholic News, 8 May 1915; there were 58 Tyneside Irish recruits from Easington/Easington Colliery, and 45 from Dipton. John Sheen, Tyneside Irish Database (unpublished, 2011).

[45] Auckland and County Chronicle and Stanley News, 6 March 1919.

[46] For example, Thomas Archbold, who presided at Trimdon’s Hibernian social, was also vice-president of the local UILGB branch. Tyneside Catholic News, 31 January & 18 April 1914.

[47] Southern Star, 30 October 1915.

[48] Weekly Freeman’s Journal, 4 March 1916.

[49] Newcastle Daily Journal, 11 February 1916; South Shields Daily Gazette, 14 February 1916; Tyneside Catholic News, 30 September 1916; Weekly Freeman’s Journal, 4 March 1916.

[50] Stephen Lucius Gwynn, John Redmond’s Last Years (London, 1919), pp. 223-4.

[51] Newcastle Evening Chronicle, 29 April 1916.

[52] Daily Gazette for Middlesbrough, 3 May 1916.

[53] Newcastle Evening Chronicle, 3 May 1916.

[54] Weekly Freeman’s Journal, 7 April 1917.

[55] On Tyneside, the Walker and Wallsend divisions were ‘reorganised’, i.e. amalgamated. These were two of the original North East divisions of 1904. Weekly Freeman’s Journal, 14 April 1917.

[56] John Belchem, Irish, Catholic and Scouse: The History of the Liverpool-Irish, 1800-1939 (Liverpool, 2007), p. 263.

[57] In June 1919, the Northumberland and Durham District had a total of 1,492 male and 201 female members. Weekly Freeman’s Journal, 28 June 1919.

[58] Catholic Times and Catholic Opinion (Liverpool edition), 25 February 1919.

[59] Newcastle Evening Chronicle, 28 August 1922.

[60] Catholic Times and Catholic Opinion (London edition), 9 September 1922.

[61] Newcastle Evening Chronicle, 30 September 1922.

[62] Knights of St. Columba, https://ksc.org.uk/

[63] Nottingham & Midland Catholic News, 8 February 1920.

[64] Weekly Freeman’s Journal, 2 February 1924.

[65] Tyneside Catholic News, 25 January 1913; Nottingham & Midland Catholic News, 3 May 1913.

[66] Tyneside Catholic News, 6 October 1917.

[67] Wearside Catholic News, 23 November 1918.

[68] Tyneside Catholic News, 19 April 1919.

[69] Nottingham & Midland Catholic News, 24 May 1913.

[70] Jarrow Guardian, 13 August 1909.

[71] Letter (undated, c.1936?) written by Terence O’Connor in support of an application for a military pension for J. J. King, Bureau of Military History, Military Service Pensions Collection, MSP34REF45159, John Joseph King.

[72] Tyneside Catholic News, 10 January 1920.

[73] Jarrow ISDL, Minute Book, 1922-23, 13 April 1923.

[74] After 1922, Irish voters ‘simply fell in behind the Labour Party’, D. George Boyce, The Irish Question and British Politics, 1868-1996 (Basingstoke, 1996, 2^nd edition), p. 78, quoted in Mo Moulton, Ireland and the Irish in Interwar England (Cambridge, 2014), p. 260.

[75] Newcastle Chronicle & Northern Mail, 16 March 1931.

[76] Hughes & MacRaild, Ribbon Societies, pp. 21, 299.

[77] Irish Weekly & Ulster Examiner, 3 February 1934.

[78] Tyneside Catholic News, 21 February & 4 April 1914.