‘The Bunkum of Ulsteria’: the Orange Marching Tradition in Late Victorian Cumbria

Abstract

The Orange march in late Victorian Cumbria might appear, at first sight, to have been an isolated, anachronistic and largely harmless expression of devotion to a dead king.¹ After all, the region was far from the main theatre of British politics, and lacked the massive early-century Irish immigrations that so influenced the Orange traditions of Liverpool and Glasgow. Yet from the mid-Victorian years, Cumbria, too, developed a large Orange movement that was noted for displays of strength that often occasioned communal unrest. It was the public belligerence of Orangemen, and their sometimes violent defence of the union, which led one Barrow nationalist, F.J. Devlin, to dismiss the movement as ‘the bunkum of Ulsteria’ and ‘a banditti of marauders, committing massacre in the name of God, exercising despotic powers in the name of liberty’.²