Hayton on Kelly, 'The Sieges of Derry'


W. P. Kelly, ed. The Sieges of Derry. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2001. 144 pp. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-85182-510-3.

Reviewed by D. W. Hayton (School of Modern History, The Queen's University of Belfast)
Published on H-Albion (September, 2001)

Following the Drum

Following the Drum

The 1990s witnessed several significant commemorations in Ireland. In particular, the sesquicentenary of the Great Famine and the bicentenary of the 1798 rebellion each gave rise to a shower of conferences, events, exhibitions, and publications. In turn, participation in the process of commemoration prompted historians to reflect upon, and to investigate, the historical experience of commemoration itself. The volume under consideration here was presumably conceived as a contribution to both genres, for it consists of accounts of some of the events surrounding the siege of Derry in 1689, and extended commentary on the ways in which this dramatic episode has been remembered and re-enacted in Ulster. But, it is a mixed bag, to say the least, and the cumulative effect is not very enlightening.

Only two essays are concerned with the background and immediate consequences of the siege. The editor, W.P. Kelly, provides a detailed narrative of a previous, "forgotten" siege in 1649, of the Roundhead forces under Sir Charles Coote, who had taken Derry on behalf of the English parliament. This is interesting enough, but its implications for understanding the commemoration of the more familiar events of 1689 must be indirect and conjectural. The Scottish historian J.R. Young is, surprisingly, the only contributor to direct his attention to the Jacobite siege, but his approach is also oblique, for he seeks to provide a Scottish perspective, drawing together references from Scottish parliamentary records and some other contemporary sources in order to understand how Scots responded to events across the North Channel. The conclusions--emphasizing familial and commercial links between Presbyterians in Scotland and Ulster, a shared outlook and sincere sympathies--will surprise no one. In practice, the Scots were able to do little or nothing to influence the course of the siege and its relief.

The history of commemoration fares little better. Serving as an introduction to the volume is a brief historical survey by T.G. Fraser, evidently a third recycling of a paper which the author declares his intention of using yet again. There follows a similar though more substantial piece by Jim Smyth, who traces the historiography of the siege in more detail but offers little advance on Ian McBride's recent book on the subject. (The Siege of Derry in Ulster Protestant Mythology [Dublin, 1997]). By way of justification, Smyth concludes by dismissing the naive aspirations to objectivity of "revisionist" historians who fail to recognize their own prejudices and agendas. This is rhetoric rather than argument and is in effect a non sequitur, since it does not derive perceptibly from the material in the essay. By contrast, Brendan Mac Suibhne offers an intriguing, and indeed surprising, account, based closely on contemporary sources, of popular political celebrations in Derry in 1779-80, some of which were related specifically to commemoration of the siege. These occasions were inspired and partly organized by the Volunteers, those "patriotic" Protestant paramilitaries who took up the cause of free trade and Irish legislative independence, and were also strongly supported by a local newspaper, the Londonderry Journal, and its enthusiastic proprietor, George Douglas. Mac Suibhne's contention is that these episodes reveal the "patriotism" of Derry's Presbyterians to have been not only self-consciously "Irish" but vigorously anti-British. If true, this would be a remarkably early example of such national fervor, and a stark contrast to what was happening elsewhere in Ulster in the 1770s; as for example, when Presbyterian voters in County Antrim serenaded the successful "independent" candidate in the 1776 general election with such "patriotic" ditties as "Britons strike home." Unfortunately, the evidential base employed by Mac Suibhne is slender, derived entirely from the columns of the Journal, and there is little contextualization. In particular, Mac Suibhne makes much of the long-standing animosity between Church of Ireland Protestants and presbyterians, but makes no reference to the important distinctions within Ulster Presbyterianism, between "old" and "new light" congregations, and the seceders. His rather simplistic approach contrasts with Mark McGovern's much more sensitive analysis of Protestant political culture in Derry in the first half of the nineteenth century: a persuasive and well-informed essay which turns our attention to the influence of Protestant evangelicalism and the responses to O'Connell's emancipation crusade in stiffening the attitudes of local Presbyterians and building a political alliance between conservative Presbyterians and Anglicans. Whereas Smyth and Mac Suibhne, in trying to understand why "radical" Presbyterians became "conservative" after 1800, concentrate on the effects of the '98 and the government-inspired propaganda that followed ("What had happened between 1788 and 1829?," writes Smyth [p. 25]; "The short answer is the 1790s."), McGovern offers an explanation in religious as well as political terms, and all the more plausible for that.

The final essay on the commemorative theme, by Brian Walker, gives what is in effect a potted history of the Apprentice Boys and their activities, making good use of newspapers and some quite obscure local sources. What emerges is, first, the crucial importance of two decades, the 1840s (with O'Connell again the specter at the feast) and the 1880s, in giving impetus to the local growth of the movement in the nineteenth century, and, second, the very much greater expansion, right across Protestant Ulster, which has taken place since 1921. Walker hints at an interpretation which would follow the notion of an "invented" tradition, as developed by Eric Hobsbawm (whose name he misspells), but shies away from this at the last minute. The Apprentice Boys' commemorations are, it seems, a genuine tradition after all, even if heavily inflated in the modern era.

There is one final paper, an essay by Robert Welch on Oliver Goldsmith, but this has nothing whatsoever to say either on the siege of Derry itself or its commemoration, and seems to have wandered in from another collection. Its presence, although a mystery, is however symptomatic of general editorial slackness. There is no real introduction to the book (despite Fraser's tacked-on historical survey); and nothing at all by way of conclusion. The reader is left to infer what the general purpose and thrust of the volume might be. Nor have the editor and contributors been well served by the publisher. Production values are distressingly low: far too many errors, especially in the spelling of proper names; an absence of copy-editorial control, which allows, for example, both "Derry" and "Londonderry" to appear on the contents page and gives no explanation of why "Derry" has generally been preferred in the text; and no index. Overall, it is hard to resist the conclusion that this is a ragbag, hastily assembled by an editor and publisher in search of a book, rather than a work which has emerged after a process of reflection on the part of an editor and contributors who have something significant to say. This is a great pity: the subject is good one, but it requires from its historians more intellectual engagement than simply an eagerness to clamber aboard a bandwagon, or, to use a more appropriate metaphor perhaps, to run after a drum.

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Citation: D. W. Hayton. Review of Kelly, W. P., ed., The Sieges of Derry. H-Albion, H-Net Reviews. September, 2001.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=5460

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