Ruth Dudley Edwards: I under-estimated that brave Orangeman, the Rev Martin Smyth MP
The obituaries of Martin Smyth over the last few days took me back to the 1990s when I was getting to know the loyal institutions up close.
I wasn’t much of a fan of his politics.
At a time when Sinn Fein were doing a fine job of bamboozling both the British and Irish governments, I had come to see David Trimble as the only hope for unionism.
But though centrist, Smith — an Ulster Unionist MP from 1982 — was unimaginative and in many respects seemed a hidebound hindrance.
Yet I was looking up the book I wrote about the Orange Order just now and was reminded of my achievement in tempting this Presbyterian minister into using a bad word.
During a period when the Orange Order was being torn asunder by a group of intransigent extremists called the Spirit of Drumcree, I was the first person publicly to abbreviate them to SODs.
A Sunday Times sub-editor headed my article ‘Tell the Orange Bigots to SOD off,’ and — at the subsequent Grand Lodge meeting — the Reverend Martin Smyth did just that.
Which might have inclined him to give me a helpful interview for the book I was writing about the loyal institutions.
I needed to interview the long-serving Grand Master of the Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland.
I wasn't looking forward to it, but I remember our meeting in the House of Commons positively, for as Imperial Grand Master and Imperial Grand President (the Orange Order, like most fraternal organisations, are very hot on titles), he brought home to me its internationalism.
“One could go to any part of the world and find a relationship immediately,” he said.
“Oh, yes, like any other family, they will be cantankerous. There’ll be folk you might love, but you couldn't like. But it's a family of nations and it's fascinating.”
Having an institution which was proud of being multiracial and included Mohawk Indians, Maoris and West Africans tarred with the racist brush understandably distressed him greatly.
The order had never developed in the southern states of America, he told me, “because they did not want to appear to be anti-black and didn't want to work the fertile ground of what would have been the Bible belt where there was slavery.
“They did have occasional blacks, but they were in the northern states.”
In South Africa, the Orange was finished off because it wouldn’t operate a colour bar.
I learned from his obituaries that he spoke French and German, that in the House of Commons he was distinguished as an advocate for disability rights, was Vice-Chairman of the All-Party Committee on Soviet Jewry and active in the International Parliamentary Union.
And we forget that his predecessor as South Belfast MP, the Reverend Robert Bradford, had been murdered in 1981 by three IRA members, one with a submachine gun, along with the caretaker, while he was hosting a constituency surgery in a community centre.
I underestimated Martin Smyth, one of those demonised by the Sinn Fein and forgotten like so many.
Apart from everything else, like so many of his colleagues, he was brave.
• Ruth Dudley Edwards is a historian, commentator and author whose books include 'The Faithful Tribe: an intimate portrait of the loyal institutions'