Hugh Thom Barrie, a self-made man and champion of unionism

Hugh Thom Barrie was born in Glasgow in 1860. At the age of 19, he borrowed £100 from his father, arrived in Coleraine and started a produce business and became a major player in the export of grain, potatoes and hay.

The company’s business was not confined to the British Isles but extended to North America. Barrie was a frequent visitor to Canada.

In 1894 he took over the Scottish firm in which he had served his apprenticeship.

Active in Coleraine politics, he held virtually every local public office that it was possible to hold. At different times he was a justice of the peace, a deputy lieutenant, chairman of Coleraine Urban District Council, a member of the County Council, chairman of the Londonderry District Asylum Board, the chairman of the County Agricultural Committee, chairman of the Joint Technical Instruction Committee and chairman of the Coleraine Harbour Board. He held some of these positions concurrently.

In 1901 he was instrumental in establishing Coleraine Technical College, the first such institution in Ulster outside Belfast.

In December 1905 Barrie was selected as the Unionist parliamentary candidate for North Londonderry, the safer of the two seats in the county, in the imminent general election.

This election, which took place in January 1906, was expected to be an exceedingly difficult one for Unionism. T W Russell, the extremely able but renegade Unionist MP for South Tyrone, had organised Ulster’s tenant farmers in revolt against the Unionist Party and had successfully contested by-elections in East Down and North Fermanagh in 1902 and 1903 respectively.

By 1906 Russell was widely believed to be able to mount a very serious challenge to the party in a wide range of Ulster constituencies. On the eve of the election, J M Rentoul, the former Unionist MP for East Down, viewed Russell as ‘the dictator of Ulster’.

Barrie was extremely fortunate that his Russellite opponent in North Londonderry was A H White, an English journalist, who polled poorly.

As it happened, the Russellite challenge never realised its full potential, not least because the formation of a Liberal government in December 1905 prior to the election revived the spectre of Home Rule and prompted the return of a great many tenant farmers frightened at the prospect to the Unionist fold.

Russell retained his South Tyrone seat but lost both East Down and North Fermanagh. North Antrim proved to be the Russellites’ only gain.

In the general election of January 1910 Barrie was returned unopposed and in the general election of December 1910 he polled almost 70% of the valid vote, defeating a Liberal opponent with ease.

Barrie did not contest the general election of 1918 because there was uncertainty about his eligibility (because he was high sheriff of Derry that year) and fears that he would be unseated by petition. He stood aside in favour of Hugh Anderson, Barrie’s election agent, who easily defeated his Sinn Fein opponent. Anderson was sworn in as an MP on February 10 1919 but resigned his seat only three days later. At the subsequent by-election Barrie returned to the House of Commons.

In an era when many MPs would have rarely, if ever, spoken in the chamber, Barrie appears in Hansard on 732 occasions.

As a successful grain merchant, Barrie represented a new type of Unionist MP. In the 1880s Unionist parliamentary representation was dominated by landlords but the number of landlords in the Unionist Parliamentary Party steadily declined in 1890s and collapsed after 1900. By the general election of 1918 only one Unionist MP was a landlord. Landlords had been systematically replaced by MPs with professional (usually legal) and commercial backgrounds.

Barrie was chairman of the Ulster Unionist Group in the Irish Convention, an attempt to solve the Irish Question in the wake of the failure of Lloyd George’s abortive attempt to resolve the problem in the immediate aftermath of the Easter rebellion. The convention sat from July 1917 until March 1918. Barrie’s task was to secure the position which Unionists had gained in 1916 (permanent six-county exclusion) without appearing intransigent and unreasonable. He seems to have managed this difficult feat rather well.

As leader of the Ulster Unionist Group in the convention, Barrie earned the respect of Lloyd George, now prime minister. This played a part in Barrie’s appointment as vice-president of the Department of Agriculture and Technical Education for Ireland in December 1919 but he also had a genuine interest in the portfolio.

The appointment of a Unionist to this office initially occasioned Nationalist bitterness and resentment. However, the careful and diligent way Barrie discharged his responsibilities went some way to dissipating Nationalist discontent. He was appointed a member of the Privy Council of Ireland in the 1920 Birthday Honours.

Barrie resigned on November 19 1921 because of the government’s negotiations with Sinn Fein which would result in the Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 6 1921. Barrie felt these negotiations (by reopening up issues which Unionists had believed had already been settled by the Government of Ireland Act of 1920) rendered his position untenable. He wrote letters of protest to both Sir Hamar Greenwood, the Canadian-born chief secretary for Ireland, and the prime minister setting out his case.

Barrie briefly had two other significant roles in Unionist politics. When Sir John Lonsdale, the Mid-Armagh MP, stepped down as secretary of the Unionist Parliamentary Party, Barrie assumed that role. He was also a member of the Senate of Northern Ireland.

In early 1922 he signalled his intention to step down as an MP. In poor health, his last recorded contribution in the Commons was on July 8 1920. Furthermore, North Londonderry was to disappear at the next general election, North and South Londonderry and City of Londonderry being replaced by a new constituency covering the entire county and county borough.

However, his intentions were overtaken by his death at The Manor House, his Coleraine home, on April 19 1922. The News Letter observed that ‘Ulster unionism [had] lost one of its sturdiest champions’.