Robert James McMordie, unionist East Belfast MP who always felt more at home in city hall

An Ulster-Scot, McMordie was a son of the Rev John Andrew McMordie, the Presbyterian minister of Seaforde and was born on January 31 1849 in Cumran, near Clough.

He was educated at ‘Inst’ and Queen’s College, Belfast, where he excelled at mathematics and chemistry, and graduated in 1870.

An accomplished speaker and debater in the Literary and Scientific Society, he became president of the society.

Having enjoyed his time at Queen’s, in due course he became a significant benefactor of his alma mater. The original McMordie Hall was the product of his generosity.

A solicitor by profession, Robert James had offices in Lombard Street and built up a very large land practice in Co Down.

On May 21 1886 he married Julia Gray, daughter of Sir William Gray, a shipbuilder and shipowner from West Hartlepool.

Two interesting but largely forgotten organisations occupied a significant place in McMordie’s life.

He was president of the Irish Industrial Development Association, an umbrella group of local development associations, which sought to impress on Irish industry the importance of advertising and of producing high-quality merchandise. It also sought to encourage local wholesalers, shops and commercial travellers to promote Irish goods.

Liberal Unionists – men like Thomas Sinclair, the author of the Ulster Covenant, and Thomas Andrews, the father of the shipbuilder and designer of the Titanic – passionately believed that Ulster’s prosperity was founded on industry, technology and ingenuity and that these would prove to be the salvation of the rest of Ireland. This explains why Unionists’ first objection to Home Rule as set out in the document was the conviction that Home Rule would be ‘disastrous to the material well-being of Ulster as well as the whole of Ireland’.

The Citizens’ Association was a ratepayers’ association and pressure group made up of businessmen and professional people formed in 1905. They accused the Corporation of extravagance and incompetence. In practice, it was a vehicle which Liberal Unionists employed to campaign on local and non-constitutional issues.

In January 1907 McMordie was one of five members of the Citizens’ Association elected to Belfast Corporation.

The Citizens’ Association was particularly exercised about public health in Belfast and was largely responsible for the establishment of the Vice-Regal Inquiry into these matters in 1906.

By the advent of the third Home Rule crisis very little in policy terms separated the Conservative Party and the Citizens’ Association. Even in the municipal elections of 1908 all but one of Citizens’ Association’s candidates were joint selections with the Conservatives.

By 1911 the Citizens’ Association had been virtually absorbed into the Conservative Party by the creation of the Belfast Unionist Municipal Association. Nationally, the formal merger of the Conservative Party and the Liberal Unionist Party as the Conservative and Unionist Party took place in May 1912.

The election of McMordie in 1910 as both lord mayor and MP for East Belfast confirmed the direction of travel.

He took municipal affairs very seriously and rarely missed a meeting of the Corporation.

Robert Meyer, the town clerk, said that no lord mayor ‘ever gave more time to the duties of his office or took more infinite pains to discharge them efficiently’.

Like many politicians who have served their apprenticeship in local government, McMordie was more at home in the city hall than he was in the House of Commons.

Although ‘a strenuous debater’ and a period of heightened political tension because of the third Home Rule crisis, he proved to be ‘a very firm and equitable chairman and ruled the discussions in a manner which gave satisfaction to all parties’. His courtesy and kindness made him friends on all sides and both with fellow members of the Corporation and the citizens of the city.

His generosity was widely acknowledged and appreciated.

As a measure of the high esteem in which they were held, both the lord mayor and lady mayoress were elected honorary Burgesses of the city on January 23 1914, and the presentation of the certificates of their election was made the occasion of a citizens’ banquet on February 5.

His mayoralty coincided with both the launch and the loss of the Titanic. Following the loss of the great ship on April 15 1912, at a meeting in the city hall, chaired by the lady mayoress, on May 3 a resolution was passed authorising ‘the building of an appropriate public memorial, to be erected on the most prominent site available’.

McMordie was closely involved in the events leading to the formation of the Young Citizen Volunteers which had its origins within the membership of the Belfast Citizens’ Association.

He presided at the meeting in the lord mayor’s parlour on June 6 1912 to consider the formation of ‘a Young Citizens’ Volunteer Corps’.

When the YVC was formally launched at a meeting in the Great Hall of the Belfast City Hall on September 10 1912, McMordie chaired the proceedings and became the organisation’s president. (The YCV became the nucleus of the 14th Battalion of the Royal Irish Rifles in September 1914.)

Turning to the Ulster Covenant, at the eve-of-covenant rally in the Ulster Hall on September 27 1912 McMordie proposed the resolution: ‘We hereby affirm the resolve of the great Ulster Convention of 1892 – “We will not have Home Rule”.’

The following day he welcomed Sir Edward Carson to the city hall to become the first signatory of the document and afterwards entertained him at the Ulster Club in High Street.

McMordie died unexpectedly – at the height of the ‘Curragh Incident’ – on March 25 1914 at his home at Cabin Hill, Knock, once the home of Dr William Drennan, the founder of the United Irishmen. Members of the YCV acted as pallbearers at his funeral.