A Moth-eaten rag on a Worm-eaten Pole? or Something Important?

As a child I used to love collecting things, mostly coins, but also sets. Along with pennies from almost every year since 1860, some polished to smoothness, others still clearly legible (‘Victoria, Deo Gratia, Reg. Omn. Brit., Ind. Imp. Fid. Def.’ , I seem to recall they said, and I knew what it meant) , I possessed silver threepenny bits, many farthings and a few enormous coppers from the days of George III, plus some French Third Republic coppers and various  coinages from the Channel Islands, where a penny mysteriously became ‘Eight Doubles’ pronounced Doobles.   I am convinced that I had an Edward VIII threepence (not silver but that yellowy cupro-nickel) but I may now be imagining it.  I certainly don’t have it now, and am not even sure that any coins were struck with his name and superscription upon them. That brief King had left very few solid traces, though his monogram, unusually,  was to be found over the Post Office at Havant and on a pillar box in Dunfermline, two places where I lived during my childhood. It also used to be visible over the Post Office at Wallingford, near Oxford, but I am not sure if it still survives there.

 

I also had a fine assembly of those enjoyable little volumes called ‘Observer’s Books’ as far as I know, nothing to do with the great liberal newspaper that once bore that name ( I believe another, rather different publication carries it now). They had a particularly enjoyable smell, thanks to the shiny paper they used for the illustrated pages, which for years I associated with Christmas. I am sure if I smelt it again now I should know it instantly.

 

I have lost most of them (only the astonishing one dealing with British railway locomotives seems to have survived the years – how shocking it is to see all these steam-powered monsters described as if they are normal and everyday, rather than semi-mythical museum pieces).

 

And one of the missing is ‘The Observer’s Book of Flags’. It would be wholly obsolete now, thanks to the incessant creation of new nations in the past half-century, and the habit of many old nations of acquiring new flags.

 

What sticks in my memory (apart from a helpful little essay on such terms as ‘hoist’ and  ‘fly’ and on that useful invention, the Inglefield Clip)  is a brief verse that was, I think, on the title page, about a moth-eaten rag on a worm-eaten pole. Unable to remember all of it, I found it on the Internet, attributed to Sir Edward Hamley, on seeing some old colours of the 43rd Monmouth Light Infantry, laid up in Monmouth Church:

 

‘A moth-eaten flag on a worm-eaten pole, it does not look likely to stir a man’s soul.
Tis the deeds that were done ‘neath the moth-eaten rag, when the pole was a staff and the rag was a flag’.

 

Well, exactly. And some thought of this kind does come to mind when I see those ancient battle-flags, now so old they are practically transparent, hanging in the silence of an old parish church.

 

No such silence was to be found this week outside Belfast’s majestic Victorian (designed) and Edwardian (built) City Hall which, as it happens, I visited only a few weeks ago while on a visit to that interesting and enjoyable city. Instead a  very angry and rather nasty mob burst into the courtyard and clashed with police.

 

I wish they hadn’t. No cause is helped by angry mobs. But it does show how much emotion a flag can stir. It’s not just a piece of cloth.

 

What had the City Council done? It had voted quite decisively to end the practice, continuous since 1906, of flying the Union Flag each day from above its neo-classical portico. Instead, it will now be flown on just 17 days of the year, paradoxically including St Patrick’s Day. The official excuse is of course that such matters are sensitive in that part of the world, and that one must try to be inoffensive and inclusive. It’s an interesting place whose national flag is deemed to offensive to fly from official buildings for most of the year. But then, Northern Ireland *is* an interesting place.

 

Actually, I can easily see the logic of this. That is because , since 1998, I have recognised the unlovely, enormous but largely ignored fact that Northern Ireland is on its way out of the United Kingdom, and into the Irish Republic. No sense getting angry now about a defeat which has already happened, and which the people fo northern Ireland were bamboozled into endorsing in a referendum which, like all such votes, was easily rigged to produce the result the establishment wanted ( and would have been held again if it hadn’t).

 

Only another referendum , which can be called at any time, stands in the way of this change. The people of the province are all aware of this, as are most citizens of the Irish Republic ( or ‘Ireland’ as it prefers to be known) even if almost nobody in mainland Britain knows or cares. That’s their mistake, as we shall see. It’s important.

 

Northern Ireland’s  police force, as we discussed here the other day, has on its cap badges a sort of dolly mixture of symbols, none of them supreme, symbolising the fact that nobody is really in charge, or has a monopoly of power or force.  Even the crown in the badge is not the actual Crown of St Edward, which is the symbol of law,  majesty and state power in England and its former dominions (look at the police badges in Canada, Australia and New Zealand)  .

 

By the way,   observant people will have noticed that a similar but different problem in Scotland has been resolved for now by using the Crown of Scotland, instead of the Crown of St Edward. I believe this appears on Scottish police badges, the newer Scottish pillar boxes (Some Scots objected to Queen Elizabeth the Second’s E II R monogram on these, because she is not the second Queen Elizabeth of Scotland, but the first)  and (sometimes, or in the past) on Scottish ambulances, which bear the logo of the Scottish NHS (of what ‘nation’ is the Scottish NHS the National Health Service?). Also, Scotland has its own flag, the Saltire or St Andrew’s Cross, which can be flown alongside the Union Flag, and in a sort of competition with it. It is also part of the Union Flag itself, and represented in it. Northern Ireland’s flag or common symbol is the old red hand of Ulster, which is nowadays very much associated with Unionism.

 

Ireland is also represented in the Union Flag, which contains St Patrick’s Cross, But the flag of Ireland, these days, is the secular tricolour, which was (I believe) designed in France on the pattern of its French revolutionary equivalent, and didn’t become popular until it was raised over the Dublin Post Office at the Easter Rising of 1916.

 

All this change threatens another awkward problem for the British politicians who have been dismantling the country behind our backs over the last 20 years or so.  If Northern Ireland leaves the Union (more likely, in my view, than  the much-discussed Scottish departure) , then the Royal Arms and Royal Standard will have to abandon the Harp, which forms such an important part of them. And the Union Flag will have to be stripped of St Patrick’s Cross, making it quite different. People won’t like it when it happens, I suspect.

 

But such things do happen. They may well be on their way.

 

The row over Belfast City Hall, which was flying our nation’s flag when I last saw it a few weeks ago, has drawn attention to the fact that Northern Ireland Government buildings long ago (in fact soon after the surrender to the IRA concluded at Easter 1998) abandoned daily displays of the Union Flag. Belfast City Hall, being in the centre of the Province’s biggest city, may have offered misleading reassurance to Unionists that things hadn’t changed all that much. The Stormont government buildings are some miles way, in a suburban setting which most visitors to Belfast will never see, and which few residents will visit either.

 

You may ask what will fly instead. As far as I can discover, nothing will. On the 348 or so days of the year not set aside for nostalgic displays of the Union Flag, the flagstaff will be bare, as it is at Stormont.

 

Northern Ireland, you see, is not and never can be a nation in itself. And because we never fully made it part of Britain back in 1922, we postponed till the 21st century the problems that we have coming.

 

Perhaps they could fly a large question mark in future. The flag that would, alas, most accurately assert the true state of sovereignty over Belfast and the six counties of Northern Ireland would be the EU standard, with its 12 mysterious yellow stars representing who knows what?

 

I suspect that Brussels’s blue and yellow banner will be the flag and badge of the ‘peacekeepers’  or perhaps gendarmes who, 30 years from now, will be dealing with protestors on the Shankill Road in Belfast, who refuse to accept Dublin rule and have (once again) been infringing the law by displaying the banned Union Flag, long ago forgotten and abandoned by the truncated, multicultural English Republic across the sea.

 

For the defeat of Unionism throughout the British isles will turn out to be the heralds of the end of the country we grew up in in all its territory.  Northern Ireland’s Unionists are like pit canaries, the first to smell defeat.

 

I’ll be told (I often am) that the Roman Catholics of Northern Ireland currently have no desire to unify with the South. That may well be so.  Who’d have thought that the Unionists would ever lose their majority on Belfast City Council? But they did.  Lots of things can change, including the state of the UK economy and of the Irish and EU economies, and I’m still expecting a 32-county Ireland in my lifetime. 2016, centenary of the Easter Rising, may now be too soon because of the Eurozone collapse. But 1922, centenary of the Free State, looks a possibility.

 

There may be tumult and shouting from time to time, but the Abolition of Britain has already happened, long ago. We’re now in the interval between the fact, and everyone realising that it is a fact.