On Saturday 23 May 1874, the Orangemen of Consett raised a toast to the usual list of worthies. William III, whose memory was (to them) ‘Pius and Immortal’, ‘The Queen and all the Royal Family’, ‘The Earl of Inniskillen, Grand Master of Ireland’, the editor and proprietor of the Belfast Weekly News and ‘William Johnston of Ballykilbeg’ – each of these merited approving recitations. Such toasts, which were lovingly detailed in the ‘Orange Institution’ pages of the Belfast Weekly News, offer us an insight into how these isolated Orangemen saw their world. The names mentioned represent a neat triangulation of Orange viewpoints: they tell us where precisely Orangemen stood in relation to particular events at the given historical moment; they espouse timeless religious and political principles; and are suggestive of ethnic identity. Signs like these demonstrate how the current lives of migrant settlers were firmly moored in the old world of Ulster that they had left but had not forgotten. Irrespective of migration to northern England, their Irish Protestant culture, underpinned by celebrated British identity, lived on as truly as if these Orangemen were still toiling in the shipyards or engineering works of eastern Ulster. Not only that: for, in raising their glasses, these men knew that they were not alone in migrating from the natal soil. Each Irishman, and every Scot among them, had to deal with a culture of leaving.

Daily life confirmed that such was the case; that there was, within their ranks, a sense of diaspora and of transnationalism. For any one of these Orangeman in the north-east of England, a glance around the lodge room would have revealed the faces of people who were fellow travellers in Orangeism as in life. But such perceptual horizons stretched much further than the close confines of their own immediate Orange circle. The Orangemen of the north had no problem looking out from the small worlds they occupied. They had visions drawn in from far beyond the Ulster heartland that gave them the culture they carried on their migratory travels. For, in acknowledgement of a greater circle of life, as the glasses were pointed towards the ceiling, a commonly uttered exhortation was to ‘all loyal Orangemen round the globe’.