73

James Armour

1841–1928

 

One of the most remarkable of Ulster's Presbyterians, 'Armour of Ballymoney', still remains a potent example of what human generosity can achieve in any community divided against itself.  Though he lived most of his life in a small country town, the Ulster writer Robert Lynd observed, 'his qualities of brain and heart made him one of the most eminent and ultimately beloved Ulstermen of his day'.  James Armour's life carries a moral for all the world.

      He saw all too clearly that the rival factions in Ireland were contending for and against a concept of empire that had ended at Yorktown.  He was a liberal and a democrat, and believed that no danger came to anyone, his opinion or religion, from the extension of liberal policies and democratic values.

      James Brown Armour was born at Lisboy, near Ballymoney, in County Antrim, the most Protestant part of Ulster, on 20th January 1841.  He was educated locally at the Ballymoney Model School.  Later he attended the Royal Academical Institute, the leading Presbyterian school in Belfast.

      He then studied classics at the University College in Belfast, and the Queen's College in Cork.  This experience of living in the deep Catholic south of Ireland affected his outlook in many ways.  He taught school to support himself during his studies, though his ambition was to become a barrister.  However, he gave way to the wishes of his family to become instead the Presbyterian minister in Ballymoney in 1869.

      Ballymoney is a small linen and agricultural centre between Coleraine and Ballymena.  A few miles away was the family home of William McKinley, the twenty-fifth president of the United States.  Lying in the heart of an area of good agricultural land, Ballymoney was very typical of the planter towns, created and settled by Scottish families who came over during the seventeenth-century Plantation of Ulster.  Here they developed a prosperous linen industry and gave the little place its graceful airs with wide streets, fine Georgian terraces, and a final touch, the Masonic Hall, in 1852.  Ballymoney was all very typical of loyal Ulster.

      Unlike the McKinleys, Armour stayed in Ulster.  In March 1883 he married a widow who had two sons by her first husband.  Just as he had taught school to support his own studies, so he returned to teaching to support his new family.  In 1883 he became an assistant at Magee College in Derry, where he remained for twenty-three years.

      Like many Presbyterians, Armour was a man who valued not only private judgement, but forthright speech.  He spoke out from his pulpit and elsewhere on all the issues of the day.  From 1885 onwards these revolved largely around the issues of Ulster's future, raised by the Orange Order.

      These were largely issues of identity.  The Ulster people tended to favour union with England, while in the south the Irish party was moving towards home rule.  In March 1893 the general assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, whose members lived largely in the four counties of eastern Ulster, met in special session to debate the entire matter of home rule, and to condemn the Home Rule Bill.

      Armour, however, moved an amendment to the resolution in favour of self-government in Ireland, allied with protection for all the rights and interests of the Presbyterian Church.  This speech, as he might have expected, was hissed and booed.  He lost his amendment, and the original resolution was passed by a huge majority.  But it never worried a Presbyterian conscience to be in the minority.  At home in Ballymoney his congregation remained loyal to their minister.  However, his fellow churchmen and other unionist Ulstermen shunned him for a while.

      Armour campaigned for his views, collecting the signatures of 3,535 Presbyterians to a petition supporting the Home Rule Bill, to be sent as a memorial address to Gladstone, the British prime minister.  He had always supported the tenants' rights movement and condemned landlordism.  In a debate with Dr Anthony Traill of Trinity College, he argued in favour of the nationalists against the ascendancy (the largely Protestant landed class) in Ireland, which Traill represented.

      One of the great interests of many Catholics had long been the hope of establishing a Catholic university - Trinity and the Queen's Colleges being regarded as Protestant institutions.  A campaign was under way to dissolve the Royal University in Ireland and replace it with a truly national university into which the other colleges could be subsumed.  At the assembly in 1900 a report was presented condemning the proposed establishment of the Catholic university.  Armour opposed its adoption.

      With a relative now an official in Dublin Castle, Armour had a conduit to those in power, which he used well after the Liberal party victory of 1906.  Two years later he was told he had a critical heart condition, forcing him to leave public life.  At this time, many tributes were paid to him by all shades of opinion.

      But Armour of Ballymoney was not quite done with affairs of state, heart or no heart.  In 1912 the general assembly had decided that politics should not be allowed to bring divisions among Presbyterians.  This was the period of the unionist revolt.

      The following year a Layman's Memorial (a motion by church members) from the floor against home rule was introduced to the assembly, and Armour moved an amendment to reaffirm the previous year's decision.  In the heated atmosphere of the day this aroused great anger from his opponents.  Only forty-three members voted with Armour, against some 921 for the resolution.  He described the agitation being led by Edward Carson and James Craig, which had led to the setting up of the Ulster Volunteers to defend the Union, as 'a wicked bluff'.  The partition of Ireland which they proposed would be ruinous for Ulster.

      At the time of the Easter Rising he rightly pointed out that the insurgents had only been following the lead of the Ulster Volunteers.  As Prof. Eoin McNeill pointed out, Ulster had begun the rise of armed political parties in Ireland by smuggling in guns from Germany.  The summer of 1914 had very nearly brought about a mutiny in the British army.

      Armour warned the assembly of the dangers of denouncing minority views: 'If you deny the right of private judgement and of free speech, how much do you have of Protestantism worth keeping?' he asked.  'Nothing at all.'

      Armour was in favour of the First World War and helped to recruit for the imperial army; he also acted as an honorary chaplain to the viceroy.  To Armour, unionism meant the unity of all Ireland.  At the general assembly he again spoke out against the Government of Ireland Bill which brought Northern Ireland into existence.  He said that would only promote racial and religious division in the province, and ruin the moral and economic prospects of the whole island.  But, yet again, he was voted down.

      His son later wrote, 'One characteristic seems to have struck every observer, his fearless courage, his indomitable spirit, and the tenacity with which he held his ground against all-comers.'  An American admirer once wrote that he was 'fifty years before his time, an inconvenient gift in a province and indeed in a country, where past traditions are strong'.

      After fifty-six years, Armour finally retired from his ministry at Ballymoney, in September 1925.  He died on 25th January 1928.  To many of his countrymen, to whom the very notion of Presbyterianism means the union with Britain, Armour of Ballymoney is a beacon of another passage through the stormy waters of Irish history.