The different strands of Ulster unionism, and attempts by unionist politicians to articulate their views in forms intelligible to British and global audiences seen as fatally susceptible to Irish nationalist propaganda, have attracted much scholarly attention. Nationalists and republicans often present unionism as Herrenvolk settler racism or as manipulation of Orange plebeians by self-interested elites through bigotry and patronage.Footnote 1 Sympathetic commentators suggest that Ulster Britishness contains a potential civic identity (liberal or socialist) superior to ethnic nationalism;Footnote 2 others maintain this understates the role of populist particularism, Orange or Presbyterian-fundamentalist, in unionist self-perception.Footnote 3 Some relate the crisis of Ulster unionism to displacement of relatively cosmopolitan and politically experienced elites by socio-economic modernisation and assimilation of metropolitan standards, leaving leadership to naïve, inarticulate and provincial figures, and to the long-term departure from wider British politics, society and economy of an identity based on shared Protestantism, heavy industry in Lancashire and Lanarkshire, and imperial mission, leaving unionists as an isolated survival.Footnote 4
This article addresses these disputes through a case-study of one of the leading publicists of twentieth-century Ulster unionism. Hugh Shearman is familiar to historians of Northern Ireland as a propagandist for Ulster unionism in the 1940s and 1950s, but the only academic treatment occurs in Gillian McIntosh's study of unionist identity politics, The force of culture.Footnote 5 This article analyses Shearman's career from the late 1930s to the 1990s. It argues that Shearman's presentation of unionism as a technocratic modernising force combining cultural Britishness with regional identity reflects his theosophist view of culture based on archetypes perennially available and subject to continual evolution and revisioning, and that his concern with propaganda was influenced by theosophist preoccupation with perception and illusion.
Theosophy, based on Indian religions and Neoplatonism, offers initiates access to an esoteric universal religion based on guided evolutionary progress, involving advancement of civilisation as incidental to the incorporation of individual beings in the world-soul over successive incarnations. This set of beliefs supposedly underlies the major world religions, whose exoteric forms, according to theosophists, are distorted by materialism and dogmatism, mistaking mythic truths for historic events and seeing spiritual phenomena in material terms.
This article first documents Shearman's move from liberal Anglicanism to the form of theosophy expounded by the ex-Anglian cleric Charles Leadbeater as an example of Roy Foster's ‘Protestant magic’ – the attraction to alternative spiritualities of Irish Protestants ill at ease with inherited political and religious orthodoxy, and fearing absorption by Irish Catholicism.Footnote 6 Where such occultists as W. B. Yeats and the theosophist George Russell (Æ) saw neo-paganism evoking an all-encompassing Irish nationalism, Shearman's view of Ulster threatened by a reactionary Catholic-irredentist south made him resist equation of Indian theosophist anti-imperialism with Irish nationalism, and instead see Protestant individualism as a precursor of theosophic enlightenment. Theosophy emphasises the need to train perception and create a ‘spiritual’ art not confined to ‘materialistic’ transcriptions of sense-impressions, which made it attractive to abstract artists.Footnote 7 The article suggests that this preoccupation with hidden meanings underlies Shearman's literary use of irony and reservation, especially in his novels, to downplay concerns about unionist provincial mediocrity and inward-looking Northern Irish regionalism, and his attempts to dispel alleged illusions about the Irish problem by teaching Ulster unionists to articulate their unconscious knowledge. The article finally traces how the circumstances and memory of the Second World War, with the participation of Northern Ireland in the Allied war effort, contrasted with the neutrality of the isolationist Irish state, underpinned Shearman's credibility in the period from 1945 to 1955 as an Ulster unionist, and how his plausibility and his audience waned with the crisis of the Unionist regime from the late 1950s. Although Shearman lived until 1999, commenting on public affairs almost until his death, his last decades were spent as a provincial journalist addressing the local unionist faithful. His attributions of the post-1969 Northern Ireland Troubles to nationalist conspiracy and British betrayal revealed that his brand of theosophist-inspired technocratic unionism, assuming that specific Catholic-nationalist concerns need not be addressed because they would disappear through assimilation to unionist modernity, shared the self-deceptions, as well as some virtues, of the patronising and self-deceiving liberal-Anglican paternalism of Shearman's contemporary Terence O'Neill.
I
Shearman came from a long-established Ulster Church of Ireland clerical and professional family, claiming David Cairnes, a Williamite leader during the siege of Derry, and an apprentice boy who closed the gates among collateral ancestors.Footnote 8 His paternal grandfather (Josiah Nicholson Shearman, d. 1915) was rector of St Matthew's parish on the Shankill Road in Belfast.Footnote 9 This ancestry marked him out from populist versions of Ulster Protestant identity which emphasise Orangeism or Scots-related Presbyterianism, and gave him a sense of connection to traditional governing elites and their cultural and political achievements. Shearman claimed that the failure of his grandfather to get most parishioners to translate Protestant self-identification into church attendance reflected Protestant freedom from dogmatism; Southern Catholic critics suggested it meant that Ulster Protestants had no religion except anti-Catholicism.Footnote 10 Shearman's maternal uncle, Robert Newett Morrison (d. 1949), was rector of Ballynahinch, County Down, where Shearman lived in the mid 1940s.Footnote 11 Childhood visits to this uncle underlay Shearman's attachment to the mid Down countryside.Footnote 12 In 1945 Shearman debated the chancellor of the Church of Ireland diocese of Connor over the former's view that compulsory religious education in state schools and dismissal of heterodox teachers breached the Government of Ireland Act; the chancellor recalled the adherence to the 39 Articles of Shearman's clerical relatives.Footnote 13
Born in Belfast in 1915, Shearman was the only child of John Nicholson Shearman, a teacher at Belfast Royal Academy (B.R.A.), and his wife Margaret (née Morrison).Footnote 14 His father's life was bound up with B.R.A.; he was its elder statesman from the late 1920s to his retirement in 1942. Shearman's uncle, T. E. C. Shearman, a First World War veteran, was registrar and bursar at B.R.A.;Footnote 15 two paternal aunts were headmistresses of Ashleigh House School.Footnote 16 Social and intellectual status did not bring financial rewards (Shearman's father campaigned all his life to increase teachers’ salaries) but the Shearmans were deeply involved in the transmission of Ulster British identity through local elite schools. Shearman saw the north Belfast suburb of Cliftonville, dominated by the B.R.A.'s tower, as ‘my native village’ and lived at 36 Cliftonville Road, inherited from his parents, for most of his life.Footnote 17 During the post-1969 Troubles he often woke at night just before a bomb exploded, attributing this to ‘unity with the collective life of the whole district’.Footnote 18 He contributed to the B.R.A. magazine The Owl, which his father founded, and was interviewed for the history of the school's second century, published in 1986.Footnote 19 Advocating mixed-sex Belfast secondary schools in 1972, Shearman cited B.R.A. as showing that the civilising influence of the opposite sex outweighed possible heterosexual misconduct.Footnote 20
Shearman studied history at Queen's University Belfast under James Eadie Todd, winning scholarships.Footnote 21 Shearman visited Todd in retirement and wrote an obituary emphasising how Todd transcended pedantry:
When so much scholarship and academic teaching is rendered bleak and dull by narrow mechanical specialisation and by a certain lack of strong purpose, his work with his students gained richness, force and appeal from his deep and powerful sense of human dignity. Though he ruthlessly pursued accuracy he knew that accuracy alone is not enough. In the last conversation I had with him he said: ‘If you are going to be a historian you need to be something of a poet or a philosopher as well.’ His humanity and his sense of the drama and wonder of past human achievements gave an impressive breadth and comprehensiveness to his university lectures.Footnote 22
In 1935 Shearman published a short commissioned history of B.R.A. to mark its 150th anniversary.Footnote 23 In 1937 he sparked controversy by criticising Northern Ireland secondary schools for favouring British teachers over local graduates.Footnote 24 Shearman was active in the Q.U.B. Historical Society, where he knew T. W. Moody and was president in 1937–8.Footnote 25 A 1940 paper by Shearman on ‘History as literature’ noted the professionalisation of Irish history associated with Moody and R. D. Edwards:
One of the chief impulses came from the history department of Queen's University. That movement … would have to concern itself not only with minute and scientifically conducted research but also with the artistically attractive presentation of the results. Much unscholarly and harmfully inaccurate historical work had acquired popularity in Ireland by attractive presentation while some very good work had passed unnoticed because of its dull style.Footnote 26
Shearman's extracurricular intellectual interests were not confined to the society. He also wrote for the student magazine, New Northman, defending what he called ‘new paganism’ while accusing Christian churches of intellectual evasiveness.Footnote 27 In newspaper controversies he criticised fascist regimes: ‘The Fascist State … plays into the hands of ruffians and mediocrities rather than promoting altruism and public spirit. It leads to tyranny and corruption, and to inefficiency in all departments save those concerned with war, propaganda and tourist traffic. It causes espionage, fear, the most sinister forms of exploitation, a sense of insecurity, a falling standard of public services, a precarious economy, lower wages, cruelty, injustice.’Footnote 28 During a 1940 exchange in which he opposed calls for draconian post-war treatment of Germany, Shearman stated that he had worked with refugee victims of fascism, was cut off from his intended career by the war, and then undertook unspecified work ended by the fall of France.Footnote 29
Shearman undertook a Ph.D. in history at Trinity College Dublin. In 1943 he received a Ph.D. for a dissertation on the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland. (In 1970, Shearman published a pamphlet, How the Church of Ireland was disestablished, to mark the centenary; his dissertation was published in 1995 by the Lurgan-based Ulster Society as Privatising a church).Footnote 30 Shearman found the Irish state insufficiently innovative as compared to Northern Ireland. He thought that Dublin retained from its aristocratic and professional past the habits of living beyond one's means or subsisting by public employment rather than by making money, and of wasting time in idle talk. Rural areas seemed decades behind Northern Ireland.Footnote 31 He was dismayed that while Stormont encouraged efficient consolidation of small farms, the southern government divided large farms among smallholders, justifying this by papal encyclicals.Footnote 32 Shearman's doctorate suggests that he sought an academic career. He subscribed to early volumes of Irish Historical Studies, contributing an article on post-disestablishment tenant purchase of church lands and a note on citation of parliamentary papers.Footnote 33 In 1946 he addressed the Ulster Society for Irish Historical Studies on ‘British statesmen and the Irish church question’.Footnote 34 Shearman was, however, directed towards journalism by religious and political commitments, probably also by marriage. His wife worked for British Intelligence in London during the war, and they had a son and a daughter.Footnote 35
II
Shearman's grandfather favoured the liberal Anglicanism associated with George Salmon, and published a book, The natural theology of evolution (London, 1915), which tried to reconcile evolution and Christianity.Footnote 36 The Irish Times editor Douglas Gageby, a B.R.A. contemporary, recalled the adolescent Hugh Shearman as a committed Anglican.Footnote 37 Salmon's writings on biblical criticism — though relatively conservative — led Shearman to decide that the Bible, open to textual corruption and different interpretations, was an inadequate basis for faith.Footnote 38 In 1940 Shearman joined the Belfast lodge of the Theosophical Society.Footnote 39
Theosophy was founded in 1875 by Helena Blavatsky (1831–91), who claimed to communicate with advanced beings — ascended masters or mahatmas — who trained her in clairvoyant techniques of ‘Esoteric Buddhism’ when she visited Tibet. After her death, the Theosophical Society split (1895) between a largely American faction led by Dublin-born William Quan Judge (1851–96) and the main body headquartered at Adyar (near Madras, now Chennai, in India) under Blavatsky's lieutenant Henry Steel Olcott (1832–1907), but dominated by Annie Besant (1847–1933) and Charles Webster Leadbeater (1854–1934), a former Anglican clergyman claiming clairvoyant powers, who coined the theosophist motto ‘No religion is greater than truth’ and expounded clairvoyant explorations of the nature of colours, atoms and his previous incarnations.Footnote 40 The Dublin lodge, dominated by George Russell (Æ), sided with Judge but operated independently after Judge's death; the Belfast lodge was affiliated to Adyar. Russell agreed with the Judge group that Besant's Hindu-influenced beliefs and Leadbeater's Christian Gnosticism betrayed Blavatsky's ‘Esoteric Buddhism’; privately, he called Leadbeater a bad man.Footnote 41 Judge's successor Katherine Tingley (1847–1929) accused Leadbeater of sexually abusing adolescent male disciples. Leadbeater claimed this was a misunderstanding but his principal biographer states, on the basis of surviving disciples’ recollections, that the accusations were true.Footnote 42 In 1909 Leadbeater identified Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) as incarnating a great ‘World-Teacher’. Leadbeater and Besant then oversaw Krishnamurti's upbringing. Messianic preparations included the creation of the Liberal Catholic Church (1916) by ex-Anglican clerics who received episcopal orders from an Old Catholic bishop (regarded by Rome as validly consecrated though schismatic) in the expectation that when Krishnamurti manifested himself, ex-Catholic followers would remain attached to familiar liturgical forms. Leadbeater was its second presiding bishop and composed its liturgy, a revised Mass excluding sacrificial atonement. He reinterpreted Catholic sacraments in accordance with theosophist occultism and incorporated Masonic ritual elements.Footnote 43 (Tingley denounced the Liberal Catholic Church, claiming that Adyar theosophists had been infiltrated by the Roman Catholic Church.)Footnote 44 Relations between the factions mellowed after Krishnamurti disclaimed his assigned role in 1929, and following the deaths of Besant, Leadbeater and Tingley. Shearman lectured at the Dublin lodge at least twice,Footnote 45 but always regarded Leadbeater as the most significant spiritual leader of the movement. Shearman was influenced by the writings of George Arundale (1878–1945) and saw Curuppumullage Jinarajadasa (1875–1953) as his mentor.Footnote 46 Both men, successive presidents of the Theosophical Society, were protégés of Leadbeater. Shearman was ordained in the Liberal Catholic Church and became an apologist for the organisation; in 1980 he published a short life of Leadbeater under its Sydney-based imprint, St Albans Press.Footnote 47
Similarities between Roman Catholic and Liberal Catholic Church liturgies did not indicate affinity; Besant and Leadbeater denounced the church of Rome as an external, materialistic travesty of Christian gnosis. Shearman's references to Catholicism displayed social distaste. His novel A bomb and a girl (London, 1944) presented Catholic clerical students as overgrown schoolboys with dirty fingernails. His theosophical writings emphasised personal cleanliness as spiritual discipline; the narrator of his earlier work of fiction, The bishop's confession (London, 1943), despises the dirty fingernails of working-class evangelicals.Footnote 48 Shearman accused the evangelical revivalist W. P. Nicholson of exciting psychosexual hysteria.Footnote 49 Shearman's attitude to Catholicism also displayed revulsion against external authority. The central character of The bishop's confession is briefly enthused by John Henry Newman and thinks revelation through a living church more plausible than Protestant biblicism (this might imply theosophist clairvoyance), but ‘could not very well swallow the Pope’.Footnote 50
Shearman claimed that theosophy upheld the Protestant revolt against authority and dogma, which had been abandoned by ossified Protestant churches; Puritanism was misunderstood as external conformity, whereas its inwardness (especially the free-thinking Ulster variety) produced everyday mysticism resembling the Hindu concept of dharma.Footnote 51 He complained that Catholics misunderstood Protestantism as adherence to a different religion, rather than commitment to truth even beyond formal religious observance.Footnote 52 Shearman's theosophy saw the universe as governed by mind, as individuals overcame limitations — mainly involving compartmentalisation of reality — to achieve wholeness and absorption in the world-soul.Footnote 53 Similarities to Jungian psychology should not obscure Shearman's literal belief in clairvoyance, telepathy, reincarnation, non-human spirits like devas, daemons and fairies of mythology, and highly-evolved consciousnesses like the Ascended Masters.Footnote 54
For decades Shearman was Northern Ireland chairman of the Theosophical Society, serving on the council of the worldwide society. From the 1950s to the late 1990s he wrote for the society journal, The Theosophist. Footnote 55 He wrote books and pamphlets on theosophist history and philosophy, including The purpose of tragedy (Adyar, 1954); Modern theosophy (Adyar, 1954); Purpose beyond reason (London, 1955); An approach to the occult (Adyar, 1959); The passionate necessity: a view of human purpose (London, 1962); and The round of experience (Aydar, 1962). These subtly-written apologias were intended as preliminary guides; Shearman insisted there was no substitute for mystical experience, which lay beyond words. He opposed systematisation, and called revelations claimed by Blavatsky and Leadbeater approximations rather than definitive.Footnote 56 A revised edition of Shearman's To form a nucleus: a guide to work in the theosophical society (Adyar, 1959), a practical guide to founding and maintaining a lodge, was published by the Theosophical Society in 2007 as Working in theosophy.
Theosophists who lectured in Belfast under Shearman's chairmanship included the educationalist and Indian classical dance revivalist Srimati Rukmini Devi (Arundale)Footnote 57 and her brother Nilakanta Sri Ram, fifth president of the Theosophical Society, who had been Besant's secretary and campaigned with her for Indian independence.Footnote 58 In 1956 Shearman addressed the tension between theosophist Indian nationalism and his Ulster unionism. Shearman recalled visiting the 1916 Room in the National Museum of Ireland with an Indian nationalist imprisoned under the British and contrasted what he called emotive, self-dramatising exhibits with the calm self-command of the Indian. Shearman emphasised that Theosophists had favoured legal, non-violent protest and post-independence cooperation with Britain, and had distrusted Gandhi's mass politics. He compared the Republic of Ireland to Pakistan, the product of an irrational secession driven by hysteria and reactionary religious sentiment. Referring obliquely to Dr Noël Browne and the controversy over the mother and child scheme, Shearman noted that ‘it is particularly the welfare of mother and child which has in each case suffered’. Shearman suggested that in the end geography would prevail over politico-religious division, and Pakistan and the Republic of Ireland would reunite in the broader natural units of the Indian subcontinent and the British Isles respectively. Shearman claimed, misleadingly, that Besant's view of Ireland as ‘the India of the West’ represented religious rather than political sympathy, and mischievously suggested that she equated Irish members of Catholic religious orders with Indian Yogis.Footnote 59 Shearman reiterated his view of the republic as the Pakistan of the British Isles in 1993.Footnote 60
III
Shearman first publicly defended Ulster unionism with Not an inch: a study of Lord Craigavon and Ulster unionism (London, 1942). This was not a biography but an apologia for Ulster unionism distilled from such sources as the three-volume life of Carson by Edward Marjoribanks and Ian Colvin.Footnote 61 Shearman claimed to represent a new generation reassessing a history it knew by hearsay.Footnote 62 Craig was presented as the single-minded human embodiment of the Ulster cause, whereas John Redmond's support coalition, based on self-deceiving ‘emotional’ unity, shattered when concrete decisions could not be evaded. De Valera's ideals, on the other hand, possessed integrity but were alien to Ulster unionists. The events of 1940, when Ulster unionists stood with Britain while the south remained neutral, were Craig's vindication. Shearman saw in Craig his own concern with unification of the psyche:
One of the great difficulties … in trying to tell the life story of Lord Craigavon is that it is such a very simple story. James Craig … saw things with a flat, good-humoured common sense, and acted undeviatingly in the light of what he saw … the practical and reliable man among people who were impractical and unreliable, the wise man among the otherwise. … The complex person, the person of shifting emotions and unsteady purpose, the person of passionate espousals of causes and passionate rejections of incompatible facts … is often very much at war with himself, full of inconsistencies and uneasiness. But the forces of the truly simple man run all in one direction …. and he often finds that his strength is as the strength of ten.Footnote 63
The difference between this alleged central essence and a comprehensive account of Craig's political career is hinted at in Shearman's novel A bomb and a girl, where ‘Lord Drumbo’, representing County Down at Stormont, as did Craig, gets a worthless aristocratic relative elected to Westminster by agreeing, with nods and winks, to a civil service job for the nephew of a constituency activist.Footnote 64
Not an inch outlined the unionist apologetic Shearman reiterated throughout his career: that Ulster unionism was essentially progressive, aligned with right-wing British Toryism only because the Liberal and Labour parties misguidedly identified with Irish nationalism. He saw himself as left-liberal, read the New Statesman and regularly wrote to it defending unionism.Footnote 65 Progressives in Northern Ireland, Shearman argued, supported the Unionist Party to avoid absorption by the retrograde southern state. Shearman maintained that internal competition between Unionist factions compensated for the absence of conventional party divisions.Footnote 66
Stormont, Shearman argued, coped relatively well with declining traditional industries and the displacement of labour from agriculture; he claimed that the quick response permitted by the local administration sustained a share of British export trade outweighing their share of the British economy, while the southern state crippled exports in pursuit of delusional self-sufficiency.Footnote 67 Shearman argued that financial subsidies from Westminster, denounced by nationalists as ‘bribes’, reflected normal transfers between richer and poorer regions in any state; similar resources, he claimed, would have been available to a Dublin government operating the 1920 Government of Ireland Act rather than demanding full sovereignty.Footnote 68 Shearman maintained that the non-emigrant southern electorate were entitled to ruin themselves, but not to ruin northerners who found their ideals incomprehensible or repulsive.Footnote 69 Shearman later lauded the enactment by Stormont of British welfare legislation, the development of large-scale housing programmes and the pursuit of outside investment. Shearman denied significant anti-Catholic discrimination, highlighting instances of anti-Protestant hostility in the republic and emphasising the decline of its Protestant population.Footnote 70 Shearman's support for the modernising project of Terence O'Neill in the 1960s suggests that he knew his earlier portrayal of Northern Ireland was over-idealised; even in the 1940s he was criticised by John Hewitt and R. M. Henry for dismissing Craig's ‘Protestant parliament for a Protestant people’ as platform rhetoric.Footnote 71
Shearman followed Not an inch with two satirical novels. The bishop's confession, which appeared in 1943, parodied the autobiography of C. F. D'Arcy, the Church of Ireland archbishop of Armagh, who died in 1938.Footnote 72 The novel, which presented the ostensible memoir of Percival MacPeake, bishop of the united Church of Ireland dioceses of Bangor, Dungannon and Strabane, describes the slow realisation that his beliefs reflect inherited social assumptions and personal frustrations, culminating in private abandonment of orthodoxy for a life-philosophy of personal authenticity. Maurice Craig declared it:
the first serious work of fiction involving philosophical ideas to come out of this particular social stratum in the North of Ireland … it establishes Mr Shearman as a real writer, not only the man of a single book. The Bishop (if he had really lived) would not have been a nonentity … his conflicts and problems live for us … Mr Shearman has not put together his book out of little bits of social history, or little snippets of ideas … Mr Shearman has treated Ulster society in a way in which it has not yet been treated in literature.Footnote 73
In A bomb and a girl, published in 1944, a more broadly satirical treatment of Belfast society, the bright but socially isolated student Stanislaus McOstrich discovers that Q.U.B. professors are phonies while students are mindless conformists or parrot fashionable doctrines; these include a Freudian ascribing imaginary sexual perversions to professors and a Nazi terrified to encounter genuine ruthlessness. Stanislaus assassinates a professor who sexually harassed a young woman to whom Stanislaus is attracted and unjustly marked down Stanislaus's papers. The police suspect Stanislaus but cannot arrest him without proof: ‘This is a free country. You can only do that sort of thing with Sinn Fein rebels and communists’. They suggest that another professor should give Stanislaus low marks to provoke a second assassination attempt, allowing the police to catch him. The professors instead award Stanislaus the highest marks and load him with scholarships. The girl of his dreams, previously glacial, shyly confesses her love after realising that he, like her, is a psychopath. Shearman hints that she is the reader's surrogate; humorous access to Stanislaus's mind brings disturbing complicity in his ill-gotten power. On graduation McOstrich secures a civil service appointment through political jobbery and glowing academic references, attains rapid promotion from cowardly superiors aware of the professor's fate, and is last seen nursing Whitehall ambitions, blissfully unaware of the imminent Second World War.
Close examination reveals that beneath the satirical humour of the novels references can be found to theosophist preoccupations such as the female element in the divine and the pursuit of the authentic self as symbolic crucifixion. In a theosophist in-joke, Stanislaus gives his religion as ‘Esoteric Buddhist’ in A bomb and a girl, explaining that he admires the universal duty of harmlessness.Footnote 74 A theosophical subtext is discernible in both novels’ concern with an authentic self, free of convention and compartmentalisation, although the authentic Stanislaus is alarming. He reflects Shearman's observation that proponents of freethought often advocated moral benevolence based on enlightened self-interest without explaining why the latter might not promote ruthless amorality.Footnote 75 Beneath the irony of a bishop without faith in Christianity, the MacPeake character in The bishop's confessions is an unflinching follower of the theosophist motto ‘no religion is greater than truth’ coined by Leadbeater, who is a partial model for MacPeake. The protagonist becomes involved in controversy over public advocacy of sexual education for adolescents. Leadbeater's apologists, including Shearman, argued that accusations of pederasty against him arose from frank conversations with youthful disciples about sexual problems.Footnote 76 The unconventionally shameless actress who is MacPeake's platonic love interest might be an avatar of the goddess archetype described by Blavatsky. Shearman denied the novel was autobiographical,Footnote 77 but it deploys some of his own experiences: MacPeake contrasts the showy and talkative Dublin encountered at Trinity College with sober and business-like Belfast.Footnote 78 Born forty years earlier, Shearman might have become a Church of Ireland clergyman; Shearman's Liberal Catholic ordination may suggest that he once aspired to Church of Ireland ministry.
Where most readers of The bishop's confession, nonbelievers or adherents of Abrahamic religions, assume life comes only once, Shearman sees a single episode in a learning process covering many incarnations. In the only extended critical assessment, Gillian McIntosh argues that MacPeake's favourite sister, who lives a bohemian life of sexual promiscuity before reconciliation with MacPeake in her last years, is a free spirit who lived a fuller life than her brother.Footnote 79 Shearman indicates that MacPeake's youthful self-righteousness is mellowed by unwillingness to condemn his favourite sister, but her treatment of her first husband is depicted as thoughtless, selfish and cruel.Footnote 80 Shearman disapproved of Christian sexual puritanism but believed enlightenment required self-regulation and wrote that the sexually promiscuous, trapped in childish pursuit of passing sensations, fail to attain maturity.Footnote 81 MacPeake's seeing in his dying sister the wilful, charming little girl of childhood implies that she has failed to progress in her current incarnation,Footnote 82 whereas MacPeake's loneliness reflects Shearman's view that loneliness and loss of accepted values necessarily precede ‘an entirely new kind of relevance and significance’.Footnote 83 The difficulty of conveying this belief through a first-person narrator who does not share it, to readers to whom Shearman's underlying beliefs were unknown and impossibly exotic, may explain why Shearman turned from novels to elucidations of theosophy.
IV
During the international anti-partition campaign by the de Valera and Costello governments after 1945, when the Irish government and overseas sympathisers disseminated propaganda aimed at mobilising international opinion to secure British withdrawal from Northern Ireland, Shearman emerged, with the playwright and journalist St John Ervine, as a spokesman for Ulster unionism. Reviewing Ervine's official biography of Craigavon, Shearman complained that unionist leaders neglected counter-propaganda:
Mr Ervine's exposition of Unionism consists in giving a very entertaining show-down to the mass of mendacity and humbug that is put out by Irish Nationalists and their fellow-travellers … These wild and untrue statements about Ulster which appear so often in the Press ought to be systematically dealt with the moment they appear, in the spirit in which Mr Ervine deals with them. If the slumberers of Stormont or Glengall Street had been more active in this matter, Ulster would to-day have a better name in Britain and would be less generally and dangerously misunderstood.Footnote 84
Shearman wrote for the Ulster Unionist Party-sponsored monthly Voice of Ulster in 1947–8. He predicted economic ruin should Northern Ireland be absorbed by the republic and paralleled Ulster and pre-war Czechoslovakia.Footnote 85 He addressed the Young Ulster Society in 1947 and a Young Unionist summer school organised by Terence O'Neill in 1948.Footnote 86 In 1950, Shearman published a brief history of modern Finland.Footnote 87 Douglas Savory, former professor of French language and Romance philology at Q.U.B. and unionist M.P., who had been lampooned in A bomb and a girl,Footnote 88 suggested that Shearman implicitly equated Finland's relations with Russia to those of Northern Ireland with the republic.Footnote 89
Participation in counter-propaganda brought official rewards. In 1944 the Northern Ireland government commissioned Shearman to write an official booklet for H.M.S.O.: Northern Ireland: its history, people and resources (Belfast, 1946). Shearman's official sponsors made him redraft the pamphlet to omit any suggestion of unionist shortcomings. The Northern Irish government often distributed the book among overseas opinion-formers and a print run of 50,000 was swiftly exhausted; by October 1947, 60,000 copies had been distributed gratis, with a further 25,000 retained for sale.Footnote 90 In 1948, when nationalist M.P.s at Stormont demanded the teaching of Irish history in schools, Samuel Hall-Thompson, the minister for education, said he had commissioned a history of Ulster from Shearman. South Armagh Nationalist M.P. Malachi Conlon called it ‘a complete contortion’; Hall-Thompson was ‘quite pleased with it’.Footnote 91 In 1946 Shearman drafted a report for the Royal Society of Ulster Architects on ‘Planning and reconstruction in Ulster’, with reference to tourist facilities.Footnote 92 In 1951 the state commissioned a pamphlet on How Northern Ireland is governed, and in 1952 the government employed him to write a school textbook (published in London), Modern Ireland, which Shearman described as intended to prevent nationalist teachers implying that Sir Basil Brooke caused the Famine.Footnote 93 Modern Ireland asserted pre-plantation Ulster distinctiveness, with the Mournes and Lough Erne as boundary. During a 1956 Stormont debate, Harry Midgley, minister for education, stated that grant-aided Catholic schools would receive two of Shearman's historical works free of charge: ‘He hoped that anti-“partition” members would use their influence to have the books read and not put in the waste-paper basket.’Footnote 94 Shearman engaged in publicity and research for the Ulster Tourist Development Association.Footnote 95 From 1946, he broadcast on B.B.C. Radio Ulster on cultural and historical topics.Footnote 96 Faber & Faber published Shearman's Anglo-Irish relations (London, 1948), which was notably more acerbic on Irish nationalism and the Republic of Ireland. Shearman attributed this shift to the shadow cast over Irish neutrality by the death camps.Footnote 97 M. J. McManus called the book ‘a scandalous libel on the Irish people’, excoriating its Malthusian argument that the Famine was not the British government's fault and had benefits. He noted Shearman sensationalised republican violence in the independence struggle while downplaying loyalist violence.Footnote 98
In 1949 Shearman published Ulster in the Robert Hale County Books series, reflecting wider British interest in regionalism in the aftermath of war. This personal account of the nine-county province, begun c.1944 and incorporating material from radio talks,Footnote 99 newspaper articles and even passages from A bomb and a girl, is Shearman's magnum opus. It combines personal reminiscence and reflections, some understandable only through Shearman's other commitments. When Shearman cited the Belfast-born theosophist poet James Cousins (1873–1956) as exemplifying Belfast literary achievement and the pagan streak underlying Puritanism,Footnote 100 emphasised that George Russell saw fairies,Footnote 101 claimed that a spot near Slieve Croob in central Down was haunted by feelings of evil,Footnote 102 and accepted claims by a seventeenth-century writer that ‘great angels’ were seen on the Antrim plateau,Footnote 103 he was making literal statements of belief knowing most readers would think them casual whimsicality. Shearman's theosophy underlay his disagreement with W. R. Rodgers's view of rural tradition dwindling inexorably. Shearman suggested that rural traditions reflected psychological archetypes which reappear in new forms.Footnote 104 On the advantages of modernisation, he commented:
I am not sorry to see the coming of the steam thresher or the other new things that are making farming easier … I know how pleasant thatched roofs look, but, unlike so many people who admire them, I have been underneath them and have listened to the vermin rustling about in them above me, and I have seen what it is like when a thatch catches fire … our best energies should not be directed to opposing new things but … using the new things in a right manner … If we have won new technical capacities … those capacities are only destructive if we imagine that we can stop growing. If we realise that we have to go on growing and have to turn now to clean up the jungles and problems of inner worlds, the worlds that we call emotional, intellectual, intuitional or spiritual and what the psychologists call the unconscious, then mass production and other modern conveniences become healthy steps on our way.Footnote 105
Shearman's regionalism did not advocate perpetuation of Ulster-Scots dialect, which he apparently associated with Presbyterianism and provincialism. Ulster identity did not depend on these, any more than religious faith on traditional theological formulations:
It will be a long time before local dialects are worn down by modern transport, education and the radio; but the subtler developments of dialect are already wilting before these influences in many parts of the world. Many will regret this, for local dialects are a defence against the onset of a standardised drabness … the richest capacities of human nature do not manifest themselves through the lives and activities of primitive peasants and fisher folk but through men and women of complex natures whose very circumstances compel them to express themselves through the medium of the standard metropolitan dialects of the languages which have the greatest international currency. So, though we may rightly give all honour to the vitality that bubbles out in the creations of local dialect … there is no need for dismay at the thought that the tide is likely to run steadily against the preservation of local dialect in the coming centuries.Footnote 106
In the Irish Press, Frank Gallagher (de Valera's chief anti-partition propagandist) and ‘David O'Neill’ compared the book to a history of German-occupied France by a collaborator, omitting the Resistance. Shearman was denounced for ignoring the ‘real history’ of Protestant Ulster: the United Irishmen of the 1790s. Reviews pointed out that Shearman dismissed the organisation in a couple of paragraphs, without naming key figures. Gallagher and ‘O'Neill’ accused the distinguished Ulster individuals whom Shearman celebrated of craven servility because they were not nationalists. Indeed, Gallagher was outraged at the inclusion of Ulster in a series on English counties.Footnote 107 Another reviewer complained of Shearman's suggestion that fewer Catholics than Protestants reported fairies because of ‘a Christian Brother with a ruler, or some other agent of orthodoxy’.Footnote 108 Shearman replied that he expressed his own convictions:
I have found myself adversely criticised in the Unionist press on the grounds that my pen has been used in the disservice of that government … I express my own personal view of things and do not write at the inspiration or in the service of any particular organised political interest … The account of social life in Ulster at the close of the 16th century … is drawn largely from the work of Professor TW Moody … my book is largely concerned with geology, archaeology, field studies, folklore, the scenery and people of modern Ulster, reminiscences of my own childhood, and makes very little mention of politics … Surely it is time that people exercised the necessary self-control to protect some small corner of life and literature on this island from the intrusive noise of political rant … [which] caused Irishmen to get their growing world reputation as a race of talkative and mendacious bores.Footnote 109
‘O'Neill’ replied that Moody had not portrayed pre-conquest Gaelic Ulster as a land of savages or the plantation as an unquestionable improvement.Footnote 110 Shearman's denial of official inspiration was disingenuous. His repudiation of Gallagher's claim that he had insinuated that the republic was a priest-ridden backwater will not convince readers of Ulster, but Gallagher's dismissal of the possibility that Shearman and other unionists genuinely identified with Britain ignored the fact that his own employment by de Valera did not mean that his republicanism was not sincere. Shearman also argued over the book with Michael Morris, third Lord Killannin in the Times Literary Supplement.Footnote 111
From the early 1950s, as the international anti-partition campaign faded, Shearman's principal literary endeavours involved theosophy and Belfast journalism, initially in the Belfast Telegraph. One article discussed his feeling that the mysterious landscape in a plantation map of ‘Cuj-Ully’ (Cuige Uladh – the province of Ulster) persisted within contemporary Northern Ireland.Footnote 112 He contrasted the Wolfe Tone Annual's eulogy of John Mitchel with the latter's defence of slavery, which he subjected to psychological analysis: ‘Mitchel… [was] a warped and pathetic figure, full of turbulent and confusing passions … seeking emotional satisfaction in the espousal of mean and reactionary causes … advocacy of physical force in politics and of physical cruelty and oppression against negroes, are tightly bound up together.’Footnote 113 From the 1960s to the 1980s Shearman wrote almost exclusively for the Belfast News Letter and its stable-mate the Sunday News. In 1961 he oversaw a group of Unionist Party intellectuals advising the organisation on policy formation and propaganda.Footnote 114
Shearman regarded abandonment of economic nationalism by the Republic of Ireland in the 1960s as a confession of nationalist bankruptcy. He saw the Northern Ireland civil rights movement of the late 1960s and the post-1969 Troubles as reviving the anti-partition propaganda of 1945–51 and paramilitary subversion of 1956–62, at the behest of the Irish government and the I.R.A., to undermine Ulster economic success, reverse Catholic acquiescence in the status quo, and conceal the republic's failings. Shearman does not seem to have responded when republicans quoted his defence, in Not an inch, of Craig's appeal to force as evidence in favour of their own arguments that Northern Ireland derived from the assertion of force against democracy, and that if unionists had won by force in the past nationalists might triumph through force in the present.Footnote 115 Shearman attributed the Cameron Commission's findings of significant anti-Catholic discrimination to British credulity towards republican propaganda and longstanding unionist ineffectiveness in presenting their case. His last publication commissioned by the Stormont government, a lavishly-illustrated brochure commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the northern state, repeated his standard narrative about the achievements of unionist rule and predicted renewed modernisation after the defeat of terrorism.Footnote 116 In an Unionist Party pamphlet published after the suspension of Stormont in 1972, Shearman declared that the repeal of every Catholic-influenced law in the republic would not convert unionists, since the Irish state and popular attitudes which produced economic havoc over ‘half a century of muddle’ would persist.Footnote 117
Shearman's Ulster regionalism was British rather than particularist, but the demise of Stormont presented the recurring unionist dilemma of British governments seeing Ulster unionism as un-British. In the News Letter Shearman denounced the suspension of Stormont on 30 March 1972 as betraying commitments made in 1926, when the Cosgrave and Baldwin governments recognised the Northern Ireland border, and 1949, when the British parliament enacted legislation which declared that Northern Ireland could not leave the United Kingdom without consent of the Northern Ireland parliament. Shearman opposed direct rule from Westminster. He argued that retaining devolved bureaucracy without the flexibility of devolved political administration was a bad idea and that Westminster would trade Northern Ireland to the Irish state if it felt British interests required it.Footnote 118 Shearman's short commissioned history of the Belfast News Letter blamed deindustrialisation in Northern Ireland during the 1970s and 1980s on the incompetence and indifference of British administrators of direct rule.Footnote 119 This ignored the long-term decline of traditional industries and the heavy subsidisation of the Northern economy during the Troubles; even without the Troubles Stormont could hardly have countered the oil crises, 1970s ‘stagflation’, and Thatcherite abandonment of Keynesianism and of British regional development policies.Footnote 120 Shearman believed that no devolved government could function with members committed to its destruction, a category which included all shades of nationalism. This belief led Shearman to oppose the Sunningdale Agreement. In April 1974, he lectured United Ulster Unionist Council delegates on propaganda techniques for their campaign to bring down the power-sharing executive.Footnote 121
Over the following decade and a half, Shearman defended Stormont's record and the unionist cause, notably in a column which he published for eighteen years in the Sunday News as ‘John Morrison’. He also gave talks and wrote pamphlets for pro-union groups. The substance of these polemics appeared in The Ulster cover-up (Lurgan, 1993) published under his pen-name John Morrison. The book resembles Not an inch and Anglo-Irish relations in format, but while the earlier books were published by the prestigious London publisher Faber & Faber, The Ulster cover-up was produced by the Lurgan-based Ulster Society, founded in 1986 to promote cultural and intellectual unionism, and linked with future unionist leader, David Trimble.Footnote 122 Once again, Shearman argued that the post-partition Irish state wrecked its economy by severance from the British exchequer and adherence to authoritarian Catholicism; it had escaped economic collapse by promoting foreign investment, bringing abject dependence on Europe and Third World levels of debt.Footnote 123 While secularising trends were visible in the republic, the persistence of sixteenth-century mindsets was, he claimed, indicated by nationwide 1985 sightings of ‘moving statues’, the defeat of the 1986 divorce referendum, and the halving of the Protestant population since 1926.Footnote 124 Without mentioning theosophy, Shearman remarked that those who embraced unusual religious beliefs aroused only tolerant curiosity among northerners, but faced hostility in the republic. In the 1970s members of the Hare Krishna movement who chanted in the streets of Dublin were, he claimed, arrested as a public nuisance, whereas they danced unmolested in Belfast.Footnote 125 Shearman argued that Stormont had been the victim of hostile propaganda which denounced theoretical powers provided by emergency legislation while ignoring its limited impact in practice.Footnote 126 He denied conscious discrimination against nationalists, attributing their disadvantages to the peripherality of Catholic areas and the limitations of the Catholic educational system, as well as the social effects of large families, parental neglect and early school-leaving.Footnote 127 Shearman argued that Stormont simply left nationalists to their own devices and pursued a long-term strategy of breaking down barriers through competent managerial government, culminating in the O'Neill era. Shearman emphasised high social expenditure under Stormont compared to the republic, and the acknowledged success and impartiality of the Northern Ireland Housing Trust.Footnote 128 He attributed the absence of post-partition Catholic unionists entirely to nationalist intimidation.Footnote 129 This ignored then-recent publications of historians such as Patrick Buckland, whose archival research revealed that inter-war Stormont governments deliberately disadvantaged nationalists and discouraged cross-community opposition parties, and that Catholics who wished to work with unionism were rebuffed.Footnote 130
Shearman acknowledged the existence of loyalist violence, and the political role of Ian Paisley and Protestant fundamentalism, but claimed that these were reactive and represented a subculture rather than a communal monolith, as he saw Catholic-nationalism. Shearman criticised talk of two communities in Northern Ireland, claiming the variegated Protestant population did not share a single co-ordinated identity. He argued that northern Catholics were not excluded but walled themselves off just as, he claimed, the republic tried to seal out the wider world.Footnote 131 This was compounded, in his view, by an alleged perennial British desire to conciliate Dublin using Belfast as a bargaining chip; he denounced the abolition of Stormont as an offence against democracy, complained that the insistence on power-sharing gave the S.D.L.P. — and indirectly, Dublin — a veto over political progress and argued that the British refusal to declare the union inviolable encouraged the I.R.A. campaign.Footnote 132 Shearman lamented that Brian Faulkner and his colleagues, through misplaced loyalty, had been unwilling to cause trouble for the direct rule administration.Footnote 133 Edward Heath's negotiation of the Sunningdale Agreement was attributed to self-importance and Margaret Thatcher's conclusion of the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement to a prime minister resembling Neville Chamberlain in mistaking petulance for strength, and being manipulated by civil servants, the real architects of long-term Westminster policy.Footnote 134 Shearman endorsed claims by Kennedy Lindsay and Colin Wallace that the British deep state actively undermined unionism through black propaganda and covert intrigues.Footnote 135 Shearman suggested that the Thatcher governments, with their support base in southern England, deliberately deindustrialised Northern Ireland and Scotland with the aim of making them nominally independent ‘Bantustans’ like the Republic of Ireland.Footnote 136 (The South African apartheid regime established ‘tribal homelands’ to provide cheap migrant labourers while disavowing responsibility for their well-being.) Shearman's arguments looked back to the mid century polemics around the anti-partition campaign. The year 1993, at the beginning of the ‘Celtic Tiger’ economic boom in the republic and the precipitate decline of Catholic church influence there, was probably the last time when such arguments could be advanced with contemporary, as distinct from historical, plausibility.
Shearman's late-life isolation, symbolised by the embattled position of his Cliftonville home (subsequently demolished), as working-class estates climbed the previously middle-class Cave Hill and the nationalist New Lodge district expanded, reflected the wider erosion of provincial Ulster Protestant elites. Shearman's lament at the end of The Ulster cover-up that unionists failed to publicise their own case reflects this wider process.Footnote 137 In later life Shearman suffered from kidney cancer; he commented sardonically on fellow theosophists’ speculation that this reflected an indiscretion during previous incarnations in Atlantis.Footnote 138 After moving to a nursing home in Belfast following a stroke, Shearman died on 26 January 1999. The lack of notice in local newspapers shows that he had become a man out of his time, but he offers valuable insights into Ulster unionist cultural politics in the mid and later twentieth century.
Shearman was located at the cusp of the professionalisation of Irish academic history, but his accounts of Ulster, though fascinating and revealing, remain nineteenth-century-style historical apologetics. He drew on Church of Ireland and governmental traditions within unionism rather than the populist image of the Ulster Scot: at the same time Shearman surreptitiously blended nineteenth-century Protestant-imperial emphasis on self-command and inner self-conviction with the theosophist project of an unflinching search for the authentic self even when this required investigating rumours of angels in Antrim.Footnote 139 His arguments about the managerial achievements of Stormont have some substance, though he ignored Stormont's long-standing preference for propping up declining industries rather than promoting new sectors. The Troubles reflected political failure which his technocratic pretensions failed to address, however, not least in their assumption that technocracy made it unnecessary to acknowledge the existence of nationalism since modernisation would somehow automatically dissipate it. Shearman's obliviousness to the violent and emotive aspects of popular unionism suggests that his emphasis on the ability of perceptions to create realities was excessive, but he provides a mirror to the self-perceptions of the Ulster unionism of his day and its genuine ability to detect splinters in the nationalist eye while ignoring those in its own.
