Tommy Henderson - Relations With Official Unionism

Relations With Official Unionism

Henderson was a member of the Irish Unionist Party and when the Unionists decided to establish the Ulster Unionist Labour Association to bolster their support with Protestant workers in 1918, he became a founder member and one of the leading personalities and very popular among the Shankill workers.

In 1920, he offered himself as a potential Unionist candidate for the House of Commons of Northern Ireland at the first election but was met by a patronising response from the Chairman of the selection meeting who looked down at him (Henderson was significantly below average height) in his ill-fitting and paint-spattered clothes and asked "What kind of a man are you?". Henderson left the meeting before the ballot, knowing he could not win and determined to show the Unionists exactly what kind of a man he was.

Read more about this topic:  Tommy Henderson

Famous quotes containing the words relations with, relations, official and/or unionism:

    I only desire sincere relations with the worthiest of my acquaintance, that they may give me an opportunity once in a year to speak the truth.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    All social rules and all relations between individuals are eroded by a cash economy, avarice drags Pluto himself out of the bowels of the earth.
    Karl Marx (1818–1883)

    I know one husband and wife who, whatever the official reasons given to the court for the break up of their marriage, were really divorced because the husband believed that nobody ought to read while he was talking and the wife that nobody ought to talk while she was reading.
    Vera Brittain (1893–1970)

    What is Virtue but the Trade Unionism of the married?
    George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)