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, official and/or unionism:
“Consciousness, we shall find, is reducible to relations between objects, and objects we shall find to be reducible to relations between different states of consciousness; and neither point of view is more nearly ultimate than the other.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“Our medieval historians who prefer to rely as much as possible on official documents because the chronicles are unreliable, fall thereby into an occasionally dangerous error. The documents tell us little about the difference in tone which separates us from those times; they let us forget the fervent pathos of medieval life.”
—Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)
“What is Virtue but the Trade Unionism of the married?”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)