Signed in Blood Myth
Contrary to popular belief, no signatures were signed in blood. The signature of Frederick Hugh Crawford was claimed by him to have been written in blood. However, based on the results of a forensic test that he carried out in September 2012, Dr. Alastair Ruffell of The Queen's University of Belfast has asserted that he is 90% positive that the signature is not blood. Crawford's signature was injected with a small amount of luminol; this substance reacts with iron in blood's haemoglobin to produce a blue-white glow. The test is very sensitive and can detect tiny traces even in old samples. Crawford's signature is still a rich red colour today which would be unlikely if it had been blood. Nevertheless, some Unionists are not convinced by the evidence.
In January 1913 the Ulster Volunteers aimed to recruit 100,000 men aged from 17 to 65 who had signed the Covenant, as a unionist militia.
A British Covenant, similar to the Ulster Covenant in opposition to the Home Rule Bill, received two million signatures in 1914.
Read more about this topic: Ulster Covenant
Famous quotes containing the words signed, blood and/or myth:
“You watched and you saw what happened and in the accumulation of episodes you saw the pattern: Daddy ruled the roost, called the shots, made the money, made the decisions, so you signed up on his side, and fifteen years later when the women’s movement came along with its incendiary manifestos telling you to avoid marriage and motherhood, it was as if somebody put a match to a pile of dry kindling.”
—Anne Taylor Fleming (20th century)
“I too have been in the underworld, as was Odysseus, and I will often be there again; not only sheep have I sacrificed so as to be able to speak with a few dead souls, but neither have I spared my own blood as well.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“One of the oddest features of western Christianized culture is its ready acceptance of the myth of the stable family and the happy marriage. We have been taught to accept the myth not as an heroic ideal, something good, brave, and nearly impossible to fulfil, but as the very fibre of normal life. Given most families and most marriages, the belief seems admirable but foolhardy.”
—Jonathan Raban (b. 1942)