Bogeyman but not bigot

Edward Carson: even today, almost 70 years after his death, the name of the barrister and Unionist leader has the power to inspire hatred or adulation. A short time ago Ian Paisley was photographed at the election count in Belfast City Hall touching a bust of Carson as though it was a sacred relic. To his detractors, Carson stands in the same relation to the rancorous, sectarian creed of Paisleyism as Hitler does to neo-Nazism.

Carson has not lacked biographers, notwithstanding the dust-jacket’s puff for this as the first modern biography. The three-volume official biography, started by Edward Marjoribanks, half-brother of the late Lord Hailsham, and completed by Ian Colvin, was published a decade or so after The Waste Land; it was hardly modernist but it was certainly modern. Eighteen years after Carson’s death, H. Mont- gomery Hyde published a substantial life in one volume. The Belfast historians A. T.