Life
[?]-1906 [‘fighting Saunderson’]; Founder of Ulster Unionism
and MP; once used fisticuffs in House of Commons; subject of bronze statue
in Portadown. SEE Alvin Jackson, Col. Edward Saunderson: Land and Loyalty
in Victorian England (OUP 1995); quotes account in F. F. Moore, The
Ulsterman (1914): ‘Ay it’s a long time since we had a man that
would make a speech to sting them [the nationalists] as colonel Saunderson
used to do. If Saunderson was alive now, and if poor Chamberlain was his
old self again, we wouldn’t hear much about a gang of Nationalists
ruling the Empire.’ (Cited in review, Don MacRaild, Irish Studies
Review, 20 Autumn 1997, p.40.); there is an earlier memoir of 1908
by Reginald Lucas.
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