Loyalist Art/Crumlin Road Exhibition

Last Wednesday night, a group of the old Volunteers of the early seventies met up again, at the front gates of Crumlin Road Prison to view the Ex-Loyalist Prisoners Art Display.

It was brilliant to meet up again with so many sincere old comrades, in much better circumstances than when, we had last unwillingly been together in the same old building at  Her Majesties Pleasure.

Thanks to the fantastic artwork of Geordie Morrow we were able to review our incarcerated past, preserved for future generations by Geordies totally realistic paintings.

These paintings are not copies from pictures, memories, or fantasies, they are factual periods in time capsulated forever, as they actually happened thanks to Geordie Morrows artistic talent and foresight.

I looked on with pride as my ageing comrades studied their place in history, entranced and reinvigorated again by the memories and enthusiasm of their youth.

It brought home to me the importance of preserving and displaying all the artwork of our past for the benefit of the future generations, who are already starting to be deceived by the whitewashed version of the past that is being portrayed by, the poor perpetually victimised and of course totally innocent, barbaric ethnic cleansers of the republican movement.

Geordie Morrow has many other periods of our past capsulated forever in paint still to be displayed. Beano Niblock has written a vast quantity of poetry and literary art, I believe that there is a massive pool of as yet untapped Loyalist artwork, poems, songs, paintings, and craftwork, lying nearly forgotten about and unpublished in the homes of many ex-prisoners.

Thanks to, “Wee lonely pint” Plum Smith, the work of co-ordinating all this material  into what should become a permanent home and rolling road show, has just hopefully just began.

This permanent Loyalist Exhibition should be situated in a Loyalist Working Class area and definitely not in association with the Republican Shrine, that is to be erected at Long Kesh.

Charlie Freel.