MCCORMICK, James Hanna

James Hanna McCormick had two careers on two continents. In Canada, he was an original Barr colonist, deputy mayor of a prairie town, a militia officer, and the author of a Saskatchewan boosterist volume. He took a commission with the Canadian Expeditionary Force in the First World War, raised his own troop of Western Canadian cowboys at his personal expense, fought at Vimy Ridge and Lens, was recommended for the Victoria Cross, and was awarded the Distinguished Service Order instead. He returned to Ireland after the war, married, wrote a memoir of his Canadian years, and sat in the Parliament of Northern Ireland for nine years as the Ulster Unionist member for Belfast St Anne’s, surviving a gun attack outside his own home along the way.

Early life

McCormick was born in Belfast on 20 September 1875 to Thomas McCormick and Elizabeth Hanna McCormick. He emigrated to Canada as a young man; the sailing is not recorded in the Library and Archives Canada passenger lists for the years under which the age-band fits, and the exact date remains open. He saw his first military service in the South African War of 1899–1902 with the Imperial Yeomanry, in an Irish Horse regiment.

Saskatchewan

McCormick joined the original 1903 movement of English settlers, led by the Anglican clergyman Isaac Barr, that founded the colony at Lloydminster on the Saskatchewan-Alberta border. He was among the colonists from the start, not a later arrival, and by 1908 or 1909 he had built a substantial position in the young town: he held the deputy mayor’s office, owned some 1,200 acres of land, sat on the town council from 1911, and worked as an estate auctioneer, later his stated occupation on his CEF attestation papers.

He held a simultaneous militia commission with the 22nd Saskatchewan Light Horse, and for a period served as deputy sheriff of Saskatchewan.

He drew on his prairie years for two books, written at very different points in his life. The Greater Saskatchewan, a boosterist volume on the young province, appeared in 1910 while he still lived at Lloydminster. Lloydminster, or Five Thousand Miles with the Barr Colonists, his fuller account of Isaac Barr’s 1903 settler movement, did not follow until 1922, published by Drane’s in London after McCormick had already returned to Ireland; it is a retrospective memoir rather than a contemporaneous settlement account. Both titles are now out of print and held mainly in provincial archives and university special-collections libraries.

War service

When the First World War broke out, McCormick, then serving as deputy sheriff of Saskatchewan, raised and equipped at his own expense a troop of riders that became known as the Corps of Western Canadian Cowboys, nicknamed “McCormick’s Devils.” The unit was folded into the 197th Battalion of the Canadian Expeditionary Force, in which McCormick took a lieutenant’s commission; the battalion was later absorbed into the 11th Battalion, CEF, a common fate for CEF units raised in Canada once they reached England, where reinforcement needs at the front routinely broke up freshly arrived battalions and redistributed their men. His Officer’s Declaration Paper, held at Library and Archives Canada, records his occupation as auctioneer and his stated religion as “Irish Protestant.”

McCormick crossed the Atlantic in January 1917. He was recommended for the Victoria Cross and wounded five times over the course of the war; the Distinguished Service Order he was ultimately awarded, gazetted in the 1918 supplements, cited his conduct at Vimy Ridge that April. By August 1917 he was leading the 17th (City of Winnipeg) Battalion in the final assault on Lens. He returned to Canada in October 1919 before eventually resettling in Ireland; by the time he named his Belfast house “Vimy,” after the battle, the wartime service that had produced his decoration was already the defining chapter of his life to his neighbours.

Northern Ireland

McCormick had settled back in Ireland by the early 1920s. In 1922 he married Evelyn Campbell; they had two sons, William and Campbell McCormick. The new Northern Ireland government gave him two successive chairmanships

: the Appeal Court, 1921 to 1924, and then the labour-ministry appeal tribunals from 1928 into 1929. He stood for the newly-drawn Belfast St Anne's seat in 1929 as an Ulster Unionist and won it, becoming the constituency's first member of parliament and taking a place in the Parliament of Northern Ireland. The constituency returned him through the 1930s.

McCormick was active in the Ulster Protestant League from its formation in 1931 and spoke on its behalf to the allied Scottish Protestant League in Scotland; in 1933 he told an Orange gathering that Protestants who hired Catholic workers were guilty of a form of betrayal, and he warned publicly of the growth of the Catholic population in the north. That October, two assailants attacked him outside his own home; he fought them off with his walking stick but was shot in the arm before they fled. He retired from Stormont in 1938 and Edmond Warnock succeeded him in Belfast St Anne’s. He made one further attempt at elected office in 1950, standing as an independent unionist for the Westminster seat of Belfast West, and was defeated by the official Ulster Unionist candidate, James Godfrey MacManaway.

Death

McCormick died at Belfast on 4 May 1955, at the age of seventy-nine.