Apprentice Boys' Memorial Hall

Apprentice Boys' Memorial Hall Review

Imposing in its Scottish Baronial fortified grandeur, this is a meeting place for the exclusively Protestant organization set up in 1715 to honor 13 apprentice boys who slammed the city gate in the face of the Catholic King James in 1688 and sparked the Siege of Derry, and it has remained a symbol of Protestant stubbornness ever since. Inside there's an initiation room in which 20,000 have pledged to uphold Protestant values, and a magnificently chaotic museum filled to the brim with furniture, firearms, books, bombs, swords, and sculpture. It's a fascinating glimpse into a mostly closed world. An upstairs bar and dance hall—now used for meetings, initiations, and social events organized by the Apprentice Boys—has walls lined with 12 banners representing the lost tribes of Israel. (Some Protestants believe the lost tribes of Israel ended up in Northern Ireland and are their forebears.) More recent exhibitions showcase the story of the siege and show a scale model of how the city walls looked at the time of the siege. In 2010 four murals on boards depiciting scenes from the siege were transferred from the walls of the Protestant Fountain estate into one of the Hall's exhibition rooms.