|
|
|
Christopher Gill's tribute to
Norris |
|
With the death of our President Norris
McWhirter CBE, the Association has lost not only a great inspiration but
also a true friend to all who knew him. |
|
Norris was a truly remarkable man. In
his younger days, he had been a gifted athlete who ran for his native
Scotland as well as representing Great Britain. As an athletic
commentator for the BBC and as a co-presenter of Record Breakers, Norris was
known to millions of listeners and viewers but his fame as the joint founder
of the Guinness Book of Records made him a household name in many other
countries far beyond these shores. |
|
His founding of The Freedom Association in
1975 owed much to a chance encounter that he had on a trans-Atlantic
airliner with the late Viscount De L'Isle VC who became the Association's
first President. For Norris and his twin brother Ross, sadly murdered
by the IRA in 1975, love of the country which they had both served as Royal
Navy officers on active service in World War II, was deep rooted and well
founded. He had an unrivalled knowledge of British constitutional law
and fought hard and long against European integration in which connection he
felt passionately that the British people should at least be consulted
before being subsumed into the totalitarian European Union which he so
fiercely opposed. |
|
In 1991 Norris launched the Referendum First
campaign believing as he did that the Treaty of European Union (Maastricht)
should not be ratified without the wholehearted consent of the people.
Subsequently he laid charges of misprision against Douglas Hurd and Francis
Maude, the two Government ministers who had signed the Treaty on behalf of
the United Kingdom. In 1994 he and his co-accuser, Rodney Atkinson,
recorded these events for posterity in their book Treason at Maastricht.
When Norris died on the afternoon of Monday 19th April 2004 he had the
satisfaction of knowing that what he had fought so hard to achieve was at
long last to become a reality as it had been announced that the Prime
Minister would be going to the House of Commons the very next day to promise
a referendum on the proposed European Union Constitution. |
|
Norris was a man of great courage, enormous
integrity and a fearless campaigner for individual freedom and national
independence. He was a man of principle, a truly honourable man but
above all else, a committed and sincere patriot. As a champion of
freedom he was a beacon of hope whose sudden and unexpected extinguishment
will be an irreplaceable loss to the the cause for which he gave so much. |
| As befitted a good all-rounder, in 2003
Norris was awarded the Society of St. George's "True Englishman of the Year"
award - as he said himself with characteristic modesty, a rare achievement
for a man born into a Scottish family from Ayrshire! |
|
Click here
to view the next page of tributes |
|
Click
here to add your
own tribute to Norris McWhirter CBE |
