Party;
and he had from his youth been convinced that the day would come when
Ulster would have to carry out Lord Randolph Churchill's injunction.
That being so, he was not the man to tarry till solemn assemblies of
merchants, lawyers, and divines should propound a policy; if there was
to be fighting, Crawford was going to be ready for it, and thought that
preparation for such a contingency could not begin too soon. And the
advertisements were not barren of practical result. There was an
astonishing number of replies; Crawford purchased a few rifles, and
obtained samples of others; and, what was more important, he gained
knowledge of the Continental trade in second-hand firearms, which had
its centre in the free port of Hamburg, and of the men engaged in that
trade. This knowledge he turned to account in 1912 and the two following
years.

He had been for nearly twenty years an officer of Artillery Militia, and
when the U.V.F. was organised in 1912 he became its Director of Ordnance
on the headquarters staff. He was also a member of the Standing
Committee of the Ulster Unionist Council, where he persistently
advocated preparation for armed resistance long before most of his
colleagues thought such a policy necessary. But early in 1912 he
obtained leave to get samples of procurable firearms, and his
promptitude in acting on it, and in presenting before certain members of
the Committee a collection of gleaming rifles with bayonets fixed, took
away the breath of the more cautious of his colleagues.

From this time forward Crawford was frequently engaged in this business.
He got into communication with the dealers in arms whose acquaintance he
had made six years before. He went himself to Hamburg, and, after
learning something of the chicanery prevalent in the trade, which it
took all his resourcefulness to overcome, he fell in with an honest Jew
by whose help he succeeded in sending a thousand rifles safely to
Belfast. Other consignments followed from time to time in larger or
smaller quantities, in the transport of which all the devices of
old-time smuggling were put to the test. Crawford bought a schooner,
which for a year or more proved very useful, and, while employing her in
bringing arms to Ulster, he made acquaintance with a skipper of one of
the Antrim Iron Ore Company's coasting steamers, whose name was Agnew, a
fine seaman of the best type produced by the British Mercantile Marine,
who afterwards proved an inval