Mary Kenny’s Crown and Shamrock colours in the history of the relationship between Britain and Ireland in the 19th and 20th centuries, often producing unexpected quirky details – always popular here.
I’m going to pick on two; one true and one, I think, not so true. In the 20th century many statues and symbols of British rule were taken down including, in 1947, this statue of Queen Victoria in front of Leinster House. It was not destroyed and eventually, forty years later, found a new home outside the Queen Victoria building in Sydney.
If I may digress, Queen Victoria was fairly amply proportioned in her later life. PG Wodehouse might have opined that when God made her he had enough material for at least two Empresses, though he would have been referring to another Empress. She also had a somewhat forbidding expression. Her statue is Windsor was known by me as a schoolboy as “pick up that orange peel”.
Well I never. You wait ages for a statue of Queen Victoria and then three come along in the same post. But what of other British memorials in Ireland? Some remain, like the Duke of Wellington atop a column in Trim. Another surprising survival is Prince Albert whose statue (by John Foley) was unveiled beside Leinster House in 1871. It is still there, on the Merrion Square side, half-hidden by a hedge. It may owe its survival to not having any name on the plinth.
If you live in Dublin you may know all that. Something else I didn’t know was that Éamon de Valera and Frank Aiken spent the last night of British rule in India with Mountbatten in the Viceroy’s palace in Delhi. Mary’s source is Andrew Roberts’s Eminent Churchllians. It would provide the basis for a play – how about it, Tom Stoppard? The parallels between the partition of Ireland and India are so obvious and Nehru may be likened to an Indian Dev.
Independence came at midnight on the night of 14th August 1947. Dev and Aiken, I think, visited India in June 1948 and indeed did visit Nehru and the Mountbattens, so still plenty for Stoppard to get his teeth into. I think the confusion is between the last night of British rule and the last night the Mountbatten’s spent in India.
I hope I’ve whetted your appetite to read this absorbing and often opiniated history. My window cleaner came yesterday and said that he will buy it to read on holiday. His recommendation for me is My Promised Land by Ari Shavit.
https://youtu.be/-DxqdIA75sc
Good luck with persuading T Stoppard as to the theme of a new play. I wrote to him once in that vein and got a v nice sort of GBS card back saying that the idea sounded fine (I forget the details of my proposal and of his reply) and why didn’t I write it myself?
I enjoyed Cliff Richard, but times have changed. He and the other road users would be done today for Careless Driving, Seat Belt offences, and Carrying passengers in a way involving danger or injury (Road Traffic Act 1988) at the very least.
Thank you for your informed comment. I will drive with care in the environs of Colchester.