The Irish Cultural Centre in Hammersmith was already filling up and the musicians were tuning up almost an hour before Prince Charles and his wife Camilla arrived. It was a patchwork of green dresses and ties, tweed coats and shamrock earrings, and a medley of Irish accents, some gently inflected by their years in England. “Singers: mezzanine. Knitters into room 2,” came the announcement over a loudspeaker.
Cathy Richardson, originally from Waterford city but long settled in Fulham, was among the knitters and she was wearing a pink knitted scarf, hat and sweater. One of her friends had knitted the hat and scarf but the sweater was, she said, “Primark’s best”. I asked her if she was excited about meeting the royal couple. “I couldn’t care less,” she said. “I’ve seen Charlie before. What is there to be excited about.”
The knitting group, which meets at the centre once a week, were sitting around an oval table with balls of wool and half-knitted garments in front of them. Mary Hamarogue from Ballinrobe, Co Mayo, said the knitting circle was a hotbed of gossip. “We come here every Tuesday afternoon and we gossip about everything. We’re at an age when we can say anything,” she said.
Downstairs, Charles and Camilla were arriving and pressing the flesh before sitting among a group of musicians and receiving a lightning lesson in playing the bodhrán. The prince took to it quickly enough, leaning in as he picked up the pace and after a while his wife got the knack too, tapping her black suede boots as she hammered away at the goatskin.
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Charles and Camilla will be in Ireland next week for their sixth visit in less than a decade and they have already visited all but a handful of counties. But pulling a pint of Guinness remained a challenge as the prince struggled with how long to let it settle before topping it up and sipping it before it was ready and leaving part of it on the end of his nose. “An unsettling experience,” he pronounced.
Then it was upstairs to meet the knitting group and as the prince admired their work, Cathy from Waterford city commanded his attention. “Charles, do you like mine?” she said. “Do you get better and better as you go on?” he said. “Ah listen, love, I’ve been knitting since I was four years of age,” she said. As the couple were whooshed out into the next room, Cathy was triumphant. “Jesus, I’m famous,” she said.
The Irish Cultural Centre opened in Hammersmith in 1995 to promote Irish art and culture through community, education and cultural programmes. But, chairman Peter Power-Hynes said, many people in Ireland and elsewhere still confuse the centre with the London Irish Centre in Camden.
“We’re purely cultural but what we say is that we do welfare through culture, whereas Camden tend to do the majority of their work through pure welfare, which is the reason they were created in the first place. We have a very modern building which is only seven years old and we’re actually hoping to expand into the adjoining building,” he said.
When John Byrne showed the royal couple around the centre’s library, Charles pointed to Tim Pat Coogan’s biography of De Valera and asked if he had read it. Camilla spoke about her affection for Edna O’Brien’s novels.
After a brief detour when they sang Percy French’s Mountains of Mourne along with the singing group, the royal couple went downstairs to watch a display of Irish dancing. The six dancers looked splendid in their sequinned costumes as they performed great feats of footwork and athleticism. Downstage left stood an easel bearing a plaque draped in a piece of silk fabric which the prince was due to unveil but as the dancing gained momentum, the easel started to tremble. With a great crash, it fell forward on to the stage, revealing the plaque and it had to be rushed into the wings before being put back together in time for Charles to unveil the plaque a second time.
Within a couple of minutes, the royal couple were gone, departing in a blur of sirens and whistles. I asked Cathy if she had enjoyed meeting them. “Yeah, they were all right. They’re the same as us,” she said. “They are, aren’t they? The dead same. He’s a man, she’s a woman, that’s the way I look at it.”
