WRITING IN the journal Studies, Mary Kenny describes the trauma "southern unionists" suffered on the declaration of the Republic 60 years ago; some of it related to postboxes. She quotes Senator David Norris saying how "devastated" his maternal aunts and cousins in the midlands were at the farewell to their monarch, since Irish Anglicans would no longer pray for the king during religious services, writes FRANK MCNALLY.
But she adds: “They were also in tears [. . .] to see that the insignia of Queen Victoria, King Edward, and King George V were being removed from the letter-boxes in Co Offaly. They had accepted that the letter-boxes were painted green; but at least they had retained the attractive monograms of VR and ER and GRV.”
In fact, as she points out, the Republic’s zeal for removing royal insignia did not last long. It seems to have gone the same way as the rebranding of my Eircom Phonewatch alarm, promised in a letter back around the turn of the century but apparently forgotten, so that the wall-box still refers to the ancien regime: “Telecom” (God save it).
But on the question of paint, what should have further comforted southern unionists is the fact that British post-office boxes in Ireland were merely being returned to the colour they had to start with. It’s true. For 20 years after Anthony Trollope introduced them to England in 1855, pillar-boxes were green: “sage-green” to be exact.
So that when the Trollope heroine (still a troubled phrase, that) Miss Stanbury sends up her creator’s innovation in his 1869 novel He Knew He Was Right, it was probably a green, rather than red, postbox she was refusing to use: “As for the iron pillar boxes which had been erected of late years for the receipt of letters, one of which – a most hateful thing to her – stood almost close to her own hall door, she had not the faintest belief that any letter put into one of them would ever reach its destination. She could not understand why people should not walk with their letters to a respectable post-office instead of chucking them into an iron stump as she called it out in the middle of the street with nobody to look after it.” It was only because the green boxes lacked visibility that “pillar-box red” became standard from the 1870s. But in a further twist, of which Offaly unionists may or may not have been aware, the tops of British postboxes were painted green again – khaki this time – in 1939. It wasn’t to make them less visible, though. The paint was specially designed to change colour on exposure to gas, giving people early warning of a chemical attack.
THE COLOUR OF postboxes aside, Mary Kenny suggests, letters were a vexed issue throughout the years of the Irish Free State. Specifically, southern unionists had the habit of writing to Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle to assure the monarch of their continued affection, despite the change of management. This caused certain diplomatic problems.
Sometimes they took the trouble of posting such letters from Holyhead lest the Free State censor them. And the suspicion was not entirely unjustified. When the death of King George V provoked an upsurge in the correspondence, taoiseach Eamon de Valera insisted that all royal acknowledgments should be sent via his government, as correct protocol.
Buckingham Palace disagreed and even summoned Dev’s man in London for a dressing down from the king’s secretary, who lectured: “Gentlemen don’t open other gentlemen’s letters!” The list of Irish institutions that wrote then included, unsurprisingly, the Royal Dublin Fusiliers Old Comrades Association and the Royal St George Yacht Club, Kingstown. But condolences were also sent by the County Sligo Agricultural Society, the UCC Literary and Philosophical Society, the Guardians of the Coombe Lying-In Hospital and the Sandycove Bowling Association, among many others.
The new king, George VI, continued to receive letters from Dublin, including one in 1937 from a man in Booterstown who assured him “there are many thousands of your loyal subjects in the Irish Free State”. But a decade later, Dev was ousted from power. And in one of the ironies of history, it was his ostensibly-less-radical successor who finally removed the constitutional ambiguity; partly from annoyance when his hosts at a state dinner in Canada reneged on an understanding that the king and president would share joint billing in the toast.
When the Republic was formally established, even George VI joined the congratulations, although privately appalled that “Eire” was leaving the “family”.
Irish Anglicans, in Offaly and elsewhere, dutifully amended their prayer-books, and would henceforth plead for the president’s health rather than the monarch’s. But there was time for one final letter to the king, which left him deeply moved. It was from Mrs Doris Weir, wife of the rector in St Matthew’s Church, Dublin 4, where a “valedictory” service for the old order had just been held.
“In our Parish Church, once the royal chapel of St Matthew, Irishtown, on Easter Sunday evening, we sang with sorrow, for it was the last time, the National Anthem,” she wrote. “It was a prayer from all our hearts – God Save the King. Legislation does not kill love and loyalty. We will forever continue to pray for you and for all your family, and to hold you in deep affection.”
fmcnally@irishtimes.com