The late Queen Elizabeth made a small piece history with her success in pronouncing Irish words. But she was less successful with Irish numbers – at least of the telephone kind. And on one infamous occasion, this was the indirect cause of a transatlantic libel action.
It happened in January 1961, when her sister Princess Margaret was staying at Birr Castle, ancestral home of her then recently acquired husband, Antony Armstrong-Jones.
The visit had caused quite a stir locally, for example multiplying the usual attendance at the town’s Anglican church by an estimated 700 per cent. It also attracted many British journalists, one of whom was slightly injured during a melee at the church when he came into collision with a woman’s handbag.
In those pre-automatic times, the phone number for the Castle was Birr 23. But when the Queen tried to ring her sister one night, she or the royal handler got through for Birr 32 instead.
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Unfortunately, that was Dooly’s Hotel, where many of the journalists were staying. Also unfortunately, it was one of the pressmen – Seamus Brady of the Daily Express – who answered the phone.
As with most wrong-number calls, the conversation was a short one. But the January 16th, 1961, issue of Newsweek magazine carried a highly colourful account of it, in which among other exaggerations, Brady became the “barman”.
Under the headline “British Royalty – The Joneses is Ireland,” the item ran as follows:
“Shortly before closing time the phone rang. No one paid attention. [It was] Probably Mrs O’Halloran, and it was the fault of Dooly’s Bar that himself was on the drink again.
“Once more the phone rang. Barman Seamus Brady wiped his hand on a tired towel. Slowly he took the receiver off the hook. At the click, a cultured English voice broke in over long distance. ‘Sandringham here. May I speak to Her Royal Highness?`
“Brady looked about the bar, its over-shot spittoons, the flyspecks on the window, the regulars happily arguing, and O’Halloran snoozing peacefully in his chair. No Royal Highness here as far as he could see.
“’And who did you say it is?” Brady asked into the phone. “The Queen here.” “Would you [be] now?” said Brady to himself. Aloud he said: “And what number would you be calling?”
“Is that Birr 23?”
“No,” said Brady, “Wrong number, lady. This is Birr 32 – Dooly’s Bar.”
“From the other end of the line – a sharp click.”
Dooly’s promptly sued Newsweek. As summarised by the Irish Times report of the subsequent High Court proceedings, the plaintiffs alleged that the article meant their hotel and bar were “dirty and unhygienic, […] frequented by uncouth persons, and staffed by a careless and inattentive personnel, that they permitted drunkenness on the premises, and that the company and their staff were unsuitable persons to carry on [such a business].”
A jury was sworn in but not required. The case was settled on the steps of the courtroom, with Newsweek paying £1,500 plus costs and issuing an apology.
In maximising the dramatic possibilities of a misplaced call, the magazine’s wannabe short story writer had even interpreted the mood of the Queen’s hanging-up technique:
“If that click sounded impolitely abrupt, it was because Queen Elizabeth II […] had many reasons to be upset – a wrong number to a hotel bar in the town of Birr (population 3,300) was only one of them. What had started out as an Anglo-Irish friendship-building venture, and a self-styled ‘second honeymoon` for her sister […] was getting out of hand.”
This was a reference to the undue media attention being given to a private trip, which eventually resulted in a communiqué to Fleet Street and the Dublin press asking them to tone it down.
But according to the Offaly History Blog, at least, a potentially worse incident was self-inflicted by the visiting party. Or to more exact, it was inflicted by them on one of the security detail during a pheasant shooting expedition:
“This time Billy Wallace [an ex fiancée of the princess] was responsible. At the pheasant shoot, he let fly a spray of birdshot at a rising cock and hit a nearby cop. The cop’s heavy overcoat fortunately absorbed most of the impact, but again the press had a field day.”
The Irish Times does not seem to have been invited to that field day. The most violent encounter reported by our man at the scene was the enforced abandonment of one of the royal hunts, which was itself being hunted.
“Their shoot was cut short when a number of English pressmen ran the party to earth just off the main road,” we reported. “One car almost hit a prize Labrador, owned by the estate gatekeeper.”