What a pity that Nelson's Pillar is not around to be the centrepiece of a Dublin celebration of the 200th anniversary of Trafalgar, and a commemoration of the hundreds of Irishmen who fought and died in the battle, writes Dennis Kennedy
When news of Nelson's victory reached Dublin on November 8th, 1805, it was greeted with genuine enthusiasm. The celebrations in the streets were wild enough to develop into riots, Rule Britannia was sung in the theatres. The city was illuminated, and at the Mansion House "an elegant transparency showed Neptune laying his crown at the feet of our gracious sovereign, seated on his throne supported by Britannia and Hibernia".
Before the end of November, the lord mayor, alderman James Vance, had called a meeting of the nobility, clergy, bankers, merchants and citizens which set up a committee and called for subscriptions to finance a suitable monument for the dead hero. It took time to raise the money, and the foundation stone for Nelson's Pillar was not laid until February 1808, and the monument completed in October 1809. London did not get its column in Trafalgar Square until 1843.
At the time there was almost no opposition to the pillar and Nelson on political (or moral) grounds. Watty Cox, an eccentric United Irish supporter and publisher of the Irish Magazine was rude on both counts in 1809, but for its first 116 years the only real objection to it was from people who thought it was an obstacle to traffic. (A few did not like the look of it - Warburton, Whitelaw and Walsh, in their 1818 History of Dublin, found it "ponderous", with a "vastly unsightly pedestal".) But traffic was a problem. The pillar sat at the junction of Sackville Street with the main route down from the heart of Dublin to the Custom House and the quays, along Henry Street and North Earl Street. Few in Dublin in 1805 would have regarded Nelson as an oppressor. Neither '98 nor the Emmet rebellion had popular support, and there was little enthusiasm for a French "liberation". The young Daniel O'Connell had confided to his journal that a French victory would be "attended with bad consequences".
Dublin's merchants would have had particular commercial cause to be grateful to Nelson for lifting the French blockade, but Dublin generally would have been aware of the significance of Nelson's victories in the epic struggle with France. Memories of the French invasion of 1798 were still fresh. Emmet's rebellion had again raised the French spectre. In January 1805 Napoleon ordered his fleet at Brest to prepare to land troops in Ireland.
While this was probably part of a grand Napoleonic bluff, it was enough to cause alarm. The extensive building programme of Martello Towers around Dublin, begun in 1804, provided physical reminders of the French threat. But Ireland had more personal and human reasons to cheer Trafalgar. Nelson's fleet was far from an exclusively English one; one quarter to one third of the sailors who manned it were from Ireland. The British National Archive's listing of all the royal navy personnel who fought at Trafalgar shows, for instance, 59 Murphys - all but two with Irish home addresses - and the same number of Sullivans, all but three Irish.
Irish-born officers played major roles. One of Nelson's ships of the line, the Tonnant, was captained by Dublin-born Charles Tyler. Of almost 500 men aboard the Tonnant at Trafalgar, 272 were English and 128 Irish, with 44 Scots and 33 Welsh.
The commander of the marines aboard Victory at Trafalgar was Capt Charles William Adair, from Ballymena. He fought on deck alongside Nelson, was wounded and then took a second hit and died. Capt Henry Blackwood, who commanded the frigate Euryalus, was on the Victory with Nelson as the battle commenced. He was the son of Sir John Blackwood of Ballyleidy, County Down, and Dorcas, Baroness Dufferin.
He survived Trafalgar and ended up vice-admiral Sir Henry Blackwood. Surgeon William Beatty, who tended the dying Nelson and boosted Nelson's heroic status in his Authentic Narrative of the Death of Lord Nelson, was from Derry, where his father was a customs official.
It was, of course, the Dublin establishment, the "quality", that built the monument. The committee set up on November 28th, under the lord mayor, included four MPs, two baronets, the chief secretary, and Arthur Guinness. It took almost four years and repeated appeals to raise the final cost of £6,856. 8s. 3d. The corporation gave £220 and Trinity College £100, and lords lieutenant past and present gave £200 each. Sir Arthur Wellesley, then chief secretary, gave £108. 6s. 8d. Three Guinnesses, Arthur, Benjamin and William, managed £25 between them.
The published list of more than 200 subscribers includes many who gave much less, often just one pound. Serving offices and soldiers from various units are recorded as giving one day's pay, while the largest single donation was £341. 5s from "the Patriotic Fund".
Despite various plans to move or remove the pillar during the 19th century, all on grounds of traffic, including one Act at Westminster, nothing happened, mainly because of cost.
So Nelson stayed, and found its way into Bloom's itinerary in Ulysses, even into Finnegans Wake as Nelson and his "trifulguryous pillar", onto the destination boards of trams and buses and into the iconography of Dublin, surviving the destruction of 1916 unscathed.
After independence the case for removing the pillar became overtly political. If the pillar could not be moved, then at least Nelson could be replaced. Dublin Corporation voted for this in 1931, but there was still the legal problem, and the question of cost. In 1955 the corporation asked the pillar's trustees for permission to remove Nelson and put up Tone, but the trustees declined, being bound to "embellish and uphold the monument in perpetuation of the object for which it was subscribed and erected by the citizens of Dublin". The following year the City Council demanded legislation to enable it to take possession of the Pillar and remove or demolish it. But there was no enthusiasm from government.
So Nelson remained until the early morning of March 8th, 1966, when he joined William III, George II, Lord Gough, Lord Carlisle and Lord Eglinton as victims of 20th century monumental vandalism.
Not everyone cheered. Owen Sheehy Skeffington told the Senate that "the man who destroyed the pillar made Dublin look more like Birmingham and less like an ancient city on the River Liffey".
The worldwide celebrations of the 200th anniversary of Trafalgar remind us of how much damage was done to the historic character of Dublin by those brainless dynamiters of 1966. The spire may be a modern marvel, but it commemorates nothing.