From The Irish Times, December 18 1961. A fine base for Lord Gough, but no sign of the man himself.
We’ve looked at plaques in considerable detail on the site, and one thing I really want to get around to in time is the statues of Dublin. ‘All the fellas between Charles Stewart Parnell and Daniel O’Connell’, with the exception of William Smith O’Brien, have gone unexamined. How many Dubliners can name all the statues on O’Connell Street?
We looked briefly too at the loyalist bombing of the Daniel O’Connell statue in 1969, and jaycarax had a fascinating photographic history of Henry Grattan’s statue, the Trinity graduate facing his Alma Mater at College Green.
Of the statues no longer with us, Lord Gough’s has always been particularly interesting to me for a few reasons. Like Victoria, he is a Dublin statue which has ended up many miles from home, though not vanished quite as far as herself (she’s in Australia, for anyone who doesn’t know). The statue was the site of Winston Churchill’s earliest childhood memory, and it is a statue that was in and out of the newspapers for a long time prior to its ultimate removal from the Phoenix Park. It also inspired my favourite Dublin poem, which for a long time was falsely attributed to Brendan Behan, for example even in Ulick O’Connor’s biography of the man, but was in fact the work of quintessential Dub Vincent Caprani. The statue is the work of the great John Henry Foley, responsible also for Daniel O’Connell’s statue at the top of O’Connell Street and the Trinity duo of Burke and Goldsmith among others.
John Henry Foley
Winston Churchill recalled in his autobiographical work My Early Life 1874-1904, that his earliest memories from childhood were set here in Dublin. Asking “when does one first begin to remember?” he went on the write about the unveiling of John Henry Foley’s equestrian statue to imperial war hero Lord Gough at the Phoenix Park in Dublin in 1878. Churchill spent some of his earliest years in Dublin where his Grandfather had been appointed Viceroy and employed Churchill’s father as his private secretary. Churchill’s earliest memory was of his grandfather unveiling the doomed statue.
A great black crowd, scarlet soldiers on horse-back, strings pulling away a brown shiny sheet, the Old Duke, the formidable grandpa, talking loudly to the crowd. I recall even a phrase he used: ‘And with a withering volley he shattered the enemy’s line.’ I quite understood that he was speaking about war and fighting and that a volley meant what the black-coated soldiers (riflemen) used to do with loud bangs so often in the Phoenix Park where I was taken for morning walks.
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Donal
Ciarán
Sam
Come Here To Me! 