Just in time for Christmas: some excellent news for the Knickerbocker Greys.

Her Excellency the Governor of the great Empire State of New York has signed into law a requirement that this venerable Manhattan cadet corps be allowed to remain in its quarters at the old Seventh Regiment Armory (as The New York Sun reports).

Over recent years the Park Avenue Conservancy has restored the building — a gem of American architecture and interior design — but also effectively expelled the military units still based at the Armory.

The Greys managed to hold out in their “800-square-foot broom closet” (as the New York Post described it) but the Conservancy moved to evict the youth group in 2022. The Greys have fought the eviction in court.

In June a bipartisan bill guaranteeing the Knickerbocker Greys “access and use for permanent headquarters” of the Armory “for the purposes of programming during periods which are not periods of civil or military emergency” passed in the State Assembly and Senate but has only now been signed into law.

The hope is this new legislation will persuade the Conservancy to drop their eviction proceedings which the Greys have been challenging.

Monsieur François Bayrou, a secondary character and destined to remain so, is remarkable only for his perseverance in undermining the higher interests of France. He eminently possesses what the English call ‘nuisance value’.

At what point did his self-image begin to cloud his judgement? Here is a Béarnais, the son of a farmer, who, gifted for studies, became an agrégé in classical literature. At twenty-eight, he took his first steps in politics by entering the office of Monsieur Méhaignerie, Minister of Agriculture. At the same time, he joined the centrist party that Giscard d’Estaing created to serve his personal elevation. This party, which participated in overthrowing General de Gaulle in 1969, would become the UDF.

Monsieur Bayrou settled there and prospered. He was elected general councillor in his native department, then regional councillor. He was also an advisor to Monsieur Pierre Pfimlin, to the presidency of the European Assembly. Monsieur Pfimlin was an excellent man in every respect, who exercised very high functions with rectitude. He had only one fault: he was a centrist, that is to say, like all centrists, he was mistaken about the hierarchy of values.

He is credited with having made Paris lose its status as the capital of Europe. Indeed, it was agreed between Adenauer and de Gaulle that the institutions of the European Community would have their headquarters nearby. A large complex would be built in the near Paris region. On this, Pfimlin, an Alsatian, intervened, proclaiming: “Strasbourg, Strasbourg… the link between France and Germany, between the two cultures… reconciliation… Strasbourg, a symbolic city!” Could Alsace be insulted? The Parisian project was shelved.

The move was well-intentioned, but it was a misjudgement.

Paris, a great metropolis of the arts and business, as well as an international communications centre, had all the attractions for Members of the European Parliament, diplomats, and civil servants; Strasbourg, beautiful but provincial, with limited entertainment and above all poorly served, requiring changes of plane to reach its often foggy aerodrome, exercised little charm on the new community population. If the monthly sessions of Parliament – at what cost and for how long? – continue to be held there, everything else, commissions and services, has moved to Brussels and it is Brussels that has become the administrative capital of the Union.

Let us return to Monsieur Bayrou, who is following a fairly typical political path. Elected to parliament, he quickly showed a ministerial appetite by making education issues a specialty. He founded and chaired a permanent group to combat illiteracy. A laudable program. Unfortunately, during the time he was Minister of National Education, illiteracy continued to increase and the general level of education continued to decline. Was it during this period that he experienced a somewhat excessive expansion of his ego?

It is said that one night he woke up the members of his cabinet, urgently summoning them to the ministry, to consult them on a vision he had just had of his presidential future. The anecdote has been circulated with too much insistence for there not to be, at its origin, some reality.

Why am I dwelling so long on Monsieur Bayrou, when we have concerns that seem to be of greater importance? It is because, not content with creating disorder in our domestic policy, he is currently acting contrary to the interests of France in the European Parliament.

Monsieur Bayrou is a candidate for the presidency of the Republic: we know that. He has made it known urbi et orbi and, stubbornness being in his nature, there is every reason to believe that he will be one for life. He also ran in 2002 and, having arrived at the back of the pack, with 6.8%, he immediately put on the jersey with the bib number marked 2007.

Assuring that he is part of the majority in the National Assembly in order to keep his electorate, he keeps his parliamentary group on the fringes, under the pretext of refusing corporatisation; he never stops criticizing the government’s actions, often using the opposition’s arguments, and only votes for it with his fingertips, when he does not abstain, visibly waiting for its fall. Beautiful political logic! This is what Monsieur Bayrou calls cultivating one’s difference. When one benefits from such great support, one ends up preferring adversaries.

His programme? It is made up of nothing but worn-out words and formulas that have become hollow from being used too much. It is as if we had returned to the “more just, more humane Republic” of thirty years ago. Everything ages – even demagoguery. […]

What a waste! And all in keeping. Those who stick around François Bayrou for career interests, like those who stay there out of personal loyalty, expose themselves to serious disappointments.

In politics, I have no other criteria than services rendered to the country.

Prince Talleyrand said: “Without wealth, a nation is only poor; without patriotism, it is a poor nation.”

Dempsey Heiner was neither coward nor fool: he lied about his age to join the U.S. Navy during the Second World War and later studied at Harvard, Yale, and the Sorbonne. His schoolmate from St Bernard’s days, the Paris Review founder George Plimpton, described him as “the brightest boy in the class, a genius”.

In addition to his wide reading and erudition (which he wore very lightly), Dempsey was also one of the kindest, gentlest creatures the world has ever known. He spent most of his life uncomplainingly caring for his disabled wife day in and day out for decades. By the end, she was immobile, blind, and nearly comatose.

As his parish priest put it, “Not once did I ever hear him speak of her as anything but a blessing… and he seemed never so joyful as when he tried to make her drink through a straw.”

He died in 2008 and I still think it was one of the greatest privileges in my life to have counted him amongst my friends.

Dempsey’s most famous act — one would be tempted to use a bit of New York tabloid hyperbole and say most notorious act — occurred on this week in 1999. It is might best be described as the nexus between filial piety and art criticism.

In the late 1990s, Charles Saatchi put on an exhibition at the Royal Academy entitled ‘Sensation’ displaying works from his own collection produced by ‘Young British Artists’ or YBAs. The show was largely an act of self-promotion and the Royal Academy was accused of collaborating with Saatchi to increase the value of his own collection for eventual re-sale.

Among the works on display was a depiction of the Blessed Virgin which was surrounded by pictures cut out of pornographic magazines, although the press tended to centre in on the artist’s use of cow dung in the painting.

By 1999, Saatchi’s exhibition had crossed the Atlantic where it found a temporary home at the Brooklyn Museum. Despite being one of the best collections of art in the United States, the Brooklyn Museum has suffered somewhat from its borough’s perception as something of a bag-carrier for the more glamorous neighbouring isle of Manhattan.

Dempsey, a convert to Catholicism, had a profound devotion to the Blessed Virgin. He wasn’t keen on the idea of some art-market scheme profaning the image of the Mother God, so in December 1999 the 72-year-old New Yorker bought a bottle of latex paint, smuggled it into the Brooklyn Museum, and daubed the paint on the insulting artwork.

As luck would have it, the Magnum photographer Phillip Jones Griffiths was visiting the museum with his daughter and was in the room when Dempsey began his rather pro-active work of art criticism. Jones Griffiths caught Dempsey in the act with his camera and the next day the image was splayed on the front page of the New York Post.

The security guards detained him pending the arrived of New York’s finest, but Dempsey told me that once his police escort was out of view of museum officials they each patted him on the back and congratulated him for his deed.

Dempsey’s act of defiance was almost certainly a felony-level offense but, as the Museum did not want to put a value to the artwork, the Brooklyn DA’s office felt obliged to reduce the charge to a misdemeanour — still carrying the possibility of up to two years in prison.

At trial, Dempsey said the exhibition’s gravest sin was neither blasphemy nor profanation but its “suggestion that there is no beauty in the world.”

“It’s like what Jean-Paul Sartre said: ‘L’enfer, c’est les autres’,” he told the court. “I reject Sartre’s view of humanity. Art is also supposed to be about skill. There was none of that in ‘Sensation.’”

A spokeswoman for the Brooklyn Museum deployed almost comical de haut en bas at the trial: “I don’t think we’ll respond formally to Mr. Heiner, beyond pondering what in his background makes him an expert on artistic skill.” (His Yale degree was in law and his Sorbonne degree in medicine, so I’m not sure if Dempsey ever formally studied art.)

One of the museumgoers in the room at the time told the Post that, while he disagreed with the vandalism, he “understood” Dempsey’s reaction: “Someone had to stand up and say, ‘This is not right.’”

“I think it was heroic,” our own Irene Callaghan (who died this year) told the Post. “He did it for all the Christians. I’m sure if he smeared paint on the window of a fur shop everyone would think it was marvellous.”

In the end, as the Post reported, Dempsey escaped a prison sentence:

Calling it a “crime not of hate, but of love,” a Brooklyn judge slapped a $250 fine on the man who defaced a dung-daubed image of the Virgin Mary, instead of tougher penalties prosecutors sought.

State Supreme Court Justice Thomas Farber released Dennis Heiner with the fine on the condition that “so long as he has paint in his hands, he’s required to stay away from the Brooklyn Museum.”

Farber, who has called the Heiner case one of the most difficult of his career, said the frail, gentlemanly Roman Catholic advocate had taught him something new.

“I had assumed that an act like this would always be committed by an angry man motivated by hate,” Farber said. “But this was a crime committed not out of hate but out of love for the Virgin Mary.”

“When the row eventually fades,” the then-editor of Art & Auction magazine, Bruce Wolmer, wrote, “the only smile will be on the face of Charles Saatchi, a master self-promoter.”

Saatchi made a mint off the artworks he sold, sparking criticism of museum institutions’ alleged complicity in inflating the prices of YBA works.

What happened to the offensive painting? Heavily insured, it was lost unto the ages in a warehouse fire. None of the art world figures who chimed in to praise it at the time mourned its passing. Sic transit opprobrium mundi.

Dempsey himself had no regrets, but he said he wouldn’t engage in any more public acts of paint smearing.

“I’m too old,” he told the press, chuckling. “I’ve said my piece.”

May he rest in peace.

Not many people can claim with any accuracy to have crafted a Portal to Paradise, but Simon Verity was one. The master carver was born and raised in Buckinghamshire but made a significant contribution to the stones of New York.

At the Protestant Cathedral of St John the Divine in Morningside Heights — “St John the Unfinished” to many — tools had been downed following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. When the Very Rev’d James Parks Morton became Dean in the 1980s he decided it was time to re-start work on the gothic hulk — one of the largest cathedrals in the world.

Morton commissioned the Englishman to come and become Master Mason at the New York cathedral based on his experience on the other side of the Atlantic. Verity tackled the main task of finishing the carvings on the great west portal of St John the Divine — the “Portal of Paradise” — training up a team of local youths in stonecarving to help with the job.

“Mr. Verity took the long-dead worthies of the Hebrew and Christian traditions and made them things of wonder for people in our own day,” the current Dean said following Verity’s death earlier this year.

Most memorable was his ostensible depiction of the destruction of the First Temple, which actually showed the Twin Towers and other familiar New York skyscrapers collapsing into ruin and fire.

Late in 2018 — after the collapse of the actual World Trade Center — an unknown vandal took it upon himself to smash the stone towers off the facade, but the Cathedral has since had them restored by Joseph Kincannon who carved the original depiction under Simon Verity.

Eventually the money ran out and the stonecarvers at St John’s had to down tools yet again so Verity returned to England, but he maintained close connections with New York. He was responsible for the carving and lettering in the British & Commonwealth 9/11 Memorial Garden in Hanover Square, for example.

When the trustees of the New York Public Library proposed clearing out the stacks from their glorious Bryant Park main building and moving the books to New Jersey — a truly criminal plan since, thankfully, abandoned — Verity drew a series of doodles in opposition, many depicting the iconic lions Patience and Fortitude who guard the Library’s entrance.

A few of the mentions of his death this summer are gathered here:

There is a wonderful glimpse of the old days in the memoirs of the late Lord Waddington (1929-2017).

David Waddington was a Lancashire man who became a lawyer, Member of Parliament, Government Chief Whip, Home Secretary, peer of the realm, and eventually Governor of Bermuda. (In that final role, he was the last of the big dogs — all the ones since have been civil servants.)

The old British constitution — before New Labour’s ill-judged reforms — had a lithe efficiency in those days aptly reflected in quite how few people were employed by the highest court in the realm — and how unfussedly they were officed:

I had only been in the House for two days when I received a telephone call from the clerk of my Manchester chambers asking me if later in the week I was prepared to sit as a deputy County Court judge somewhere in London. This would allow my colleague Bob Hardy, who had contracted with the Lord Chancellor’s Department, to sit as a judge on that day, to take over a brief of mine, a libel action in Leeds.

At the eleventh hour someone pointed out that if I were to sit, my career as an MP would come to an abrupt end because as a result of the House of Commons Disqualification Act I would have disqualified myself from membership of the House, thereby precipitating another by-election. I was then begged by Bob to go and explain to the lady in the Lord Chancellor’s Department why he could not sit and why I had turned out to be an inappropriate replacement.

I set off and, after journeying along many corridors and ascending and descending many staircases, I eventually found a little old lady sitting alone in a tiny office at the bottom of a gloomy stairwell somewhere in the bowels of the House of Lords.

I apologised for troubling her and she said: ‘I can assure you it is no trouble. In fact I am delighted to see you. I have been in this office for thirty-five years and you are the first person who has ever visited me.’

Hawksmoor House, Matjieskuil Farm, Wes-Kaap

Sometimes the perfect house meets the perfect owner: if so, then Hawksmoor House and its current owners, Mark Borrie and Simon Olding, have been an ideal match. The old manor house of Waarburg probably dates from the mid-eighteenth century and, after falling victim to neglect and unsympathetic updates, has been meticulously restored in the twenty-first century.

The history of this property, with its various names and numerous owners, now spans three centuries. In 1701, the Dutch governor of the Cape, Willem Adriaan van der Stel, granted sixty morgen of land at Joostenburg in the district of Stellenbosch to the dominee Hercules van Loon.

He was the predikant of the Reformed congregation in the “City of Oaks”, where he lived in a house on Dorpstraat just a few doors down from my former abode.

Occupied in town, van Loon also purchased farmland in the surrounding district, naming one Hercules Pilaar and another Waarburg, after the German castle of Lutheran lore.

The earliest surviving map of the property shows that there was a house here by 1704, but it is believed it was rarely used by the preacher who was occupied with his duties in town.

One day in that same year, Ds. van Loon rode from Hercules Pilaar towards Stellenbosch and, in a field outside the town, cut his own throat with a penknife. His flock were astonished and recorded that no-one knew why the preacher had killed himself.

Matilda Burden has argued that the existing house was built between 1758 and 1765 by the then-owner Jacobus Christiaan Faure. By 1826, Waarburg became known as Matjeskuil or Matjieskuil which it retained for most of its existence.

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France’s Top Military-Literary Prize Awarded to François Lecointre

IT SHOULD surprise no-one that the French Army awards an annual prize for military literature. Since 1995, the Prix littéraire de l’Armée de terre – Erwan Bergot is awarded every year for “a contemporary work of French literature that demonstrates active commitment, of a true culture of audacity in service to the collective whole” and is named in memory of the paratrooper officer, writer, and journalist Erwan Bergot (1930-1993).

This year’s prize has been awarded to Gen. François Lecointre, the former Chief of the Defence Staff who now serves as the Chancellor of the Légion d’honneur.

A graduate of Saint-Cyr, Lecointre’s book Entre Guerres (Between Wars) relays his long service to France in the land forces, including operations in Central Africa, Rwanda, Bosnia, the First Gulf War, and elsewhere.

As a young captain in Bosnia, Lecointre was concerned when his company lost radio contact with the French UNPROFOR observation post on Vrbana bridge early on the morning of 27 May 1995. When he went himself to investigate, Captain Lecointre discovered that Bosnian Serb soldiers in captured French uniforms had seized the post and taken French soldiers hostage.

Lecointre immediately informed Paris, where President Jacques Chirac circumvented the UN chain of command in Bosnia by allowing soldiers under Lecointre’s command to retake the post on the northern end of the bridge with a bayonet charge that overran the Serb-held bunker. Vrbana bridge is believed to have been the last bayonet charge of any French military operation to date.

General Pierre Schill, Chief of the Army Staff, awarded his comrade-in-arms the Prix Erwan Burgot this weekend. The prize includes a monetary award of €3,000 which Gen. Lecointre has donated to the association Terre Fraternité that provides support to France’s wounded soldiers and their families.

Entre Guerres had already won the Prix Jacques-de-Fouchier awarded by the Académie française earlier this year. (Above: Gen. Lecointre with the académicien, lawyer, and writer François Sureau.)

The Erwan Burgot prize’s jury was chaired by Gen. Schill and included the son and widow of Erwarn Burgot, alongside Col. Loïc de Kermabon, Col. Noê-Noël Uchida, the journalist and writer Guillemette de Sairigné, literary figure Laurence Viénot, Général de Division Jean Maurin, Général de Brigade Gilles Haberey, prix Goncourt winning novelist Andreï Makine, writer Christine Clerc, former head army medic Dr Nicolas Zeller, journalist Jean-René Van Der Plaetsen, Professor Arnaud Teyssier, and the historian François Broche.

Old Kinderhook is most famous for being the birthplace of the “Red Fox”, Martin van Buren — sometime inhabitant of London and later President of the United States.

He remains the only President who was not a native English speaker, and he spoke with a thick Dutch accent until the end of his days.

If legend is to be believed (and no evidence has been presented compelling us to do otherwise) the town is also the origin of the word “okay” or “O.K.” — for the “Old Kinderhook” clubs that sprung up to support van Buren’s bid for the White House.

Like many towns up and down the Hudson valley, Kinderhook had its own newspaper — originally named the Kinderhook Herald but which later took up the idiosyncratic name of Rough Notes.

As befits the newspaper of record of an old Dutch settlement, its banner bore the motto Een=dracht maakt macht, a Dutch translation of the old Latin motto of the Seven Provinces that means “Unity makes strength”.

These old and highly localised newspapers were once the chief source of information for people in the surrounding districts and one is pleasantly delighted by the sheer variety of the contents.

In addition to news, agricultural reports, poetry, and the moral and religious column there are reports of the meetings of Congress in Washington and the legislature in Albany, trials for murder, amusing notices from other newspapers in the New World, and news of battles and great events worldwide.

Thanks to the excellent New York State Historic Newspapers online archive you can virtually flip through the pages of this and numerous other periodicals.

The greatest event of the bonaerense calendar — nay, the entire Argentine year — is La Rural, the annual agricultural show of the Sociedad Rural Argentina. The silverine republic is a farming powerhouse and this show is probably second only in greatness to the annual Salon international de l’agriculture in Paris.

It is when the campo comes to town in all its glory, and mixes with the city-dwellers too. As the photographer Thomas Locke Hobbs put it, the crowd at La Rural is pretty much fifty per cent gaucho, fifty per cent Ralph Lauren.

Horses, cows, pigs, every beast of the Pampas, and every man that can ride, shoot, skin, or hunt it, manifests themselves somewhere here on the exhibition grounds in Palermo between the American embassy and the Plaza Italia.

Over a million visitors are expected across the ten days of the exposition, which are currently only halfway through.

Such are the glories of this great festival of Argentina’s living traditions I thought it worth sharing a few photos from the SRA’s own photographers.

And a gran saludo to the president Nicolas Franco Pino and all his team at the Sociedad Rural.

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A disappearing remnant of 1960s Gaullist optimism in London

While elegant proportions and a certain timeless yet modern style might sound like some bavard’s evocation of a French woman, it seems most appropriate when describing French Railways House.

180 Piccadilly was designed by the architects Shaw & Lloyd to house the main London office of the SNCF, France’s state railway, and incorporated their sales desks and information bureau for tourists on the ground floor.

With interiors by Charlotte Perriand (left) and signage lettered by Ernő Goldfinger (right) — the architect so despised by Ian Fleming that he named a Bond villain after him — the excellent proportions of this little modernist gem exude the optimistic confidence of the Gaullist Fifth Republic.

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While in the outer world the British people have been electing as their representatives, by the degrading process of universal suffrage, several hundred paid professional politicians, few of them owners of landed property, many of them positively base-born, in the closed world of this column a very different ceremony has been taking place.

In the dark, time-worn Gothic Hall of Assembly, amid crumbling tombs and carved symbols whose inmost meaning few can now read, the Great Feudatories of the Realm have been swearing fealty to the Regent, settling on their broad shoulders once more, for another year, the dreaming loads of Church and State.

In a thousand manors too, throughout the column, the Lesser Feudatories have been receiving the allegiance of village headmen bearing baskets of eggs, indigenous stones and symbolic flowers, of representatives of the craft-guilds – wood-carvers, arquebus-designers and organ-builders prominent as ever – and tenant farmers and yeomen, red-cheeked, bucolic figures in their holiday coats of decent frieze.

After these day-long, solemn ceremonies, rituals so intricate that none but the columnar heralds can understand them, high and low, through all their exact, foreknown, immutable degrees from the Regent to the humblest labourer, feel themselves united, confirmed once more, as the mighty order of society is confirmed.

In the outer world all is ephemeral, unstable, eddying and whirling this way and that in ceaseless, unreasonable change. Within, all is unchanging and unchangeable. As it was, as it is, as it will be, till Judgment Day.

Die moederstad in oude dae

Wag vir die bus — St George’s-straat, 1974 [link]

Inkopies saam met Pa, Die Parade (Grand Parade), 1960 [link]

Dame met Vespa, hoek van St George’s- en Waterkantstraat, 1960 [link]

Hoek van Darling- en Parlement-straat, 1946 [link]

Tydsrik verkoper, 1970 [link]

Die blommedames, 1946 [link]

Kortmarkstraat, 1960 [link]

“Tweee virrie prys van een!” J. Adonis vishandelaar, Distrikt Ses, 1968 [link]

Poseer vir die kamera, Bo-Kaap, 1962 [link]

Besoekers-buro, Adderleystraat, 1950s [link]

Die balkon by Stuttaford’s afdelingswinkel, 1968 [link]

Oud en nuut: die Koopmans-de Wet Huis, Strandstraat, 1981 [link]

Kampsbaai, 1974 [link]

Die Parade, 1962 [link]

Vierde Strand, Clifton, 1960s [link]

Clifton Hotel, 1961 [link]

Bloemstraat, Bo-Kaap, 1974 [link]

Bryantstraat, Bo-Kaap, 1978 [link]

Die Eerste-Minister sorg vir sy blomme, Groote Schuur, 1946 [link]

Muizenberg strand, 1965 [link]

Was dag, Bo-Kaap, 1961 [link]

Vishoekstrand, 1970 [link]

Stirling Castle vertrek vir Southampton, 1966 [link]

Boekkopers op die Parade, 1960 [link]

Pentzstraat, Schotschekloof, 1961 [link]

Nuwe kar, Blouberg, 1965 [link]

Simonstad spoorlyn, tussen Glencairn en Sandy Cove, 1989 [link]

’n SAS&H toeriste-bus, Groot Constantia, 1951 [link]

Saterdag-middag, Burgstraat, 1979 [link]

Wasdag is verby, Bo-Kaap, 1965 [link]

Kenilworth renbaan, die Metropolitan Handicap, 1962 [link]

Die prinses Elizabeth (later Elizabeth II, Koningin van Suid-Afrika), verwelkomingsparty by Tuynhuis, 1947 [link]

Die Noon Gun, Leeukop, 1967 [link]

Bloubergstrand, 1950s [link]

In the collections of the American Numismatic Society — formerly resident at Audubon Terrace but lately removed further south to Varick Street — there is a fine example of letters patent from the year 1786, signed by Governor George Clinton and validated by the Great Seal of the State of New York.

Letters patent are a form of open declaration by a sovereign or head of state, usually conferring the grant of an office, title, land, or rights. The most well-known patents are those covering the intellectual property of scientific inventions, issued by bodies like the United States Patent and Trademark Office or the UK’s Intellectual Property Office.

These particular letters patent deal with a land grant made to one Joshua Mersereau. From a family of Huguenot extraction, Mersereau studied at King’s College and ran a tavern on Staten Island. When America’s first civil war erupted in 1775, he joined the rebels and was commissioned a major in the “patriot” forces. He also represented his island’s coterminous County of Richmond in the rebel Provincial Congress that convened at Kingston.

Alongside other members of his family, Major Mersereau organised an effective spy ring that gathered useful operational intelligence on the movements of British and loyal American forces in the Hudson Valley, Staten Island, and neighbouring parts of New Jersey. It was likely for that contribution, as well as for his political influence more broadly, that this grant of land was made.

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The Mosaic of Saint Patrick in the Palace of Westminster

This feast of St Patrick marks the hundredth anniversary of the mosaic of Saint Patrick in the Central Lobby of the Houses of Parliament. At the heart of the Palace of Westminster, four great arches include mosaic representations of the patron saints of the home nations: George, David, Andrew, and Patrick.

The joke offered about these saints and their positioning is that St George stands over the entrance to the House of Lords, because the English all think they’re lords. St David guards the route to the House of Commons because, according to the Welsh, that is the house of great oratory and the Welsh are great orators. (The English, snobbishly, claim St David is there because the Welsh are all common.) St Andrew wisely guards the way to the bar (a place where many Scots are found), while St Patrick stands atop the exit, since most of Ireland has left the Union.

The mosaic of Saint Patrick came about thanks to the munificence of Patrick Ford, the sometime Edinburgh MP, in honour of his name-saint. Saint George had been completed in 1870 with Saint David following in 1898.

Sir William Raeburn MP commissioned the artist Robert Anning Bell (depicted right) to design the mosaic of Saint Andrew in 1922, which so impressed Patrick Ford that he decided to commission the same artist to depict the patron saint of Ireland.

Anning Bell had earlier completed the mosaic on the tympanum of Westminster Cathedral from a sketch by the architect J.F. Bentley. Following his work in Central Lobby he also did a mosaic of Saint Stephen, King Stephen, and Saint Edward the Confessor in Saint Stephen’s Hall — the former House of Commons chamber.

In the mosaic, Saint Patrick is flanked by saints Columba and Brigid, with the Rock of Cashel behind him. As by this point Ireland had been partitioned, heraldic devices representing both Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State are present.

On St Patrick’s Day in 1924, the honour of the unveiling went to the Father of the House of Commons, who happened to be the great Irish nationalist politician T.P. O’Connor, then representing the English constituency of Liverpool Scotland (the only seat in Great Britain ever held by an Irish nationalist MP).

“That day,” The Times reported T.P.’s words at the unveiling, “in quite a thousand cities in the English-speaking world, Saint Patrick’s name and fame were being celebrated by gatherings of Irishmen and Irishwomen. Certainly he was the greatest unifying force in Ireland.”

“All questions of great rival nationalities were forgotten in that ceremony. From that sacred spot, the centre of the British Empire, there went forth a message of reconciliation and of peace between all parts of the great Commonwealth — none higher than the other, all coequal, and all, he hoped, to be joined in the bonds of common weal and common loyalty.”

T.P.’s remarks were greeting with cheers.

The Most Honourable the Marquess of Lincolnshire, Lord Great Chamberlain, accepted the ornamental addition to the royal palace of Westminster on behalf of His Majesty the King.

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