The Free State and the Cenotaph

During the Imperial Conference in London, in October 1926, the British prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, invited WT Cosgrave to join the other Dominion prime ministers at the unveiling of a tablet in Westminster Abbey in memory of the Empire dead of the Great War.

Cosgrave declined, partly on the ground that he had been involved in “hostilities” against the British army in Dublin in April 1916 but he asked his minister for justice, Kevin O’Higgins, to take his place and to lay the Irish wreath at the Cenotaph on Armistice Day.

O’Higgins hadn’t taken part in the Rising and he had lost a brother, Michael, a lieutenant in the Leinster Regiment, in France in 1917.

By November 1927, Kevin O’Higgins was dead and Patrick McGilligan, the minister for external affairs and industry and commerce, attended.

The Cenotaph in London’s Whitehall is the focal point for the official remembrance of the United Kingdom’s war dead. It was designed by the architect Edwin Lutyens and erected in 1920 to replace a temporary structure. Until the end of the second World War the commemoration took place on November 11th, the anniversary of the Armistice in 1918, but since then it has been held on the nearest Sunday.

The ritual has remained almost unchanged over the years. Massed bands play a repertoire that includes Elgar's Nimrod and Thomas Moore's The Minstrel Boy and Oft in the Stilly Night . A cannon is fired on nearby Horse Guards Parade before and after a two-minute silence at 11am. The Last Post is sounded, wreaths are laid by the monarch, other royals, senior politicians, the high commissioners of the Commonwealth countries and representatives of the armed forces, the merchant navy, the fishing fleet and a number of welfare services. Prayers are said and there is a march-past of veterans.

Throughout the 1930s, the Irish wreath was laid by the high commissioner in London, John Whelan Dulanty, one of the most interesting characters in Irish diplomatic history, a networker par excellence, a survivor of widely different governments in Dublin and a man noted for his deferential manner, a useful trait for members of his profession.

According to Winston Churchill, as quoted by his eminent biographer, Martin Gilbert, Dulanty was “a general smoother representing everything Irish in the most favourable light”. They had known each other since he had worked on Churchill’s election campaign in Manchester, in 1908.

He was born in 1883 into an Irish working-class family in England but succeeded in becoming a lawyer, a senior civil servant during the war, and a successful businessman afterwards. Although an admirer of Wolfe Tone, he was appointed director of the United Irish League of Great Britain by John Redmond. Later, in 1926, he accepted an invitation from McGilligan to become the Free State’s trade commissioner in Britain, despite the loss of income involved. In 1930, he became the high commissioner and in that capacity he served first the Cosgrave government, then the de Valera government through the economic war and the second World War and finally the Costello inter-party government that took Ireland out of the Commonwealth.

In 1950, when he was the doyen of the high commissioners in London, he became Ireland’s first ambassador to the Court of St James’s and retired shortly afterwards.

On his departure, the prime minister of the day, Clement Attlee, gave a farewell lunch at 10 Downing Street that was attended by senior members of the three major British political parties and a few months later Sean MacBride, the Clann na Poblachta minister for external affairs in the inter-party government, attended a dinner in his honour hosted by the National University of Ireland Club in London.

In February 1955, his funeral Mass in Westminster Cathedral was attended by Gerard Sweetman, the minister for finance in the second inter-party government, and Eamon de Valera, who was then the leader of the opposition.

The Irish wreath at the Cenotaph was always distinctive because the flowers used to form it were reminiscent of the Tricolour. For example, in 1938, it was described by one newspaper as “in the form of a harp with petal-white chrysanthemums mounted with sprays of saffron and white carnations, green orchids and white lilies”. It was accompanied by a card that read “From the Irish Free State (Ireland from 1937), in memory of the brave”.

On November 11th, 1939, Dulanty laid a wreath at the Cenotaph for the last time. By then, the United Kingdom was at war again but Éire was neutral and he would not be returning to Whitehall. But the wheel of history keeps turning and 75 years later, on Remembrance Sunday this year, Ireland will, once again, be represented at the ceremonies, this time by his current successor, Dan Mulhall.