Niall Kiely was on hand at two simultaneous balls in 1980 to mark the end of the year’s Dublin Horse Show.
A week’s horsey revelry peaked last night at opposite ends of Dublin city with the simultaneous consummations of the Louth Hunt and Cavalry Balls, events of disparate ambience but essentially equine in character. At both, it was music, drink, food and crack in whatever order suited the personal bill and both, it can safely be stated, were enjoyed to the full.
The Cavalry Ball, revived last year, was held again in the beautiful McKee Barracks on the north side of the city, pleasant redbrick buildings surrounded the square into which the guests drove.
The Army No 1 Band lent their dulcet silver sounds to the evening to greet arrivals: in the lobby, a strong and sweet cup was served from the bottomless depths of the Nations Cup trophy dating back to the days of the British occupation. The evening was decorous, dignified, friendly and efficient as only the army can manage.
Outside, two deadly old wheeled cannons, captured from the Sikhs in the days when the Empire bestrode the globe, flanked the entrance. Facing them, a pair of Panhard AML 90 armoured cars showed the army’s new form of cavalry transport. The barracks itself, originally named after Marlborough, was built for the 10th Hussars a century ago: the Irish have found it useful and its ample stabling now forms the foundation of the army’s equitation school.
Indoors, it was a mixture of formal military dress, carefully-clad women and the inevitable formality of such evenings. Brigadier Peter Robinson, British military attaché in Dublin, was asked if he would like to meet the Duchess of Argyle. The brigadier, all smiles and bushy eyebrows, said: “I’ll do it for Queen and Country, but we haven’t spoken to that crowd since seventeen forty-something!”
Over in the Burlington Hotel, things were rather different as the 700 dressed-up guests mingled with the usual drinkers and the American tourists in the loud check trousers. The Louth Hunt, with scarcely a hundred members, makes a few quid from the Horse Show Ball: at £15 a head, the demand is still greater than the supply of tickets, and the profit helps the hunt to survive the vicissitudes of this unsympathetic century (it was formed in 1817, and reportedly finds the 1980s farmers rather less co-operative than his 1880s counterpart).
Many of the women are beautiful, the younger men casually confident, evening suits and dangling white scarves: members of hunts disport in formal pinks (scarlet jackets to you and I) and everywhere is a cacophony of accents... And after a few hours at bar and table, even such piddling differences seem to disappear: at both venues, it seemed that a few drinks helped no end in forgiving those American carpetbaggers for stealing away the Aga Khan after three glorious years.
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