Queen Victoria and the cult of the shamrock

March 17, 1909: St Patrick's Day is now a Bank Holiday in Ireland, perhaps the most popular of all the Bank Holidays. We feel that it is special to ourselves, and it comes at a time of year when, after the rigours of winter, the public mind is peculiarly susceptible to the joys of change and rest. Tomorrow, if the weather be bright and fine, there will be a general exodus from Dublin and other large towns, while the country people, by means of many special trains will make their way into the cities.

And everywhere would be the shamrock. "It is probably safe to say," reported The Times's Dublin correspondent, "that while, ten years ago, not more than 40 per cent of the Irish people showed their nationality on March 17, not more than 5 per cent will be tomorrow so singular or so forgetful as to dispense with 'the leaf'."

This flurry of enthusiasm for the shamrock was, according to our writer, entirely due to Queen Victoria's intervention. Nine years earlier she had overruled the objections of the Army authorities and decreed that soldiers could "wear the green". And once the Army were sporting shamrocks, he said, the Nationalists had to follow.

Vast quantities of shamrocks were picked and boxed and sent, not just to decorate the Irish Guards on duty at Windsor Castle, but to the United States, Egypt and India. Some charlatans would try to substitute "the common clover", but "the deception becomes annually less practicable, since it is now a part of every Irishman's patriotism to be a connoisseur in shamrock".

Aside from its green credentials, St Patrick's Day 1909 doesn't sound too lively: 

It is a great pleasure to be able to add that one of the bad old traditions of St Patrick's Day in Ireland is now falling every year into worse discredit. Even persons who get drunk frequently now make it a point of honour not to be drunk on the national holiday. In Dublin tomorrow the majority of the more respectable public houses will remain closed. It is only fair to say that the temperance work of the Gaelic League has been to some extent responsible for this happy development ...

The pubs closed? There's more ...

The Lord Mayor's procession, which will take place in the afternoon through the principal streets of the city, will also attract numerous spectators, and in the evening the Lord Mayor, who has the courage of his temperance convictions, will give the first temperance banquet which has ever been given by any occupant of the Mansion House.

Hardly surprising that "at Trinity College some of the students flung oranges at the State Coach". And in London, a thoroughly bad time must have been had by all at a recital of Irish songs at the Aeolian Hall by Mr Plunket Green. The snobbery of the reviewer makes your heart sink:

Musical people, Irish or other, generally avoid the concerts with which St Patrick's Day is celebrated; and if for the sake of hearing a few good tunes they brave the ordeal, the probability is that the tunes are sung in such a way as to bear only, the faintest likeness to their traditional forms.

Mr Green apparently treated his audience to "the lovely Cuckoo Madrigal", Trottin' to the Fair and The Jug o'Punch. Rather them than me.