LYNDON JOHNSON demanded that anyone in his administration must be willing “to kiss my ass at High Noon in Macy’s window and swear it smells of roses.” BBC comment on Queen Elizabeth’s recent speech, like all her speeches these past eighty years attest to its loyalty – and TV is a vastly more public medium than Macy’s window at High Noon.
Millions of people standing by their own windows applauding NHS staff, prompted by politicians who have treated those staff abominably is the very essence of Claptrap – “Language, sentiment, meant to catch applause” according to The Concise Oxford Dictionary.
The next entry in that volume is “Claque.” Defined as an “hired body of applauders.”
The BBC noted how the Queen’s remarkable speech quoted Vera Lynn. You’d think it was of the standard of the First Queen Elizabeth’s reputed speech at Tilbury in 1688 at the time of the Spanish Armada. The Armada was dispersed by a Protestant Wind which could well have made her speech indecipherable.
I myself was on the East Pier in Howth on a windy July day in 1961 as a member of a Presidential Guard of Honour when Erskine Childers’ yacht Asgard, which had brought rifles there in 1914 returned. And I could not make out de Valera’s speech. I don’t know what reporter took down the Virgin Queen’s address.But I’ve heard it mooted that it was concocted by Shakespeare after the event.
It’s highly likely, for “Shakespeare” was of the Lord Chamberlain’s Company, a mercenary Spin Doctor, first for Queen Elizabeth, and later for James I when the company was called The King’s Company. Each man in his time plays many parts, and who “Shakespeare” was remains a puzzle.
What actors get up to in the dressing room can be intriguing. Two London schoolboys of lower middle class families appeared on stage together in the Edwardian era, and reinvented themselves. One, Noel Coward, as a fashionable toff, another, Alfred Wilmore, as Micheal MacLiammoir, a cosmopolitan native Irish speaker and playwright from Cork. The name “Liam” is a truncated version of William, probably not invented when Wilmore was born in 1899 and I doubt if the name MacLiammoir has yet appeared on a Birth Certificate.But that is by the bye.
Anyhow for all the spin-doctoring about Francis Drake and the Spanish Armada – his role there was of little importance nor Queen Elizbeth’s reputed speech at Tilbury.
The 900 single-shot 1870 vintage Mauser Rifles landed by Erskine Childers’ Yacht in Howth in 1914 had a real impact on history. Without them Ireland’s people would still be subjects of a foreign monarch rather than citizens of their own sovereign state.
And now free nations inspired by Ireland’s struggle might still groan under foreign masters had it not been for the Asgard.
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