Murphy of the Scots Guards Helps Celebrate QueenVictoria’s Jubilee at Dublin Castle
BY SÉAN DONNELLY
celebration to mark the same jubilee of her great-grandmother Queen Victoria. The picture reproduced here, ‘The Queen’s Long Reign: A Celebration at Dublin Castle, 1897,’ was sold for €500 on 27 May 2006 by Whyte’s Auctioneers, Molesworth Street, Dublin 2. In the auction catalogue it is described as a ‘watercolour heightened with white in grisaille’ – white used to give the illusion of relief – measuring 7.5 by 11.2 inches. The artist was Joseph Nash junior (d.1922), who worked from sketches byW.C. Mills. The picture shows the pipers of
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T is appropriate that in the Diamond Jubilee year of HMThe Queen we look back at a
the 1st battalion, the Scots Guards, then stationed at Richmond Barracks, Inchicore, playing in front of St Patrick’s Hall in the Upper Castle Yard, Dublin Castle, on the night of Friday, 12 March 1897.The occasion was a torchlight tattoo to conclude a state banquet celebrating Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee. The host was the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, the 5th Earl Cadogan. The banquet would have concluded the annual vice regal season which lasted from the 1 January to St Patrick’s Day. Since the 17 March was not a public holiday in 1897, the celebrations were held on the nearest suitable date.The public was not admitted to the tattoo, but it was repeated a week later for