Alan Wilkes
Irish journalist and author of robust letters to the Telegraph
ALAN WILKES, who has died aged 75, was a Dublin journalist who during the 1990s wrote some 30 pseudonymous letters to The Daily Telegraph championing the traditional values of the Anglo-irish Ascendancy.
Writing, for reasons of office politics, as one “Horace Woolington” of “Castleknock, Co Dublin”, he made no bones about being unimpressed by the political corruption which had betrayed hopes for the southern Irish state. Instead he championed the rejected policy of “Home Rule”, which he argued could have prevented the Easter Rising against the British.
On the release in 1996 of Neil Jordan’s film Michael Collins, “Horace” wrote a letter to the Telegraph declaring that the national hero was responsible for the deaths of 117 Irish policemen, and dismissing claims that he died in an attempt to remove the gun from the country’s politics as “fatuous tosh”.
The renaming of the Royal Ulster Constabulary recommended in the 1999 Patten report was not only sad and craven, he wrote, it was ridiculous, since more than 60 organisations in the Dublin phone book still bore the “royal” prefix. And when the “academically unqualified” Martin Mcguinness was appointed as Northern Ireland education minister, Horace Woolington wrote that Mcguinness’s enthusiasm for restoring the Irish language heralded “a new era of nationalist bloodymindedness cloaked as linguistic individuality”. Although only 2 per cent of the Republic’s population spoke Irish, the Linguistics Institute had advertised for an office cleaner, stipulating that “spoken Irish” was “essential”.
Richard Anand Wilkes, known as Alan, was born in Dublin on September 16 1942. He went to the Carmelites at Terenure College, then University College, Dublin, before joining the Dublin Evening Press, where he met his future wife Clare Boylan, a feature writer and later a novelist. He became a fine motoring correspondent, driving a Morgan and Subarus, while rising to deputy editor, like his father before him.
In the early 1990s he was introduced to Hugh Montgomery-massingberd, the Telegraph’s obituaries’ editor, who invited him to contribute. Since the paper’s obituaries were anonymous there was no problem, but a potential difficulty arose when Wilkes offered to write letters, since the Press was still owned by the family of the former president of the Republic Eamon de Valera. Taking the name of the Wilkes family tom cat, Horace J Woolington, his letters indicated a man of mature years, since he signed one Woolingham.
Although Dublin is not renowned for keeping secrets, the truth about the authorship was successfully restricted to Wilkes’s family. But it became the subject of speculation, particularly at Mulligan’s, the journalists’ pub in Poolbeg Street. One intrepid reporter even went out to Castleknock, where she knocked on doors and interviewed the vicar, to no avail. She was said to have concluded that the letters must have been dreamt up by Telegraph leader writers. Wilkes retired from his epistolary career after more than a decade, but he continued to write obituaries, concluding with a colourful advance notice for the Fianna Fail prime minister Charlie Haughey. “All the dirt’s there,” he said on filing his copy.
By then Wilkes was spending long periods with the now sick Clare in Brittany, where he kept a fine collection of Hornby trains. On recovering from the effect of her death in 2007, he became a fierce contributor to Facebook, admired for his Tory beliefs but dismissed by some as a “user and abuser of social media”.
Wilkes had no further contact with his creation. But Horace has become one of the immortals, occasionally reported on internet blog sites, at rugby matches and even in the racing world.