History shouldn’t be lost in the post

Mary Kenny makes a plea for Ireland’s streets to preserve some remains of a British past

At a time when statues and monuments from the past seem to be in danger of being pulled down, I have sometimes feared for Ireland’s heritage of old postboxes which still feature the monarchical crests of Victoria, Edward VII and George V.

For some time, Sinn Fein has expressed its intention of having these embellishments scraped off the traditional postbox, originally painted red but, since the establishment of the Irish state, repainted in green.

It was Anthony Trollope, the novelist, who brought the postbox to Ireland in the 1840s, when he ran the Royal Mail services, initially from the banks of the Shannon. It was an innovation of immense benefit to the public, ensuring that the mail was safe, secure and swift. Even up to the 1940s, Trollope’s postal legacy endured, and there were four postal deliveries a day in Dublin. My grandmother in County Galway wrote daily to my mother in Dublin. She posted the letter for the 11.30am collection and it arrived by the 4pm delivery.

So, even if people are now sending fewer letters, surely the postboxes should be preserved – and preserved just as they were erected. The short reign of Edward VII brought a huge increase in the number of postboxes and it would be historically untruthful to erase the crests.

The Irish state, after 1923, added to Trollope’s original postboxes, first with the emblem of ‘Saorstát Eireann’ and subsequently with the Celtic lettering of ‘P & T’.

Fortunately, there is a growing recognition that the postboxes are part of ‘street history’, and a Labour councillor and former Dublin Lord Mayor, Dermot Lacey, has been campaigning to keep them in place, monarchical emblems and all.

Brexit politics have prompted a slight revival of Anglophobia in Ireland, and a flare-up of hostile feelings about the

The Oldie border, but ‘our shared history should be acknowledged,’ says Lacey. Quite so.

Some oldies of the 1960s generation may feel, as Lord Melbourne did, that they are like Regency rakes who have lived into the age of high Victorian moralism.

Old chaps are having their careers and reputations ruined for ‘lewd’ and ‘inappropriate’ remarks which, if I remember correctly, we took in our stride. When Frank Muir said, on TV, that a man’s ideal woman was ‘a deaf and dumb nymphomaniac who lives over a pub’, we screeched with laughter. Actually, most women, privately, still laugh at this laddish drollery.

And now France – France! – is committed to introduce legislation that treats the traditional wolf whistle as a matter for criminal prosecution. The French Secretary of State for Gender Equality, Marlène Schiappa, aged 34, also wishes to make it a criminal offence for a man to ask for a woman’s telephone number more than three times. Any kind of street sexual harassment should, in her view, be met with a fine of €5,000.

I discern a generation gap on the wolf-whistle question. Most older women I know seem to view the sound quite nostalgically. As the estimable Miriam Gross, famed beauty and femme de lettres, has written, ‘Personally, I’ve always been cheered up by it.’ Bel Mooney, the Daily Mail’s agony aunt, recalls, ‘In my youth, wolf whistles were normal… They never bothered me at all. I would say, in all honesty, that I did dress quite sexily too. Only once do I recall an overtly sexual comment (from an electricity worker and that involved “plugging in”) and that was unpleasant – and ignored.’

President Macron is, apparently, in favour of criminalising the wolf whistle and any form of ‘inappropriate’ language or signals. What would Colette, de Maupassant or even Simone de Beauvoir think of such a state-controlled démarche? For de Beauvoir herself, the founder of French feminism, wrote, ‘It is impossible to bring the sexual instinct under a code of regulation.’

Are there any Catalan words that have entered the English language? Yes, ‘paella’ is Catalan (according to my son Patrick West, who reads Catalan). But many Spanish words have become a well understood part of English vocabulary. ‘Mañana’ is not just a word but a whole philosophy. ‘Amigo’ is commonly recognised, as is its companion ‘adios’. ‘Hombre’ crops up in old American cowboy movies – Paul Newman made a film of that very name, in 1967. And was it Ernest Hemingway who introduced the Spanish concept of masculinity – ‘macho/machismo’ – which has now become, probably, rather pejorative?

‘Guerrilla’ entered English during the Peninsular War, filling a gap for which there were no previous words, except ‘independent fighter’.

‘Hasta la vista’ is a nice way to sign off, amigos.

* Mary’s book: ‘Am I a Feminist? Are You?’ has just been published by New Island Books, available from Amazon

www.mary-kenny.com Twitter: @Marykenny4