How a piece of Nelson's Pillar ended up in Bective garden

Gardeners and designers who like to come up with rare objects or sculptures for ‘outdoor living’ will be hard pressed to find a better conversation piece than a piece of masonry that sits in John and Lorraine McDowell’s rockery at Asigh, near Bective.
It isn’t any old piece of rubble – it’s a piece of Nelson’s Pillar, which once stood on O’Connell Street, and was blown up 50 years ago this week by a group described as ‘socialist republicans’.
As the capital looked towards the 50th anniversary of 1916, the statue of the British admiral Horatio Nelson standing 134 feet above the main thoroughfare was blown to smithereens at 1.32am on 8th March 1966. All that was left was a 70 feet high stump, blown up by the Irish Army later in the week in a controlled explosion that did more damage than the original blast, although this was contradicted by a retired army officer this week.
John McDowell’s uncle, Jack, was running the family jewellery business, the Happy Ring House, at the time.
“We presume he loaded up a piece of the stone and put it into the boot of the car,” says John. “It arrived out to his home at Sutton, Warren Villa, and was used as a base for a sun dial.”
Jack McDowell had a racehorse, Caughoo, which famously won the 1947 Aintree Grand National after emerging from a fog that hindered the field and saw Ratoath jockey Eddie Dempsey pull ahead by 20 lengths.
“When Caughoo died, he was buried at Warren Villa. The piece of the pillar was used to mark his grave,” John McDowell explains. “Later, the property was sold for development, and Caughoo’s remains were moved to Fairyhouse, where my cousin Peter McDowell was living at the time. The farm is now the Tattersalls complex, and Caughoo still lies in the front garden.
“The stone remained in Sutton until my aunt Mary was clearing the house and we moved some of the contents to Asigh. The sun dial was broken by this stage, but there was a piece of inscribed marble attached to it. I often meant to replace the sun dial, but haven’t got around to it yet,” John says.
The monument, designed by Francis Johnson, had been erected in 1808-’09 to commemorate Nelson’s victory and death at the great naval battle of Trafalgar in 1805.
The pillar was a Doric column topped by a 13 feet tall statue in Portland stone by Cork sculptor Thomas Kirk. All the outer and visible parts of the pillar were of Wicklow granite.
While Jack McDowell made off with his souvenir, a group of students from the National College of Art and Design were cheekier.
They stole the statue’s head from a storage shed as a fund-raising prank to pay off a Student Union debt. They leased the head for £200 a month to an antiques dealer in London for his shop window. It also appeared in a women’s stocking commercial, shot on Killiney beach, and on the stage of the Olympia Theatre with The Dubliners. The students finally gave the head to the Lady Nelson of the day about six months after taking it. It now resides in the Gilbert Library, in Pearse Street.
And the man believed to be responsible for orchestrating the demolition job, barrister and maverick republican Joe Christle, founder of the Rás Tailteann, lies not too far away from John McDowell’s piece of the pillar. Following his death in 1998, he was laid to rest in Kilmessan Cemetery beside his old friend, Leo Collins of Ennistown Stud.

 

History Ireland Hedge School on

The rise and fall of Nelson’s Pillar

National Library of Ireland, Kildare Street

Mon 14 March at 7pm

No charge and no booking required

Who was Horatio Nelson and why did his naval victory over the French at Trafalgar in 1805 provoke a craze for building monuments throughout Britain and Ireland? The first, a ‘Nelson arch’, was erected at Castletownshend, Co Cork, within days of the victory, and by 1808 ‘Nelson’s Pillar’ was erected in Dublin’s Sackville (now O’Connell) Street. From the start it was a controversial and polarizing monument and eventually fell foul of a republican bomb in March 1966, shortly before the official commemorations of the 50th anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising. To discuss Nelson, the Pillar and the atmosphere of 1966 Ireland, join History Ireland editor, Tommy Graham, for a lively round table discussion with Donal Fallon, Fergus Whelan, Dennis Kennedy and Carole Holohan.