Исчезновение белых коней в фанлайтах: как политический символ стал украшением и мифом в Дублине

Once a common sight across the city, the famous white horses of Dublin seem to have become extinct in our time. It may be partly the loss of their favoured habitat – the fanlights of Georgian-style doors. More likely, it was changing fashions or politics that caused them to die out. But in the early years of the last century, the small equine statuettes must have been at least as ubiquitous as “Our Lady of the Liberties” is today. That (also white) plaster figurine of a seated woman started adorning Dublin windows in the 1990s and has since given rise to several urban myths about what it means. READ MORE By contrast, the significance of the fanlight horses was well known once, or at least widely assumed. It marked the household as Protestant and/or loyal to the crown. But within that, the symbol had two separate derivations and, by extension, political nuances. The white horse could represent the one King William rode at the Boyne, thereby proclaiming any address that displayed it as a house of Orange (as it were). Or less radically, it could symbolise the horse on the family crest of the Hanoverians, a Germanic line of monarchs who ruled Britain and Ireland from 1714 until the death of Queen Victoria. Either way, the story goes, it once spared householders the attention of the Orange Militia men seeking out “Croppies” during the 1798 terror. And later, it may also have deterred the lesser nuisance of visitors from nationalist backgrounds seeking support – financial or electoral. Catholic religious callers might have been equally discouraged. [ More than once a friendly hello has been met with silence, even here in IrelandOpens in new window ] Elizabeth Bowen (1899 – 1973), who was two years old when Queen Victoria died, noticed the statuette’s popularity on her childhood visits to Dublin. The Bowens had a stately home in north Cork but retreated in winter to a town house on the capital’s Grand Canal, from where the future writer sometimes ventured across the waterway to the wide, well-heeled neighbourhoods of Waterloo, Wellington and Raglan roads. Over there, she recalled, white seemed to be the predominant colour, even of the light: “Along the rows of big polished windows, white lace curtains veiled the darkness of rooms. Bird cages caught the sun on their bars, and statues, figures or white horses, stood in the fanlights over doors.” That was the same era in which another Irish writer, Katharine Tynan, set her novel Mary Gray (1909). It begins, contrastingly, with a description of the “squat line of mean little houses” where her heroine was born. The characterisation of “Wistaria Terrace” incudes this: “Five out of six houses had a ramping plaster horse in the fanlight of the hall door, a fixture which went with the house and was immune from breakage because no one ever thought of cleaning the fanlights.” Perhaps by then, people were forgetting the political significance of the horses – if there ever was one – as they instead acquired them accidentally from previous owners and just left them where they were. The ones in the photograph – from 1967, when they were among the last survivors of an endangered species – were hardly by then deliberate statements. Indeed, I’ve read the suggestion somewhere that because it was once assumed to confer a certain immunity on houses displaying it, the symbol was then also adopted by those of contrary or no politics, as an insurance policy. From there it may have descended to being a mere good luck omen, like another equestrian ornament, the horseshoe. On the other hand, what reminded me of the subject in the first place was a fascinating talk, “Of Cobblestones and Jostle Stones”, in Dublin’s Central Library last weekend, by historian Cathy Scuffil. In her survey of the numerous ways horses left their mark on Dublin, she mentioned the fanlight figures as once signifying that the family had lost a son in the war. For many, that sacrifice (and the advertising of it) would have been an extension of their political identity. And if there was a resurgence in use of the symbol during and after the first World War, it might explain an item from 1932 in this newspaper’s then new column, An Irishman’s Diary The diary began as a miscellany of short items, written by staff journalists or freelance writers for a guinea a piece. And it’s fair to say that, even in 1932, the typical contributor would have had a good insight into the feelings of Irish unionism. So it seems odd that, while noting the fanlight symbols’ stubborn popularity, the writer was mystified as to what, if anything, they meant. The ornaments were not always horses, he noted. On a tram to the Phoenix Park, he had also been “intrigued at the display of china swans and dogs, bulb bowls and busts of past masters in the world of music and literature, with a minority of ships of various types”. He added: “For some unknown reason, however, white horses are predominant.” Then he remembered an English visitor from years before who had assumed them to be symbols of trade. “Tell me,” the Englishman had asked: “Is everyone in Dublin a blacksmith?”