Victoria, Plunkett and Wilde
On 1 April, Queen Victoria ordered the formation of the Irish Guards, explicitly recognising Irish soldiers’ service in the South African War, then generally called the Boer War. Three days later, on 4 April, the Queen made her public arrival at Kingstown and travelled into Dublin. It was her final visit to Ireland, and its pageantry was emphatically imperial: decorated streets, official receptions, troops and police, crowds gathered along the route, and ceremonies centred on Dublin Castle and the Phoenix Park. Film survives of her carriage procession in the city, an unusually immediate visual record of a political occasion otherwise filtered through official speeches and partisan newspapers.