Confidential report from Brendan Dillon to Seán Nunan (Dublin)
(11/-) (Confidential)

You may, perhaps, be interested in certain remarks made to me recently by the British Air-Attaché, Group Captain TOWNSEND,¹ who, you may recall, was in attendance on Queen Elizabeth during her post-Coronation visit to the Six Counties.

He referred, of his own accord, to that visit and mentioned, with amusement, that many of the arrangements seemed to go wrong. Apparently, however, the Royal party was not a bit put out and enjoyed the whole thing tremendously. ‘After all’, said he, ‘when one goes to Ireland one expects things to go wrong!’ He said that he mentioned to ‘Pim’² (I am not sure if that is the correct spelling) that the police precautions seemed a little excessive and was told in reply that the week before all the railway bridges the party crossed had been mined! Townsend said that he thought this statement ‘a bit Irish’ and that obviously the dangers had been exaggerated so that the vigilance of the authorities might seem the more praiseworthy.

Townsend, who favours the monologue as a form of conversation, went on to discuss religion and in particular the Anglican Church of which he seems to be a devout member, and concluded by remarking that he considered it fantastic that the Anglican church should be the state church in England and dictate the moral tone of the nation when only a fraction of the people followed its beliefs.

I replied in non-committal fashion to these remarks, which seemed to distress the Counsellor of the British Embassy who sat with us and made vain attempts to divert the discourse. Eventually he rose and left.

It should, I suppose, be added that despite this conversation and his rather mincing manner, Townsend, who is obviously more soldier than diplomat, is a not wholly unlikeable personality though his casual insolence of manner would take your breath away. Seated by my wife at dinner, three places from his hostess, he remarked as the main course was taken away, ‘Well I didn’t care much for that. Did you?’ At any rate he does not appear to be over-popular with his British and Commonwealth colleagues, one of whom, a South African, described him to me in very unflattering terms. One gathers that, rightly or wrongly, the general feeling is that his abrupt departure from London was at his own request and that he is here in Brussels a fugitive from a princess.