The "Royal Dublin Fusiliers," or "Royal Dublins," were an
Irish infantry regiment of the British army from 1881 until
the founding of the Irish Free State in 1922. Molly Bloom's
father, identified in Oxen of the Sun as "a gallant
major" and in Ithaca as "Major Brian Cooper Tweedy,
Royal Dublin Fusiliers" (though he probably was only a sergeant-major), served in
this regiment in the 2nd Battalion stationed in Gibraltar.
After his time, the regiment sent both of its regular
battalions to South Africa to fight in the Second Boer War
from 1899 to 1902.
In Proteus, Stephen imagines a gypsy woman's
companion selling her body to "two Royal Dublins"
in Blackpitts, and this
association with prostitution continues in Lotus Eaters
when Bloom scans the troops in a recruiting poster looking for
the regiment that Molly's father served in: "Where's
old Tweedy's regiment? Castoff soldier. There: bearskin cap
and hackle plume. No, he's a grenadier. Pointed cuffs. There
he is: royal Dublin fusiliers. Redcoats. Too showy.
That must be why the women go after them. Uniform. Easier to
enlist and drill. Maud Gonne's
letter about taking them off O'Connell street at night:
disgrace to our Irish capital. Griffith's
paper is on the same tack now: an army rotten with venereal disease."
Slote, citing the Encyclopaedia Britannica, notes that
"The full dress uniforms of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers and the
Grenadier Guards were quite similar, with the main difference
being the cuffs and hats. The Grenadiers wore bearskin hats
with a white plume."
When he is accosted by two policemen in Circe Bloom
leaps to associate himself with the troops, because of his
involvement in a pro-Boer
demonstration in 1899: "My wife, I am the daughter of a
most distinguished commander, a gallant upstanding gentleman,
what do you call him, Majorgeneral Brian Tweedy, one
of Britain's fighting men who helped to win our battles. Got
his majority for the heroic defence of Rorke's Drift."
Now the major, perhaps already glorified from a mere
sergeant-major, has become a general officer. Gifford suggests
that Bloom is thinking of another man of the same name, Major
General Willis Tweedie, who commanded troops in India. The
assertion that Tweedy fought in the battle of Rorke's Drift
against the Zulus in 1879 may also be fantastic: nothing else
in the novel confirms it.
Challenged by a constable to name his "Regiment,"
Bloom "Turns to the gallery" and affirms his
connection with Tweedy's outfit: "The royal Dublins,
boys, the salt of the earth, known the world over. I think I
see some old comrades in arms up there among you. The R. D.
F., with our own Metropolitan police, guardians of
our homes, the pluckiest lads and the finest body of men, as
physique, in the service of our sovereign." Someone accuses
Bloom of being a "Turncoat" who supported the Boers against
the British cause, and he asserts that he fought in the Second
Boer War "and was disabled at Spion Kop and Bloemfontein, was
mentioned in dispatches."
Later in the episode, when Stephen finds himself in trouble
with two soldiers, Bloom tells them that "We fought for you in
South Africa, Irish missile troops. Isn't that history? Royal
Dublin Fusiliers. Honoured by our monarch." The air
of fantastical elaboration still clings in the phrase "missile
troops." Fusil is French for a long gun, and the
first fusiliers in the late 17th century carried
flintlock muskets. In the 19th and early 20th centuries they
were riflemen, not manners of missile batteries.
