by Paul Howard
In the established Guinness tradition, all three girls chose partners with money and impeccable breeding, although none of their marriages would prove to be happy. Aileen married her cousin, the Honourable Brinsley Plunkett – or Brinny, as he was known. They set up home in the spectacular Luttrelstown Castle, built on a 500-acre estate seven miles north-west of Dublin. Maureen married the ostentatiously named Basil Sheridan Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, who very shortly afterwards inherited the title of Marquess of Dufferin and Ava when his father was killed in an aeroplane crash. With it came the spectacular Clandeboye house and estate, twelve miles north of Belfast. Oonagh was the youngest when she married. In 1929, just five days after celebrating her nineteenth birthday, she exchanged vows with a twenty-two-year-old stockbroker named Philip Kindersley. It seemed like a match made in Debrett’s heaven. Philip was the youngest son of the successful financier Sir Robert Kindersley, a director of the Bank of England, who had been knighted for his work as president of the National Savings Committee.
Philip met Oonagh at a ball in London in 1928. Tall and dark, he was every young debutante’s dream. A year later, they married at St Margaret’s, Westminster. And, very quickly, they discovered they had almost nothing in common. ‘My father and mother weren’t suited at all,’ recalled their son, the champion amateur jockey Gay Kindersley. ‘My father was sort of hunting and shooting. My mother liked the company of intellectuals. It’s a wonder they ever hit it off. I mean, in those days, the men used to go to these debs’ dances and just cling on to the lady they were dancing with. There wasn’t very much in the way of conversation. And then one night, they said, “Will you marry me?”’
Philip’s intention in marrying Oonagh, according to Gay, was simply to produce a son and heir.
Gay was born on 2 June 1930 and named after an American playboy called Gaylord, whose tragic death in a speedboat accident Philip had recently read about while holidaying in the south of France. Two years later, in January 1932, Oonagh gave birth to a daughter. Like Gay, Tessa was delivered by caesarean section. Both births took a heavy toll on the delicately built Oonagh, as all of her experiences of labour would.
The newly married Kindersleys set up home at Rutland Gate, Hyde Park, from where Philip commuted each morning to the City of London, while Oonagh was seldom seen without her children – at least in the daytime. Weekends were spent in the country, usually at Plaw Hatch Hall, the Kindersley family home in Sussex, where Philip’s enthusiasm for riding, shooting and other country pursuits served to emphasize the lack of compatibility between him and his more sophisticated wife.
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For Oonagh and Philip, getting married and starting a family didn’t mean settling down. In fact, none of the Guinness girls let domesticity come between them and their enjoyment of a full and active social life. The 1920s was a time of carefree hedonism and raucous exuberance for London’s young upper-class set. There was widespread relief that the Great War was over. The waste of an entire generation of men lost in the trenches of the Western Front – including Philip’s brother, Bow – brought about a new attitude among young people, characterized by a studied lack of seriousness, a tendency towards excess and the elevation of triviality above everything else. And no one pulled it off with as much high-decibel enthusiasm as the raffish, fast-living and forever-capering set that posterity remembers as the Bright Young People.
The Guinness sisters became adults at the centre of this pleasure-seeking, incessantly giggling demi-monde. Its habitues were characterized in Bright Young People, D. J. Taylor’s authoritative biography of the set, as ‘idle young men living in Mayfair mewses, blooming specimens of aristocratic girlhood from Pont Street and Lowndes Square (and) Tatterdemalion “artists” hunkered down in Chelsea basements’.
In the popular imagination, the lifestyle associated with the set was an endless round of cocktails, jazz, licentiousness, headline-grabbing stunts and fancy-dress parties that tried to outdo each other in the manner of theme and outrageousness. In his 1930 satirical novel, Vile Bodies, the writer Evelyn Waugh lampooned this louche and frivolous world, of which he himself was a part. ‘Masked parties,’ he wrote. ‘Savage parties. Victorian parties. Greek parties. Wild West parties. Russian parties. Circus parties. Parties where one had to dress as somebody else, almost naked parties in St John’s Wood, parties in flats and houses and shops and hotels and night clubs, in windmills and swimming baths . . . All that succession and repetition of mass humanity – Those vile bodies.’
Waugh dedicated the book to Oonagh’s cousin, Bryan Guinness, and his wife, Diana Mitford, his close friends who were the first torchbearers of the set. Bryan and Diana were among the originators of the treasure hunt, the 1920s youth cult in which partygoers were given a series of cryptic clues that sent them dashing around London in open two-seater automobiles. These, in turn, grew into scavenger parties, at which guests were challenged to bring back random items, such as a policeman’s helmet or the pipe of Stanley Baldwin, the Prime Minister, whose daughter Betty was a member of the set.
The old conservative establishment, which had led Britain into a ruinous war, regarded them with exasperation.
‘I don’t understand them and I don’t want to,’ declared Waugh’s fictional Lord Metroland, reflecting a commonly held attitude in Britain. ‘They had a chance after the war that no generation has ever had. There was a whole civilization to be saved and remade. And all they seem to do is play the fool.’
Oonagh and Philip were dedicated members of the set. They were pictured in the 21 June 1933 edition of Tatler at a ‘Come and Be Crazy Party’ at London’s Dorchester Hotel, surrounded by fellow revellers wearing pyjamas, false beards, public school blazers, top hats, shorts with garters and Harrow caps.
It was the Guinnesses, Fortune, the global business magazine reported, who started the fashion of driving to Cuckoo Weir, the swimming hole at Eton, for midnight bathing parties, and Kenelm Lee Guinness – the brewery director and racing driver – who drove a steamroller over an enormous pile of tin cans to find out how it would sound.
All of these antics coincided with the emergence of a new type of press, aimed at Britain’s middle classes. Positioned somewhere between the stiff newspapers of record and the lower-brow tabloids, this new market was defined by Lord Northcliffe, the founder and publisher of the Daily Mail, as news that the thousand pound a year man is interested in reading. The new ‘society journalism’ was concerned not only with news, but with gossip and personalities. Oonagh and her sisters – rich, beautiful and fun-loving – fitted Lord Northcliffe’s criteria for newsworthiness perfectly.
In 1931, to celebrate his wife’s twenty-first birthday, Philip commissioned the royal portrait artist Philip de László to paint her. The portrait, capturing Oonagh in a white ballgown and an emerald necklace, with one hand placed demurely on her clavicle, cost £1,575 and was later exhibited in a retrospective of the Hungarian’s work in Paris. While Oonagh was thrilled with the portrait, the picture of happy marital contentment that she and Philip presented was at sharp odds with the reality.
Adultery was almost institutionalized among the upper classes in Edwardian and post-Edwardian Britain. Extramarital affairs were socially permissible as long as they were conducted discreetly. According to Gay, his father remained faithful to his mother for barely a year of their married life. Then, he embarked on a relationship with her best friend and bridesmaid, Valerie French, the granddaughter of the first Earl of Ypres. Valsie, as she was known, had only recently become married herself, to Victor Brougham, the fourth Lord Brougham and Vaux. According to Gay, Oonagh knew about the affair and professed not to care until Valsie was photographed with Philip at a function, wearing her bridesmaid’s dress.
While her husband found happiness in the arms of her best friend, Oonagh too had found love outside their marriage. It’s not known exactly when her affair with Dom began. Discretion was important as they were both still married to other people. In her divorce petition, Dom’s first wife, Mildred
, suggested that it started early in 1934.
In the tight, socially incestuous world of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy, it’s likely that Dom and Oonagh had met many times before they ever became lovers. Dom had known the Guinness family most of his life. His home of Castle Mac Garrett was just twenty miles away from Ashford Castle, which his great-grandfather had sold to Oonagh’s great-grandfather back in the 1850s. He was invited there regularly to shoot woodcock and snipe and was also an occasional visitor to Ernest’s London home at 17 Grosvenor Place.
With her marriage as good as over, Oonagh spent a great deal of that autumn and winter in Ireland. The social pages from the time suggest that Oonagh crossed paths with the Oranmore and Brownes at a number of shoots, race meetings and hunt balls through the latter half of 1933. By the summer of 1934, Dom and Oonagh were in the first flush of love.
As they prepared to move on to the next chapter of their lives, Oonagh and her first husband seemed to reach an unusually dignified accommodation with one another’s lovers. In August 1934, Oonagh, Dom, Philip and Valsie all holidayed together in the south and south-west of Ireland. With their mutual friend, the writer Edward Lindsay-Hogg, they spent a weekend at the Tramore Races in Waterford. They then travelled together to Kerry, enjoying the scenic Lakes of Killarney before riding on horseback through the Gap of Dunloe, the spectacular mountain pass that lies in the shadow of Ireland’s highest peak.
By then, Valsie had already divorced her husband, who was in serious financial difficulty as a result of his gambling debts. Philip told Oonagh that he wanted to marry Valsie, while Oonagh told Philip that she wanted to marry Dom.
‘It suited everyone,’ according to her son Garech. ‘It was rather fortunate, really, that everyone fell in love with someone else at around the same time.’
Rumours of their unusual extramarital arrangement eventually reached the ears of the press. In the early months of 1935, the society writers began dropping hints about something that was already the subject of gossip in social circles in London. The Bystander began to refer to Valsie rather pointedly as Oonagh’s ‘erstwhile’ friend. Earlier in the year, without using names, the same magazine reported that ‘London’s only really happy couple’ were breaking up: ‘Far be it from us to take sides, as we like them both enormously, but we consider the present situation constitutes one more instance of the close proximity of fire when we see a lot of smoke. We girls are tremendous believers in platonic relationships, but we do think they have their limitations, and when a husband is seen exclusively with another woman, it usually means it’s ripened into something stronger. Similarly, when the wife stays on at the same house party as her boyfriend without her husband, we trust we are not being unduly suspicious if we wonder what it’s all about.’ In a reference to Dom’s wife, Mildred, the column said, ‘The one with whom we sympathize deeply is the boyfriend’s wife. She seems to have had very little fun.’
While Mildred was aware of Dom’s unfaithfulness, she was shocked to her core when he told her that he was leaving her and their five children for another woman. ‘She was absolutely devastated,’ remembered Dominick. ‘We all were. You’ve lived together all your lives as a family and then you’re suddenly separated. I was only six years old. We were all required to leave this castle in Ireland where we’d lived all our lives and suddenly we’re staying in digs in London, near Marble Arch.’
Under English law a divorce was attainable only if one partner could prove adultery on the part of the other. And proof required at least one independent witness. The customary arrangement, in the case where a split was amicable, was to contrive a situation in which one or both parties would be ‘caught’ committing the act by an independent third party. But Oonagh and Dom’s efforts to stage-manage an act of infidelity turned into a farce worthy of Oscar Wilde. They travelled to France to stay at a hotel, owned by a cousin of Oonagh’s. However, the hotel manager refused to give evidence to support Philip’s petition for divorce in what he believed was an act of loyalty to his employer. The act of infidelity was eventually staged in Austria.
The Oranmores and Kindersleys were divorced on the same day and in the same court in November 1935, but they managed to keep the news a secret for a while. Within days, Oonagh and Dom sailed to New York on a Cunard liner, the RMS Aquitania. Their presence in America was covered extensively in the national press, although they went to lengths to give the impression that they were travelling separately.
They married the following spring, at Marylebone Register Office, on 29 April 1936. It was a far more muted occasion than Oonagh’s first wedding, which had been a 1929 society event of the year. The bride wore a mauve-blue ensemble with a matching hat, the groom a navy pin-striped suit with a red carnation in the button, and they exchanged their vows in front of half a dozen guests. The Daily Express reported that they made three unsuccessful attempts to leave the registry office and that their efforts to evade press photographers resulted in a car chase.
Ernest Guinness made Oonagh a wedding gift of an exquisite eighteenth-century house, tucked into a cleft on a 5,000-acre estate in the Wicklow Mountains. ‘Luggala has been given to me by my kind father,’ Oonagh wrote in the visitors’ book. It was the home where, thirty years later, their younger son would celebrate his coming of age in the company of Brian Jones and Mick Jagger and the Bright Young People of another generation, little knowing that it would be the final milestone event in a short but extraordinary life.
2: WAR BABY
Blond-haired and blue-eyed, Tara Browne entered the world on 4 March 1945, in a nursing home on the banks of Dublin’s Grand Canal. Oonagh regarded him as her miracle baby – and not only because her doctors had tried to warn her off having any more children. Tara arrived into Oonagh’s life right in the middle of a decade blighted by sadness and tragedy, a period in which she would lose her daughter, her infant son, her husband, her father and much of her fortune.
Tara’s birth was a rare moment of joy in her thirties. The Second World War was in its final weeks and she could allow herself to be excited about the future. A photograph taken in front of Castle Mac Garrett on the day that Tara was christened shows Oonagh smiling while holding her new baby, surrounded by her enormous extended family. Dom is standing at the back, his face partly obscured, as if to emphasize the fissure that had already opened up in their marriage. Before Tara had even taken his first tottering steps, his father would meet the woman for whom he would eventually leave his wife.
Marriage to Dom didn’t turn out to be the better life that Oonagh dreamt of. But they were happy once, before the pressures of the war years drove a wedge between them. In 1936, after a prolonged honeymoon in Scotland, they returned to Ireland with six-year-old Gay and four-year-old Tessa. For the next few years they lived between their houses in Mayo and Wicklow, as the 1930s built to a tumultuous head.
Despite her one-time ambivalence towards outdoor pursuits, the new Lady Oranmore and Browne appeared to settle happily into country life and told the Sketch that she no longer cared for London and the restaurants and nightclubs of which she was once so fond. And then, as if to symbolically close the door on her former life, she changed the colour of her hair, from bombshell blonde to subdued brown.
It wasn’t just for Oonagh that an era was coming to a close. The great social and economic convulsions of the 1930s had forced an end to the antics of the Bright Young People. In 1931, Britain had responded to the worldwide economic crisis precipitated by the Wall Street Crash by leaving the gold standard, a considerable blow to the country’s self-confidence. Suddenly, the kindergarten antics of high bohemia began to seem in bad taste to a country that had three million unemployed and the horrible probability of a war with Hitler’s Germany ahead.
It was mostly from their castle retreat in the west of Ireland, surrounded by their large brood of children, that Oonagh and Dom watched the watershed moments of the 1930s unfold, from the abdication of Edward VIII – a long-time friend of Oonagh’s and a spiritual bellw
ether for the Bright Young People – to Neville Chamberlain’s return from the Munich Conference and the slow, grim realization that the world would soon be at war again.
Only occasionally were they seen in London. As a peer of the realm, Dom, together with his new wife, attended the coronation of George VI in Westminster Abbey in May 1937, both wearing ceremonial robes for the occasion. They were also at the wedding of William Somerset Maugham’s daughter Elizabeth, and the reopening of the famous Ciro’s Club in London. Tatler, noting Oonagh’s presence there, compared her to Greta Garbo.
She was still incredibly glamorous. She loved clothes. And, as the society magazines spotted, she was taking her fashion cues from the new stars of Hollywood’s first talking pictures. After her vanity case was stolen from Castle Mac Garrett by a party guest, she went to court in nearby Claremorris wearing a trouser suit with tapered legs, and a hat, cocked to one side, so that it covered her right eye, in the style of Carole Lombard or Loretta Young.
Her husband was similarly enamoured by clothes. ‘He was a very debonair dresser,’ according to his daughter Judith, ‘just like Tara and Garech really. He always got his clothes made by the best tailors in London.’
Oonagh and Dom’s social life now revolved around shooting weekends and white-tie balls in castles in the west of Ireland, with their ever dwindling circle of aristocratic friends, members of the diplomatic set and foreign royals who used Ireland as a playground for their pastimes.
Thanks to Oonagh’s wealth, the couple enjoyed a life of considerable comfort, with a large house staff. But much like her marriage to Philip, Oonagh’s relationship with Dom was far from the happy domestic idyll. Their arguments were famous, with house guests regularly pressed into choosing sides. Marriage to Oonagh had also failed to put an end to Dom’s sexual wanderlust. ‘Oonagh’s father,’ Judith recalled, ‘used to call him the Stallion.’
