by Paul Howard
Their life in the west of Ireland was at least filled with one thing that Oonagh loved: children. As well as Tessa and Gay, there were Dominick, Martin, Patricia, Brigid and Judith, the five children from Dom’s first marriage, who visited regularly from their new home in London.
‘At first it was difficult to go back to Castle Mac Garrett,’ remembered Dominick, Dom’s eldest son. ‘It had been our house and it was no longer our house. It was the house of Gay and Tessa. They were sleeping in our old bedrooms. That’s one of the awful things about divorce. And maybe the biggest shock of all was that they had horses and ponies and Guinness money and, well, we had nothing. We were arriving back to this castle where we once lived, but we were arriving back as poor people.
‘But then, after a time, we loved it. And Oonagh was a lovely person. I adored her. This is where I felt I let my mother down, because I should have hated her. But you couldn’t help adoring her. She was so kind and so sweet.’
Soon, more children arrived at Castle Mac Garrett. First came Neelia and Doon Plunkett, Aileen’s daughters. She had divorced their father and deposited the two girls with her sister before removing herself to America for the duration of the war. Oonagh was more than happy to become a surrogate mother to her two nieces. And by the time of their arrival in 1940, Oonagh and Dom had started a family of their own.
Their first son, Garech Domnagh Browne, was born on 25 June 1939, in Glenmaroon, the Dublin home of Oonagh’s parents, close to the Guinness brewery. He was baptized in St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, with water from the River Jordan, surrounded by his half-brothers, sisters and cousins. Garech was delivered by caesarean section. The delivery exacted such a physical toll on Oonagh that, at twenty-nine, she was advised not to have any more children.
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Within weeks of Garech’s birth came the news that Germany had invaded Poland and the world was once again at war. Dom attempted to enlist in the British Army but, at thirty-seven, he was deemed too old for service. A recruiting officer told him that his energies would be more productively spent farming his land, since food rationing was likely to be a fact of life for as long as the war lasted.
Oonagh’s ex-husband, Philip, who had since married Valsie and set up his own stockbroking firm, did succeed in enlisting. He joined the Coldstream Guards and saw action in France and in North Africa, before he was captured by the Germans. He spent almost two and a half years as a prisoner of war, first in Italy, then in Germany.
From captivity, he would direct a bitter legal battle with Oonagh over the custody of their son, Gay, which would make newspaper headlines around the world.
When their parents’ marriage was dissolved, Gay and Tessa had been made wards of court. Philip acquiesced to his children spending their childhood in Ireland on the condition that, once Gay reached the age of ten, he would be sent to Colthill, a preparatory school near Abingdon, then on to Eton, just like his father. Gay spent a year at Colthill, but in the summer of 1940, the Luftwaffe was subjecting Britain’s cities to the largest and most sustained aerial bombardment the world had ever seen. Oonagh and Philip both agreed that Gay would be safer in Ireland and he was enrolled in Castle Park, a Protestant boarding school with Anglocentric leanings, in Dalkey, south of Dublin.
On Christmas Day 1942, Philip was captured by the Germans near Tunis and was fortunate to escape with his life when the officer escorting him accidentally trod on a mine. The young man, Philip noted in his diary, was ‘blown to bits from the waist down’, while he himself was thrown clear and escaped with cuts and shock. He was sent to a Tunis hospital to recuperate, then on to the first of several prisoner-of-war camps.
In 1942, as Gay approached his thirteenth birthday, and with the skies over England largely quiet, Philip’s father, Sir Robert Kindersley, demanded that the original agreement be honoured and that Gay be sent to Eton. Through the English courts, Sir Robert applied successfully for custody of his grandson. Oonagh ignored the order of the court. An application was then made to the High Court in Dublin, where Oonagh was ordered to hand over her son in time to start school at Eton in September 1942. Again, Oonagh defied the order. ‘My mother’s lawyers advised her that she couldn’t lose,’ according to Garech. ‘They said an Irish court would never force a mother to hand over her child.’
On legal advice, and much to the anger of the Kindersley family, she took out Irish citizenship for both Gay and Tessa.
The fate of Oonagh and Philip’s son became an international cause célèbre as the court proceedings dragged out over the seven months that followed. Oonagh held firm in her refusal to – as her counsel put it – ‘take the boy from a country at peace to a country engaged in a life and death struggle, to remove him from his mother and turn him into a sort of orphan . . . supported by a well-to-do grandfather’.
In July 1943, the High Court in Dublin decided that the wishes of Gay’s father must be ascertained before it ruled where the boy should be educated. The case was adjourned while efforts were made to contact Philip. He was being held in Fontanellato, a small town in the province of Parma in northern Italy, in an orphanage that had been requisitioned for use as a prisoner camp for Allied soldiers.
Gay had no doubt what his father would say if they managed to get a communication to him. Philip, he said, had a deep loathing of the Irish. For several months there was silence. As the September 1943 deadline passed, Gay was enrolled in St Columba’s College in Dublin.
By that time, Oonagh, having ignored medical advice, was pregnant for the fourth time.
The stress of the custody case took a heavy toll on her. Some days she travelled to court from a Dublin nursing home, where she was forced to stay, owing to difficulties with the pregnancy.
Finally, in November 1943, Oonagh – wearing a fur coat and a black hat and veil – was in court to see her one-time father-in-law produce a telegram, received from Philip through the British Foreign Office. ‘Application for release of Gay to enter Eton,’ the message said, ‘has my full knowledge and approval.’
In a separate letter to his father, Philip wrote: ‘It is really wonderful for you to have done this for me, as I had visions of Gay being educated as a Sinn Feiner.’
The High Court upheld the order of the English court and instructed Oonagh to hand over her son to his grandfather. Oonagh appealed to the Supreme Court, which unanimously upheld the decision of the High Court, while acknowledging that Oonagh’s actions were motivated by ‘nothing other than a genuine love for her son and regard for his safety and welfare’. On 15 January 1944, a last appeal, based on a technical issue, failed to overturn the original order. At three o’clock that afternoon, Gay was reading a comic book in the office of the registrar of the High Court, when he was told that he was being handed over to his grandparents to be brought to England.
Oonagh wasn’t in court to see the final act play out. On 28 December she had given birth to a boy. Two days later, before she even had an opportunity to name him, he died. ‘He was almost stillborn,’ according to Garech. ‘He didn’t have a hope really.’
Oonagh was too ill and riven by grief to be in court to see Gay placed in the care of Sir Robert and his wife for the journey to England. ‘I remember Dom, my stepfather, leading me out of the court,’ recalled Gay, shortly before his death in 2011. ‘A boy, rather bewildered. I remember all these old Irish ladies lined up outside the court, shaking their fists at my grandparents, saying, “Taking a boy from his mother! You should be ashamed!” They followed us out to the taxi. They banged on the windows. I was quite frightened. We went to the Gresham Hotel. We stayed the night and got the mail boat the next morning.’
Three days later, Gay started school at Eton, while Oonagh laid her unnamed baby to rest close to the lake at Luggala under a stone marked with the simple inscription, ‘Baby Browne’.
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Neutral during the war, Ireland may have seemed like a peaceful sanctuary on the periphery of a continent tearing itself apart. But the war years brought a
considerable amount of unhappiness and tragedy to Oonagh and Dom’s door. In 1941, two years before the custody case and the death of Baby Browne, Dom had lost one of his children. Fourteen-year-old Brigid – or Biddy, as she was fondly known – died of pneumonia in Scotland. ‘She caught it coming home from school,’ her sister, Judith, remembered. ‘It was a particularly bad winter when all the lakes froze over. My mother always said that if penicillin had been more widely available at the time, she wouldn’t have died.’
The war itself laid waste to another generation of men in their prime and the aristocratic classes were not spared from loss. Oonagh’s sisters, Maureen and Aileen, both lost the husbands they’d married in the giddy, jazz-filled years that followed the First World War. Brinny Plunkett – by then divorced from Aileen – enlisted as a flight lieutenant in the RAF Volunteer Reserve and was killed when he crash-landed his Spitfire in Aden in November 1941. It fell to Oonagh to break the news to Neelia and Doon, who were living at Castle Mac Garrett, that their father was dead.
Maureen’s husband, Basil, the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, was engaged in a propaganda operation in Burma, designed to stop the Japanese advance on Mandalay. On 25 March 1945, he was killed in an ambush, close to the ancient capital of Ava, the town whose name he shared.
Oonagh’s father, Ernest, lost his younger brother, also in the colonies. After a distinguished political career, Walter Guinness, the Lord Moyne, had been appointed British minister of state in the Middle East by Winston Churchill in January 1944. In the early afternoon of 6 November of that same year, Eliyahu Bet-Zuri and Eliyahu Hakim, two members of the militant Zionist group Lehi, shot him dead in the back of his chauffeur-driven car close to his home in Cairo.
Right in the middle of a decade that would be marked by further tragedies, Tara arrived into Oonagh’s life like a blessing. The death of Baby Browne had made her even more determined to conceive again, even against medical advice. ‘One of the reasons,’ according to Garech, ‘was of course that she’d lost a baby and she wanted another child desperately. But it was also because being a mother was something she happened to be rather wonderful at.’
Tara was delivered by caesarean section in Portobello House, a private nursing home, in Dublin. He was born healthy and with no complications for either mother or child. Oonagh, who had a deep love of Irish history, considered naming her new baby Fiach, after Fiach mac Aodha Ó Broin, a sixteenth-century Robin Hood figure whose clan controlled the mountains around Luggala and fought the Tudors during the Elizabethan conquest of Ireland. ‘He was going to be Fiach,’ according to Garech, ‘but then everyone started saying that, if he ever left Ireland, he’d be known as Fuck or Fucker, so she decided against it.’
Instead, she chose Tara, after the historic Hill of Tara, the ancient seat of the High Kings of Ireland. On 15 April 1945, he was christened by the Archdeacon of Tuam at Crossboyne Church in County Mayo.
The war in Europe was coming to an end – Hitler’s death was only two weeks away – and there was a sense of optimism about the world into which Tara was born. He could look forward to a childhood of Blytonish fun and adventure in the company of his brother, half-siblings and cousins. Dom and Oonagh and their large brood of children looked like one big, happy, extended family in photographs taken in the months after Tara’s arrival. Tessa, by now a very accomplished rider, won the Children’s Championship jumping competition at the Royal Dublin Horse Show that summer. The following day’s newspapers carried photographs of Oonagh standing next to her thirteen-year-old daughter and her pony, Brown Jack, looking every inch the proud mother.
A sense of normality seemed to be returning to their lives. Fifteen-year-old Gay, on holiday from Eton, had just enjoyed an emotional reunion with his father, who had been liberated from Oflag 79, a prisoner-of-war camp near Braunschweig in Germany.
With her new baby boy, Oonagh was as happy as she’d been for years. But the following year, her world was once again shattered by tragedy. On the evening of Friday, 2 August 1946, Garech fell ill. At the time, there had been an outbreak of diphtheria in the west of Ireland. Fearing the worst, Oonagh summoned Dr Heneghan, the family GP, from nearby Castlebar. He arrived shortly after dinnertime. To her relief, it turned out that Garech wasn’t suffering from diphtheria, but since the doctor was there, Oonagh asked that he inoculate the entire household. The doctor administered seven injections of diphtheria antitoxin, including one to Tessa.
Fifteen minutes later, Tessa, an asthmatic since childhood, ran into her mother’s room, complaining of breathing difficulties. Within five minutes, she had slipped into a coma. The doctor returned to the house and administered a shot of adrenalin, but Tessa’s heart began to fail. For an hour, Oonagh tried desperately to revive her by means of artificial respiration, but to no avail. Gay, who was at Castle Mac Garrett on his summer holidays, remembered his mother coming to his room along the passageway. ‘She said, “I’m afraid your sister has died”,’ he recalled. ‘I was just devastated. I went into her room. The sight of her pale face and her blonde hair, like a halo, on her pillow is something I never forgot.’
The news of his daughter’s death was broken to Philip over the telephone. He arrived at Castle Mac Garrett the following day and he and Gay fell weeping into one another’s arms. Gay took his father to the room where Tessa was laid out. He kissed her on the lips, before turning to comfort Oonagh, who had stayed with her daughter’s body all night, knowing how much she hated the dark.
Dom, meanwhile, was in London, supposedly on Lords business, although, according to Gay, he was there to visit one of his mistresses. When Oonagh phoned her husband at the May Fair Hotel, a receptionist told her that ‘Lord and Lady Oranmore’ had gone out for the evening. Dom was finally located the following day and he returned home stricken with grief. For the rest of his life, it was said, he carried the burden of guilt around with him that, had he been at home, he might have questioned the doctor on the possible side effects of the injection and saved his stepdaughter’s life.
Oonagh and Dom had problems in their marriage long before Tara was born. But the death of Oonagh’s beloved daughter caused a fracture between them that would never heal.
A post mortem revealed that Tessa’s death was due to cardiac arrest brought on by anaphylactic shock. Members of the Castle Mac Garrett house staff carried her small coffin the one and a half miles to the church at Crossboyne where Tara had been christened just sixteen months earlier. The following day, Tessa was taken to Luggala in County Wicklow and buried by the lake next to Baby Browne, the half-brother she never got to know in life.
The loss of Tessa tightened Oonagh’s bond with her infant son. ‘She loved all of her children,’ according to Garech, ‘but if there was a favourite, then it probably was Tara.’
In March 1949, just as she was emerging from the blackest period in her life, she suffered yet another blow when her father died suddenly at the age of seventy-two. Ernest had suffered a blood clot in his leg as a result of a boating accident. His doctor told him, ill-advisedly, to take a hot bath. Ernest followed his instruction and suffered a fatal heart attack.
His unexpected death would have serious financial consequences for his family. Unlike his brothers, Ernest hadn’t taken the precaution of transferring the bulk of his wealth to his children to avoid Britain and Ireland’s punitive post-war inheritance taxes. On his death, almost half of his fortune went to the Irish exchequer.
Tara might have grown up almost destitute had it not been for a trust fund that had been set up by his great-grandfather years earlier. Edward, the brother whose cunning had been recognized by James Joyce, had rather presciently sought to secure the livelihoods of his descendants by making them the beneficiaries of a trust. Under its terms, future Guinness sons and daughters would inherit a substantial sum upon reaching the age of twenty-five. However, they were not permitted to withdraw capital from their inheritance. Instead, they could use it to buy property or make investments, provided that the board of tru
stees, who managed the money, considered them prudent. This was aimed at preserving the wealth within the family and also ensuring that future Guinness scions wouldn’t become wealthy idlers.
Ernest’s death, coming so soon after his brother’s assassination in Cairo, created a succession crisis for the Guinness business. For the first time since the family began brewing porter, there was no male heir either willing or qualified to assume control of the business. As his eldest grandchild, Ernest had once considered Gay as his most likely successor. However, at the end of the nineteenth century, in an effort to ensure a more scientific approach to the method of brewing, the company had adopted a policy whereby all senior recruits were required to have a degree in chemistry from either Oxford or Cambridge. ‘It was my worst subject at Eton,’ Gay recalled. ‘So there was no way it was ever going to happen.’
By the time his grandfather died, Gay, who was then nineteen, was doing his military service with the Fourth Royal Tank Regiment in Yorkshire, after which he was planning to embark on a career as an amateur jockey.
Tara was born into a family that was fast losing control of the business that had made their name and their fortune. His grandfather’s death set in motion a chain of events that would eventually lead to the brewery passing out of the Guinness family’s hands altogether and prompt Oonagh’s cousin, Benjamin, to reflect many years later: ‘We could have been the British Rockefellers or Rothschilds . . . But we lost our way.’
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While she was still coming to terms with the deaths of her daughter and father, as well as the loss of much of her inheritance, Oonagh had to face up to the fact that her second marriage was coming to an end too. Oonagh and Dom were incompatible in all the same ways that Oonagh and Philip had been. Their friends and their enthusiasms were different. Like her first husband, Dom liked country life and the company of other hunting types. Oonagh was rather more cultured and preferred the company of bohemians and intellectuals. There was also the not inconsiderable question of Dom’s philandering. In the autumn of 1946, not long after Tessa’s death, he had met and quickly fallen in love with a movie actress whose porcelain features and husky voice had earned her a reputation as Britain’s own Marlene Dietrich. She was known as Sally Gray and she was regarded as one of the world’s most beautiful film stars.
