I Read the News Today, Oh Boy

by Paul Howard

  ‘“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.”’ The Bystander, 15 January 1935.

  ‘“The one with whom we sympathize deeply is the boyfriend’s wife. She seems to have had very little fun.”’ Ibid.

  ‘“She was absolutely devastated . . .”’ Author interview with Dominick Browne, Lord Mereworth, London, 2014.

  ‘However, the hotel manager refused to give evidence to support Philip’s petition for divorce . . .’ An account of this story features in Flings Over Fences – The Ups and Downs of Gay Kindersley by Gay Kindersley with Robin Rhoderick-Jones (Quiller Press Ltd, 1994), p. 6.

  ‘The Daily Express reported that they made three unsuccessful attempts to leave the registry office . . .’ Daily Express, 30 April 1936.

  ‘“Luggala has been given to me by my kind father.”’ Visitors’ book, Luggala.

  2: WAR BABY

  ‘Despite her one-time ambivalence towards outdoor pursuits, the new Lady Oranmore and Browne appeared to settle happily into country life . . .’ Contemporary issues of The Sketch.

  ‘They were also at the wedding of William Somerset Maugham’s daughter, Elizabeth, and the reopening of the famous Ciro’s Club in London . . .’ Contemporary issues of Tatler.

  ‘“He was a very debonair dresser . . .”’ Author interview with Judith Haslam, by telephone, 2014.

  ‘Their arguments were famous . . .’ Author interview with Gay Kindersley, East Garston, 2011.

  ‘“Oonagh’s father,” Judith recalled, “used to call him the Stallion.”’ Author interview with Judith Haslam, by telephone, 2014.

  ‘“At first it was difficult to go back to Castle Mac Garrett . . .”’ Author interview with Dominick Browne, Lord Mereworth, London, 2014.

  ‘A recruiting officer told him that his energies would be more productively spent farming his land . . .’ Author interview with Garech Browne, Wicklow, 2014.

  ‘On Christmas Day 1942, Philip was captured by the Germans near Tunis . . .’ An account of Philip Kindersley’s war experiences is featured in For You the War is Over by the Honourable Philip Kindersley (Hippocrene Books Inc., 1984).

  ‘Through the English courts, Sir Robert applied successfully for custody of his grandson . . .’ Contemporary newspaper reports of the case.

  ‘An application was then made to the High Court in Dublin, where Oonagh was ordered to hand over her son in time to start at Eton in September 1942 . . .’ Contemporary newspaper reports of the case.

  ‘“My mother’s lawyers advised her that she couldn’t lose . . .”’ Author interview with Garech Browne, Wicklow, 2014.

  ‘“ . . . take the boy from a country at peace to a country engaged in a life and death struggle . . .”’ Various newspaper reports of the court case, 6 December 1943.

  ‘In July 1943, the High Court in Dublin decided that the wishes of Gay’s father must be ascertained . . .’ Contemporary newspaper reports of the court case.

  ‘Philip, he said, had a deep loathing of the Irish.’ Author interview with Gay Kindersley, East Garston, 2011.

  ‘“. . . Application for release of Gay to enter Eton,” the message said, “has my full knowledge and approval.”’ Details of the letter reported in several newspapers on 12 November 1943.

  ‘“It is really wonderful for you to have done this for me, as I had visions of Gay being educated as a Sinn Feiner.”’ Letter read into the court record on 12 November 1943 and reported in all of the main British and Irish newspapers on 13 November 1943.

  ‘“ . . . nothing other than a genuine love for her son and regard for his safety and welfare . . .”’ Reported in all of the main British and Irish newspapers on 15 December 1943.

  ‘“He was almost stillborn . . .”’ Author interview with Garech Browne, Wicklow, 2009.

  ‘“I remember Dom, my stepfather, leading me out of the court . . .”’ Author interview with Gay Kindersley, East Garston, 2011.

  ‘“She caught it coming home from school . . .”’ Author interview with Judith Haslam, by telephone, 2014.

  ‘“One of the reasons,” according to Garech, “was of course that she’d lost a baby and she wanted another child desperately . . .”’ Author interview with Garech Browne, Wicklow, 2009.

  “He was going to be Fiach [mac Aodha Ó Broin] . . .’” Author interview with Garech Browne, Wicklow, 2014.

  ‘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 . . .’ From contemporary Irish newspapers.

  ‘“She said, ‘I’m afraid your sister has died . . .’ ”’ Author interview with Gay Kindersley, East Garston, 2011.

  ‘. . . according to Gay, he was there to visit one of his mistresses.’ Flings Over Fences – The Ups and Downs of Gay Kindersley by Gay Kindersley with Robin Rhoderick-Jones (Quiller Press Ltd, 1994), p. 17.

  ‘For the rest of his life, it was said, he carried the burden of guilt around with him . . .’ According to Gay Kindersley, interviewed by the author, East Garston, 2011.

  ‘A post mortem revealed that Tessa’s death was due to cardiac arrest brought on by anaphylactic shock . . .’ Contemporary newspaper reports from 5 to 9 August 1946.

  ‘“She loved all of her children,” according to Garech, “but if there was a favourite, then it probably was Tara.”’ Author interview with Garech Browne, Wicklow, 2011.

  ‘On his death, almost half of his fortune went to the Irish exchequer.’ The Guinnesses, by Joe Joyce (Poolbeg, 2009), p. 299.

  ‘“It was my worst subject at Eton . . .”’ Author interview with Gay Kindersley, East Garston, 2011.

  ‘“We could have been the British Rockefellers or Rothschilds . . . But we lost our way.”’ Quote attributed to Benjamin Guinness, the third Earl of Iveagh, by Ernest Saunders in Nightmare: The Ernest Saunders Story by James Saunders (Hutchinson, 1989), p.140.

  ‘ . . . at a charity preview screening of the romantic fantasy movie A Matter of Life and Death . . .’ It was the first ever Royal Film Performance attended by both the King and Queen, as well as Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret, to raise money for the Cinematograph Trade Benevolent Fund.

  ‘He was immediately smitten and soon he would be openly declaring his love to his “darling girleen” . . .’ Author interview with Charles Doble, film archivist and an authority on the life and career of Sally Gray, Ashbrittle, 2014.

  ‘. . . Fred Astaire, who gave her private dancing lessons during breaks in performances.’ Obituary, Daily Telegraph, 29 September 2006.

  ‘ . . . it was her romantic involvement with another married man . . . which brought about her mental collapse.’ Author interview with Charles Doble, Ashbrittle, 2014.

  ‘“. . . It didn’t bother my father either. What a naughty man.”’ – Author interview with Dominick Browne, Lord Mereworth, London, 2014.

  ‘“They rowed out into the middle of the lake . . .”’ Author interview with Garech Browne, Wicklow, 2010.

  ‘“They were just so in love. You can tell from the way they looked at each other. So, so in love.”’ Ibid.

  ‘“I remember being taken from school by my father . . .”’ Ibid.

  3: OONAGHLAND

  ‘“I remember Oonagh giving a very big dinner party one night . . .”’ Author interview with Kenneth Rose, by telephone, 2013.

  ‘When asked to account for the time missing from their lives, they explained that they’d been “Luggala-ed”.’ Author interview with Nicholas Gormanston, London, 2014.

  ‘“Whenever I pass between those gateposts . . .”’ Living Like a Lord, by John Godfrey, Lord Kilbracken (Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1955), pp. 211–12.

  ‘Where else could you find the Duke of Brissa . . .’ As quoted in Luggala Days by Robert O’Byrne (CICO Books, an imprint of Ryland Peters & Small Ltd, 2012), p. 141.

&
nbsp; ‘“She had a wicked sense of where to place people . . .”’ Author interview with John Montague, by telephone, 2011.

  ‘Brendan Behan, who was skilled in all three areas, once wrote that Luggala was a house where you could say anything you liked, “provided you were witty and didn’t take too long about it”.’ As quoted in Brendan Behan: A Life by Michael O’Sullivan (Roberts Rinehart Publishers, 1999), p. 197.

  ‘. . . which in the era of the Irish showband days was Tommy Kinsman and his Orchestra.’ Music was one of Gay’s great passions. When he finished racing, he set up a group called the Valley Minstrels, a vocal trio with a tea-chest base and guitar. In January 1966, they performed on Ireland’s Late Late Show ahead of a tour of Ireland. From Flings Over Fences – The Ups and Downs of Gay Kindersley by Gay Kindersley with Robin Rhoderick-Jones (Quiller Press Ltd, 1994), pp. 115–16.

  ‘The Spanish Ambassador and the United States Chargé d’Affaires were among the guests who watched . . .’ Author interview with Garech Browne, Wicklow, 2012.

  ‘“When I think about Oonagh now . . .”’ Author interview with Martin Wilkinson, Newport, 2011.

  ‘“Lots of people were in love with her . . .”’ Author interview with Desmond Guinness, Kildare, 2012.

  ‘“Sometimes,” recalled Garech, “the telegram would simply say, ‘Goodnight, Darling’.”’ Author interview with Garech Browne, Wicklow, 2009.

  ‘“I would say he was quite lonely . . .”’ Author interview with Rabea Redpath, by telephone, 2011.

  ‘“My mother knew Oonagh through the social round . . .”’ Ibid.

  ‘“We ran up and down the corridors of Claridge’s banging on people’s doors . . .”’ Ibid.

  ‘“I used to get flown off at weekends to Luggala, aged seven . . .”’ Ibid.

  ‘“There was, in the background, this sadness in him . . .”’ Ibid.

  ‘“He’d have bouts where he liked one particular thing . . .”’ Ibid.

  ‘“At home, I’d been made to go to bed at seven o’clock every night . . .”’ Ibid.

  ‘He was immediately mesmerized by this shy, twenty-one-year-old aristocratic beauty . . .’ Caroline Blackwood and Lucian Freud were introduced by Ann Fleming, the wife of James Bond creator, Ian Fleming. Like Oonagh, she was a celebrated hostess with her own collection of artists, writers and intellectuals. An account of their first meeting is featured in, amongst other books, Dangerous Muse: The Life of Lady Caroline Blackwood by Nancy Schoenberger (Da Capo Press, 2002) and Why Not Say What Happened? by Ivana Lowell (Vintage, 2011).

  ‘In a letter to the writer Nancy Mitford, Evelyn Waugh wrote, “Poor Maureen’s daughter made a runaway match with a terrible Yid.”’ The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh, edited by Charlotte Mosley (Hodder & Stoughton, 1996), p. 335.

  ‘“Caroline always said she regretted that our mother wasn’t her mother . . .”’ Author interview with Garech Browne, Wicklow, 2011.

  ‘She fantasized about this very thing in “How You Love Our Lady” . . .’ How You Love Our Lady by Caroline Blackwood was first published in London Magazine in 1970.

  ‘. . . he had recently written a potboiler thriller called Beat the Devil.’ Beat the Devil by James Helvik, aka Claud Cockburn, was published by J. B. Lippincott Company in 1951.

  ‘“He badly needed the money that a motion-picture sale would give him.”’ An Open Book by John Huston (Knopf, 1980), p. 245.

  ‘. . . the director persuaded Truman Capote, who was then living in Rome, to produce a script from Cockburn’s book.’ An interesting account of the making of Beat the Devil is contained in Bogart by A. M. Sperber & Eric Lax (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997), pp. 469–80.

  ‘Tara was mesmerized by the sight of Bogart arm-wrestling the eccentric, velvet-suit-wearing and flamboyantly homosexual Capote for money . . .’ – ‘I couldn’t go to Italy,’ Garech recalled in an interview with the author, ‘as I was in boarding school. I was terribly envious, because I was fourteen years old at the time and hopelessly in love with Gina Lollobrigida. But Tara brought me back a photograph of her and he’d asked her to autograph it for me.’

  ‘. . . in which she starred alongside the American actor George Raft, whom she hated intensely.’ Obituary, Independent, 2 October 2006.

  ‘ . . . turning down a reported million-dollar contract offer from RKO Pictures in Hollywood . . .’ Interview with Charles Doble, Ashbrittle, 2014.

  ‘“Tara and I watched the parade from a shop window . . .”’ Author interview with Garech Browne, Wicklow, 2010.

  ‘“I think she felt terribly guilty about taking our father away from us,” said Garech.’ Ibid.

  ‘“Tara hated Sally . . .”’ Author interview with Judith Haslam, by telephone, 2014.

  ‘“He would say, ‘Oh, my mother said I don’t have to go to bed until eleven o’clock’ ”.’ Ibid.

  ‘“We used to play roulette . . .”’ Author interview with Dominick Browne, Lord Mereworth, London, 2014.

  ‘“There was a very elderly West of Ireland lady whose job it was to bath him . . .”’ Author interview with Nicki Browne, by telephone, 2010.

  ‘“We each had our own greenhouse at Castle Mac Garrett . . .”’ Author interview with Garech Browne, Wicklow, 2009.

  ‘“That was when the work on the farm stopped . . .”’ Author interview with Philomena Flatley, Mayo, 2010.

  ‘“There was always a dance in the garage at Christmas for all the workers . . .”’ Author interview with Garech Browne, Wicklow, 2010.

  ‘“When we were supposed to be asleep . . .”’ Ibid.

  ‘“The problem for us,” said Garech, “was that these schools didn’t teach any of the things that we wanted to learn . . .”’ Author interview with Garech Browne, Wicklow, 2008.

  ‘“It didn’t last long,” Garech recalled, “because I ran away again.”’ Ibid.

  ‘ . . . he ended up staying the night with the driver and his wife in Salisbury, Wiltshire . . .’ – ‘The driver rang the headmaster,’ Garech recalled in an interview with the author, ‘I think with the intention of telling them that I was safe and that they were going to try to talk me into going back. But he said he’d never spoken to a bigger fool in his life and he didn’t blame me for running away. I tried to ring my mother, who was on holiday in Brighton with Robert Kee. The reason I couldn’t find her was because she was staying in the hotel under the name Mrs Kee. I went into hiding in London. Occasionally I’d ring my father, who thought he had to be strict, and he’d say, “You have to go back to school,” and I’d say, “Toodle-oo – talk to you next week!”’

  ‘. . . memorably characterized by the poet Seán Ó Faoláin as a “dreary Eden”.’ Eamon de Valera by Sean Ó Faoláin (Penguin, 1939), p. 180.

  ‘“It was an extraordinary little place . . .”’ Author interview with Neale Webb, Dublin, 2011.

  ‘The vast majority of the school’s 120 students were boarders.’ One of Tara’s schoolmates was William Taft, the great-grandson of the former US president of the same name. Young William’s father, who was also William, was the American ambassador to Ireland at the time.

  ‘“There weren’t terribly many cars on the road in Ireland at that point . . .”’ Author interview with Neale Webb, Dublin, 2011.

  ‘“He told me that he never, ever wanted to go to school . . .”’ Author interview with Nicki Browne, by telephone, 2009.

  ‘“We knew that when he left school, it was to go back to this fairyland castle . . .”’ Author interview with Neale Webb, Dublin, 2011.

  ‘“The invitation would arrive and there would be a coronet on the envelope . . .”’ Author interview with Michael Steen, Dublin, 2011.

  ‘“He looked like a boy soprano, or a cherub . . .”’ Author interview with Gordon Ledbetter, Dublin, 2011.

  ‘. . . about a headless coachman that he liked to tell Lucy Hill.’ The poem was reproduced in St Stephen’s School: 1946–1963. An Anthology, an oral history of the school, compiled and published by David C
rampton, the well-known Irish building contractor, and David Neligan, the former Irish ambassador to Japan, who were both past pupils of the school. It is reproduced here with the kind permission of the Honourable Garech Browne.

  ‘. . . from their days as Bright Young People on the London social scene.’ John Betjeman had served as Press Attaché at the British Embassy in Dublin during the Second World War.

  ‘“I remember once I told him that I’d climbed Djouce Mountain the previous weekend . . .”’ Author interview with Neale Webb, Dublin, 2011.

  ‘. . . Robert Kee’s new book, A Sign of the Times, a darkly comic, post-apocalyptic novel that was widely praised by the literary critics.’ A Sign of the Times by Robert Kee (Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1955).

  ‘“We had to reach him from the other side of the house . . .”’ Author interview with Maura Byrne, by telephone, 2011.

  ‘He was preparing to ride his horse, Sandymount, in the 1956 Grand National at Aintree . . .’ The 1956 Grand National would become famous for the collapse of Devon Loch, the Queen Mother’s horse, while five lengths clear in the closing straight. As it happened, Sandymount didn’t even make it to starter’s orders. Gay was forced to withdraw his 100–1 shot on the eve of the race because of a problem with a gland in the horse’s tongue.

  ‘Philip disapproved of the match, as did Gay’s stepmother, Valsie.’ Author interview with Gay Kindersley, East Garston, 2011.

  ‘“I was discussing hunting,” Gay recalled . . .’ Ibid.

  ‘The following day, after drinking two bottles of wine with lunch at the Savoy, Gay and Magsie made up their minds to get married in defiance of Philip and Valsie’s wishes.’ Flings Over Fences – The Ups and Downs of Gay Kindersley by Gay Kindersley with Robin Rhoderick-Jones (Quiller Press Ltd, 1994), p. 62.

  ‘“Her Ladyship,” the Daily Mail reported, “with long blonde hair in a scarf, and a mink coat over her nightdress, sat on an old oak dining chair directing operations.”’ Daily Mail, 26 January 1956.

  ‘The fire brigade arrived on the scene too late to save the house.’ Three units were dispatched from Greystones, Rathdrum and Bray, according to contemporary newspaper reports, but they had difficulty reaching the house on the treacherously icy approach roads. All three fire engines slid into ditches and had to be dug out using shovels. Eventually, branches were laid down in front of the wheels of the vehicles to form a track over which they could make their tortuously slow progress towards the burning house.