The Last Knight E-Book

Robert O'Byrne

• Herausgeber: The Lilliput Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 287

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

When Desmond FitzGerald died on 14th September 2011, obituaries paid tribute to his involvement with organizations such as the Irish Georgian Society and the Irish Architectural Archive. Over the previous decades, however, Desmond achieved far more than has yet been acknowledged. Not only did he battle to save his ancestral home, Glin Castle, from destitution but he ensured the survival of many other historic houses in Ireland, raising large sums at home and overseas for this cause. Without his passion and commitment, Ireland's architectural heritage today would be much the poorer. A pioneer in the field of Irish cultural studies, Desmond was awarded a postgraduate scholarship to Harvard, where he began a thesis on eighteenth-century Irish architecture. At a time when little was known about the subject, even in Ireland, Desmond's research proved invaluable and brought Irish design to the attention of the public. The range of his interests and the consistently high quality of his published material across the spectrum of Irish architecture, the decorative and fine arts, furniture and interior design, meant he paved the way for all subsequent writers on these subjects. While The Last Knight celebrates Desmond FitzGerald's great public legacy, it is also an assessment of the man. Robert O'Byrne has spoken to a wide range of family, friends and colleagues from his schooldays onwards and read many of his letters and papers. The result is a rounded portrait of a very distinctive Irish patriot.

Leseprobe

The Last Knight

A Tribute to Desmond FitzGerald 29th Knight of Glin

Robert O’Byrne

THE LILLIPUT PRESS

DUBLIN

Contents

Introduction

Early Life

The Art Historian

The Conservationist

The Connoisseur

Glin

Acknowledgments

Illustrations

Copyright

Introduction

THE DEATH OFDesmond FitzGerald in September 2011 was widely reported both in Ireland and overseas. Yet it struck me at the time that what garnered most space in media coverage was the fact that he represented the end of a line; that with his passing disappeared an ancient Gaelic title. On the other hand, Desmond’s tireless and ground-breaking work on behalf of Irish painting, architecture, the decorative arts and the built heritage received less attention in reports and obituaries. The enormous difference that his efforts in these fields had made – to the perception of and regard for Irish culture at home and abroad – did not seem to be adequately understood or celebrated.

Those of us who knew Desmond and who had the good fortune to work alongside him always recognized the significance of his endeavours. Soon after his death, Professor Roy Foster pronounced:

Like the Kilkenny writer Hubert Butler, Desmond made and kept a passionate commitment to Ireland which was strengthened rather than weakened by his privileged family background and his sense of the multiple weave of Irish history … Ireland has lost a doughty fighter in the national interest, a supreme recorder of her aesthetic achievements and a unique, vivid and irreplaceable personality.

It may be that his personality was in some measure responsible for the relatively meagre cognisance Desmond’s efforts on behalf of Ireland sometimes received, particularly within his own country. In an eloquent address delivered at his funeral, Desmond’s old friend Eddie McParland observed, ‘He wasn’t, I’m glad to say, the easiest person in the world to please.’ The comment was received with wry laughter, because many of those present had, at some point or other, experienced Desmond’s displeasure. He was not a man given to mincing his words or hiding his feelings. He spoke his mind, and could speak it frankly, even on those occasions when an emollient approach would have served him better. Desmond was not a politician, and as a rule he had little time for the members of that caste.

‘In my experience,’ he commented in 2002, ‘politicians generally don’t seem to be interested in taking care of our heritage.’ (There were, of course, exceptions. His friend, the current Minister for Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht Jimmy Deenihan, for example, rightly declared that with Desmond’s death ‘Ireland has lost one of its titans and greatest champions of the arts and heritage.’) In 2004, Desmond wrote, ‘One of the greatest problems is that we are perhaps not the most visual people in the world here in Ireland and the whole nightmare of rural housing is a prime example of this.’ This is hardly the language of the populist, and Desmond could be even less temperate in speech than he was in print.

He recognized this aspect of his character and also the charge of aloofness sometimes levelled at him. ‘In my life I’ve always known exactly which people I’ve wanted to be involved with and they are mostly academics,’ he told aSunday Independentjournalist in November 2002. ‘So I really couldn’t care less if people want to think I’m stuck up. I get a constant stream of people asking for my help and I’m very happy to be of help, if I can. I believe firmly in education and I do a lot of lecturing. That, I believe, is one of the most inspiring elements of life: communication with people who are interested.’

Fortunately, some people were interested in the same things as Desmond and this was always a delight. ‘What pleased him inordinately,’ said Eddie McParland in the course of that same funeral address, ‘was any genuine interest shown in the history of Irish families and their buildings, furniture, gardens, silver, plasterwork, books, music, pictures and sculpture.’ Desmond readily engaged with everyone who showed interest in the subjects that had captivated him since childhood. Surely one of his most admirable traits was this preparedness to share material he had gathered, sometimes over decades, with students and academics to whom it might be of use. What mattered was that Ireland’s cultural heritage receive its due validation: provided the ambition was realized, he did not care who claimed responsibility. He was a deeply unselfish man who just wanted to see results.

‘FitzGerald is wondrously loyal and consistent in his loves and hates,’ wrote Christopher Gibbs – a much loved friend over five decades – in an article on Glin Castle forHouse & Gardenin January 1995. ‘He keeps his friendships in good repair; he hates vulgarity and sameness, and those who would harm his vision of Ireland; he has a distaste for the stuffy and self-important. He is steeped in Ireland’s history and its architectural pleasures, whose mysteries he has been unravelling since he was a boy.’ Similarly, Desmond declared almost twenty years later, ‘I have my friends and I have always been really interested in books and writing and my life here.’ ‘Here’ was Glin, a place of abiding importance. ‘Everything in his life centred on Glin and on his life here,’ said Eddie McParland in his funeral address. ‘It was from Glin that radiated out those passionate commitments which embraced the whole of Ireland. For this most cosmopolitan man, Ireland was the centre of the world and Glin was the centre of Ireland.’

To understand Desmond one needs to understand Glin, and so a section of what follows is devoted to the place he loved so well that his equally adored wife Olda regularly declared it her only rival. Other sections deal with Desmond’s pioneering and inestimable work in different, albeit complementary, fields and explain how he became the man he was. This is not a biography, although inevitably it contains a degree of biographical information. Rather it is intended to be a celebration of Desmond’s public life and a record of his achievements. Christopher Gibbs proposed to me that it should be a rallying cry, an appeal to others to pick up the baton, to follow where Desmond led. None of us can hope to match his energy, his passion, his commitment, and the sheer scope of his scholarship. But we can try to emulate at least some of his attainments. In doing so, we will best pay tribute to a truly splendid Irishman.

Early Life

ACROSS CENTURIESthere has been a pattern of Knights of Glin marrying either strong and managing wives, or wives who brought satisfactory dowries to replenish depleted castle coffers. This was the case with Desmond’s paternal grandfather FitzJohn Lloyd FitzGerald, 27th Knight. He inherited the Glin estate in 1895 and two years later married Lady Rachel Wyndham-Quin, daughter of the rich and adventurous 4th Earl of Dunraven who lived at neighbouring Adare Manor.

By all accounts she was charming, kind, beautiful and artistic. After her marriage she brought rare specimens of trees and shrubs collected by her father on his travels in South America and these flourish in the Glin garden today. Her skilled portraits of her family’s racehorses still hang in the front hall at Glin. The tragedy was that she died at just twenty-eight within days of giving birth to the couple’s only child Desmond Wyndham Otho FitzGerald (future 28th Knight).

The 27th Knight never remarried and after suffering a stroke in 1914 was confined to a wheelchair. He lived another twenty-two years, dying just ten months before the birth of his grandson. Desmond later wrote that his grandfather, a keen sportsman, had been ‘a good shot and a fine fisherman’. Evidently he was also as devoted to Glin as had been generations of FitzGeralds before him.

A friend later remembered how he had ‘lived in almost feudal circumstances on the not inconsiderable part of a once larger estate, the rest of which had been forfeited to the Crown through the rebellion of his ancestors of the past. Though far from rich he was generous to a fault and extraordinarily popular with all who knew him, especially his own people at Glin …’ When members of theIRAarrived to burn down the castle during the Civil War in 1923, the 27th Knight announced from his wheelchair: ‘Well you will have to burn me in it, boys.’ The men, checked in their resolve at the prospect of dealing with the immovable, redoubtable Knight, decided to go back to the village. There, it was said, the locals got them so drunk they were unable to return and finish their mission. Meanwhile, Desmond’s father was able to use the oil and petrol they had left behind for his machinery and for his own and his father’s motor cars.

Desmond’s father, the 28th Knight, had a somewhat lonely childhood, raised at Glin without a mother until he was old enough to be sent to school in England. However, he had benefitted from the care and influence of his grandfather Lord Dunraven, and also of his beautiful aunt Nesta Blennerhassett of Ballyseedy, County Kerry, the 27th Knight’s sister, whose portrait hangs in the hall at Glin. Ironically, Nesta would later become the ‘chère-amie’ of Lord Dunraven until his death, something of which her brother greatly disapproved. Desmond’s father went to Lancing where one of his contemporaries was Evelyn Waugh.

After he left school, Lord Dunraven arranged for him to become a clerk at Lloyds in London, but the job was not to his liking. Passionate about motor sports (he raced at Brooklands in Surrey and was known as ‘The Nippy Knight’), in 1923 he set up a car-sales business at 32 St James’s Street with Captain Alistair Miller, son of a Scottish baronet, who was seven years his senior. The association ended in litigation and the loss of money that the 28th Knight could ill afford. His diaries from the time record a jolly lifestyle of endless lunching, dining out at fashionable watering holes, and going to the theatre in the company of a series of pretty showgirls.

This brief outline of their respective characters will have indicated that, aside from a passionate love for Glin, Desmond’s interests were quite different from those of his father and grandfather. Although a youthful portrait at Glin shows him holding a gun, he was uninterested in sports of all kinds, and matters mechanical also remained alien to him: he never acquired even basic computer skills and puzzled over how to use a mobile telephone. He was the unlikely product of rollicking, fighting, hard-living FitzGerald ancestors and one wonders from whence came the remarkable sensitivity to art and architecture that defined his persona and left such a legacy of research and scholarly authorship. For a part explanation one must turn to his mother, whom Desmond’s father met in August 1928 at Kilruddery, County Wicklow, home of his aunt Aileen, Lady Meath. Veronica Villiers was the daughter of Ernest Villiers, former LiberalMPfor Brighton and grandson of the 4th Earl of Clarendon. Veronica’s mother Elaine was the granddaughter of Lady Charlotte Guest, and the wealthy ironmaster andMPfrom Glamorganshire in Wales, John Josiah Guest. The Guests later became Lords Wimbourne. Lady Charlotte was a famous connoisseur and her collection of fans and porcelain is now in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum where Desmond would later work. She was a philanthropist and a scholar of the history of Welsh literature (she translated into English the famous mediaeval saga theMabinogion).Meanwhile, on her maternal side Veronica was a granddaughter of Lady Cornelia Churchill, one of the daughters of the 7th Duke of Marlborough, thereby making her a cousin of Winston Churchill, a connection of which she was rightly proud.

A powerful influence on Desmond, Veronica’s story has been eloquently chronicled in Margaret Cadwaladr’s 2002 book,In Veronica’s Garden. Desmond fully co-operated with the publication of this work, which makes no attempt to play down the complexities of Veronica’s character, noting how she ‘clearly had a sometimes-volatile nature and an excessive self-centredness. Whether from a single event, undue discipline or neglect, her behaviour appeared to mask underlying feelings of inadequacy that she was never able to overcome.’ Most of Desmond’s friends who met his mother have little kind to say of her; commonly known as ‘the Knight-Mère’, she and her son often clashed. ‘She adored rows,’ says her daughter-in-law Olda, ‘and if she could provoke one she was completely happy. She required constant attention and nurturing because she was very insecure, even though she put on a terrific front.’

Nevertheless, despite the irritation she caused him – often sparked by attempts to direct his life after he reached adulthood – Desmond accepted that his mother had done much good, not least by holding on to Glin when lesser women would have abandoned the struggle. And at least some of her traits were inherited by Desmond, including an ability to persuade other people to work with and for him on his favourite schemes. The same was also true of Veronica. In February 1953, for example, when she was attempting to set up an Irish equivalent to Britain’s National Trust, one of the men she asked for help, Senator Frederick Summerfield, declared, ‘As you know, you can use me in any way that will be useful, and I therefore await your reply to this letter with interest.’

Exceptionally tall and good-looking, Veronica was twenty at the time of her marriage to Desmond’s father in 1929. Almost from the start the relationship was volatile, a situation not helped by the couple having to share Glin Castle during their first years with the old Knight, forever reluctant to accept any change to the existing regime. But Veronica immediately responded to the allure of her husband’s family home: Desmond would write that his mother ‘had a good “eye” and was much struck by Glin’s delicate plaster ceilings and graceful “flying” staircase’. Desmond would also remember his mother and Eva, Lady Dunraven, antique hunting in Limerick. The two women shared a love of family history, antiques, pictures and gardening, and Eva was a kindred spirit amongst the hunting-shooting-fishing Limerick neighbours.

Her husband, despite his father’s objections, had previously initiated a programme of improvement to house and grounds, and this was continued after his marriage. Desmond recalled how his parents ‘restored the drawing-room ceiling, removed the Sibthorpe wallpaper [hung by his great-grandmother Isabella in the late 1860s], bought the Bossi chimneypiece for the room, and made the house comfortable, entertaining and leading a lively social life both in Ireland and in England’.

Following a visit to Glin not long after the couple married, Eva, Lady Dunraven, wrote in her diary, ‘Such a nice house and pretty Adam ceilings, they gave us tea in the little sitting room with charming mahogany dado and bookcase. They are making plans for doing the house up.’ In 1931 she visited again and wrote, ‘Went to Glin, was delighted with the lovely view along the Shannon, found Veronica and Desmond there, and they showed us around the house, and the things they had bought at Colemans sale. The place looked so nice and we admired it and its fine bits of furniture.’

Similarly, the young couple embarked on a restoration of the gardens at Glin, neglected since the death of Lady Rachel in 1901. Perhaps to escape from the baleful eye of the old Knight, they not only travelled widely within Ireland to stay with friends but also periodically took houses in Dublin and in London. Their first daughter, Fiola, was born in April 1930, followed by a second daughter, Rachel, in March 1933. By this time the marriage was under strain, Veronica frequently living apart from her husband whose diaries indicate his unhappiness with the situation. In November 1932, for example, he wrote: ‘The most awful shock in my life, she no longer loves me. I feel that life is not worth living’, and later that same month: ‘Veronica seems to have no sense of shame or decency. I can hardly believe it …’ On another occasion he recorded in his diary, ‘The only way to have a married life without divorce is to give way …’ This appears to have been what he did: although appalled by his wife’s wilful and erratic behaviour he remained loyal to her and did not countenance divorce. But the pair led largely separate lives, Desmond travelling extensively around Europe and even as far as South America while Veronica was often in London where her striking beauty, high spirits and sense of fun ensured she always had plenty of admirers. (As she did until the very end of her life.)

In 1936, the old Knight died and his departure appears to have encouraged a rapprochement between Desmond and Veronica FitzGerald since less than a year later their only son, christened Desmond John Villiers, was born on 13 July 1937. One consequence of this event was that the couple remained together, a circumstance further encouraged by the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939. Desmond’s father applied to join the British armed forces but was rejected on medical grounds. For some time he had been unwell with what he self-diagnosed as a lingering ’flu; only in June 1944 was his condition discovered to be bovine tuberculosis. Ill health and enforced isolation due to Ireland’s neutral status during the war years, together with fuel restrictions, meant he and Veronica were obliged to spend much of the period at Glin.

As will be evident from this brief synopsis of his parents’ marriage,Desmond’s early years were thus spent in a strained household where resources were scarce, his father unwell and his mother restless; always interested in art during this period, she studied painting in Connemara with Charles Lamb and came to know other Irish artists such as Sean Keating and Sean O’Sullivan. Since his two sisters were older than he and away at school, Desmond had a solitary childhood, largely raised by nannies and his nursery maid Una Bourke, who would remain an important presence at Glin for decades. One beneficial consequence of this lonely boyhood was that it encouraged him to develop his interest in history, in art, in architecture, in all the subjects on which he would later write with such fluency and knowledge.

Furthermore (and as will be discussed in more depth in the later chapter ‘The Conservationist’), he was fortunate to encounter a number of older individuals who stimulated those interests. Among them was former Trinity College Dublin professor John Wardell who lived not far away and on one occasion gave the young Desmond a copy of M.R. James’Ghost Stories of an Antiquarywith the instruction, ‘Don’t show this to your mother.’ In 2009, Desmond wrote that ‘these brilliant stories haunted my life in those days and ever since have encouraged my interest in old houses, forgotten parks and gardens and antiquarian pursuits’. Another telling incident that Desmond would relate from his childhood concerned an occasion when he was travelling on the bus from Glin to Limerick and enthusiastically pointed out a ruined castle to his elderly neighbour. He always remembered the quick retort: ‘Young man, that is not a castle, it is a tower house.’ The elderly man was Thomas McCreevy, poet, literary and art critic, friend of Beckett and Joyce and the director of the National Gallery of Ireland. A native of neighbouring Tarbert, County Kerry, he was making his way back to the capital, and on the way giving the young Desmond one of his earliest lessons in architectural history.

Speaking toThe IrishTimes’ Catherine Foley in August 2008 about his early years, Desmond recalled, ‘I was quite a solitary figure … I was thrown into my own company at an early age. I was addicted to reading quite young.’ From these words one receives the impression of a small boy escaping from the palpable unhappiness of his parents’ marriage and his father’s ill health. ‘He had a lonely childhood,’ says his widow Olda, ‘and I know he read and read.’ During the war years he was usually taken for a summer holiday by his mother to Ballybunion, County Kerry, where, he remembered in the sameIrish Timesinterview, they would stay in the old Castle Hotel. When Veronica discovered that the German chargéd’affaires was among the guests, she informed the manager ‘that she would not have dinner in the company of a German, so she ordered her dinner in her bedroom. All the other people in the hotel followed her example, which caused quite a ripple.’

Even before the conclusion of the war, Desmond started to see still less of his father since the latter travelled abroad – to the dry air of Arizona, to a sanatorium in Switzerland – in what ultimately proved a futile effort to cure his tuberculosis. ‘I only knew him when I got bad reports from school,’ Desmond told Victoria Mary Clarke of theSunday Independentin September 2002. On the other hand, given the frequency of those bad reports, he must have had regular encounters with his father. By this stage, it was time for Desmond to follow the example of his predecessors and be sent away to boarding school. For some reason he seems to have attended a succession of preparatory schools and later remembered being unhappy at the first of these, Aravon, County Wicklow: seemingly the other children threw stones at him and he was obliged to take refuge in a tree so often that all its leaves fell off, for which he was sharply reprimanded by the headmaster in front of the whole school. His tormentors would cry: ‘The Knight of Glin is a Bing Bong Bin, his helmet is tin and his sword is a pin! Yah boo sucks!’ Being deposited at school by his great-aunt Lady Meath’s coachman driving a pony cart each morning cannot have improved his standing with his fellow students, either.

But after that he seems to have fitted in well enough. In October 1948, he writes from his next school, King’s Mead in Sussex: ‘We have lost two matches this term, there are two more today I hope we win them.’ This must have been just about the last time Desmond expressed any interest in sport. (Interviewed byHello!magazine in July 1990, Desmond was asked if he enjoyed sport. His robust reply: ‘Absolutely not. I’ve no interest in sports. My healthy colour comes probably from having a glass of wine at lunch.’)

Desmond’s father, despite repeated efforts to find a cure for his illness, finally died in April 1949. Like his ancestor the 24th Knight, Desmond now came into an impoverished inheritance at the age of twelve. Perhaps his academic troubles can be considered as due to grief at the loss of a parent. Yet even while his father was still alive he displayed consistent disinterest in study. After repeatedly failing to get into Eton he was sent to Stowe.

Founded in 1923 and occupying the former seat of the Dukes of Buckingham and Chandos in Buckinghamshire, Stowe had hitherto had as headmaster the charismatic J.F. Roxburgh, who once said he wanted to turn out young men who would be ‘acceptable at a dance and invaluable in a shipwreck’. Unfortunately, he had retired the year before Desmond arrived and his successor Eric Reynolds is generally regarded as having performed less well in the position. Stowe in Desmond’s time was perceived as somewhere for boys who, like himself, had for diverse reasons been unable to win a place in their first school of choice. Dick Temple, who was there at the same time, remembers, ‘My understanding was that J.F. Roxburgh believed in turning out civilized gentlemen and that was the culture of Stowe still, partly because of the ambience, the environment, this fabulous parkland and house. It was called the “Country Club” by other schools.’

Although not in the same house, Robert Jocelyn was a contemporary of Desmond’s at Stowe and like him travelled over from Ireland at the start of each term. ‘In those days,’ he remembers, ‘Stowe was not the best of public schools. It had a poor headmaster (Mr Reynolds) and most of the staff were about average to say the best. What we did have was almost untrammelled freedom in wonderful surroundings. The grounds were nothing like they are today and many of the buildings were falling into serious decay.’ Those buildings and the grounds in which they were set would leave a lasting mark on Desmond but little else about Stowe seems to have been to his taste. George Adams, another contemporary who was in the same house, Grenville, recalls, ‘We had a very hard taskmaster in the form of our housemaster [Brian Gibson, known to the boys as “Slug”] who expected all to be as keen on sport as he was, which did not suit Desmond too well. He had a mass of blond curly hair and the handsome look of a Greek God and whether or not because of that he was teased a lot at Stowe.’

Desmond took refuge in the art school, where he drew and painted a great deal. His pen-and-ink drawings of the follies and temples of Stowe are extremely skilled and show an architect’s eye for detail; they hang as a group at Glin today. He spent a lot of time in the library where, he later wrote, he occupied himself researching the various families into which his ancestors had married over the centuries: ‘I still have a bound exercise book with these pedigrees and I must have been deemed a terrible little snob constantly delving into the fat volumes ofBurke’s PeerageandLanded Gentryin search of connections.’ He was, says another of his contemporaries, Alan Spence,

perfectly placed for his future career as his conversation down the dining table was always about houses and their disappearing demesnes (I think he could have writtenLost Demesnestwenty years before its publication in ’76!). He used to have long discussions on this with fellow Grenvillian Count Zygmunt Zamoyski who had family losses of property in the Polish post-War II situation.

Many of those who were at Stowe with Desmond describe him as being something of a loner, not much given to mixing with other boys aside from a few friends like Zygmunt Zamoyski (who would die exactly a year after Desmond).‘There was something compact and neat about his appearance,’ says Dick Temple. ‘His voice was a drawl which was one of his main characteristics, along with golden wavy hair and a genial bearing. And always this look of inner amusement.’

According to Robert Jocelyn, ‘Desmond was most fortunate in studying history under the only inspiring master – an unusual character called Bill McElwee. He and his wife (Patience) held court in their house not far from Stowe. In fact, it was really a school within a school.’ Bill and Patience McElwee lived in Vancouver Lodge, a house renowned for its untidiness.But the McElwees were also famous for the kindness and hospitality they extended to generations of boys, including Desmond, and evidently did a great deal to make his time at Stowe more enjoyable.

Perhaps encouraged by Bill McElwee, it was during the same period that Desmond started to write for publication albeit only within the covers of the school magazineThe Stoic. It seems that his first published piece appeared in a special issue,Natural History in Stowe, which was produced in summer term 1953 and for which Desmond rather surprisingly wrote about bats, not a subject on which one might expect him to have much knowledge or interest. More predictably, for the summer 1955 issue ofThe Stoiche wrote an article on the Irish historian Charles O’Conor who, in the early nineteenth century, served as librarian at Stowe to the 1st Duke of Buckingham and Chandos.

By the time this piece appeared, Desmond had left Stowe and moved to Canada. Since his father’s death in 1949, his mother had struggled to find enough money to keep the Glin estate running. Even while the 28th Knight was still alive, Veronica had assumed many responsibilities for the place, which, in the aftermath of the war, had become unprofitable. It would have been understandable if, like many of her contemporaries in similar circumstances in Ireland, she had taken the decision to sell up and return to England with her children; this was a course of action encouraged by her own mother. Yet Veronica remained at Glin, determined to pass on his family estate to her only son once he reached maturity. She raised chickens, and grew vegetables in the walled garden, which were sold to the transatlantic flying-boat terminal in nearby Foynes, as well as growing violets that were sent by train to be sold at Covent Garden market in London. The money made from these enterprises helped to pay Desmond’s school fees. Veronica also sold Denver Public Library a panoramic view of Estes Park, Colorado, paintedc.1877 by German-American artist Albert Bierstadt. This had come to Glin from Adare Manor when Lady Rachel Wyndham-Quin married Desmond’s grandfather and made in the region of £5000 in the late 1940s.

Efforts were made to let the house, preferably for a period of several years. This would have provided Veronica with a guaranteed income while ensuring Glin was occupied. The problem was that nobody seemed interested in renting a castle in west Limerick. Typically, an agent in Dublin wrote to Veronica in August 1951 noting that ‘on looking over the advertising which has been carried out, I find that about £55 has been spent advertising the castle during the past three months with, as you know, no tangible results’. By 1953, Veronica found herself obliged to take in paying guests. While the majority of Desmond’s friends found Veronica difficult, one has to admire her pluck in hanging on at Glin when many other women would have abandoned the struggle.

Luckily, she did not have to struggle for too much longer because in February 1954, Veronica, who in the years since 1949 had had several admirers, married for a second time. Her new husband was a wealthy Canadian widower twenty years her senior called Ray Milner, a lawyer who also sat on the boards of many of his country’s most influential companies. He had first met Veronica in the United States in November 1944 when she and the 28th Knight were on their way to Arizona in a bid to improve the latter’s health. The two had kept in touch and when Milner, who was widowed in November 1952, came to Europe just over a year later, he met Veronica again and soon proposed to her.

It was an unlikely but successful match, with little of the drama that had characterized Veronica’s first marriage. At least part of her motivation for accepting Ray Milner’s offer seems to have been financial; as Margaret Cadwaladr has noted, before the wedding Milner wrote to Veronica asking, ‘How much do you owe & to whom?’ But if she would be the beneficiary of his largesse, so too were Desmond and Glin. ‘That’s why I married Ray,’ she once told Olda FitzGerald. ‘Because I knew he’d be a wonderful father for Desmond.’ Ray Milner was one of the most important people in Desmond’s young life. He offered the stability that had previously been absent, not least by providing Veronica – and her son – with financial security. Veronica in turn grew more relaxed and less volatile, and this obviously had advantages for Desmond.

Most importantly, Ray Milner became a paternal presence, calm but authoritative, offering sound advice and support, intuitively recognizing what was right for Desmond at each stage of his development to adulthood. Sometimes he discreetly directed from behind the scenes; surviving letters show him making various arrangements for Desmond of which the latter would not have been aware at the time. On other occasions his help was more overt, not least in relation to ensuring Glin Castle’s survival, as will be seen. For the rest of his life Desmond always spoke in admiring and appreciative tones of his stepfather, a man he came to know much better than he had his own father and who exercised a consistently positive influence on his upbringing.

Following her marriage, Veronica moved to Milner’s home at Qualicum on the east coast of Vancouver Island where she created a spectacular garden over the following decades. Initially, Desmond remained at Stowe but the following spring it was decided he too should travel to Canada. His reports from Stowe were no better than had been their predecessors at prep school. Although eventually he would catch up with, and surpass, the majority of his contemporaries, academically Desmond was a late developer. By 1954, it was apparent he would have little chance of winning a place at either Oxford or Cambridge. Desmond’s mother and stepfather therefore decided the best option was for him to try for a place in a Canadian university. Before doing so, however, he had to spend a few terms at another private boarding school, Trinity College School in Port Hope, Ontario, which was established in 1865. Even before he left Stowe, Desmond was warned that in his new school he would be expected to work harder than before; a letter sent during his final weeks in England complains, ‘You did not tell me about the physics and chemistry. This all sounds so grim that I try not to think about it.’

Simultaneously changing school and country might seem a wrench, yet Desmond appears to have made the transition with ease. In fact, moving to Canada proved to be highly beneficial: from being a rather introverted adolescent aloof from his classmates and unable to engage with schoolwork, he became outgoing and much more interested in learning. Letters from Port Hope to his mother and Ray Milner show Desmond settling into his new environment without effort, and indeed quickly establishing himself in a circle of friends.

Spurred on by his stepfather, Desmond worked harder than hitherto and gained a place to study fine arts at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. However, his results were not as good as he or his mother and Ray Milner had hoped. ‘It is such a disappointment to me to hear that I only scraped through,’ he wrote from the château de Bresse-sur-Grosne in Burgundy where he had been sent to stay with the de Murard family to improve his French. ‘I really expected to do well in history and the two Englishes as I worked hard for them all and they were not terribly difficult, I thought.’

In any case, he did succeed in gaining a place at the university and while there seems to have taken full advantage of all the campus had to offer. Desmond made a strong impression on his college contemporaries. Barry Mawhinney, who would reconnect with Desmond decades later when he was appointed Canadian Ambassador to Ireland in 1994, remembers that impact: ‘I, a callow youth from Nanaimo, certainly held him in awe. With his languid air, the slight hint of theflâneur