Recently my eldest daughter, Charlotte, picked up a new edition of this book and gave it to my mother, not knowing the connection. Needless to say my mother has hardly put it down since, as it’s at least seventy years since she last read it and it’s the most marvellous record of the times and people of that intriguing era.
Pamela also wrote a wonderful book called Irish Gold, which was actually set at Drominagh and is still available through online bookshops selling rare books.
My father described meeting my mother: ‘In July, the ‘Red Boat’ arrived from Clonmoylan. It included a very beautiful young lady and her fiancé. She was Eira Margaret Antonia Mackenzie, niece of Winnie’s, and as far as I was concerned the fiancé was rather superfluous, as I was extremely taken straight away. In fact before the summer was out I was very much in love and more than sad that she was out of reach.’
Fortunately the Red Boat arrived again in the August of the following year. This time the fiancé had been left behind and my mother was free. As my father states: ‘This was very satisfactory from my point of view.’ With the excuse of returning a lost earring, he traversed the lake in his small sailing boat from the Tipperary side to where Clonmoylan, a two-storey gabled house stood graciously on the Galway shores opposite, adjoined by a walled garden with wisteria and geraniums tumbling happily into beds of roses and vegetables. An apple orchard and a myriad of stone fruit trees dotted the gently sloping lawns which ran into the fields rolling down to the lake.
In this splendid setting, my mother’s enchanting Aunt Winnie, with her long thick flaxen hair often tied up in a neat bun, was now looking after numerous nieces and nephews, who’d returned from abroad, together with her own brood of four. Often she would throw magnificent weekend house parties, with the guests partaking in sailing competitions, boisterous games of tennis, or duck shooting. Sometimes the guests arrived on horseback, by boat across the lake, or by pony and trap.
It was during this time that my father eventually won my mother’s heart. However, it took a couple of visits across the Irish Sea to London before matters were finalised and he arrived home to Drominagh to announce to his mother, Eily, that he and Toni, the daughter of George Henry Louis Mackenzie of Coul, Inverness, Scotland, were now an engaged couple. Not a notion that thrilled my grandmother in the least, having been used to having her eldest son to herself, not to mention at her every beck and call.
My mother was not just a rare beauty; more importantly as far as the Esmonde clan was concerned, she was also a skilled tennis player – a great asset to the competitive brothers, and in particular as a doubles partner to her new husband. My father, as always being humble at such times, said he was a fairly indifferent player himself and gives all the credit for their successes in the many competitions around Tipperary and Galway to my mother. As she only just missed out on playing at Wimbledon, a great feat for a woman at the time, perhaps his humility was well placed.
The marriage took place on the 19th February, 1938, at the Garrison Church, Farnborough in England – from the house of my mother’s cousins, General Sir Brian and Lady Taylor. My mother’s uncle, Father Hugh Pope, was to have conducted the service. As he suddenly became ill at the last minute they were lucky to have my father’s brother, Donal, as a guest. Fortunately for all, Donal had not long been ordained a Catholic priest, hence was able to step into the breach, performing his duty with great aplomb, with my mother’s young nieces, Deirdre and Phillida, as bridesmaids.
They look a handsome couple standing on an Indian rug in the lush garden at Farnborough this misty February morning. My mother’s wedding dress is not unlike many of the fashions of these modern times, my father resplendent in his morning suit.
Spending their honeymoon on the Tyrol near Innsbruck at Ehrwald in Austria, they took a chairlift up the Zugspitz on the border of Austria and Germany.
‘We were amongst the last people to walk the tunnel into Germany shortly before it closed during the war,’ my mother told me as we looked at an old snap of them skiing on the alps.
Back at Drominagh after the honeymoon, my father endeavoured to make a living, but it was not always easy as the economy in Ireland was in dire straits, with the Great Depression casting a gloomy shadow over the entire land. Needless to say it was also somewhat difficult for the new bride, as Eily still saw herself as lady of the house.
It was only when we were leaving for Australia many years later that she called my mother aside, explaining her unreasonable attitude: ‘I just imagined when you married Owen you’d become another member of the family. Like one of my children,’ she told my mother apologetically, with compassion in her thickly lashed troubled eyes. ‘Looking back, I should have realised you’d want to have a say in how the household was run.’
My grandmother wrote a novel at this time, called Inistaig, about a couple living in a large mansion in Tipperary with the husband’s mother. It described an idyllic household in perfect harmony.
‘Not quite the truth,’ my mother told me recently with a smile. ‘Yet its royalties brought in much needed funds when it was serialised in the American Notre Dame magazine, so it was a blessing in a way…giving us some sort of security for a while.’
I’ve hunted everywhere for a copy. So far I’ve been unsuccessful.
Any spare time from running Drominagh’s estate back then was spent hunting or dapping on the lake and fishing when the trout were biting, playing tennis or sailing with the brothers and Carmel when they returned from England and other parts of the world. For a time, before the war, it was a wonderful carefree existence, apart from financial woes.
Dapping on Lough Derg was one of my father’s greatest loves. It is almost a religion in Ireland, particularly on Lough Derg, one of the few limestone lakes that breed the mayfly in the months of May and early June.
Sir Thomas Gratton Esmonde wrote in his book Hunting Memories in the 1920s: ‘May Fly rising; come at once.’
This telegram on my London breakfast table puts thought of all else out of my head: The irresistible call of the wild is in my ears and nothing else matters. But of all the dapping districts, I prefer Lough Derg, and I know of no place where this fishing is to be carried on amid more romantic surroundings or lovelier scenery. And nowhere are there better fish, heavier or stronger fighters than in the great lake to whose shores I have brought my readers.
I last read from this book of my uncle’s when I was having a couple of weeks in Paris, one of my favourite cities. Once more I rummaged amongst the shelves of old books and magazines in the quaint and renowned Shakespeare’s Book Shop, a special haunt of mine, and found a rare copy hidden behind other dust-covered books on the top floor. I took the somewhat battered copy and sat at the tiny window shrouded in the splendid purple early spring flowers of a Virginia creeper and read for over an hour. I almost felt as though I was there at Drominagh too, with my uncle, my father and his siblings as they donned their long waders and hauled the wooden row boat through the rushes for a day’s fishing on the lake. I also looked at Shakespeare’s for copies of the Notre Dame magazine with my grandmother’s articles. Alas, none were to be found.
My mother assures me that even my father would admit he wasn’t the best of farmers, with most of his orders being shouted out of the bathroom window on the second floor of Drominagh (when he was having a shave) to the workmen in the cobbled courtyard down below. Only recently I stood at that very same window and imagined him doing just that. Not quite the normal way farms are managed. Yet, what is normal, particularly in Ireland – and particularly in the Esmonde family? After all, this was a family who’d lost John Esmonde in 1798 to a political hanging by the British on O’Connell’s Bridge in Dublin. His son was on his way to tell his father he’d been given a reprieve. Tragically, when he got there his father was dangling from the hangman’s noose. Undaunted by this atrocious act by the British, the son went on to serve in the British Navy, captaining the notorious frigate, Lion, into battle.
Chapter 5
The Second World War changed many things at Drominagh, as each of the brothers decided to cross the channel and join the British forces in their fight against Germany and its allies, leaving Eily and my mother to run the estate. Eugene, VC, DSO, my father’s younger brother and Jimmy’s twin was the tragic star, yet the others deserved immense praise too.
Eugene died aged just thirty-two while serving in the British Fleet Air Arm in 1942, leading a flight of Swordfish in the Channel Dash chase of the Prince Eugen, Gneisenau and Scharnhorst and was awarded the Victoria Cross posthumously.
Codenamed Fuller, the surface and aerial British planners’ view was that the German ships would pass the straits of Dover in darkness and could therefore be attacked safely by the vintage Swordfish in the protective cloak of night and without the need for fighter escort.
How wrong that was.
On Wednesday 11th February, Eugene left Manston, where he was stationed with his 825 squadron and travelled to London to receive his newly awarded Distinguished Service Order (DSO) (for his effort in sinking the great German battleship, The Bismarck in May 1941) from the King. Unbeknown to him, whilst he was happily celebrating his award back at Manston, the German Admiral Ciliax issued orders for The Scharnhorst, followed by Gneisenau, Prinz Eugen and accompanying surface escorts to slip out of Brest at 9.15pm undetected. After a series of mishaps and errors by the RAF and RN, they sailed on for another thirteen hours before they were spotted. All hell let loose. On the 12th February Eugene was faced with the unthinkable – a daytime attack. The odds against the Swordfish were high, but Eugene had no intention of sending his Squadron out on a suicide mission. Yet that is what it virtually ended up being.
‘Forget all you’ve learned of a night time attack,’ he told his Squadron. ‘We’ll attack in sub-flights in line astern at a height of 50 feet. We’ll have plenty of fighter cover so you won’t have to worry too much about enemy aircraft.’
Wing Commander John Gleave, the RAF Station Commander at Manston, met Eugene as he walked to his aircraft and wished him good luck.
Gleave said, ‘The look on his face shook me. It was the face of a man already dead. It shocked me as nothing had before, nor has done since.’
Apart from Eugene’s Victoria Cross, eighteen men of 825 Squadron were all decorated, thirteen of them posthumously. Eugene’s body was washed up on the banks of the Thames Estuary many weeks later. He was identified by a small gold ring on his left little finger bearing the word Jerusalem, part of the Esmonde family’s coat of arms. A few days later he was given a Royal military funeral at Gillingham cemetery with all the trimmings befitting a hero.
On the 3rd March, 1942, my grandmother received the following letter:
I am commanded by My Lords, Commissioners of the Admiralty, to inform you that the King has been graciously pleased to award the Victoria Cross to your son, Lieutenant-Commander Eugene Esmonde, DSO, Royal Navy for valour, in the action in which he lost his life.
On the morning of Thursday, the 12th of February, 1942, Lieutenant-Commander Esmonde, in command of a Squadron of the Fleet Air Arm, was told that the German Battle Cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau and the Cruiser Prince Eugen, strongly escorted by some thirty surface craft, were entering the Straits of Dover, and that his Squadron must attack before they reached the sandbanks North East of Calais.
Lieutenant-Commander Esmonde knew well that his enterprise was desperate. Soon after noon, he and his Squadron of six Swordfish set course for the enemy, and after ten minutes’ flight were attacked by a strong force of fighters. Touch was lost with his fighter escort and in the action which followed, all his aircraft were damaged. He flew on, cool and resolute, serenely challenging hopeless odds, to encounter the deadly fire of the Battle Cruisers and their Escort, which shattered the port wing of his aircraft. Undismayed, he led his Squadron on, straight into this inferno of fire. Almost at once he was shot down; but his Squadron launched a determined attack, in which at least one torpedo is believed to have struck the German Battle Cruisers, and from which not one of the six aircraft returned.
His high courage and splendid resolution will live in the traditions of the Royal Navy, and remain for many a generation a fine and stirring memory.
I am to express Their Lordships’ pleasure at this, the highest mark of His Majesty’s appreciation and their deep regret that your son did not live to receive it.
I am, Madam,
Your obedient Servant.
HR Markham.
As I mentioned, the day before his tragic death, Eugene received the DSO for his action in launching a torpedo at The Bismarck, which hit the ship and slowed it down before the British navy finally finished it off. In foul weather, and against strong head winds, on the 24th May, 1941, he led a strike of nine Swordfish armed with torpedoes from the aircraft carrier Victorious. Sighting the Bismarck some eight miles ahead, he led the Squadron into attack. Flying though intense anti-aircraft fire and sustaining some damage, the Squadron pressed home the attack, claiming a torpedo hit on the starboard side of The Bismarck, which finally sank on the 27th May.
Eugene was not the only Esmonde involved with the fate of The Bismarck. The next day, the Admiral of the Fleet took his destroyers in to attack the wounded battleship. Second in this line was the impudent little ship Zulu, her engineer officer being Eugene’s debonair older brother, Lieutenant-Commander Witham Esmonde. Witham said that to try and get the engines to put out more speed, everyone on board had to grab tables, chairs and anything else they could lay their hands on, and hurl them into the boilers.
And in a convoy fewer than 20 miles from the Swordfish action, Eugene’s twin brother, Jimmy, was sailing home from his job in the mines of the Gold Coast in Africa when their boat was torpedoed. Fortunately he survived.
Oliver St John Gogarty (the father of Eugene’s sister Carmel’s husband, Dermot) wrote a poem in Eugene’s honour…
the first verse being:
Eugene well got!!! Well born, I mean.
Of Norman knights on the Irish scene,
Who threw in their lot with the Irish lot
And with them for liberty turned and fought.
If I were told of the Clan Esmonde,
The best would be known of Ireland.
My father proudly received the Victoria Cross for his brother from King George V1, (of The King’s Speech) together with his mother, Eily, in her wheel chair, having been partially crippled in an accident where she hit her head on the door frame of a chicken shed at Drominagh some years before.
Eily’s youngest son, Paddy, stood proudly on the other side of her wheel chair as the King presented the Cross.
King George had kindly arranged for a special plane to fly from England to collect Eily, Carmel, and Paddy from Sydenham, Belfast. The plane came from Lee On Solent, Eugene’s station, and was flown by a fellow Lieutenant Commander and a great friend of his. Arriving in dreadful weather the tiny plane ferried the contingent across the Irish Sea to Sealands, Chester; then to London where they landed at Hendon and met up with my father. The 5th Sea Lord had sent his own personal Bentley. By six o’clock they were in London drinking tea at the popular Welbeck Hotel.
When asked if she was tired, after the long, arduous journey from deep in the countryside of neutral Ireland to war-torn London, my grandmother seemed surprised. ‘No. Of course not,’ she stated airily. ‘Why should I be?’
At ten o’clock the following morning, 17th March, St Patrick’s Day, a day befitting such an occasion and with shamrocks pinned to their lapels, the party drove to Buckingham Palace where a wicker bath chair awaited my grandmother. A few minutes later my father and Paddy carried her inside to the front row. Shortly, King George arrived and when the time came to hand over the award he leaned down, telling my grandmother how he had met Eugene not long before – when he had proudly pinned on his DSO.
Paddy tells us that the King’s manner to his mother was lovely. He says: ‘The beauty of those few m
inutes was indescribable and I remember feeling as I stood there and watched in a daze of admiration that Eugene was not far away. The King shook my mother by the hand and smiled and he looked at Owen and me and shook our hands.’
A few days later my grandmother returned to Drominagh, where my mother and my two elder sisters, Deborah, aged four, and Gill, two, waited. The noble grey walls of Drominagh once more received a symbol of an Esmonde who had done his duty in the service of England.
The Tattler and Bystander reported in bold print, along with a large photograph of my grandmother, my father, and Uncle Paddy:
Wearing the shamrock of St Patrick, Mrs Esmonde was accompanied by her sons, Pilot Officer Owen Esmonde and Captain Patrick Esmonde when she went to Buckingham Palace to receive the VC.
The article went on to say: The King asked Mrs Esmonde: ‘How many sons do you have fighting in the services at present, Mrs Esmonde?’
She answered bravely: ‘Only four now, Your Majesty.’
My father became a reluctant media star, as his photo, together with his mother’s and Paddy’s, blazed out from nearly every newspaper in England and Ireland at the time. Needless to say, being rather shy, this caused him some consternation, but as he was so enormously proud of his younger brother, and mourned his loss dreadfully, he was happy to do all he could to honour him and commemorate his memory, as well as be a staunch support for his mother and the rest of the family.
The first Esmonde Victoria Cross was won by Captain Thomas Esmonde, my great uncle, in the Crimea… for repeatedly rescuing wounded under fire of shell and grape shot, and particularly for extinguishing a fireball before it could betray the position of his men.
After my grandmother died, my father was the custodian of Eugene’s Victoria Cross until his own death. For many years, along with the family silver, it spent time in the vaults of the Bank of Ireland at Rathdrum. Now its home is with the Imperial War Museum in England, having been loaned to them by my brother, Eugene, Uncle Eugene’s namesake, born soon after his untimely death, whose care it was entrusted to after my father’s death.
Can My Pony Come Too? Page 4