by Paul Howard
At the age of thirty-seven, he was, by the standards of the time, relatively advanced in years when he began what was his second family. He already had five children, including Judith, from his first marriage to Mildred Egerton, the granddaughter of the third Earl of Ellesmere. Similarly, Oonagh Guinness, who was eight years his junior, had a son and a daughter from her marriage to the London stockbroker Philip Kindersley.
Dom was born in Dublin on 21 October 1901, into a way of life that was in its twilight. The Brownes were once the biggest landowners in the province of Connacht and one of the famous Tribes of Galway, a group of fourteen merchant families who dominated the political, commercial and social life in the city from medieval to early modern times.
The first member of the family to be ennobled was Dom’s great-grandfather, who was also called Dominick, in 1836. As an MP for Mayo, he campaigned for the restoration of Catholic property rights removed by the Penal Laws. Daniel O’Connell, who led the fight for Catholic Emancipation, once wrote to him, saying, ‘The country never wanted men of your constitutional principles more than it does at present.’
When he was raised to the peerage, he chose the rather unwieldy titles of Baron Oranmore of Carrabrowne Castle in the County of the Town of Galway and Baron Browne of Castle Mac Garrett in the County of Mayo. But, within a decade, he was on the verge of bankruptcy. The Potato Famine of 1845 to 1852 ruined him, just as it did many other large Irish landowners. He managed to hold on to Castle Mac Garrett but he was forced to sell all of his other estates, including Ashford Castle, also in Mayo. By the time Dom was born, the Browne family fortune had dwindled away to almost nothing.
Born, as he was, into Ireland’s Protestant ascendency, political events at the beginning of the century always threatened to upset the happy equilibrium of Dom’s childhood. The Easter Rising of 1916, in which armed rebels took over key buildings in Dublin and declared Ireland’s independence from Britain, made him an effective prisoner in Mayo during his Easter holidays from Eton.
Castle Mac Garrett managed to escape the ritual burnings of the homes of the gentry that was a feature of the War of Independence that followed the Rising. According to family legend, Dom’s father had shown great kindness to a young footman who became an IRA commander and ordered that the Browne house be spared. But the Irish Civil War, which resulted from the disputed treaty with Britain, did manage to upset the genteel rhythm of life in the house. In 1923 it was requisitioned by the army of the new Irish Free State for use as a barracks and the family was forced to leave. They moved to England, where they had recently inherited Mereworth Castle in Kent. When Dom’s father returned to Castle Mac Garrett the following year, he was devastated to see the damage that had been done during its occupation. He wrote in his diary: ‘I don’t think it will ever be possible to go back and live at home.’
Dom’s early life followed the classic trajectory of a member of the British aristocracy. He was schooled at Eton, then he studied, briefly, at Oxford. ‘He was thrown out for having too good a time,’ according to his eldest son, Dominick. ‘He was out all night and not behaving himself. He had an enormously strong constitution for everything – gambling, women, drinking.’
Equally brief was his career in the military. He served with the Grenadier Guards, where he earned a reputation as a fine shot, before his interest in pursuing the sybaritic pleasures of the night did for him again. ‘He was what they call bowler-hatted out,’ said his son. ‘Handed his bowler hat and told he was no use to the army, thanks all the same.’
Even marriage in his mid-twenties to Mildred Egerton failed to curb his louche ways. However, his life was turned upside down in June 1927 when his mother and father were killed – just as his son would be killed almost forty years later – in a car accident. Their chauffeur-driven Daimler was involved in a collision with a bus on the main road between Tonbridge and Tunbridge Wells in Kent. Lady Oranmore was pronounced dead at the scene. Lord Oranmore sustained catastrophic internal injuries and died three weeks later.
At the age of twenty-six – not long married, and still reeling from the sudden loss of his parents – Dom entered the House of Lords, where he would have a seat for seventy-two years, without ever speaking, until hereditary peerages were abolished in 1999.
He also inherited two castles – one in England and one in Ireland. Dom had always longed to return to the Mayo of his childhood. Despite the political and economic uncertainty surrounding the newly independent Irish state, he decided to make his permanent home at Castle Mac Garrett.
‘He didn’t fancy spending his life hanging about with other Old Etonians,’ according to Dominick. ‘He wanted to be his own king, which is how he felt when he was in Ireland.’
Dom wrote to William T. Cosgrave, the first leader of the Irish Free State, seeking an assurance that the castle and its 3,000-acre demesne would not be confiscated by the Land Commission, which had been set up to compulsorily purchase, then redistribute, land owned by non-Irish citizens in the wake of independence. Cosgrave gave him the assurance he sought. In 1930, Dom sold his father’s English estate to set up a permanent home with his first wife and their young family in the west of Ireland.
The decision to offload Mereworth was forced on him. It took a considerable amount of money to maintain and run one major country house, let alone two. Few upper-class families emerged from the Great War, and the hard decade that followed it, with their fortunes intact. Punitive post-war taxation, as well as the worldwide economic crisis triggered by the Wall Street Crash, fatally weakened the financial and social position of many of the aristocracy, whose numbers had been ravaged anyway by the war.
Even families like the Guinnesses, who had an industrial fortune to support them – ‘trade’, as it was snootily referred to by the idle rich – discovered that big country houses were becoming increasingly impractical and financially draining. In England, as well as Ireland, an era was coming to an end. As Noel Coward put it in his song ‘The Stately Homes of England’, the big house and all it represented was ‘rather in the lurch’.
Dom’s answer to this crisis was to go to work. After selling Mereworth, he attempted to make his one remaining estate self-sufficient, turning Castle Mac Garrett into a working farm and becoming a major food producer in the west of Ireland.
‘There were huge greenhouses,’ recalled Philomena Flatley, who worked as his secretary from 1950. ‘There was everything in there. Every fruit and vegetable you could think of. They had vines with grapes. They had figs. They had orchards. They sold an awful lot of tomatoes in season. Smith the gardener would load it all up and bring it off to the market and to local shops. They made feed for cows. They sold garden produce. There was a dairy and they sold milk to the creamery. They churned as well to make butter. And eggs. They had hens. Free range.’
Land was reclaimed, reseeded and stocked with a herd of Aberdeen Angus cattle. Suffolk and Galway sheep were cross-bred in order to provide the ‘perfect’ lamb. Some 1,200 pheasants were raised every year for shoots. Eels were caught in the eel weir, then shipped to the markets of London, where they were a popular dish. Castle Mac Garrett even had a sawmill that provided the country’s nascent Electricity Supply Board with the wooden poles used in the electrification of rural Ireland.
‘There were horses here as well,’ Philomena said. ‘Prince d’Ardia Caracciolo and also Lord Harrington sent their mares to Castle Mac Garrett for service. There were so many things happening. His plan was that the estate would be entirely self-sufficient and that the income would pay for the maintenance of the house and the salaries of the staff.’
Despite the demands of trying to make the estate pay for itself, he still found time to indulge his hobbies. He hosted regular shooting parties, at which members of venerable European families would come to shoot pheasant, snipe or whatever happened to be in season.
His responsibilities as a farm-owner and family man did nothing to dissuade him from his pursuit of attractive women. By 1934 – married
and with five children under the age of ten – his eye had been taken by a woman who was reputed to be one of the most beautiful women in Ireland.
•
Oonagh Guinness was the youngest of Ernest Guinness’s three blonde, blue-eyed daughters. She was a member of the sixth generation of the brewing dynasty, whose surname was as famous as Ireland itself. Over the course of the previous 150 years, the family had built what was once a small business into one of the world’s most identifiable brands and one of the world’s biggest fortunes. The Guinnesses used the political, commercial and financial clout that accompanied their success to rise to the ranks of the British aristocracy, in defiance of traditional class snobbishness towards fortunes earned through industry.
Irish by birth, but British by manners and political affiliation, the family expertly steered through the choppy political waters of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, managing to be from both countries and neither country at exactly the same time. The Guinnesses were opposed to every Irish nationalist movement from Home Rule to land reform to political rights for the country’s Catholic majority. The same Daniel O’Connell who praised the Brownes said: ‘With contemptuous pity, I dismiss the Guinnesses.’
And yet the people of Ireland retained a deep sentimental attachment to them, thanks to their enlightened employment practices and acts of philanthropy, which included building new accommodation for families living in Dublin’s overcrowded and notoriously squalid tenements and gifting St Stephen’s Green to the people of the city.
The writer Brendan Behan, who was a close friend of both Oonagh and her children, regarded the family as the closest thing the country had to royalty. ‘The Guinnesses,’ he said, summing up an age-old paradox, ‘are the only English aristocrats who have remained truly Irish.’
Contrary to popular belief, they didn’t invent the highly distinctive dark beer which made them, at one point, the wealthiest family in Britain and Ireland. They were, in fact, relative late comers to the business of brewing. Porter was first produced in Shoreditch in the East End of London in 1722 and was so named because of its popularity among manual labourers – porters – in the markets of early eighteenth-century London.
The first Arthur Guinness, whose signature remains part of the iconography of the brand founded his brewery at St James’s Gate, on the banks of the River Liffey, in 1759. Its grey walls, giant vats and confusion of piping would become as recognizable a part of Dublin as the smell of toasted hops that still hangs over the city in the early morning to this day.
His son, the second Arthur Guinness, was behind two business decisions that helped turn the family brewery into the most dominant Irish company of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The first, taken with his father and their brewing partner, John Purser, was to concentrate on only one product. The second was to brew it so well that porter and Guinness would come to mean one and the same thing.
But it was Oonagh’s grandfather, Edward, and his older brother, Sir Arthur – immortalized as the Cunning Brothers in James Joyce’s Ulysses – who completed the family’s ascent to the very heights of British society, where they could count the British royal family amongst their friends. These fourth-generation Guinnesses initially ran the business as partners, although, in time, one brother proved to be more cunning than the other. Edward persuaded Sir Arthur, who was more interested in pursuing a peerage than running a brewery, to sell the business to him at what proved to be a knockdown price. The dissolution was announced on 1 January 1877, when Oonagh’s grandfather became the sole owner of what was then the world’s largest brewery. He was still only twenty-nine.
By his late thirties, he was an incredibly wealthy man, earning somewhere in the region of £100,000 per year at a time when only 4,000 people in Britain had an annual income of over £5,000.
The uncertain political and economic future of Ireland was probably behind his surprise decision in the late nineteenth century to cash in his inheritance and to make England his permanent home. In 1887, Guinness was floated on the stock market. The public was invited to buy a piece of Ireland’s most successful business, although the family would remain the biggest shareholder, retaining 33 per cent of the stock.
Having achieved his business ambitions, he set about making his own mark in high society. His brother had become the first Guinness admitted to the ranks of the aristocracy when he was made a peer by Benjamin Disraeli in his 1880 resignation Honours List, in recognition of his services to the Conservative Party. Sir Arthur acquired the title Lord Ardilaun. In 1890, Edward, too, was ennobled. He chose the title Lord Iveagh and retired to Elveden, a vast estate in Suffolk.
When he died in 1927, Lord Iveagh left his shares and the job of managing the brewery to his three sons, Rupert, Ernest and Walter. All three were in their middle years and two of them were happily ensconced in careers that had nothing to do with brewing porter. Rupert, the eldest, succeeded his father as chairman of the company, but he had little interest in the day-to-day running, preferring to concentrate on farming. Walter, the youngest – and the future Lord Moyne – was the Minister for Agriculture and Fisheries in Britain. So it was Oonagh’s father, Ernest, who became the de facto head of the brewery at the age of fifty-one.
Ernest steered the business successfully through the difficult years between the wars and was a key player in the decision that turned Guinness into one of the most iconic brands of the twentieth century: the decision to advertise. Ernest’s father had considered the notion of promoting the company’s product through billboard and newspaper advertising to be vulgar. But Ernest’s cousin, Kenelm Lee Guinness, a Guinness director, motor racing driver and later a role model to the teenage Tara, offered the company the benefit of his experience marketing the KLG spark plug, which he had invented. The famous Guinness toucan, the zoo keeper and sea lion, and the farmer pulling a horse in a cart soon featured in the company’s ads and crossed quickly into the media mainstream.
Ernest married Marie Clotilde Russell – or Chloe, as she was popularly known – in 1903. The couple spent their time between Glenmaroon, their Dublin home; Holmbury House, their mansion on 300 acres in Surrey; and, as if to emphasize the Guinness family’s propinquity to royalty, their house in London’s Grosvenor Place, at the western perimeter of Buckingham Palace Gardens.
Together, they had three daughters, all of whom were given Irish names. Aileen, the eldest, was born in 1904, Maureen in 1907 and Oonagh in 1910. All three were considered to be extraordinary beauties in their time. They were part of a new wave of Guinnesses who would make newspaper headlines for reasons other than the business of brewing porter. Anticipating the Swinging Sixties by an entire generation, their permissive lifestyles and outrageous behaviour would earn them the prurient fascination of the gossip writers, who dubbed them the Golden Guinness Girls.
‘The sisters are all witches,’ the movie director John Huston, a close friend of Oonagh’s, once said. ‘Lovely ones, to be sure. But witches nonetheless. They are all transparent-skinned, with pale hair and light-blue eyes. You can nearly see through them. They are quite capable of changing swinish folk into real swine before your very eyes, and turning them back again without their even knowing it.’
The girls received little by way of a conventional school education, much like Tara later on. Homework, Oonagh would later tell Tara’s eldest son, Dorian, was something that governesses did. They were born into a world of wealth and privilege but one which could also be cold and remote. It was a social norm among the upper classes that children saw their parents only intermittently: often for half an hour in the morning and half an hour in the evening. The Guinness girls were no different in that regard. The nannies that supervised their upbringing were capable of the most awful cruelty. ‘My mother told me that if she was sick,’ Garech recalled, ‘she was forced to eat her vomit for her next meal.’
Ernest was determined to keep his daughters out of the politically turbulent Ireland of their childhood and they spent mu
ch of their early lives in England. In 1922, however, while holidaying in Ireland, they were witnesses to one of the defining moments of the Irish Civil War: the burning of the Four Courts, which they watched from the top of a turret in Glenmaroon, their vast Dublin home, a short distance from the brewery.
Oonagh was regarded as one of the most desirable young women in London by the time of her ‘coming out’ – the elaborate, 200-year-old ritual in which England’s well-born daughters were presented to the Queen before the start of the summer social season. She was considered by many to be the most attractive of Ernest’s daughters, sharing none of Aileen’s grandiosity, and none of the pretensions to royalty that would later drive a wedge between Maureen and her own daughter, the writer Caroline Blackwood.
Oonagh was tiny, almost elfin, standing barely five feet tall in her stockinged feet, which were so slight that she wore children’s shoes all her life. While Maureen was a born comedienne – she was the model for Osbert Lancaster’s Maudie Littlehampton cartoons and bore more than a passing resemblance to Dame Edna Everage – Oonagh was demure. That’s not to say she lacked assertiveness. She once dared to tell King George V that he was ‘pompous and boring’.
‘Oonagh,’ according to Martin Wilkinson, one of Tara’s friends who knew her later on, ‘was a strange mixture of very spoiled and very sweet and very fucked-up and very kind and very open. She was a convent girl crossed with this extremely sophisticated product of the Hollywood, Paris and literary worlds that she moved in. She had the air of a Fifties actress.’