Hidden treasure

PHOTO ARCHIVE:A stash of photographs found in the basement of Russborough House provide an intimate look at the off-duty private lives of some rich, famous and powerful people from Coco Chanel and Rex Harrison, the Mitford sisters to Winston Churchill, writes DEIRDRE MCQUILLAN, who says it's also a fascinating insight into 20th-century fashion

RUSSBOROUGH HOUSE IN Wicklow, home of the late Sir Alfred and Clementine Beit and their celebrated art collection, has been one of Wicklow’s greatest visitor attractions since it opened to the public in 1978. Although 17 of the masterpieces, including works by Goya, Velázquez, Gainsborough and, most famously, a Vermeer, are now in the National Gallery following various burglaries, recently uncovered new finds in the basement of the house have revealed another exciting treasure – a vast collection of photographs, slides and film that span the 20th century.

This is another reason to visit this historic Georgian mansion overlooking Blessington Lakes, originally built by Joseph Leeson, the first earl of Milltown, in 1741. Eric Blatchford is chief executive of the Alfred Beit Foundation, which oversees the Russborough estate. “One of the first things I had to do when I was appointed [two years ago] was to look in every room,” he says. “And when I went down to the basement, the doors were locked and it had not been accessed by anyone for at least 20 years.”

Among the discarded furniture and old carpets, he came across 16mm film cans and thousands of glass slides carefully arranged in wooden boxes. The earliest pictures were made in 1925 and 1926 by Alfred Beit, then 22 and in his last year at Oxford. They are a detailed record of a world tour he took with his friend Anthony Hornby. Blatchford also found an extensive diary Beit kept of the trip, his passport and an international letter of credit for £1,500 that funded the whole journey. The vast majority of the collection are photographs taken by Beit between the 1920s and 1950s.

Beit started taking pictures as a little boy. Along with film reels are thousands of photographs preserved in huge, leather-bound albums. They are full of intimate portraits of family and friends and of the aristocratic and social circles around the world in which the Beits moved. “He was a great man for documenting everything; fastidious about detail,” says Blatchford, leafing through the albums, each captioned in Beit’s elegant script and showing how the glass slides were kept and catalogued. “He kept a record of everything. We have boxes and boxes of slides, about 8,000 in all and he processed everything himself and captioned each photograph.”

Much of that material is now presented in the newly refurbished basement area of the house, where the exhibits tell the story of Russborough, its various owners, and the Beit family. Officially opened by Ruairí Quinn earlier this month, it is a state-of-the art interactive exhibition with a small cinema where some of the silent documentary footage made by Beit can be viewed. Audio handsets play some of Beit’s extensive music collection (he was also an accomplished pianist) and recorded memories from friends such as Thomas Pakenham, Desmond Guinness and the historian John Julius Norwich.

Among the well-known people photographed are some of the world’s great beauties, such as the Paget sisters, the Guinness girls, the Mitfords, Diana Cooper, and actors including Rex Harrison, Charlie Chaplin and the beautiful Lili Damita, who later married Errol Flynn. There’s a photograph of Anthony Eden relaxing in a deckchair, another of Coco Chanel in a hammock, pictures of Winston and Randolph Churchill, Cecil Beaton and many others.

Their Irish friends included John Huston’s wife Enrica Soma, Henry McIlhenny, the US millionaire owner of Glenveagh Castle in Donegal, Derek Hill, Sybil Connolly and the Dunsanys.

The collection also gives an insight into 20th-century fashion and the slim figures of the various women wearing everything from grand ballgowns to palazzos and floppy hats with equal ease. That casual, laconic air of the very rich and the very thin is fascinating.

Inevitably, there are many photographs of Clementine, from the first days of their marriage right up to their later years, which tell their own story of the Beit’s social and cultural life

Alfred Beit, the man behind the Russborough lens

Alfred Beit inherited a family fortune and a world-class collection of art in 1930 from his uncle, also called Alfred, a South African mining millionaire. The son of a London-based German father and an American mother, Beit studied at Eton and Oxford and later became an MP in London. In 1938 he married Clementine Mitford, a cousin of the famous Mitford sisters. (Another of her cousins, also called Clementine, married Winston Churchill.)

At the outbreak of war, he joined the RAF, where he worked as a squadron leader under Bomber Harris. In 1952 the Beits bought Russborough, sight unseen, after spotting an advertisement for it in Country Life. In 1974 an IRA gang made off with more than a dozen paintings, later recovered, and in 1976 the house was gifted to a charitable foundation. Some 12 years later it was raided again by a Dublin criminal gang, but the stolen paintings were again successfully tracked down and restored. In 1993 the Beits were made Irish citizens. Sir Alfred died in 1994 aged 90 and Clementine in 2005.

Russborough.ie