The ghosts in the photograph

While walking in Paris, Allen Smith came across a life-sized vision that took his breath away: his late mother and aunt chatting while WB Yeats looked on. How did they get there?

FOR RETIRED Dublin architect Allen Smith, an apparition in a Paris street this summer brought his mother Gladys back to him in a most unexpected way.

Smith was in the French capital with his wife Elizabeth to visit their grandchildren, and they were strolling en famille past the Jardins du Luxembourg, on their way to buy shoes for the children, when without warning he came face to face with his late mother.

“It was her. There was no doubt. I recognised her immediately. It was my mother, and there she was, talking to my aunt Lilah.”

Smith – well known in Dublin musical circles as the man who oversaw the original restoration of the National Concert Hall, and for his tireless promotion of jazz over the years – stopped in the middle of the street and wept. It wasn’t a ghost that he had seen, nor a look-alike, but a life-sized photograph, hanging there on the railings of the Luxembourg gardens.

“I had just walked past photographs of women from all over the world. You couldn’t miss them – they were 10 feet high panels, mounted every few metres on the railings. There was one I remember of a religious festival in Brittany, and all the women had white lace hats on their heads. Another was of two identical women at a convention for twins in the US.

“So I came along the street to the next panel, and what immediately caught my eye was the painting of WB Yeats. I knew I had seen it before, though I couldn’t quite remember where. And I was just looking at it curiously, trying to think where I had seen it. But I knew that these were supposed to be shots of women, so my eyes scanned down the photograph . . .”

Smith pauses as he remembers the rush of emotions that followed. “And the next thing, I realised that the woman on the right was my mother. I began to cry,” says Smith, his eyes beginning to well with tears once more at the memory. “It was like an apparition. My breath just went from me. I was really very emotional. I turned round to tell my son, Macdara, who was coming along behind, and he just came up to me and embraced me. I kept saying, ‘it’s my mother, it’s my mother’.”

He noticed that the rest of the family didn’t seem so surprised, and he began to suspect that, for them, the moment was not entirely spontaneous.

“A couple of weeks before that, my daughter-in-law Christine found the photograph by accident. Her route to work normally wouldn’t pass this way, but just by chance that day, she got out at a different Metro stop. So she was walking past the gardens, and obviously looking at the photographs, and she said, ‘Oh my God, that’s Gladys!’

“Elizabeth and I were due to visit in a few weeks anyway, so they rang her and said ‘what will we do? Will we tell him before we go? Or will we just shepherd him along and let him find it himself?’ And Elizabeth said, ‘He’ll be fine. He doesn’t mind surprises.’ In fact,” he adds, “my reaction was much more emotional than they expected.”

The photograph that stopped Smith in his tracks was taken 20 years ago in the foyer of the Abbey Theatre by the celebrated French photographer Olivier Martel. When, years later, Martel came to compile a collection of his shots from all over the world for a series entitled Femmes Éternelles – The Eternal Woman, the picture he took in Ireland that evening came to his mind. A frequent visitor to Ireland since the late 1960s, he still clearly remembers the circumstances of the shot.

“It was just one of those moments. It was during the interval, and I saw these two very respectable-looking women talking very deeply, with WB Yeats looking down at them as if he was listening to their conversation. The scene just made me smile. So very quietly, I took out my Leica and took the picture. I didn’t speak to them. If you stop to ask when you take these pictures, you lose the magic of the moment.”

The two women Martel caught unawares that night were sisters Lilah and Gladys, nee O’Donnell, from Clontarf. Born in 1913, Gladys attended the Masonic School for Girls in Ballsbridge (now Bewley’s Hotel), married businessman and cricketer Bob Smith, and they lived a long life together on Victoria Road in Clontarf. Eight years her senior, Lilah was married to Jimmy Brady, who swam for Ireland in the 1928 Olympic Games in Amsterdam.

By the time Martel took his photograph in 1991, Gladys and Lilah were both widowed, and the two sisters often attended the theatre together. Little did they know that WB Yeats was eavesdropping on their conversation. Nor that they would become, for one Frenchman on assignment in Ireland, representatives of “the eternal woman”.

For more on Olivier Martel's Femmes Éternellesseries, go to olivier-martel.com