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Papers handed to Irish ambassador cast doubt on whether Yeats’s remains were correctly identified

Nephew of painter Hannah Gluckstein, a member of poet’s late circle, approached embassy with information in 1978

The grave of WB Yeats at Drumcliffe Church in Co Sligo. Photograph: Lukasz Warzecha/ICP
The grave of WB Yeats at Drumcliffe Church in Co Sligo. Photograph: Lukasz Warzecha/ICP
Sun Dec 29 2024 - 00:00

Papers given to the Irish ambassador in London purported to prove that the remains of WB Yeats that had been returned from France by the Irish government could not, in fact, be identified as the poet’s.

After the poet’s death in January 1939 at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, he was buried in a cemetery there. Once the second World War ended, the Irish government removed his remains and transported them via an Irish naval vessel, Macha, to Galway and from there to Sligo, where he was reburied with much solemnity in the churchyard at Drumcliffe.

In June 1978 a man named Gluckstein approached the ambassador in London, Paul Keating, with papers that belonged to his aunt Hannah Gluckstein. At the time of Yeats’s death Hannah Gluckstein and the poet were sharing the love of the journalist Edith Shackleton Heald.

The papers suggested that Yeats had been buried in a pauper’s grave and those remains were disinterred after five years and placed in an ossuary to make room for more burials. Therefore, it was impossible to state that the bones removed from the graveyard were those of Yeats.

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An unsigned memo from the embassy suggested that there was enough in the Gluckstein papers to “cast a veneer of doubt and suspicion over the proceedings”, especially in view of reservations already expressed by the French abbot who surveyed burials in the graveyard. The abbot had also expressed doubts about positively identifying the poet’s remains, but others, who had been present at the exhumation, did not share those doubts. The memo recalled that the gravedigger himself was sure the remains were those of Yeats because of the large skull.

There were fears that the businessman Gluckstein was attempting to blackmail the embassy by threatening to make the documents public and thus cause distress to the Yeats family, but Mr Keating was sanguine about it.

“There is obviously the makings of a scandal here but one which is not really very damaging in any real sense to anybody except the immediate members of the Yeats family,” he wrote in a memo to the Department of Foreign Affairs.

He also dropped something of a bombshell in the correspondence by stating that while working in the embassy in 1965, he was given telephone instructions by the department regarding the exhumation of the remains of Sir Roger Casement.

[ Roger Casement made a ‘fool of himself’ – Kathleen Clarke ]

In 1965 the British government agreed to allow the repatriation of the remains of Casement, who had been hanged in Pentonville Prison in August 1916.

Keating said he was instructed to “take back one hundredweight of earth from the grave if no remains were to be found.

“In fact, of course, we did discover the remains of Sir Roger. Perhaps a similar instruction was given in the case of Yeats. If so, then these documents would make this quite clear.”

The matter seemed to have been resolved by February 1980 with a letter in the file from the secretary of the Irish embassy in London, Andrew O’Rourke.

The matter had been discussed by the minister for foreign affairs Brian Lenihan with Yeats’s son Senator Michael Yeats, who, like Lenihan, was a Fianna Fáil politician.

Michael Yeats was not “greatly worried” about the contents of the Gluckstein correspondence.

Therefore, the embassy officials had decided to return the correspondence to Gluckstein. If he declined to accept them back, they would be put in the embassy archives for safekeeping.

The embassy said, either way, they would not be paying for the remains.

The controversy resurfaced on the 150th anniversary of Yeats’s death in 2015 when The Irish Times revealed French diplomatic correspondence that appeared to suggest the remains in Drumcliffe were not those of the poet.

[ The story about WB Yeats’ bones being sought from a French ossuary inspires French writer ]

However, Yeats Society president Martin Enright said they were used to the rumours.

“If there’s a skull, or even a leg bone in the Drumcliffe grave belonging to Yeats, that’s fine by me,” Mr Enright said at the time.

Certain “State papers” or official archives are declassified at the end of every year. This week, thousands of documents in archives in Dublin, Belfast and London are being made public for the first time, bringing new insights into events of times past. This year’s Dublin archives mostly date from 1994.