HERITAGE:The 29th Knight of Glin might have a history-laden title and a magnificent big house by the Shannon, but the recession has forced Desmond FitzGerald to put much of his large collection of pictures and furniture up for auction. Will the downturn see other parts of our nation's heritage suffer the same fate? askd ROBBIE O'BYRNE.
ON A DOORFRAME leading into the drawingroom at Glin Castle, Co Limerick, hangs a copy of the notice issued by the local sheriff in August 1803. It announces that in the middle of the month there would be a public sale featuring "feveral Articles of Houfehold Furniture, confifting of Parlour and Drawing Room Chairs and Window Curtains, Breakfaft and Dining Tables, Low Boys and Defks, a fuberb Service of real India China, fome beautiful Carpets, Bed and Besfteads"and much else besides. In fact, as a result of debts accrued by the then recently deceased Col John FitzGerald, 24th Knight of Glin, almost everything in the house, other than some family portraits, had to be sold.
Next May there is to be another auction during which many pictures, silver and items of furniture from Glin Castle will be offered to the public, and while this will not leave the place looking quite as bereft as it must have done in 1803, the loss to the house – and to Ireland – is serious.
“I need the money,” says Desmond FitzGerald, 29th and last Knight of Glin, when asked why the forthcoming sale should be taking place. “We have to take steps,” explains his wife Olda. “Otherwise we won’t be able to look after the house. It’s like having a difficult and demanding child on your hands.”
The FitzGeralds are similar to many other couples who have recently seen their income slashed, albeit on a larger scale. For them, like everyone else at the moment, retrenchment is the only option. Furthermore, the knight, like most of his forbears, has never been particularly wealthy: although Glin Castle was built in the 1780s, its top floor was only completed more than two centuries later in the 1990s. Big house, small wallet – it was ever thus at Glin.
Nobody, not even the current bearer of the title, can provide a definitive account of its origins. Documented from the 15th century onwards, the moniker is certainly older and may first have been granted by the English crown or bestowed on the family by powerful FitzGerald cousins, the earls of Desmond. Or indeed it could be some adaptation of a Gaelic chieftainship. But regardless of its genesis, the holders have always been based in west Limerick at a spot overlooking the Shannon estuary.
According to family legend, during the Elizabethan wars an English vessel captured one of the then knight’s sons and sent a message that the child would be put into a cannon and fired against the old castle’s walls unless his father capitulated. “Fire away,” came the response. “There’s plenty more where he came from.”
Later knights were less bellicose and better able to adapt themselves to the prevailing status quo, which is how they managed to stay put for so long.
It was always something of a struggle, however, as the 1803 sale indicates. Desmond FitzGerald has been the Knight of Glin for the past 60 years since the death of his father in April 1949. He was aged 11 when he inherited a title of no value and an unprofitable estate, and the latter would almost certainly have been lost had his mother Veronica not made a second marriage to a wealthy Canadian called Ray Milner.
“My stepfather saved the place,” FitzGerald acknowledges. “He was a most charming and benevolent person in my life.”
Thanks to Milner, Glin remained in the family’s possession, even if its young heir visited the place only intermittently. Following studies at Harvard and elsewhere, he worked as an assistant keeper and then deputy keeper in the furniture and woodwork department of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum.
It was during those years that he began collecting and writing about Irish fine art. He can still remember the first pieces of Irish-made furniture he ever acquired, a George II giltwood mirror by John Booker and a George II mahogany tea table; the two were bought from a dealer on Kensington Church Street for about £500. Not long afterwards, he spent some £800 on a mid-18th-century Irish mahogany bureau bookcase spotted in an antique shop on the Fulham Road. By this time he had begun researching Irish art and architecture and publishing his findings in journals and books, as well as building up files on these subjects at the VA. Nobody had ever paid them much attention, so the results of his work were a revelation.
Nevertheless, it was only from the mid-1970s onwards that Desmond FitzGerald began to spend the greater part of his time in this country. In 1966 he married Louise de la Falaise, later to become known as muse to the late Yves St Laurent. That marriage was relatively short-lived and immediately following his divorce in 1970 he married Olda Willes, who originally met her future husband at his first wedding, which she attended with Mark Birley, the founder of Annabel’s nightclub in London’s Mayfair. In 1968, Olda visited Glin for the first time.
“Desmond would sweep everyone up at parties,” she remembers, “and carry them off for the weekend. The return airfare was only something like £12 or £15, so I decided to tag along.”
Although they visited Glin regularly during the early years of their life together, the couple based themselves in London. However, after health problems forced FitzGerald to resign his post at the VA, they decided to move to Ireland.
“It was suddenly brought to bear on my mind that there was this great big white house sitting here,” says Olda. “There was no heating in those days, but every summer loyal Americans would come and take the place.” In 1975 Desmond FitzGerald got a job acting as Irish agent for English auctioneers Christie’s, a position he held for 28 years and which, he admits, “gave me the dubious reputation of being a total hypocrite”, since he was perceived in some quarters to be disposing of Irish fine art on the international market while simultaneously arguing for its better appreciation at home through his involvement with organisations such as the Irish Georgian Society (of which he has been president since 1991).
In response, he points out that regardless of which auction house was selling it, the Irish were as free as anyone else to buy their own heritage. Indeed, for more than 40 years that is precisely what he did, and now most of his extraordinary acquisitions are to be offered to buyers, whether they live in this country or overseas. His earliest purchases, the Booker mirror and the George II tea table, are to go, as is the bureau bookcase. Some of the items being sold in May he brought back to Ireland long after they had gone abroad. An early 18th-century portrait of a lady by James Latham, for example, was discovered more than 20 years ago in Moss Vale outside Sydney, Australia, while he found Philip Hussey’s portrait of the Countess of Brandon in Vermont.
Both Desmond and Olda FitzGerald are phlegmatic about the forthcoming auction. “Selling the collection I’ve enjoyed and written about doesn’t upset me too much,” he insists, but disposing of a lifetime’s treasures is clearly a jolt, as is the reason for this occurrence. Even after they settled permanently in Ireland, for a long time the FitzGeralds were content to let the family home on a rather ad hoc basis to various American groups and families. But in the early 1990s they began to refurbish the building and even achieved what no previous generation had managed: the completion of the top floor.
Glin opened as a hotel and while its relatively small size – just 15 bedrooms – meant the place would never make the FitzGeralds a fortune, “it went on quite well”, he observes. “Put it this way: it washed its face.”
In addition, the farm brought in a certain income, as did his work with Christie’s. The couple revamped a dilapidated wing and moved in there, leaving the main part of the house to paying guests. All seemed set fair for the future, but then circumstances unexpectedly changed. Not only has revenue from agriculture declined of late but last year for the first time the hotel received almost no guests. “Because people were generally booking later,” says Olda, “we kept thinking they were bound to come in decent numbers. But they didn’t.”
FitzGerald is now 71 and, although he gave up his job with Christie’s in 2003, he still acts as a consultant for the auction house. The couple’s investments are generating no income. If Glin is to survive for the next few years, the FitzGeralds have to make some money. Hence the sale of furniture and pictures, as well as almost all the family silver (including racing trophies won by Richard FitzGerald at Clogheen in the 1740s) and even certain items – such as some Regency hall chairs – that have been in the house since they were first made.
At the same time, even if Glin remains in their possession for the immediate future, the sudden onset of economic recession has left the couple uncertain of their home’s long-term prospects.
“It’s all in the air,” says FitzGerald. “We’d love to keep going in some way, so we’re going to explore every avenue and see.”
Unlike his Elizabethan ancestor, he and Olda do not have plenty of sons. They have three daughters, none of whom is in a position to assume responsibility for maintaining the Glin estate. While this is a cause of some regret, until recently the FitzGeralds thought there existed an alternative solution to the problem of ensuring the place’s survival. In July 2006, the Irish Heritage Trust (IHT), a limited company with charitable status and an independent board, was officially established with support from the Government. This body’s mandate is to acquire for public access significant heritage properties that are deemed to be at risk and for which the State does not want to assume direct responsibility; in December 2007, for example, the IHT took over Fota House, Arboretum and Gardens in Co Cork.
In recognition of the significance of its work, the Government earmarked €35 million for the organisation over the duration of the National Development Plan 2007-2013.
Accordingly, the IHT entered into discussions with the owners of a number of properties, most notably with the Grove Annesley family about acquiring the 500-acre Anne’s Grove estate in north Cork, including the house, farm and internationally renowned gardens. Then last December John Gormley, the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government, wrote to the IHT advising that due to changing circumstances it would not be possible to support the acquisition of Anne’s Grove.
What will happen now to the IHT is anyone’s guess, since without the funds to acquire heritage properties its operations will be severely curtailed. And one of the properties it might have taken over in the next few years is Glin. This was very much the hope of the FitzGeralds, since they could see that the next generation is not going to be in a position to retain the family home. Now they don’t know what will become of the place.
“We just have to hope we can weather the storm and stay here for the moment,” says FitzGerald, trusting May’s sale will generate enough funds to keep them going through the current recession.
But having been a Christie’s agent since the mid-1970s, he is also aware that his predicament is not new and that traditionally this country has not been good at looking after its heritage. In February, the Hon Rose Talbot died in Tasmania. More than 30 years ago, following the death of her brother, the last Lord Talbot de Malahide, she offered Malahide Castle, together with its incomparable collection of pictures and furniture and the 265 acres surrounding the house, to the State in lieu of death duties. The offer was refused on a technicality, and instead Dublin County Council had to buy the castle and grounds, and then found itself in the ludicrous position of bidding against international dealers and collectors for some of the contents of the house during a three-day sale.
Unless a body such as the IHT can prevent it, this scenario looks likely to prevail again in the coming years, and not just at Glin: the FitzGeralds are by no means the only historic house owners in difficulty.
Fáilte Ireland estimates that cultural tourism, of which historic houses and gardens are an integral element, already delivers €2 billion in annual revenue to this country. Moreover, cultural tourism is growing at a rate of 15 per cent every year – three times the rate of general tourism. In 2007, 61 per cent of tourists said they had visited historical or cultural attractions here, and 16 per cent had visited gardens (just 4 per cent visited golf courses in the same year). In Britain, recent research conducted by the National Trust (NT) has shown that between five and nine full-time equivalent jobs are generated by each job for which the NT is directly responsible.
Tourism is clearly vital for the future well-being of this country’s economy. Eventually the present recession will pass and prosperity will return. The concern must be that by the time it does, if more sales like that at Glin have taken place, Ireland’s already meagre stock of heritage properties will be further depleted and we will all be the poorer. The auction in May affects not just one family but the entire nation’s resources.
The sale of items from the personal collection of the Knight of Glin will take place at Christie’s, London, on Thursday, May 7th