Anne de Winton:ANNE DE Winton, who has died aged 97, was the last surviving grandchild of Lady Augusta Gregory, co-founder of the Abbey Theatre and cornerstone of the Irish literary revival.
Her father was the subject of Yeats's poem An Irish Airman Foresees His Death, while her husband was assassinated serving with the Allied forces in Pola.
Reared by her grandmother after her father's death, she wrote a memoir of her early years. In Me and Nu: Childhood at Coole, she recalled meeting some of the leading writers and artists of the day. WB Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Sean O'Casey, Augustus John and Oliver St John Gogarty were among those who enjoyed Lady Gregory's hospitality.
De Winton found Yeats grumpy, rather distant and often distracted.
She remembered him humming while he wrote his verses. "He used to hum the rhythm of the verse before he wrote the words," she said.
"Grandma told us that was why his poems were so good to read aloud."
Of Yeats's poem to her yellow hair she said: "I thought it was doggerel at first and was not impressed. It was not as romantic as I would have liked it."
But when the poet publicly announced the publication of the poem and described the young Anne as "having hair like a cornfield in the sun", she warmed to it.
Born in 1911, she was one of the three children of Robert Gregory and his wife Margaret Graham Perry. Her parents were artists; her father exhibited in London as well as designing theatre sets for the Abbey.
He served in the Royal Flying Corp during the first World War, and was shot down over northern Italy in January 1918. Anne's abiding memory of her father is of him sitting on a horse in the front driveway at Cool Park.
She, her sister Catherine and brother Richard had the freedom of the demesne and the woods beyond to explore to their hearts' content. They covered their ponies with ostrich feathers and made reins of ivy or honey suckle and "tore through the wood".
It was Lady Gregory who most encouraged their childhood imaginations, telling them stories "about Kiltartan and Ireland" during what Anne remembered as "wonderful days with grandma".
She recalled parlour games with George Bernard Shaw, and was shocked to find him cheating at "Hunt the Thimble".
She had stories to tell about the "literary beacon", the magnificent copper beech into which the initials of her grandmother's guests were carved.
"We watched Sean O'Casey carve his name," she said. "He said he had had a lot of practice, as he had often carved his name on the door of his tenement flat in Dublin. We were amazed. What an extraordinary thing to do, and what on Earth was a tenement flat?"
She grew up to be a fine horsewoman. She was for a time joint master of foxhounds with the west Waterford hunt.
She met Lieut-Col Robert de Winton while she was doing war work in England, and they married in London in 1945.
Two years later she and their two-month-old son joined her husband, now Brig de Winton, in Pola, where he was commander of the British 13th Infantry Brigade.
Within a month of her arrival he was assassinated as he was about to inspect a headquarters guard.
Maria Pasquinelli, an Italian fascist, stepped from the watching crowd and shot the brigadier three times in the back as he got out of a staff car.
Pasquinelli was convicted and sentenced to death by an Allied military tribunal; the sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment.
Living in Devon, de Winton maintained her links with Ireland and in 1990 formally opened the Yeats summer school at Sligo.
In 1996, with her sister Catherine, she attended the opening by the president Mary Robinson of the Kiltartan Gregory Museum, housed in the converted stables at Coole. She returned with Catherine in 1998 for the unveiling of Ireland's largest analemmatic sundial and the launch of an audio-visual show on Lady Gregory.
The sisters were moved to see images of themselves as children with their brother Richard, and their loving grandmother.
Interviewed at her home in Devon in 2003, she said: "I often think now of those years at Coole . . . I can always see that wonderful clear light of Galway."
Her son William survives her.
Augusta Anne de Winton: born September 13th, 1911; died December 23rd, 2008