José Gauche BrowneJosé Gauche Browne, who has died at the age of 96, rose from obscure origins in London to become the 10th Marchioness of Sligo, and chatelaine of Westport House at a time, in the very early 1960s, when Richard Cassels' famous Mayo mansion was opened to the public.
She worked tirelessly to make the huge house and its invaluable possessions presentable to the public when she and her husband, Denis Browne, the 10th Marquess, had few resources and no government aid available to them for the project.
It was an inauspicious start, fraught with massive financial problems and physical circumstances which, together, did not bode well for the future. Westport House had seen four Marquesses of Sligo in 40 years, an average of one every ten years. In the case of two of them, their deaths had seen the onset of death duties, which Denis Browne was later, in his book Westport House and the Brownes (1979), to describe as "crippling."
There was, and is, a 400-acre farm with the estate, but this was at a time in the 1950s and '60s when agricultural prices were relatively low. Attempting to keep a huge house going was a burden which the young couple, who arrived from London in 1953, on the death of the ninth Marquess, found daunting.
Added to these difficulties, there was the simple physical problem of the isolation of Westport House in what was then a relatively impoverished country, and, in Westport's case, in the most impoverished and depopulated part of it, Connacht. Tourism in Ireland was in its infancy.
The Brownes brought to the task the seemingly not-very-relevant skills of artists. Denis Browne was a painter and sculptor who had studied at the Slade School of Art in London. It was there, speculates his son and heir, Lord Altamont, the present owner, that he may have met José Gauche, a beautiful and artistic young woman.
About her family, the present generation of Brownes knows virtually nothing, except that the Gauches were descendants of French Protestants, possibly Hugenots fleeing persecution in their native country, and that José's father was "in business of some sort," as Lord Altamont describes it.
She and her husband married in 1938, and went at first to live on a farm near Ipswich, Suffolk, before coming to Westport.
After deciding to open their home to the public in 1958, the Brownes faced three years preparing the building. The Marchioness took over the project, clearing every room of the detritus of nearly three centuries, and supervising the painstaking craftsmanship needed to fully realise the potential of the house.
Many of the rooms had no suitable fabrics, so she designed and made them. The crocheted bedspreads which adorn the bedrooms to this day were her work entirely.
Visitors to the house today can also see examples of her clothing, such as a beautiful orange and yellow woolen suit; José Browne made all her own clothes, including even her handbags, and hats.
Substantially, the visitor to Westport House over the past 40 years has been viewing the "look" created by José Browne; it was her vision for the place.
In its first open year, 1961, Westport House attracted just 2,600 visitors. Last year, there were over 50,000.
José Browne, Dowager Marchioness of Sligo, born June, 1908, died August, 2004.