Is this the face of Nelson’s lover Lady Hamilton?

 

Is this the face of Nelson’s lover Lady Hamilton?

 

Digital reconstruction from remains found in France bears ‘incredible’ resemblance to British naval hero’s mistress, says expert

 

Kim Willsher in Paris

Sun 28 Sep 2025 13.15 CEST

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/28/have-french-scientists-solved-the-mystery-of-nelsons-lover-lady-hamilton

 

Emma Hamilton was one of the great celebrity women of her time. The daughter of a blacksmith, she used her wit, intelligence and beauty to rise to the highest echelons of European society, mingle with royalty and win the heart of Britain’s great hero, Adm Horatio Nelson.

 

Now, more than 200 years after she died in drink and debt in Calais, French scientists have identified what they believe are Lady Hamilton’s remains.

 

Experts say they cannot be certain the bones, discovered in a tomb in the “English section” of a graveyard in Calais and exhumed in 2021, are hers. However, a digital reconstruction of a face from the largely intact skull bears a remarkable likeness, France’s foremost forensic pathologist has said.

 

“There’s every chance it’s her but we cannot be entirely certain,” Dr Philippe Charlier told the Guardian. “We have a skull that is in very good condition and about 80% of a skeleton that has been lying in the earth.”

 

The scientific examination and carbon dating of the bones pointed to a woman aged between 45 and 55 who died around 1815, Charlier said. Hamilton was 49 when she died on 15 January 1815.

 

“Traces on the mouth and teeth suggest alcohol abuse, though the rest of the body appears to have been in a healthy state. There were no traces of conditions and diseases like rickets, common in the general population at the time,” Charlier added.

 

Attempts to establish a cause of death and extract DNA from the bones have so far been unsuccessful, but Charlier’s team continues to examine the skeleton in the hope scientific advances will make identification more certain. Until then, the remains are described as “presumed” to be Hamilton.

 

Charlier, who has studied the remains of historical figures, including Richard the Lionheart, the French kings Louis IX and Henry IV and Adolf Hitler’s teeth, said the team that worked on reconstructing the face was told only that the skull was that of a European woman of a certain age. From this, they were asked to create a reproduction of how the unnamed woman may have looked.

 

“It took 18 months and was done in a completely scientific and not artistic way. The likeness to portraits of Emma Hamilton is incredible,” he added.

 

Hamilton was born Amy Lyon, daughter of a Cheshire blacksmith who died shortly after her birth and his wife, Mary. She was raised by her grandmother in north Wales and sent into domestic service as a nursery maid to a local doctor at 13 years old before becoming a housemaid for the composer Thomas Linley.

 

Aged 16, Hamilton became the mistress of the wealthy aristocrat Sir Harry Fetherstonhaugh, the MP for Portsmouth, who historical records describe as a “witless playboy” who threw wild parties. At his Sussex home, she met Charles Greville, a British antiques collector and politician, who took her to London and ordered a series of portraits of her by George Romney and one by Sir Joshua Reynolds.

 

Greville soon tired of Hamilton and packed her off to his widowed uncle Sir William Hamilton, the British envoy to Naples, suggesting mendaciously that her stay would be temporary. Among those she befriended was Queen Maria Carolina of Naples, the sister of Marie Antoinette.

 

In 1791, Emma, then 26, and William, 60, travelled to London to marry and returned to Naples where she met Nelson, who was instantly smitten, historians have said. Their daughter Horatia was born in 1801 while both were still married to their respective spouses.

 

William died in 1803 and Nelson was killed at the Battle of Trafalgar two years later, leaving Emma without protectors and penniless.

 

After she was released from the debtors’ prison, Hamilton escaped with Horatia to Calais, where she is thought to have become an alcoholic. When she died she was first buried in the churchyard of St Pierre’s in Calais. Her body was later moved and her remains lost.

 

The Calais councillor Dominique Darré, who enlisted the help of municipal gravediggers in a decade-long hunt for Hamilton’s grave, said he had almost given up hope of finding it when the skull and skeleton were discovered in the other graveyard.

 

“I feared she had been thrown into a common grave and we would never find her,” Darré said. “It’s incredible to think that this is her. I am convinced, but the experts say we have to presume it is her until science has evolved further and we have more proof.”

 

In a ceremony this month, the remains were placed in Calais’s Notre Dame church.

 

“We have done this as memorial and homage to a woman who was forgotten but who is part of the history of Calais and part of our common history,” Darré said.

A Famous "Ménage ä Trois": Emma, The Antiquarian and Volcanist Lord and The National Hero

Details of Emma's early life are unclear, but at age 12, she was known to be working as a maid at the Hawarden home of Doctor Honoratus Leigh Thomas, a surgeon working in Chester


Still only fifteen years old, Emma met Sir Harry Featherstonhaugh who hired her for several months as hostess and entertainer at a lengthy stag party at Sir Harry's Uppark country estate in the South Downs. She is said to have entertained Harry and his friends by dancing naked on the dining room table.[1] Sir Harry took Emma there as mistress but frequently ignored her in favour of drinking and hunting with his friends. Emma soon formed a friendship with one of the guests, the dull but sincere Honourable Charles Francis Greville (1749–1809), second son of the first Earl of Warwick and a member of Parliament for Warwick. It was about this time (late June-early July 1781) that she conceived a child by Sir Harry.

Sir Harry was furious at the unwanted pregnancy but is thought to have accommodated Emma in one of his many houses in London. Emma gave up on Sir Harry: probably at this time she had formed a romantic attachment to Greville. He was closer to her in age, and she might have believed that he was able to marry her. Emma became Greville's mistress. When the child (Emma Carew) was born, she was removed to be raised by a Mr and Mrs Blackburn.[2] As a young woman, Emma's daughter saw her mother reasonably frequently, but later when Emma fell into debt, Miss Carew worked abroad as a companion or governess


Emma was at Greville's mercy and acceded to his request to change her name to "Emma Hart". Greville kept Emma in a house at Edgeware Row, but he was in love with her and, wanting a painting of her, sent her to sit for his friend, the painter George Romney. Romney painted many of his most famous portraits of Emma at this time. Indeed, Romney maintained a lifelong obsession with her, sketching her nude and clothed in many poses that he used in paintings he made in her absence. Through the popularity of Romney's work and particularly of his striking-looking young model, Emma became well known in society circles, under the name of "Emma Hart". She learned quickly and was elegant, witty and intelligent. And, as paintings of her attest, Emma was also extremely beautiful.

George Romney was fascinated by her looks and ability to adapt to the ideals of the age. Romney and other artists painted her in many guises.

In 1783, Greville needed to find a rich wife to replenish his finances (in the form of eighteen-year-old heiress Henrietta Middleton). Emma would be a problem, as he disliked being known as her lover (this having become apparent to all through her fame in Romney's artworks), and his prospective wife would not accept him as a suitor if he lived openly with Emma Hart.

To be rid of Emma, Greville persuaded his uncle, Sir William Hamilton, British Envoy to Naples, to take her off his hands. Greville's marriage would be useful to Sir William, as it relieved him of having Greville as a poor relation. To promote his plan, Greville suggested to Sir William that Emma would make a very pleasing mistress, assuring him that, once married to Henrietta Middleton, he would come and fetch Emma back. Emma's famous beauty was by then well-known to Sir William, so much so that he even agreed to pay the expenses for her journey to ensure her speedy arrival. He was interested in her, as a great collector of antiquities and beautiful objects, and that was how he first viewed Emma. He had long been a happily married man, now in his mid-fifties, and he liked female companionship very much. His home in Naples was well known all over the world for hospitality and refinement. He needed a hostess for his salon, and from what he knew about Emma, she would be the perfect choice.




As Sir William's mistress, Emma developed what she called her "Attitudes", using Romney's idea of combining classical poses with modern allure as the basis for her act. This eventual cross between postures, dance, and acting, was first revealed in Spring 1787 by Sir William to a large group of European guests at his home in Naples, who quickly took to this new form of entertainment - guessing the names of the classical characters and scenes which Emma portrayed.



For her "Attitudes", Emma had her dressmaker make dresses modeled on those worn by peasant islanders in the Bay of Naples, and on loose-fitting garments such as she wore when modeling for Romney. The performance was a sensation across Europe. Using a few shawls, she posed as various classical figures from Medea to Queen Cleopatra, and her performances charmed aristocrats, artists such as Élisabeth-Louise Vigée-Le Brun, writers — including the great Johann Wolfgang von Goethe — and kings and queens alike, setting off new dance trends across Europe and starting a fashion for a draped Grecian style of dress.






Nelson returned to Naples five years later, on 22 September 1798 (with stepson, Josiah, who was in his early twenties), a living legend, after his victory at the Battle of the Nile in Aboukir. However, Nelson's adventures had prematurely aged him: he had lost an arm and most of his teeth, and was afflicted by coughing spells. Emma reportedly flung herself upon him in admiration, calling out, "Oh God, is it possible?", as she fainted against him. Nelson wrote effusively of Emma to his increasingly estranged wife, Lady Fanny Nelson
Emma nursed Nelson under her husband's roof, and arranged a party with 1,800 guests to celebrate his 40th birthday. They soon fell in love and their affair seems to have been tolerated, and perhaps even encouraged, by the elderly Sir William, who showed nothing but admiration and respect for Nelson, and vice-versa. Emma Hamilton and Horatio Nelson were by now the two most famous Britons in the world. They were not only in love with each other, but admired each other to the point of adulation. They were, so to speak, also in love with both their own fame, and that of their lover.









He was a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and a member of the Society of Dilettanti. His other books include Antiquités étrusques, grecques et romaines (1766–67) and Observations on Mount Vesuvius (1772).

Sir William Hamilton was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1766 and published his paper "Campi Phlegraei: Observations on the Volcanoes of the Two Sicilies" in the same year. He made more than 65 ascents of Mount Vesuvius and made a number of drawings before its eruption in 1767. The Royal Society awarded him the Copley Medal in 1770 for his paper, "An Account of a Journey to Mount Etna".





Sir William Hamilton,(12 January 1731 – 6 April 1803) was a Scottish diplomat, antiquarian, archaeologist and vulcanologist.



In 1786, a stunning young lady was sent to Sir William by his nephew, Charles Greville, in exchange for him settling Greville's debts. Like most of the men who wandered into her orbit, Sir William was smitten with Emma Lyon, who performed dances inspired by classical elements for himself and his guests, including Goethe, while wearing no undergarments. However, he made no advances until she was ready to accept him. They married on 6 September 1791 at St Marylebone Church, London. He was 60; she was 26. She later became the lover of Horatio Nelson, a man Sir William admired greatly, and whose liaison he reportedly encouraged.




After serving as Member of Parliament for Midhurst from 1761, he left his seat to become Britain's ambassador to the court of Naples from 1764 to 1800. During this time he studied local volcanic activity and earthquakes, and wrote a book on the ancient Roman city of Pompeii. He collected Greek vases and other antiquities, selling part of his collection to the British Museum in 1772. A small part of his second collection went down with HMS Colossus while being transported to Britain in 1798. The surviving part of the second collection was catalogued for sale at auction at Christie's when at the eleventh hour Thomas Hope stepped in and purchased the remains of Hamilton's second collection of mostly South Italian vases

House of Guinness | Official Trailer | Netflix / House of Guinness review

Review

House of Guinness review – James Norton’s pheromones positively sizzle off the screen

 

With smarts, heart and serious sex appeal, this fine drama from Peaky Blinders’ Steven Knight is an irresistible romp – like Succession, only over a booze empire. Knight has never made a better show than this

 

Jack Seale

Thu 25 Sep 2025 06.00 CEST

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2025/sep/25/house-of-guinness-review-james-norton-pheromones-positively-sizzle-off-the-screen

 

You may judge a show’s success by the number of imitators that follow: to see how much TV commissioners envied the popularity of Slow Horses, look at the recent uptick in wry dramas about spies and/or shambling outcasts who work in a grotty basement but get the job done. Another show with that status is Peaky Blinders, writer Steven Knight’s swaggering epic about a (real) Birmingham crime gang between the wars.

 

What’s unusual about the post-Blinders shows is that the author of the towering original has tended to write the pretenders to the throne himself: Knight sought to develop the formula earlier this year with A Thousand Blows, a series about a different historical crime gang, and with his new Netflix show House of Guinness, he seems to be mining the same seam. The family here is not a crime family: we are in Dublin in 1868, where Guinness is so ubiquitous that the unimaginably wealthy Guinness family run the city. But managing the factory that dominates the landscape is the fearsome Sean Rafferty (James Norton), an arch schemer whose currency is violence. He introduces himself by issuing a rallying call to the company workers, exhorting them to crush an anti-Guinness street protest then leading the way himself, gleefully swinging a hunk of hard factory iron.

 

Later on in episode one, when the Guinness cooperage is torched by malcontents, Rafferty walks into the blaze, impervious in a swishing long coat and with a clattering 21st-century rock soundtrack behind him, to sort it out. He is the steaming punk in a world where corruption outstrips the rule of law, where punches land with a merciless crunch, where chains clank, hessian chafes and pressure gauges are forever twitching into the red. The domineering patriarch of the Guinness dynasty, Benjamin, has just died, and none of his four adult children seem equipped to take over. This could be Rafferty’s moment.

 

 

Watch more than one episode of House of Guinness, however, and a realisation soon arrives: Rafferty may be an unstoppable force, but our focus slowly centres on the Guinness kids. This isn’t Peaky Blinders, the Irish prequel. It’s 19th-century Dublin’s answer to Succession. The big fella has died before it starts, but we still have three sons and a daughter whose lives have been ruined by the extreme blessings Dad’s evil genius has given them. As in Succession, or The Crown at its best, the show is alive to the fact that tragedy plus privilege still equals tragedy; it makes us feel the pain of the pampered, or at least be fascinated by it, even if we’re a step removed from it.

 

And what characters the Guinness quartet are, confidently drawn and wisely performed, powering a fine drama about people with flaws they can’t overcome, delusions of qualities they don’t possess, and weaknesses their foes will inevitably exploit. Arthur (Anthony Boyle) seems selfish enough to realise his dream of adding political power to his inherited financial might, but his superiority complex has made him impetuous and too quick to anger, and he is cursed by the times into which he has been born: his homosexuality is an open secret that could destroy him at any minute. A better bet for the business, then, might be little bro Edward (Louis Partridge), but his pragmatism masks an idealism that might not survive contact with the cold realities of commercialism.

 

Observing the filial power struggle is sister Anne, who is woefully overlooked by the family and slightly underserved by the drama, but who still provides House of Guinness with additional smarts and heart, thanks to a terrific turn by Emily Fairn, following up an unforgettable debut as lost soul Casey in The Responder. Then there is Benjamin Jr (Fionn O’Shea), who has succumbed to gambling and booze when we meet him – the only brother who has stopped pretending to be something he is not.

 

As the shouting, fighting and drawing-room tensions escalate, and as sex proves to be as much of a hindrance to clear thinking as money (the casting of Norton, pheromones fairly radiating from the screen, is a big help there), House of Guinness matures into a romp that you can hardly resist, especially when it makes such good use of its time and place. We are less than two decades on from the potato famine, and Ireland’s yearning for freedom is reaching breaking point: both are woven sensitively into the saga, making it an even richer study of the toxic rich – and making House of Guinness, for Steven Knight, a career peak.

 

 House of Guinness is on Netflix now

Desmond Guiness, Mariga Von Urach, Leixlip Castle and The Irish Georgian Society

Hon. Desmond Guinness (born 8 September 1931) is an Irish author on Georgian art and architecture and a conservationist.

He was the second son of the author and brewer Bryan Guinness, 2nd Baron Moyne and Diana Mitford. He was educated at Eton, Gordonstoun and Christ Church, Oxford.[1]
In 1958 he bought Leixlip Castle, Leixlip, County Kildare, Ireland, where he continues to live with his second wife, the former Penelope Cuthbertson, whom he married in 1984. As a member of the extended Guinness family he has a number of well-known relatives, such as Garech Browne. He has been Master of the North Kildare Harriers.

He and his first wife, Mariga (the former Princess Marie Gabrielle of Urach), founded the Irish Georgian Society in April 1958 to help to preserve Irish architecture of all periods. This was timely as the Irish planning laws were enacted only from 1963.
The IGS became involved in numerous projects and started publishing quarterly bulletins. Some early preservations or campaigns were at: Damer House (Tipperary), The Conolly Folly (Kildare), Mountjoy Square, Tailors' Hall and Hume Street (Dublin) and the Dromana Gateway (Waterford).
The IGS also held Georgian cricket matches played to the rules of 1744.
In 1967-79 the Guinnesses bought and started to preserve Castletown House, in Celbridge, Kildare, said to be the finest Palladian house in Ireland.
In more recent years he has founded a scholarship for students of architecture.
His conservation work has been recognised by many American and English cultural groups, and Europa Nostra. In 1980 he was made an honorary Doctor of Laws at Trinity College Dublin. In 2006 he was presented with a Europa Nostra award by the Queen of Spain. In 2010 he headed the Saint Patrick's Day parade in Seattle.


Married at Oxford in 1954 to Princess Henriette Marie-Gabrielle ("Mariga") von Urach, daughter of Prince Albrecht von Urach and a granddaughter of King Mindaugas II of Lithuania, by whom he had a son, Patrick Desmond Carl-Alexander, and a daughter, Marina: Through Patrick he is a grandfather of the fashion model Jasmine Guinness.
In 1984 he married Penelope Cuthbertson, a granddaughter of the artist Nico Wilhelm Jungmann.
He is the older half-brother (on his mother's side) of Max Mosley, former President of the FIA.



Le Style, C'set La Femme Meme
The Spectator
May 9, 1998
By Girouard, Mark

In the 1960s Mariga Guinness made Leixlip Castle an unforgettable place: a solid, four-towered mediaeval castle converted in the early 18th century with huge, thick-barred windows and spacious, simple rooms looking down to the Liffey; a massive front door that was never locked; and inside an inspired assembly of mainly Irish 18th-century furniture and pictures, put together and set off with a sense of color and occasion, a mixture of informality and showmanship, to make a setting in which it seemed that anything could happen and anyone might turn up.
One would turn up oneself, pull open the front door and wander into empty rooms with log fires smoldering, until people would, perhaps, begin to appear: millionaires, Irish professors, Anglo-Irish lordlings, pop stars, German princes, architects, priests, art historians, students, all revolving around Mariga, with her drawling voice and mischievous smile, and Desmond, with his charm and blazing blue eyes.
A party might develop or a picnic, or both or neither; intrigues and dramas would get under way, champagne might or might not flow, and the whole charade was given point by the crusade for Irish Georgian architecture, to save or rediscover which forays would be made from the castle all over Ireland. Here too anything might happen; mad owners would let off guns from cracked top-floor windows, a rumored masterpiece would turn out to be a hole in the ground, a detour up an unexpected avenue would lead to interiors rich with rococo plasterwork, a folly or a mausoleum would be disinterred from the ivy which smothered it in the middle of a wood.
One must be grateful to Carola Peck for patiently collecting memories of Mariga and assembling them as the basis of this book. It could have done with tougher editing - one gets too much of some voices and others are mysteriously absent, the illustrations are intriguing but grey, the achievements of the Irish Georgian Society are perhaps exaggerated and there is a rather too breathless atmosphere of `how wonderful it all was'; but it is, after all, a tribute, not a full-scale biography, and any flaws are offset by the vividness with which it succeeds in evoking Mariga: her voice, her mannerisms, her beauty, her dedication, her genius in mixing things and people, and the ultimate sadness of her life.
She was not given to personal memories or confidences. In a sympathetic introduction her son Patrick makes clear why, and explains much about her that was a revelation to me and, I suspect, to others who knew her. She was the daughter of an amiably bohemian German princeling, who was brought up with no money but a belief that he would inherit the principality of Monaco. Her grandfather was briefly King of Lithuania, the Empress Elisabeth of Austria was her great-aunt, her aunt was Queen of Belgium and her mother was half Scottish, half Norwegian, Girton-educated, from a solid, unaristocratic background.
Her father became a member of the Nazi party, even if a not especially committed one, and went out to Japan shortly before the war as a German government photographer. His wife decided that the Emperor was being misled into aggression by his generals, and stormed unannounced into the imperial palace to tell him so.
She was arrested and sedated by the security guards, removed with her screaming daughter, and returned in disgrace to England, where she had a breakdown followed by a disastrous lobotomy. She lived on until 1975 in an asylum. Mariga's father was in Germany during the war and she was brought up in Surrey, a lonely little girl and virtually an orphan, by a 70-yearold unmarried friend of her grandmother's. She had not realized how sick her mother was, and had dreams of a proper family life with both parents after the war. She went to see her mother, and told her she was her daughter; her mother said, `Impossible, my daughter is four years old.' She discovered indirectly that her father had remarried and had a second family; he had not told her so himself.
It was this girl, beautiful, gifted, affectionate, wounded, with grand connections but effectively no family, no home and almost no money, who appeared in Oxford in the 1950s and met and married Desmond Guinness. Her background and the stresses which it must have created explain much about her: her protective screen of affectation and vagueness, which could be part of her charm and could be exceedingly irritating; her basic stoicism; her drunkenness, which got worse, and could make her a great bore, which she certainly was not at other times; her kindness to old and lonely people; her mixture of Wittelsbach eccentricity and Scottish good sense; the frantic pace at which she lived. Leixlip and the Irish Georgian Society, which she and Desmond founded together, gave her a home, a purpose and an outlet for her creative genius. When her marriage broke up and she lost Leixlip and her connection with the Irish Georgians, her life lost its point and never successfully acquired a new one. The last 15 years, up to her death in 1989, were a sad story of gradual decline and increasing loneliness.
Seeing her on her occasional appearances in London in these last years could be a depressing experience. I prefer to think of her in one of the last times of her glory, not long after she first left Leixlip. Her friend Hugh O'Neill ran into a wild boar driving at night in a Belgian forest, and broke, as it seemed, every bone in his body.
Mariga went over to Belgium, flew him to London and installed him in a room full of delicacies and champagne, a telephone for business deals and a constant stream of friends. It was fun to visit him, and fun for him to be visited. Only Mariga could have transformed the depressions of hospital life and a long convalescence into a celebration and a carnival in such a stylish and practical way.



Desmond and Leixlip Castle


A 50-Year Battle to Save Old Ireland
Derek Speirs for The New York Times

By Christopher Hann

Nov. 26, 2008

https://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/27/garden/27irish.html

WHEN Desmond and Mariga Guinness first lived here in the 1950s, they were unlikely champions of Irish architecture. Mrs. Guinness, the daughter of a German prince, had grown up in Europe and Japan, with no real link to Ireland. And although Mr. Guinness had Irish roots going back more than two centuries, he had been raised and educated in England (Oxford, class of ‘54).
But he was a Guinness, descended from the 18th-century brewer who put the family name on the lips of stout drinkers the world over. His father, Bryan Guinness, Lord Moyne, kept a home in Ireland, and by the mid-’50s his mother, Diana, one of the famous Mitford sisters, was living in County Cork with her second husband. And Ireland’s long economic decline had made property far more affordable than in England, making it an attractive alternative for the young couple, who moved across the Irish Sea in 1956.
In the two years they spent searching for a home, driving through the countryside and making regular forays into Dublin from a house they rented in County Kildare, the Guinnesses became familiar with the country’s architecture — particularly its 18th-century buildings, from grand country homes to town houses filled with working-class flats — and found themselves increasingly bothered by its state of decay. And given that they did not have to work for a living (Mr. Guinness lived off family money), they were in a rare position, they realized, to do something about it.
In February 1958 they announced plans to re-establish the Irish Georgian Society, a group that had created a photographic record of Dublin’s best Georgian buildings earlier in the century; this new version, Mr. Guinness wrote in The Irish Times, would “fight for the protection of what is left of Georgian architecture in Ireland.” The following month they began restoring a building of their own, Leixlip Castle, a dilapidated 12th-century fortress on 182 acres west of Dublin, which would be their home and the group’s headquarters.
Now observing its 50th year with a series of celebrations and a lavishly illustrated book, the revived Irish Georgian Society has been credited with restoring dozens of architectural gems across Ireland, from a former union hall for Dublin tailors to the country’s oldest Palladian house. (The society’s early preservation efforts focused on Georgian Dublin, but in later years it expanded its mission to cover noteworthy buildings from any period.) Perhaps more impressively, the group has helped bring about a national change of heart regarding Irish architecture.
“We weren’t the only people concerned, but we had the time and the youth — 50 years ago — and not much to do,” said Mr. Guinness, now 77, as he reclined in the circular sitting room at Leixlip, beside one of the castle’s 20 fireplaces. He still lives here, now with his second wife, Penelope, whom he married three years after his divorce from Mariga in 1981. “You know,” he continued, “we were free. We didn’t have to go to the office every morning.”
Free or not, Mr. Guinness and his followers faced a tall order. Saving old buildings was hardly a priority in Ireland in 1958. The year before, more than 50,000 Irish citizens emigrated and 78,000 were unemployed. There were few, amid the grinding poverty, able to maintain a 200-year-old mansion. Many Irish people also reviled the lavish Georgian buildings for their association with the British occupation. “May the crows roost in its rafters,” one farmer is said to have remarked about the large house on his family’s land.
Meanwhile, the Irish government had neither the money nor much inclination to support preservation. Some officials openly assailed the Irish Georgian Society as elitist, a charge that endures to a lesser degree today. In 1966 the Lord Mayor of Dublin dismissed the society’s efforts, saying ordinary citizens had “little sympathy with the sentimental nonsense of persons who had never experienced bad housing conditions.”
Mr. Guinness was equally dismissive in return. “We were confronting a philistine state,” he said, a point that was driven home to him one day in 1957 when he saw workers systematically dismantling a pair of 18th-century houses on Kildare Place in Dublin. The city, which owned the houses, planned to demolish them in favor of new construction.
“People on the roof slinging slates down from perfectly good, beautiful buildings, with red-brick facades and good interiors,” recalled Mr. Guinness, indignation still evident in his voice. “And now they’d be worth millions.”
Mr. and Mrs. Guinness envisioned their group as a guardian of the nation’s architectural heritage, never mind that neither had formal training in architecture, Irish or otherwise. With 16 volunteers — Trinity College professors and students, friends who owned country houses and some whom Mr. Guinness called “ordinary civilized people” — they set out to spread their preservation ethos.
“They did start a quest, a sort of mission, when Irish 18th-century buildings were completely unfashionable,” said Desmond FitzGerald, the Knight of Glin, an early convert to the Guinness cause and, since 1991, president of the Irish Georgian Society.
The Guinnesses led members of the society on regular scouting missions to view buildings at risk. They lobbied local and national authorities, reminding policy makers that Irish craftsmen had constructed these buildings. They held cricket matches and galas and lectures to raise money, and Mr. Guinness, and later Mr. FitzGerald, began traveling to the United States to lecture on Irish architecture and design.
Two projects in particular helped galvanize public support for the society’s work. The first was Mountjoy Square, a cluster of town houses in north-central Dublin that dated to 1791. By the early 1960s, many of them had been abandoned, and a developer was buying them up with plans to replace them with a large office development. In 1964, the Guinnesses intervened, buying a single decrepit property, 50 Mountjoy Square, that stood in the middle of the proposed construction. The standoff got plenty of attention in the Irish press, and two years later a court hearing resulted in the developer’s backing out of the project.
The following year Mr. Guinness wielded his checkbook again, buying what many considered the most important house in Ireland for $259,000. The house, Castletown, in County Kildare, was the country’s largest Palladian house and the only one designed by the Italian architect Alessandro Galilei. It was built starting in the 1720s for William Conolly, the speaker of the Irish House of Commons, and had been in the Conolly family for nearly 250 years.
But by 1967 Castletown had been abandoned for two years. A housing development had recently sprouted next door, and an auction of its possessions, accumulated over two centuries, had left it virtually empty. Preservationists worried that it could succumb to the whims of a short-sighted developer. To buy it, Mr. Guinness borrowed against a trust he would come into in a few years.
Led by the Guinnesses — who, for aristocrats, were unabashedly bohemian and did not shy from taking a paintbrush in hand or climbing a ladder to remove moldy wallpaper — an army of volunteers descended on Castletown. Donors supplied period furnishings to fill its vast rooms, and that summer, Castletown opened its doors for visitors. Jacqueline Kennedy made a surprise visit and was given a well-publicized tour. Today, Castletown is owned by the Irish government and remains open to the public.
“When you think that that house was nearly lost to dereliction,” Mr. FitzGerald said.
Mr. FitzGerald, now 71, studied art history at Harvard and has written about Irish art, furniture and architecture. He also knows a few things about restoring old houses. Glin Castle, his home in County Limerick, has been in his family for 700 years. He inherited it when he was just 12, after the death of his father in 1949. At that point, according to Mr. FitzGerald, the family had no money and the house was in disrepair. His stepfather, a Canadian businessman, saved it, he said.
Today Mr. FitzGerald and his wife, Olda, live in a wing of Glin Castle, which they operate as a 15-room hotel. (They have a second home in Dublin.) His own experience, he believes, underscores the importance of preservation to Ireland. “I think we need the historic houses if we’re going to set ourselves up in the grand shop of tourism that the rest of Europe takes part in,” he said.
Under his leadership, the Irish Georgian Society operates on an annual budget of less than $1 million, raised from private donors. Based in Dublin, it keeps an office on Manhattan’s Upper East Side; 600 of its roughly 3,000 members live in the United States and provide two-thirds of its funding.
The group now publishes an annual scholarly journal, gives scholarships to Irish students of architecture and preservation, conducts trips abroad to historic sites and funds grants for restoration projects, like the recent repair of a conical roof at the 15th-century Barmeath Castle in County Louth.
This year the society organized a series of fund-raising events for its golden anniversary, to pay for restoring the “eating parlor” at Headfort, an 18th-century estate in County Meath, in its original colors — what Mr. FitzGerald called “a very intricate and complicated paint job.” The parlor, a high-ceilinged room with ornate plasterwork, is part of a suite of six rooms designed in the neoclassical style by the renowned Scottish architect Robert Adam. They are the only rooms he designed in Ireland that are known to exist.
LEIXLIP CASTLE has its own place in Irish Georgian Society lore. For many years it served as the organization’s de facto clubhouse, the scene of picnics and parties and a magnet for glitterati. (Mr. Guinness remembers Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull visiting in the 1960s and walking off into the grass just as lunch was being served. “I suppose they got bored with our conversation,” he said.)
Over the years, the Guinnesses have outfitted their home with objects largely reaped from native soil. The library’s gilt mirror, which Mr. Guinness bought at the Castletown auction in 1966, was made by John and Francis Booker, premiere mirror makers of mid-18th century Dublin. Mr. Guinness bought the dining room sideboard at a 1973 auction at nearby Malahide Castle. The 1740s Kilkenny marble chimneypiece in the front hall came from Ardgillan Castle in County Dublin. Mr. Guinness acquired it around 1960 by swapping the Victorian fireplace that had been in the front hall.
“I try to collect Irish furniture and pictures,” Mr. Guinness said. “And you used to be able to buy it very cheaply. Now people have discovered it.”
He has only himself to blame. Mr. Guinness, who has written extensively about Irish architecture and design, received an award in 2006 from Queen Sofia of Spain on behalf of Europa Nostra, a pan-European cultural heritage group, which cited his “fifty years of unrelenting voluntary efforts” on behalf of Ireland’s architectural heritage. The following month the Irish government provided about $645,000 in start-up funds for the Irish Heritage Trust, an independent charity designed to take ownership of historic properties.
Kevin Baird, the executive director, said the trust is just the sort of government-sanctioned body for which the Irish Georgian Society had long lobbied. “The Georgians deserve huge praise,” Mr. Baird said. “They were swimming against the tide for so long, and they were instrumental in turning that tide.”
That the tide had truly turned became evident last month, when the society published a book by Robert O’Byrne, an Irish journalist, documenting its history. The foreword, which described the society as “a fine example of the extraordinary lasting effect that a small but committed organisation can have,” was written by Mary McAleese, the president of Ireland.


Leixlip Castle

The Hon. Desmond Guinness (1970) Whicker's World

SEE ALSO:

“Desmond Guiness, Mariga Von Urach, Leixlip Castle and The Irish Georgian Society”

http://tweedlandthegentlemansclub.blogspot.com/2011/05/desmond-guiness-mariga-von-urach.html

The Aristocracy - Survival of the Fittest: 1970-1997 3rd part

The Aristocracy - Survival of the Fittest: 1970-1997 2nd part

The Aristocracy - Survival of the Fittest: 1970-1997 1st part

The £30 Million Royal Scandal: Prince Andrew's Controversial Lodge Exposed

A Gentleman's London Episode 24: Steven Hitchcock

The Aristocracy - Survival of the Fittest: 1970-1997 4th part

Bankruptcy forces baronet out of family seat. Sir Charles Both he and Lady Wolseley, his American wife, were declared bankrupt after a venture in the 1990s to turn the estate's gardens into a tourist attraction collapsed. Aristocracy - Survival of the Fittest: 1970-1997 4th part (+afspeell...

The Aristocracy series originally aired on the BBC. Each episode explores a period in the history of Britain's noble classes. Focusing on the decline of this class in the modern world, each tape offers a glimpse into a world only the privileged are intimately familiar with. In this particular episode, viewers explore a golden age for England's aristocracy. Around the turn of the century, Britain's aristocracy owned 80 percent of the land and dominated Parliament. The program features interviews with current dukes and duchesses, as well as with leading historians. ~ Rob Ferrier, Rovi
BBC:
The Duchess of Devonshire, Sir Charles Wolseley, the Marquess of Anglesey and others describe their ancestors' lifestyles and finances.

Sir Charles and his wife, Lady Wolseley, went bankrupt after a disastrous attempt to turn the huge estate into a tourist attraction

Bankruptcy forces baronet out of family seat

By Nick Britten
12:01AM GMT 03 Jan 2008 /http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1574392/Bankruptcy-forces-baronet-out-of-family-seat.html

A baronet and his wife must move out of the house that has been their family's ancestral home for more than 1,000 years after a disastrous business venture left them bankrupt.
King Edgar gave the 1,490-acre estate near Rugeley, Staffs, to the Wolseley family in 975AD as a reward for ridding the area of wolves. But Sir Charles Wolseley, the 11th baronet, failed to keep the wolf from the door.
Both he and Lady Wolseley, his American wife, were declared bankrupt after a venture in the 1990s to turn the estate's gardens into a tourist attraction collapsed.
As parts of the land were sold off to repay their debts they were allowed to keep Park House, their 34-room Georgian home, but this has now been sold by the Royal Bank of Scotland. Lady Wolseley, 64, said: "It is a very big wrench and moving is always traumatic even if you want to go.
"It is very upsetting really to leave, when it's happened after a thousand years, on your watch. You feel as though you are caretakers and the house is to be passed on."
She added: "It has been a privilege to live here — we love it and we have enjoyed it."
Sir Charles, a qualified chartered surveyor, inherited the estate in 1954. He planned to open the 45-acre landscaped gardens to visitors in the late 1980s but Wolseley Garden Park, which cost £1.73 million and eventually opened in 1990, only earned £30,000 in its first year and closed soon afterwards.
At one stage Sir Charles's debts reached an estimated £4.6 million. He was made bankrupt in 1996 with debts of £2.5 million, which Sir Charles blamed on the recession and high interest rates. Afterwards, he was forced to claim benefits in order to make ends meet.
The bank sold the estate, including hundreds of acres of woodland that now form the headquarters of the Staffordshire Wildlife Trust. Park House was built for the Wolseleys in 1793. It has been sold by the bank to another family for an undisclosed sum.
Lady Wolseley said: "It is terribly sad that the Garden Park didn't come to fruition. But it was always going to be a problem because the bank withdrew funding before it was completed, so it didn't have much chance."
Sir Charles said that they would be moving into nearby rented accommodation owned by a friend, but they were being forced to leave behind several valuable pieces of art.
He said: "There are some things we are taking, such as rare portraits of the family line dating back to the reign of James I, but other things are simply too big. We've been hanging on as best we could but the bank finally sold the house. It's very sad."
Park House is the family's last remaining physical link with the estate, although the family motto, "homo homini lupus" — man is as a wolf to his fellow man — will provide a timeless reminder.

REMEMBERING: The Aristocracy Business (1968) Whicker's World /

Del Boy Shows Off His Shooting Skills | Only Fools and Horses

Revisiting "Royal Flush" a very special from "Only Fools and Horses"

Only Fools and Horses is a BAFTA winning British television sitcom, created and written by John Sullivan, and made and broadcast by the BBC. Seven series were originally broadcast on BBC One in the United Kingdom between 1981 and 1991, with sporadic Christmas specials until 2003. Episodes are regularly repeated on GOLD.

Set in Peckham in south London, it stars David Jason as ambitious market trader Derek "Del Boy" Trotter, Nicholas Lyndhurst as his younger brother Rodney, and Lennard Pearce as their ageing grandfather (later replaced by Buster Merryfield as their Uncle Albert). Backed by a strong supporting cast, the series chronicles their highs and lows in life, in particular their attempts to get rich.


A Royal Flush
Transmitted: 25.12.1986
Duration: 75 minutes
Viewing Figures: 18.8 million


Rodney meets Vicky, a seemingly impoverished artist who it transpires is the daughter of the Duke of Maylebury.

Having obtained a pair of tickets to the sold-out production of Carmen, Rodders seems to have deeply impressed Vicky. She is less taken by the presence of Del and his peroxide blonde dolly bird. Especially when they open the crisps.

Vicky then invites Rodney to a party at the Duke’s country home, and it seems romance may be on the cards. Then Del Boy turns up, hits the vino-plonko and ruins everything for his little brother.





"Del Boy"is trying to make a "hit" sale at the market using his known Cockney rhetoric's ...


In the meanwhile his brother Rodney is on the watch ... for the police ...


Bored ... suddenly he sees a nice looking girl on the other side of the market ...


She smiles back ... and Rodney is very suprised ...


Rodney approaches her ... and they start talking


Immediately we realise that she uses an "U" speech ...or URP pronunciation
This brings them to colourful adventures ...
I let you with the images ... Try to "decode" what happens ...

As Del Boy sells cutlery to the local market crowd, Rodney spots an attractive woman, and abandons his lookout position to talk to her. At Sid's cafe, she introduces herself as Vicky. Upon further reading, Rodney discovers that she is Lady Victoria Marsham Hales of Covington House, Berkshire, the daughter of the Duke of Maylebury, a second cousin of the Queen and explains that her mother died in a skiing accident. Sensing a chance to make the Trotter family millionaires, Del decides to assist Rodney's blossoming friendship with Lady Victoria, such as by acquiring tickets for the opera Carmen.

On the night of the opera, Rodney and Victoria arrive, only to see that Del has also shown up, along with June Snell (last seen in "Happy Returns"), a former girlfriend of Del and mother of one of Rodney's ex-girlfriends. Del and June ruin the night by noisily eating snacks, talking during the performance, and arguing with other members of the audience. Nonetheless, Victoria invites Rodney to stay at Covington House for the weekend. Wanting Rodney to make a good impression, Del insists that he dresses as a country gentleman in a tweed suit. Already nervous during the weekend in Berkshire, Rodney is horrified when Del arrives with a reluctant Albert in the Reliant Regal, claiming to have turned up to deliver Rodney's evening suit that he "forgot" (although Rodney knows that he packed it and Del removed it so he had an excuse to turn up). As Rodney seethes with anger, Del introduces himself to Victoria's father Henry and invites himself to that evening's dinner having coincidentally brought his own evening suit. Del takes part in their clay pigeon shoot using a pump-action shotgun borrowed from Iggy Iggins, a local bank robber, and quickly begins to irritate Henry.

At dinner, Del gets drunk and boorish and starts insulting the guests with lewd comments, touting a marriage between Rodney and Victoria, not shutting up about the artist Leonardo Da Vinci and embarrassing Rodney by revealing his conviction for possession of cannabis. Del finally pushes the Duke over the edge by telling a skiing joke (despite knowing that's how Victoria's mother died). In a fury, the Duke demands Del meets him outside. As the two leave, Victoria asks Rodney if he's still staying overnight. He regretfully declines and decides to go home, which Victoria allows. Outside the Duke orders that Del, Rodney and Albert are to leave his premises immediately. Del tells the Duke that Rodney may need to be paid off to leave Victoria alone.

Back at the flat, a furious Rodney relates to a very hung over Del how he has always ruined his opportunities to make a success of his life by interfering, and injures his hand punching a vent cover out of anger. After Rodney reveals that he refused the offer of a £1000 pay-off from the Duke to stop seeing Vicky (angering Del, who had arranged the offer), Del says that had Rodney refused to stop seeing Victoria, he would probably have been assassinated by the Special Branch because of his conviction for marijuana use. Del ostensibly apologises to Rodney and asks him to shake his hand, but this turns out to be a ploy for Del to inflict punishment on Rodney for refusing the £1000 by squeezing his bad hand.