Telling Tales by Penny Perrick

Author:Penny Perrick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Lilliput Press
Published: 2017-11-20T18:43:49+00:00

17. Complicated Chronicles

Bill and Anita decided, after all, to take over Glaslough. In January 1954 Anita wrote to Shane: ‘Bill is trying to work out a method whereby he can run this farm [Oranmore] and at the same time spend May 1 to September 1 at Glaslough – THE important farming months.’ She and Bill wanted to set up a syndicate to organize pheasant raising and shooting, to plant Scots pines and Sitkas and to reduce ‘the immense estate loss [that] exists despite the fact that Reynolds [the farm manager] has reduced the farm loss by £1000. I think it lies in the actual layout of the desmesne – roads, walls, rates.’ The usual problems relating to badly managed estates in the mid twentieth century.

Anita’s life of Leonard Jerome was going to be published, with Winston’s approval, in both the UK and the USA. The ructions surrounding Shane’s earlier attempt – ‘that ill-fated life of Leonard Jerome which you induced me to take out of print’, as Shane accused Winston in a letter on 14 March 1954, marked ‘Very confidential’ – went on. Winston seemed to think that Shane had sold some papers relating to the enterprise but not belonging to him to a dealer called Jimmy Dunn. Shane had form in spiriting away other people’s books and papers. From 1928 until 1952, he had worked as an agent for A.S.W Rosenbach (1876–1952), the famous Philadelphia book dealer. During that time the owners of at least one Big House kept an eye on Shane whenever he visited, aware that he might make off with a book or two. Shane admitted to his cousin that he had sold some manuscripts to Jimmy Dunn for £500 because the Leonard Jerome project had left him in debt, but offered to give Winston everything at Glaslough that related to Winston’s mother, Jennie – ‘my only wish is that these papers should reach your archives.’

However, when Winston’s son Randolph came to Glaslough to retrieve his grandmother’s papers, they weren’t there. Shane wrote to Winston: ‘I remember now that most of the papers are in banks and perfectly safe’ but didn’t say which banks. To prove his integrity, he continued:

I might add that I returned to the late King [George VI] three tin boxes of my mother’s letters from the late Duke of Connaught which the Princesses believed contained intimate secrets of the Royal Family. H M asked for them and Seymour took them to Buckingham Palace and gave them to the King.

These thousand or so letters, written by the Duke over four decades, are held in the Royal Archives at Windsor and, although they were supposed to remain under seal only until 1993, access to them is denied. Leonie’s letters to ‘Pat’, as she called the Duke, were destroyed after his death.

Anita had resigned herself to an uneventful and frustrating life spent in two icy castles but in 1954 everything changed. ‘My life has become so interesting that I simply must recommence a diary.’ She

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