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

[Music] so [Music] so [Music] the second son of a lord with an unusually passionate life the honourable desmond guinness turning his back on brewing and banking and passionately breathing life into deserted georgian buildings enticing indifferent irish to visit stately homes they darkly suspect might be english long gallery at castletown was the pivot of the house in the 18th century they used it for all kinds of things theatricals uh dancing playing cards gossip and so on the murals were painted in the 1770s by a little hunchback dwarf a pupil of reynolds an irishman called riley who came over to decorate the this room and painted one other room in the house and actually died in the house there are people who just won't step through the doors of a great house you know what i mean and we have to break this whole thing down that's why we have to have terribly tactful welcoming people in the house because in england if you get rather a sort of abrupt woman at the front door of a country house you just think oh well that's not a place i'm going to again in a hurry what i mean but in ireland if you're not terribly nice to them when they come a whole thousand years of history come boiling up in their minds you know and it starts putting them off the whole cause you know the whole cause for preserving georgian island which is our cause is this your first visit to castletown well it is a marvelous house i must say yes and um if you could just gather a bit on the steps i'll say a word or two about it the house was built in 1722 and it has been the prototype for many irish country houses this is the great staircase of castletown as you see the banisters are actually brass which is quite unusual the man in the village was paid 30 shillings a year for polishing them and it incorporates family portraits in the plaster it's probably the only example of a rokako plaster staircase instant guided tours by the founder and president of the irish georgian society which exists mainly on hope and voluntary labor guinness was first good for the society's present headquarters castletown saved from speculators and vandals three years ago for 93 000 pounds people used to drive out from dublin take the lead off through throw it down drive away in the car you know we told the police in the village about it and they said as i think we can do the gates are locked the light fittings were smashed door handles stolen it was empty completely empty for one year we bought it um from the speculator been restoring it ever since and we opened it to the public after only three months of course it was in a bad state but we had to get the income from the first year's tourist traffic and jackie kennedy was one of our first visitors that helped the whole of dublin came out to see her it is perhaps the most important uh house in ireland yes it's the prototype for all the sort of winged houses like raspberry and carton and so on it's just that much earlier than they are and they're all inspired by it leinster house in dublin is inspired by it and the white house in washington is inspired by leinster house so in a sense castletown is the grandfather of the white house the cold passion of desmond guinness give a nervous energy by his wife marika who was a princess of wurttemberg a serene highness serene she's not faye and inconsequential driven by passionate impatience and adoration of the 18th century she almost alone is rescuing mount joy square from decay and developers 72 fashionable homes laid out in the late 1700s for professional people but now a dismal slum left behind when commerce and fashion moved south six years ago a developer bought 23 of these almost derelict houses for about 500 pounds each to pull down and rebuild his offices after a planning inquiry 20 were offered to the society for 68 000 pounds which somehow the guinness is raised and so saved a significant part of dublin's townscape today much of mount joy's an okc tenement rookery crammed with unwilling tenants placed here by the corporation indifferent to gracious staircases to stapleton's fine fireplaces and plaster work and the moons for them are now in the national gallery of dublin are quite recognizable these are beautiful what has happened to the the architraves are the tops of the doors i suspect some antique dealers borrowed them stolen but i'm sure moles could be copied from similar overdoses and restored desmond marie guinness are i suppose in some ways rather unique figures in irish society unique in several ways the guinness family of course through the great brewery is very intimately connected with the irish life the jolly side of it as well as the practical business side of it for the last uh oh oh well over a hundred years professor kevin nolan chairman of the dublin civic group what do you think professor the majority of irish people think about having their interests protected by a serene highness by a german princess and by a very anglicized irish the extraordinary thing is that desmond guinness and i think murica fit in there are of course some people have reservations some will think them rather strange and not quite fitting into the neat suburban image that dublin is trying to create for itself in some ways about as dull as you'll find any suburbs anywhere in the world in some ways some people may find that aspect a little perhaps different to what they're accustomed to but i think it's very good for us which one of you led the other into this enthusiasm you're talking to us surprisingly i'm sorry didn't you write for paper saying if there isn't a society irish george inserted should we start one that was one of the things that started yes and the destruction blower dominic's tweet too yes that was another and then what happened i mean was there a sort of uh uh conflagration or did you uh beat a lonely part we started we we just wrote to everybody we knew and there was a hundred people summoned everyone we could think of and they came and we got 16 members on the first day right now the society has grown to 5 000 members yes spread all over the world we've got members in new zealand australia america fuego we've got one yes every time there's an earthquake we think she must have died but she still is that i do hope so now how is this peculiarly demanding way of life which you which you've decided for yourselves how has this affected your married life but of course we um have to have an awful lot of people in the house that we wouldn't normally have such as you but i think it's exciting and exhilarating we do have perhaps too many americans coming over we do have the old bus tours and they're not a tour show whether they're in venice or vienna it seems to me that you are either uh remarkably vague or your vagueness hides a formidable sense of double-entry bookkeeping he has a backbone of steel a batman of steel and what mini yes yes what should fix inside yeah no i've got a sort of waste paper basket mind several ways poker baskets that's all those compartments but i think it's mad as the way you launch yourself upon unsuspecting people and drive them into doing things um persuade them i think in the nicest way they find themselves i'm sure they find themselves publishing the banisters i think they do this is very true because so many people can't get money and they can perhaps give time and some people really like sort of polishing a beautiful piece of furniture lonely hearts she's very good my wife's very good at getting lonely hearts together she put two lonely hearts one man one woman each polishing the handle of a door one on one side of the door one on the other side finally of course the door opened it was very romantic one of the best was an airline pilot who was just had a fortnight holiday didn't know what to do it cut down all the brambles how do you divide the responsibilities between you and the society you look after castletown i look after castletown i tend to look after donald ray longfield the country houses more and my wife's been doing the whole thing single-handed in multi-square i haven't helped at all on it except when he gets to america and i have to do all of everything everything and of course as all husbands and wives disagree about certain things everything one does it's undone when he comes back everything he does is undone when he comes back you rush into castletown and change things that's it with some people it's like breaking through a sound barrier to see castletown for the first time and when they see it they love it but we don't equally want it to be just a dead house museum we want to bring it to life i mean a house like that should really have a family living in it and and enjoying it but if it can't be brought to life in that way which it obviously can't um if we lived in it for example um we couldn't ask other people to contribute towards its restoration obviously and we've neither of us ever spent a night there i'll help you and because after a year of negotiation with the dublin customs i finally got of bed which was clearly late 18th century huge very pretty bed but it had a modern mattress they wouldn't believe it was an antique finally we got it here i was so pleased after all this i said the first thing i do is sleep in it and that was my only experience of life at castle town because there was no electricity in that part of the house so i ruined somebody's bedside table which they lent us by putting a candle on it all over it but never mind it was a wonderful feeling waking up in this great empty house in the morning this huge dusty bed from such a resting place she could observe what's been called the one piece of real architecture in all ireland built 140 feet high in 1739 but later struck by lightning in that precarious state this odd obelisk was bought by an american benefactors and presented to the georgian society well there's a big house down there you can just see the light coming across it now yeah it's rather beautiful and this was built of course to close the vista at the back it was an eye-catcher and um it was built to give employment by old mrs connolly of castletown the widow of speaker connolly in 1740 after the very severe winter of 1739 which killed so many people when people skated up the thames for a bet and this kind of thing um her sister considered her very extravagant for doing so and writes at the time my sister connolly is building an obliques to answer avisto at the bake of castletown house it will cost her three or four hundred pounds at least and i believe more i don't know how she can die so much and live as she does well it's costing you more than three or four hundred pounds to restore it how much in fact uh we will have spent six thousand pounds on it by the end of stage three of the restoration which is now in progress next year we're hoping to do a music festival and we have plans for a barbecue here with a steel band we did have one here once to raise money for obelisk we had a steel band out here and it was really very beautiful we asked people to pay 10 shillings and nobody came so we went down to the main road and i sent my wife down she signaled a whole lot of bicyclists and they were doing a bicycle race around island they thought it was one of the stops in the bicycle race and they were totally angry when they found they were only being told to come and spend 10 shillings listening to a steel band and the man in the farm next door was was dying at the time the priest came by on the motor bicycle to give him the last actions or whatever it is and so he must have had as he went up to heaven he must have had this strange steel band playing in the commonly probably she'd never heard before i'm sure in his life [Music] what made you feel that you needed a hearse i just admired it um in use one day in limerick this wonderful funeral there was this hearse there was a marvelous coachman and a coat that had gone green with age that it was no more black and then it was followed by about three black rooms with very black coated people driving them and black horses and it was so beautiful and dignified and magnificent i wonder what would happen to the hearse if people stopped having that sort of humor there having wished for so long suddenly appeared very foggy morning and i saw this beautiful rose stars rather hidden by fog outside my front door and somebody remembered that i wanted it and though it was for sale so we bought it how much i think it is very expensive actually it cost us 40 pounds which to us for their home they bought lee slip an improbable norman castle on the liffey in carrying your georgian cross you also carry quite a financial burden yes um because it's totally difficult to raise enough money really to do anything i mean to have enough secretaries to make our society really efficient and we have two full-time secretaries but it's not enough and we rely on volunteer students to volunteer anybody really to come and help us to restore to dust to put things into envelopes you have no idea what it means um putting four or five variegated bits of paper into five and a half thousand envelopes you know i mean we can't pay for this so therefore we have to rely on volunteers to come help us and we're not as efficient as we could be if we could pay for a sort of organized staff in dublin castletown and leastly you were telling me the other day that since so much of your money goes and into the society uh you have to go around with holes in your shoes i didn't have to but um you choose to well not quite but i can always think of another purpose for money than oneself i'd rather spend it on another gallon of whitewash for sun ceiling they're not a pair of shoes or a hairdresser anything like that now if you suddenly got a legacy from some texas multi-millionaire what would you do with it [Music] repair your shoes no i wouldn't i didn't think i'd arrange for um the preservation of 18th century ireland in all its forms if possible and what would that end up um too much for the texas millionaire i think richardson ledger's not from texas and definitely not a millionaire he's from orange county california but at the moment lives in this very irish mansion romantic and crumbling donna rail untouched for 40 years it's about the only the last really important house in this part of cork and it must be saved um alan bowen's court went about five years ago elizabeth bowen's house you know the writer yeah and she was just near here and we can't let donald go it's got one of the most dramatic parks he's got a 120 acres of deer park and fish ponds and it can be saved but it's a very sad and crowned right now it has it stands as cyril connolly put it so beautifully referring to irish country houses in its arrogant disrepair well now why was the georgian society so slow about getting off the mark in that case i mean why why haven't you been concerned about it before it reached such arrogant disrepair well um it wouldn't exactly be very tactful for me to go up to somebody and say take a tin of paint and go and paint your windows you wouldn't like that if i said that to you much would you no but if if you were going to pay for the paint and send someone to do it for me i'd be thrilled yes but one can't really in fact do it like that but when dick came on the scene with his young and energetic family from the united states prepared to take the place over and make a go of it then we saw that you know there was something that we really could help and get our grips onto and so the first thing we did was issue an appeal and appeal to our membership yes and they came down here with their sleeping bags to do some work yes now you're the claimant to the title yes how does that happen well i'm the uh only living here have you always known that this title was was awaiting you or have you always hoped it was awaiting you i have always known since i've been a small fella so you'll be lord donna real donna real maybe maybe you were a truck driver yes when you left your truck in california you came over here uh as pretender to the title what were you hoping would happen well i was hoping that we could um push the title through and preserve the house and open it to the public and save all the uh the old family documents and put them on display for all the younger generations to come but unfortunately the trustees have flogged them all now the trustees uh seem to feel that uh that you weren't entitled to this so they they sold them from under you yes they regard you as a sort of squatter right more or less as a squatter yes some ledger claimed the donnarell title five years ago he's credited in burke's peerage but the lord chancellors demanded further evidence from this family whose forebears founded the classic horse race there's also the dispute with the trustees over the contents of the house so these ledgers squatting upon their last piece of furniture consider leaving this mournful hulk and returning to california and those trucks we were ready to open the house to the public it was the american ambassador here to do the official opening and one day away from the opening i received an injunction that the house is unsafe to let anybody in but the immediate family the trustees were afraid the trustees place was open they would be uh they would be out then i mean we'd have too big of a foothold that's right what happened to the furniture oh the furniture well it uh it's gone who took it uh the dealer the dealers in dublin so bought it and hauled it all off so you're now just sitting on the floor more sitting more or less than on the floor when the furniture was being removed they had i think it was two four four policemen plus a local sergeant and at night there was two policemen on duty so i was watched for about seven days 24 hours a day but um when we move out they're going to be back to clean the house out and i'm sure when they mean clean they mean clean dublin a spacious capital ventilated by wide streets decorated by demure terraces shows little civic imagination in a few years the sad beauty of the 18th and 19th centuries will have slipped away the irish with their subconscious vision of elegant georgian architecture as a remnant of the british raj with their hatred of cities the irish live on the tattered fringe of europe in a land full of evening sadness beyond caring they're indifferent to their heritage despite those determined guinnesses i think it's very important for city to have every sort of person living next door to each other what about the reaction of the people who live next door to you i see you've had a number of your windows smashed here there's a little boys wouldn't you smash them if you were small i'm sort of thinking of having a face designed on one of the windows who knows that you can hit it but at least one window pane will be smashed not all now the people who've been put into the square how do they regard you do they think you're a collection of uh fanatics or cranks like people that have been put into the square by which i suppose you mean the people in the tenements are longing to move they would like to move to sites near the square obviously because they're used to schools and churches in this area um it's up to the corporation to move and what do they think about you i don't know i i shall but you must have some idea i don't know i think all that all they want is to get out of these houses because however beautiful they are they haven't been properly converted into tournament flats [Music] what do you think about the georgian society and what mrs guinness is doing or trying to do well i'll tell you something i don't mind it's immaterial to me that really who gets well and good if the if the georgie insider gets it that's all right as long as we get out with them we don't mind do you understand like it's not that we we're not going on saying we don't want them for together anything now do you understand if we get out well then we don't mind well how are you living you've got what when two one room dead they had the four and one room and no time facilities and um they're in an appalling condition the whole house from top to bottom is in an appalling condition the backyard is full of lots of people through the house actually you see the terrible regulations at the moment are that you have to have five children before you're entitled to be more hopefully five children for to be entitled the difference between you and your neighbours is that you moved in here and want to people they want to go away exactly and the other thing is you've got a house to yourself and they're living thought or wrong right i think the object of the exercise is to present is to preserve mount joy square not to develop for a prophecy really i i think we are beginning to appreciate that i feel now that you know we're sort of we suddenly realize that we've got something remember we've been told by mrs guinness and by people like this has given us that you know this is beautiful let's preserve well yeah i agree don't you think it's odd that you need a ginger group like like mr mrs guinness to do this for you well i don't know i think i'm sure somebody else would have done it somehow you need a catalyst well i do think so yeah we need imagination and unfortunately dublin every minute of the day dublin has been ruined [Music] what is this what is there in the irish character that stops them appreciating the filter what would you say well tell us well i think this is absolutely right i agree with you entirely i think this place has a lack of education over a long time we're only beginning to catch up and it takes more than one generation to achieve for some people down to fairly recent times and put it that way uh the idea of george and architecture uh being something to be treasured by all was perhaps a little alien but and consequently there was a perhaps i could put it this way in modern terms a sales blockage on the word georgian now what is the position of the church in this they're a very hard-headed bunch they're interested in figures rather than in beauty but they happen to own the most historic and beautiful buildings in ireland all of them of course are empty because the protestants left i think we're about eight percent of the population of the whole country so there you have this tragic thing that the hideous catholic church is chock-a-block five times on a sunday morning and um the protestant one is completely empty except for about three old ladies sitting the front row but there are terrible stick in the muds we're at the moment trying to save a church calls and catherine's in dublin it's being given by the protestants to the dublin corporation we have a very good offer from somebody wants to turn it into a cultural center the church in approval the corporation are in approval but the church is stuck between the two bodies and in the meantime it stands there for year after year they won't even allow us up on the roof to sweep it just to keep the water out and you know we're just bogged down with making applications to these official bodies we will never get a move on extraordinary thing is that absolutely nobody is interested in it i mean in england every dove cut by robert adams has been written up about 20 times in country life everything is documented there are museums stuffed full of architectural drawings and everything and in nash follows everything is written down and written up and you might as well burn the lot in england but in ireland the people who are really interested in irish architecture i mean you could count them on the fingers of one hand and they all loathe each other i think as though you spend you must spend a lot of your time now being charming to tiresome people yes but i have a sort of fixed smile i put on it just you know it gets me through the evening yes yes but you need i mean you need a lot of patience uh an excessive pain to deal with god you do yes it's quite true well then how do you cope i mean don't you get irritated i get absolutely mad sometimes i but i always find myself saying the opposite of what i think you know just as i'm going to say for god's sake get out of my life i'm going to slam you in the face i say how lovely how fascinating [Music] [Applause] so you

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Length: 27min 15sec (1635 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 08 2021