Wednesday 4th August: Kilgraney House & Herb Gardens with Aine McAteer

History of Duckett's Grove

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Duckett’s Grove, the 18th, 19th and early 20th century home of the Duckett family, was formerly at the centre of a 12,000 acre estate that has dominated the Carlow landscape for over 300 years. In September 2005 during Heritage Week, Carlow County Council acquired Duckett’s Grove and commenced the restoration of two inter-connecting walled gardens.

Duckett of Ducketts Grove

In June 1939, Irish gentry families, with many of their sons serving officers in the British army, were acutely aware of the war clouds gathering over Europe. For two weeks that month dinner-table talk in grand houses centred not on Hitler’s aggression and the threat of all-out war, but on a sensational court case being heard in Dublin. The High Court action involved the will of Mrs Maria Georgina Duckett, whose estate at the time of her death in 1937 was valued at £97,735 – in today’s values about £2-million. Her only daughter had been disinherited with what was known in such wills as “the angry shilling”. The beneficiaries of the vast fortune were British based Protestant charities, to be nominated by her executors. Revelations during the hearing, before a jury, of the sometimes violent relationship between mother and daughter shocked, not just family friends in County Carlow, but the society circle in Dublin where both enjoyed the status of leading socialites. Indeed the names of Maria Duckett and Olive Thompson were always on the guest lists that mattered from Dublin Castle and the Viceregal Lodge, hubs of city social life before independence.

Mrs Duckett, widow of Theophilius Thompson of Forde Lodge, Co Cavan, was the second wife of William Duckett of Duckett’s Grove. She had one surviving daughter, Olive, from her first marriage. Her second marriage was childless. William Duckett , without an heir from his marriage, was 73 when he married for the second time on the 19th November 1895. After his death in 1908, his stepdaughter was left a legacy of £10,000 and an income of £150 a year from property in Cullenswood Co Dublin. The total Duckett estate at that time was valued at £204,000. Mrs Duckett, to whom most of his wealth was bequeathed, was the last of the family to live at Duckett’s Grove – she rarely returned after her daughter’s marriage in 1926 to Captain Edward Stamer O’Grady, the son of a County Clare doctor. In the intervening years, she divided her time between London and Dublin where William Duckett purchased as a wedding gift, a magnificent house “De Wyndesore”, on fashionable Raglan Road.

The court case marked an ignominious end to the reign of one of County Carlow’s richest ascendancy families, who first purchased land in Kneestown in 1695. By the middle of the 19th century, Duckett family property covered almost 12,000 acres spread across six Leinster counties, yielding an annual revenue of just under £10,000. Family members had homes at nearby Russellstown Park, Phillipstown, and Newtown, Co Kildare. During 29 years between her husband’s death and her own death, Mrs Duckett donated between £40,000 and £50,000 to various charities – an enormous sum in those days. The startling evidence during the 12-day court hearing attracted widespread publicity with journalists filing full page reports to their editors in London and Dublin. All the major Fleet Street titles were represented and on four occasions the story was front page news in The Daily Express.

Born in India in 1851, where her father Robert Gordon Cumming was posted with British forces, Maria returned home in 1866 and she was only eighteen when she married Theophilius Thompson. They had two children, Olive born in 1874 and Maud Helena who died in 1894. Her husband died 28th July, 1888 and seven years later she married William Duckett, twenty nine years her senior, in Dublin. The court evidence provided rare personal glimpses into the wealth and lifestyles of a typically powerful gentry family, their unrestricted travels abroad, the impact of the War of Independence, the division of their estates, and Mrs. Duckett’s tragic last years in Dublin where her living conditions were variously described as “appalling” and “squalid”.

It was a picture of a women, lonely by choice, feigning poverty amidst enormous wealth, and in the end leaving it to others to decide the eventual destination of her fortune. It was the very stuff of a best selling novel. In some ways, it was just that – the novelist in this case being Maria Georgina Duckett, sad and alone in the world, persecuted in her mind by everyone from her many solicitors to the tenants who now shared ownership of the acres around Duckett’s Grove – the pride of the Duckett family for two hundred and fifty years.

Her 1934 will, disputed in court, was one of seven made by Mrs Duckett, dating back to 1912. Mrs O’Grady did not seek to establish any of the wills on the basis that her mother suffered from insane delusions and she sought administration intestate of her mother’s estate. Throughout it was stressed, by Counsel for the defence that “Mrs. Duckett was not a mad woman”. Repeatedly, witnesses referred to her as erratic, difficult and eccentric, but spoke of an astute woman, who was careful with her money and a person well capable of looking after her financial affairs. Two doctors explained that the disease of insane delusion could remain dormant for years once nothing happened to ignite it, and the patient behaved as if it did not exist. A case in Britain was cited where a man suffering from the disease was Secretary of the Finance Committee of the Bank of England, who regularly wrote authoritative articles on finance and commerce up to the time of his death. His delusion was that he was the son of George IV who bequeathed him £50,000. His own father has in fact left him £18,000, but he always accused his father of dividing the remainder of the money with his two brothers. In court, his delusion was proved in the words of Counsel” up to the hilt and he was also proved to have been a man of the greatest business capacity”. In essence, the jury had to decide if Mrs. Duckett was in fact a victim of this disease, and if so, at what point did she become incapable of making a will.

In Mrs Duckett’s case, the alleged delusions centred on her daughters character and morals, and a hatred of Catholics and the Catholic Church. She repeatedly insisted to servants and others that her daughter was not married, but was living in sin with Captain O’Grady. She accused her of wasting money attending race meetings, gambling, playing cards, and going to to dances, pastimes of which she did not approve. There were repeated allegations by Mrs. Duckett of verbal and physical assaults by her daughter from the age of sixteen. Some she entered in the margins of her many bibles, accusing her daughter of saying – “I hate you, my god how I hate you to the point of assassination”. That entry was made while on holiday in Switzerland. Before leaving for India in 1914, she had a codicil drafted cutting Olive off to a single shilling. That was two years before Olives’s marriage, which had already been delayed for six years after the death of William Duckett because “my mother would have been left alone”. She never expressed any objection to the match, but clearly engaged in psychological warfare over the marriage. There’s many a bachelor and spinister in Ireland today who could identify with such tragic games, played out by possessive parents. In the many wills and codicils between 1912 and 1934, Olive O’Grady’s share of her mother’s fortune fluctuated considerably: she was twice disinherited, in 1914 and 1934, she fared better in the 1917 will when she was given £6,400 of Midland Railway Shares and £600 in cash; in 1920 the bequest was £7,000 in War Stock invested at 5 per cent, and 1929 it was the interest for life on a similar amount of stock. In defence of giving her daughter nothing in the 1934 will, Mrs. Duckett insisted that she had been amply catered for in the will of her step-father, adding – “My daughter Olive, be it clearly understood is cut off to a shilling. Had she been an ordinary good daughter, she would have all she could have wished for”.

Mrs Duckett’s attitude to Catholics was extreme to the point where she refused to employ them, fearing for her very life. She refused to eat in her daughters house in London where two Catholic servants were employed, and at Ross’s Hotel in Dublin where she dined frequently, she kept a notebook (produced in court) with the names and religious persuasions of the staff. Her own words were that “people are in league with the Catholics to poison and kill me”. During the Eucharistic Congress in Dublin in 1932, hotel accommodation was completely booked. The unfortunate manager of one hotel, who knew Mrs Duckett, but not well enough, suggested she might take some paying guests. He too was rounded on with an accusation that it was another Catholic ploy to “get me”.

During the War of Independence, she decided to sell Duckett’s Grove. She had received a threatening letter purporting to come from what was then officially known as Sinn Fein, and as a result she was advised she go to England. It was thought the letter did not come from Sinn Fein, but was the result of spite and bad feeling locally. The parish priest of Tinryland, Fr. Edward Campion, a good friend of Captain and Mrs O’Grady, who was involved in negotiations to buy the estate on behalf of local farmers, was convinced the letter had no official authority and he undertook to investigate its source. While in possession of the letter, signed “I.R.A”, Fr. Campion was arrested by the Black and Tans, who, unaware of the background, believed he was about to deliver the threatening letter. The court heard that the arrest led to the most intense fury locally, and the O Gradys did everything in their power with the authorities at Dublin Castle to have Fr. Campion released. A telegram was drafted and sent to Mrs. Duckett, who by this time had left for London, asking her to sign the expression of sympathy over the circumstances of the priests arrest, and this she did. Their efforts were instrumental in bringing the authorities at Dublin Castle to their senses and Fr. Campion was freed.

As a result of this episode, Mrs. Duckett, then 70, could not be persuaded to return to Ireland and she remained in hiding, moving from place to place in England, often using an assumed name. After the War of Independence, the mansion at Ducketts Grove was occupied by the I.R.A. and when they left, Mrs. Duckett returned to Ireland to organise a three-day clearance sale of the contents which took place in December 1923, and which released £9,000. Soon after Mrs. Duckett, the O Gradys and a cousin of William Duckett holidayed in Biaritz, following which, and without explanation, Mrs. Duckett never spoke to her daughter for ten years.

Mrs. O Grady described one chance meeting in London. “ I met her in a big store, and put my arm around her. I asked her why she hadn` t replied to my letters. While we continued to walk around the store, she never uttered one word. She left the shop, hailed a taxi, and that was the last I saw of her until 1933. That was a very painful period for me. For a long time in the early stages, I waited on the post every day in the hope of getting a letter.

Mrs Duckett, it seems, had very few friends in Dublin during those years, and it was usually to doctors, solicitors and servants, who never remained long in her employ, that she poured out her pent feelings of anger and resentment. Dr. Victor M. Synge described how visits in 1929 and 1930 took over an hour, when she would recall all the “immoral things that happened during hunt balls in Carlow” and how Duckett’s Grove “had gone to the dogs”. Solicitor William S. Barrett listened while she told of assaults by her daughter. She told me that she had assaulted her on various occasions and that on one particular occasion, she caught her across the back of a sofa and held her there, by which the old lady got excruciating pain”. Nurse Eva Allingham, who worked and stayed at “De Wyndescore”, had been warned by Mrs Duckett that if a lady named Mrs. O’Grady called she was not to be admitted to the house.

Edward Carson K.C., who appeared for Rev. Robert Northbridge, executor of the 1934 will, described Mrs. Duckett as a very devout Protestant, and an extreme one. “I don’t think she had any use for any of the Roman Catholic community as a church, nor for the Anglo-Catholics in England, whom, I think, she thought were ever more reprehensible than the people who supported the Roman Catholic faith, views which, perhaps, would not commend themselves to the majority of the people in the country”. During her lifetime she was responsible for erecting a wing to the Adelaide Hospital, named after her; she practically built the Rathmines Y.M.C.A. with a contribution of £3,000. She contributed to the building of churches in lumber camps in Canada, the missions in India, and towards the building of four leper hospitals in Tanganyika. Her charitable contributions amounted to between £40,000 and £50,000. All along, said Mr. Carson, she had no doubt in her mind whatever as to what the objects of her bounty should be when she died – that her money should go in the same way as she had been disposing of it and dealing with it during her lifetime.

Counsel for Lieutenant Colonel W.F. Thompson, executor of the 1929 will, Mr. Overend, K.C., said that for the 22 years Mrs. Duckett had spent a considerable amount of time choosing the charities that should benefit in her will, and yet in 1934 she never once discussed where the money should go. From 1931 she commenced to object to paying her bills and she was living in her big house without any comforts, but the most striking evidence of her state of mind was the 1934 will itself. The terms of that will meant”….. I am too tired. I cant be bothered with it…..let somebody else do it for me. Give it to the bank and to Bishop Taylor Smith and let them do it for me”.

The conditions under which Mrs. Duckett lived out her final years at Raglan Road before she was put under the protection of the court and committed to a mental institution in Kingsbridge, Dublin, in July 1935 were recalled by Frank Fitzgibbon, K.C. for Mrs. O’Grady. The house was full of the most beautiful silver and china, but she fed with a kitchen cup, a pewter spoon, a tin tray and a dirty napkin. She was living in a state of almost insanitary dirt. One lady who worked in the house actually thought Mrs. Duckett was in poverty until she saw a bank book showing a deposit of £6,000. The old woman had said she could not afford a tin of sardines. After the 12-day hearing, the will of 1929 was agreed between the sides – Mrs. O’Grady got the interest for life on £7,000 war stock, with the capital to revert back into the estate after her death. Legal fees exceeded £10,000 and the remainder was given in amounts varying between £500 and £5,000 to eighteen charities.

As Olive O’Grady sat listening to the hours and days of evidence, the day in 1895 when she first arrived at Duckett’s Grove with her mother and William Duckett must have seemed light years away. She had just celebrated her 21st birthday. Forty-four years had elapse, and she was now approaching 65. The celebrations to mark old William’s return with his new wife were recalled in the early 1960s by local man James Gaynor when he spoke to author James Morris for his book Pax Britannica – The Climax of an Empire – “Best of all had been the astonishing festivities. It seemed only yesterday when Mr. Duckett, game as ever, had brought his new bride and daughter. The tenants then had taken the horses from the carriage shafts, and pulled the ladies up the drive themselves, cheering and laughing through the castellated gatehouse and up the long drive with its sculpted images of queens and animals and I don’t know what. That evening there were fireworks, to which people came on foot, and in donkey carts. A great tar barrel blazed as the sun went down, and presently the rockets soared over County Carlow. Mrs. Duckett gave a magic lantern lecture in the coach house. They danced till midnight and then all went home to their lodges, their gatehouses and cottages. Mr. and Mrs. Duckett, making sure the flag had been correctly lowered, went along the polished corridors of the mansion, to bed.”

The first Duckett to arrive in Ireland in the cromwellian period was Sir George Duckett (Hart’s Irish Landed Gentry). In 1695, Thomas Duckett purchased the Kneestown land form Thomas Crosthwaite of Cockermouth, a small town on the northern edge of the Lake District, later to become famous as the birth place of the poet William Wordsworth. Crosthwaite had obtained extensive land property in Ireland under the Acts of Settlement of 1666 to 1684 during the reign of Charles 11. Thomas Duckett came from Grayrigg in Westmoreland where his Father James Duckett was 10th in descent from John Duckett, who obtained the Grayrigg estate through his marriage to Margaret De Windesore in 1377 – the raglan road house was named after her. In Ireland, marriage would also contribute to Duckett wealth. Thomas married Judith De La Poer, Heiress to her Father’s estates in County Waterford. Their son Thomas lived at Philipstown, Rathvilly, a property purchased from the Earl of Ormonde, and it was the marriage of his grandson William in 1790 that marked a key turning point in the fortunes of the Ducketts. His bride was Elisabeth Dawson-Coates, co-heiress of wealthy Dublin banker John Dawson-Coates. The couple had four sons, and it was for their second son William that the house at Russellstown Park was built in 1824. The mansion house at Ducketts Grove was built during the 1700’s, replacing a smaller house, and it was during the early 19th century that the Gothic towers, turrets and arches were added under the supervision of architect Thomas A. Cobden. Such extravagance was affordable then in an age when labour was cheap and a few shillings a day bought the services of the best craftsmen in the land. Tradesmen were getting a little more than the 9 shillings a week paid to farm workers. The yearly revenue of £10,000 from tenant farmers went a long way towards realising even the most ambitious projects.

The lifestyle at Duckett’s Grove had a grandeur equalled only by the surroundings in which it was enjoyed by the owners and their neighbouring gentry families in Carlow, Wicklow, Kildare and Laois. Eleven men were in full-time employment maintaining the lawns, gardens and drives leading to the mansion from its three gate-lodges on the Castledermot Road, The Iron House and The Towers. The latter was probably one of the finest gate lodges built anywhere in Ireland. Once through those main gates, visitors were greeted by carefully maintained driveways, well-stocked farm land, woods and eight acres of pleasure grounds.

The Ducketts were happy to show off the centre-piece of their possessions, permitting visitors to picnic in the grounds, but by the turn of the century, attitudes were changing. Role changes from that of feared landlords to objects of curiosity were emerging. This telling notice appeared in The Carlow Sentinel in june 1901- “For over eighty years, this Demesne and grounds have been thrown open to the public, and the privilege not abused, as many as 150 lunching on the sameday, by permission, in different parts of the demesne. But during the past year, the Family have been annoyed by persons breaking the rhododendrons, and other flowers…damaging kept grass… entering the yards, bringing their faces as close to the windows as they can get, loud laughing and talking. On last Monday, a party of well dressed persons arrived and the first thing they did was to pass close to the windows and enter the kitchen yard. This hardly been good manners, they were requested to leave. Should this sort of thing continue, the steward has orders to close the demesne and grounds to all sightseers.” The notice clearly did not have the desired effect, and on August 2nd 1902, the following appeared – “Ducketts Gove Demesne is now closed to all tourists and sightseers. No one can be admitted after this notice”.

The Ducketts travelled extensively, and entertained on a lavish scale. A suite of receptions rooms added to De Wyndesore could accommodate 300 guests, and one of the great occasions there was a party organised to mark Queen Victoria’s arrival in Dublin in April 1900. The royal route from Kingstown to the Viceregal Lodge included Raglan Road, and the opportunity for a royal welcome was not passed up by the Ducketts and their country friends from County Carlow.

The Sentinel waxed lyrical “that our ‘Model County’ held a unique position bein the only one that had its special greeting for the August visitor, and for this its residents are indebted to the thoughtfulness and enterprise of Mr. and Mrs. Duckett. Here were erected nicely decorated stands, capable of accommodating some hundred guests, and commanding a splendid view of the Royal procession, while house and grounds were exquisitely adorned with the best and brightest of bunting. On the side of the house, facing the route, the inscription – “County Carlow’s Welcome to their Sovereign” – stood out in bold relief in white letters on a crimson background.”

continued in next column

 

Duckett's Grove, Rainestown, Co. Carlow.
tel: Carlow Tourist Office 059-9131554
www.carlowfloralfestival.com

Duckett’s Grove, the 18th and early 19th century home of the Duckett family, formerly centred on a 12,000 acre estate and has dominated the Carlow landscape for over 200 years. The mansion was transformed into a spectacular castellated gothic fantasy by the renowned architect Thomas Cobden in 1830. Although destroyed by fire in 1933, the remaining towers and turrets and its surrounding countryside form a most romantic landscape making it one of the most photogenic estate houses in Ireland. The stunning ruin is now under the protection of Carlow County Council who will provide public access to the historic pleasure gardens and a range of visitor amenities including car parking, tea rooms and craft rooms.
 

Carlow County Council undertook the conservation and restoration of the walled gardens.  The walled gardens are high quality and have intrinsic historic interest.  This tranquil setting has become a haven for visitors who will enjoy the experience of two newly restored walled gardens, Georgian pleasure grounds, garden visits, wooded walks and nature trails for children with seating and viewing points throughout the grounds.

HOW TO FIND US: From Carlow Town follow the R726. Take the first road to the left after the Brownshill Dolmen. Follow this road for approx. 5km to arrive at the Towers Gate Lodge of Duckett’s Grove. Duckett’s Grove is 1 km from this point on the right hand side of the road.

OPENING TIMES: The Walled Gardens and pleasure grounds at Duckett's Grove are open to the public from 10 a.m. - 6 p.m. daily.

Admission: Free admission and parking 
Facilities: Toilet facilities, car parking 
 
 
For further information on Carlow's Floral Festival Trail contact Carlow Tourism

Tel +353 (0) 5991 30411
Fax +353 (0) 5991 30477

info@carlowtourism.com

Duckett's Grove photo gallery:   Georgian pleasure grounds at Duckett's Grove In the Walled Gardens at Duckett's Grove Walled Gardens at Duckett's Grove photographs by James Burke ARPS ... website links: Carlow Gardens County Guide Location Useful Links Homepage

continued from previous column

Three years earlier at Ducketts Grove, the Queens Diamond Jubliee was celebrated with another lavish party for the estate workers, their wives and families, over 150 in all. Plaques were distributed to the children, engraved with portraits of Queen Victoria, the Union Jack flew from the turret, and old women sat recalling the celebrations after the Crimean War, and Victoria’s coronation sixty years before. Mrs. Ducketts loyalty to the Crown was beyond question. In 1902 she penned letters to the press demanding to know what the “country gentlemen of Carlow” intended to do to celebrate the Coronation of Edward VII, with a promise of £20 towards a celebration fund.

The family enjoyed a long-standing reputation for generosity towards their workers –new suits of clothes, boots and cash for the men every Christmas. Their wives got bed clothes and cash, and rabbits were sent to the Workhouse in Carlow, from which the inmates, including children, got “a liberal weekly supply”. When the I.R.A. left Duckett’s Grove after their sojourn there, the mansion, still furnished, was left intact. Only a few pot-shots had been sent in the direction of the statuary along the drive, the result, perhaps, of a message from the locals, that there were a few fond memories for the Ducketts.

Politically, the Ducketts were staunch Tories, but despite being among the top three landowners in the County, they took very little active interest in parliamentary politics. William Duckett of Russellstown Park, was secretary of the Tory organisation in Carlow in 1835, and his fox covert burned for “being a friend of Colonel Bruen, and Mr. Kavanagh”. In 1895, Stewart James Charles Duckett of Russellstown Park was defeated by John Hammond (3091 votes to 685). He was the only member of the family ever to seek a seat in Parliament. After Mrs. Duckett left to reside permanently in Dublin, the Carlow estate, reduced to 1,300 acres as a result of the various Land Acts, was put under the management of an agent until 1921, when a group of local farmers and labourers under the umbrella of the Killerig Land Committee, purchased the estate with a £32,000 loan from the Bank of Ireland. By 1925, The Killerig farmers had failed to agree on the division of the land and no repayments of interest or capital had been made to the Bank. On June 20th of that year, the Bank issued all the committee members with a bill for £38,217.18.6, with a threat that legal action would be taken against them.

After two years of negotiations the Land Commission took over the estate, cleared the Bank debt, and by 1930 the division of the land was complete. In all, 48 farmers were given holdings. Fr. Campion, and Fr. C. Kelly of Rathoe, both of whom acted as guarantors for the Killerig loan with Carlow merchant Michael Doyle, and farmer Thomas Murphy of Straboe. When the Land Commission purchased the estate, the Bank retained the mansion and eleven acres of land, which was sold in 1931 to Fredrick George Thompson of Hanover Works, Carlow for £320. Some of the outbuildings were demolished and the granite was used in the building of a new Christian Brothers School in Carlow town. Remaining buildings were used as stables by Francis Brady who occupied a wing of the old mansion.

 

The Cause of the fire which destroyed Duckett’s Grove mansion on 20th April, 1933, was never determined. Curiously, a week before, locals noticed smoke coming from the house, and as a result of their swift action, the outbreak was brought under control. The blaze the following week was more serious. Whether it was accidental or otherwise matters little today – that inferno sixty years ago reduced County Carlow’s finest mock-gothic mansion to a ruin. The visitors still come. The curiosity still lingers. But the Ducketts are gone.

RUSSELLSTOWN PARK

In some, if not all gentry families, the penalty for bringing the family name into disrepute could be severe, the ultimate sanction of disinheritance being applied to punish the perpetrator of a scandal. It was a fate that was to befall John Stewart Duckett, only son and heir of Steuart James Charles Duckett of Russellstown Park – the dower house to Duckett’s Grove, for which the architect Cobden drew the plans in 1824. Great celebrations surrounded his coming of age on 10th June 1897, and in August, he joined the 9th Lancers with the rank of Lieutenant. In February the following year, he travelled to India to join his regiment, and later served during the Boer War, where 150 soldiers from County Carlow saw action.

Back home his father, in response to several letters from his son on the war effort, launched a media appeal for flannel shirts for the Carlow rand and file in South Africa. In one appeal published in the Sentinel, he quoted a letter from Corporal Murphy of Carlow to his mother – “South Africa, March 24th, 1900 – Dear Mother, There was an officer going down the country the other day, and I have given him £3.0s 0d to send you in a registered letter. I hope to God you get it safe. I asked the Captain for £4.0s 0d but kept one, and I would give it for a shirt now as I have only half a one on now and no other to change. I have to remain in my skin until it dries”. The cost of a shirt was 2s.6d. In response to his appeals, Steuart Duckett got 90 shirts for the Carlow soliders … he had hoped to get one for every soldier.

But the father’s pride in his son’s successful army career was not to endure. News of his son’s affair with the wife of a colonel in his regiment sent shock waves through Russellstown Park, and when Steuart J.C. Duckett made his will in June 1903, he disinherited his son, in favour of his only daughter Amy, named County Carlow’s “Lady of the House” beauty in 1892. Ironically for John, the man who would marry his sister six years later, Major Louis Murray Phillpotts, was a fellow officer during the advance on Kimberley a few years earlier. Catherine Seton Duckett did not share her husband’s embarrassment over the affair, and in her will of 1916, she left her estate, valued £2,800 at the time of her death, to John. He was living in Brussels when his mother died in Middlesex on 3rd April, 1932.

Major Phillpots married Amy Duckett on October 6th, 1909. Her father died in 1915, and her husband, then Brigadier General with the First Field Artillery, was killed in action during the first World War, on 8th September, 1916. General Phillpotts was grandson of Bishop Phillpotts of Exeter, a central figure in the Gorham controversy in England in 1850, which led to the resignation of Henry Edward Manning from the Church of England. At the time, Manning (1808 – 1892) was archdeacon of Chicchester and was one of the leading Anglican thinkers of his day. His resignation followed a directive by the Privy Council to Bishop Phillpotts to appoint the Calvinist theologian George Gorham to the parish of Brampford Speke despite the bishop’s grave misgivings concerning Gorham’s views on baptismal regeneration. This decision was palpable proof to Manning of the supremacy of the temporal over the spiritual in the Church of England. Manning, whose wife had died in 1837, was received into the Catholic Church in 1851, was appointed Archbishop of Westminister in 1865, and made Cardinal in 1875. He served in the post for 27 years until his death in 1892.

Louis and Amy Phillpotts had one son, Henry Steuart, who served with the Irish Guards during the second World War. He was with the British expeditionary force sent to the Hook Holland to rescue members of the royal family before the country was over-run by invading German troops. He was adjudant when the Irish and Welsh Guards were sent to Boulogne in Northern France to prevent the Germans getting behind allied troops were evacuated after the fall of France. It was as a result of this action that he was awarded the Military Cross. A colleague who served with him, Captain Mungo Park, who now lives in Dublin, described Phillpotts as a “very fine staff officer”, but as a commanding officer, he was less than popular with his officers who nicknamed him “pompous potts”. Mungo Park was god-father to Phillpotts’ only daughter Rebecca, who was born in London, while her father was on army service in Italy. His wife, from whom he separated when Rebecca was 12, was Finnola Fitzgerald, of the well-known Kerry family. He lived alone at Russellstown Park until the middle 1950s when the estate was purchased by the Land Commission. He went to England where he got a job as a mini-cab driver, and he died in a modest bedsit in Winchester in the early ‘70s.

Fr. P.J. Brophy, a friend of Colonel Phillpotts, recalled being told that letters relating to the Gorham controversy were among the family papers at Russellstown Park- “The Colonel offered them to me, but regrettably, I didn’t get them before he left”. Rebbeca married Michael Goodbody, and the couple now live near Basingstoke in Hampshire. Once in the hands of the Land Commission, the house was demolished, and the remaining stable yard is now used as a horse riding school by Sean Doran.

Steuart’s Lodge

The Steuart’s were a Scottish family, and the first to settle in Ireland was John Steuart, son of the 4th Earl of Galloway, who purchased estates in Carlow and Meath in 1719. In 1752, his son, William Steuart, was given Steuart’s Lodge and 2,000 acres of land on “his approaching marriage to Anne Butler, daughter of Sir Richard Butler”. According to historian, Mary Stewart Blakemore in “A Narrative Genealogy of the Stewarts”, the outlawing of Scottish Presbyterians in 1638 and the persecutions that followed caused this branch of the family to flee from Scotland.

In 1843, William’s son, William Richard Steuart, High Sheriff of County Carlow in 1821, married Elizabeth Dawson-Duckett of Duckett’s Grove. The Steuarts did not enjoy the prosperity of the Duckett’s because by the middle of the last century, Elizabeth Dawson Steuart, then a widow, owned a much reduced estate of 650 acres. When she died in March 1893, she left the property to her nephew, Major Charles Edward Henry Duckett (1850 – 1904) who adopted the Steuart name, and he married the London actress, Annie Seymore. Their only son, William Steuart Duckett Steuart, died in 1930. When Annie died in 1932, Steuart’s Lodge and 136 acres of land went to her daughter Aileen’s son, Basil Cyril Dickinson. He was a Dublin based barrister, and he sold the property to P.J. Farrell, whose nephews, Cyril and Bernard Kay, sold to the present owner, Minnie Lennon in 1958.

Two months before she died, Elizabeth Dawson Steuart was a witness in an action for slander brought by her former coachman and groom, John Sweeney, against her nephew, William Duckett of Duckett’s Grove. William accused John Sweeney of theft while he was employed by Elizabeth, and mentioned the accusation to a number of people. Sweeney sought damages of £500 for slander and defamation of character. He succeeded in his action, but with a reduced order for damages of £65. The case was reported in The Carlow Sentinel on January 14th, 1893.

 

 

Source: The Carlow Gentry – What Will The Neighbours Say? by Jimmy O’ Toole. www.carlowbooks.com