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CHAPTER 5

ENCOUNTERS

When I was at Trinity, I met the King of Saxony. Except that the King of Saxony I thought I met was not the king at all. He was, rather, His Royal Highness Prinz Ernst Heinrich Ferdinand Franz Joseph Otto Maria Melchiades of Saxony, the youngest son of the last King of Saxony, Frederick August III, by his wife the Archduchess Louise of Austria, Princess of Tuscany.

I did not meet Prinz Ernst in the august precincts of Trinity College, which would not have been improbable; instead, I was introduced to him in the much more unlikely setting of Trim Livestock Market, the cattle sales-yard established by my late father in 1957 and managed in my Trinity days by my brothers Elliott and Raymond.

While a student, I was supported, and my fees paid, by Elliott through the family auctioneering business. In the winter and spring vacations, Elliott would offer me the opportunity of working as the auctioneer’s clerk in the cattle market and would pay me a daily wage. I was grateful for this but, at the same time, I hated the cattle market just as I hated everything about farming. But my mother would be insistent: ‘When he is good enough to offer you the work, you should show willing and go and do it,’ she would say and, on the mornings of the market, she would get me out of bed early and dispatch me off to the sales-yard.

The auction took place in a large covered building with an arena – the ring – in the centre, through which the cattle were paraded. It was encircled by tiered seats for clients, and on one side was the auctioneer’s box. This was something like an enclosed balcony overlooking the ring, with access from a door at the back of the box. The auctioneer – Elliott – was seated to one side; his clerk – me – to the other. Between the raised platforms on which we sat was a narrow gap where vendors would stand at a lower level and identify their cattle in the ring by peering through a tiny slit: they could see the proceedings but, most importantly, they could not be seen by potential purchasers. When standing there, their heads would be roughly level with my feet. As clerk, it was my job to write in a register – as the various lots came through the ring – the lot number, the name of the vendor, the breed of cattle being sold, their gender and number, and the price achieved. As the auction moved very fast, this had to be done at speed and with absolute accuracy. I was soon able to identify the various breeds – Aberdeen Angus, Shorthorn or Hereford Crossbreed – and I only rarely made an error in counting the number of cattle in a lot. The difficulty arose in getting the name of the vendor. As they stood below me squinting through the slit, I could only see the tops of their heads and, not knowing them, would have to ask them ‘What is the name, please?’ Understandably, vendors were very preoccupied and anxious as they watched their livelihood being sold within a space of minutes, and it was very difficult to get them to answer me. ‘What is the name, please?’ I would repeat, and repeat again. Elliott, trying to concentrate on conducting the auction, would become irritated by my ineffective politeness and would snap at me: ‘He’s Paudge O’Toole’ or ‘That’s Larkin, he’s here often enough for you to know him by now.’

On one day, the man who came into the box and took his stand peeping through the slit was ruddy-faced and wearing a tattered gaberdine, Wellington boots, and a much-soiled brown brimmed hat. He was as nervous as every other vendor.

‘What is the name, please?’ I said.

And then I said it again, and again.

In the meantime, Elliott’s patience was being sorely tested. Eventually, and without interrupting the bidding, he shouted across at me: ‘That’s the King of Saxony.’

The way he said it, one would have thought that royalty passed through the box every other day.

I wrote down ‘K of Saxony. 8 Hereford Cross bullocks’ in the register.

Prinz Ernst (b. 1896) had been brought up in Dresden at the Court of Saxony. He joined the army in the First World War and took part in the Battle of the Somme. In 1918 his father was forced to abdicate when Saxony became a Free State. The Prinz opposed the Nazis and, on witnessing the bombing of Dresden in 1945, he fled the city (having buried crates of the family’s treasures in a forest) to escape the advance of the Red Army. His first wife (and mother of his three sons) died in 1941 and he then married an aristocratic actress, Virginia Dulon, in 1947. That year they moved to Ireland, where he purchased a farm of about 300 acres, Coolamber, near Delvin, County Westmeath. There he lived until his death (on a visit to Germany) in 1971. The Princess Virginia stayed on in Ireland for the next thirty years and died at Coolamber in 2002.

From my art history studies, I knew vaguely that the Electors of Saxony (forebears of the kings) had assembled fabulous art collections which are housed in various museums in Dresden. Any general book on the history of art includes reproductions of such famous Dresden masterpieces as Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus, Rembrandt’s Ganymede and Vermeer’s Procuress. I also knew that the Italian painter Bernardo Bellotto had been invited by the Elector of the day to come to Dresden and paint (famous) views of the city. I would very much have liked to have talked to Prinz Ernst about all of this but, unfortunately, my duties in the auctioneer’s box precluded me from doing so and I was never to encounter him again.

A more satisfactory encounter – and one that led to a deep, lifelong friendship – took place in Trinity itself. One of the very few societies I joined and took part in was the Arts Society. I cannot recall now what the society actually did but they must – on at one least occasion – have put on an exhibition, because I was sitting at a table outside an exhibition soliciting custom when along came a dapper gentleman in his late thirties, balding but handsome and with large brown eyes, a very punctilious manner, a wry, witty expression, and a precision about his speech that was quite singular. He started to talk to me. He was not connected to the university but soon declared his cultural credentials: he had a great interest in pictures, which is why he had sought out the student exhibition, had lived in Rome for many years, and was now working with the Irish Arts Council. In addition he volunteered that he had been to school at St Columba’s and had once been secretary to an MP in the House of Commons (Sir Lance Mallalieu). He asked me about myself, told me how wonderful it must be to be in Trinity, asked me if I painted and, if so, could he see my work. (I didn’t paint.) He suggested that perhaps I might like to meet for a drink sometime, and asked how he might contact me. ‘A note to my rooms in Number Nine,’ I said. On departing, he handed me his card. Engraved and discreet, ‘Mr Speer Ogle’, it read, above the address of the Kildare Street Club.

And that was how I met someone who was to have an enormous influence on my life, becoming a very dear friend and remaining so to the end of his days.

Up to this, I think the only person I had met whose style I would want to emulate had been my Aunt Polly, a clergyman’s widow. But although, from school and university, I had often visited her at her home in Claremont Villas, Glenageary, I was not overly close to her. As she had (with little money) always ‘collected’, her house was wonderful, falling down with lovely things: a wall lined with pewter plates, Percy French watercolours, Dublin delft, ruby glass, needlework-covered chairs, and much more. She was also interested in ‘antiquities’ – and people – and spent a lot of time ferreting about: for example, she interviewed, and wrote about, the last poplin-makers in Dublin, the Elliotts.¹ But Aunt Polly was merely a drop at the bottom of a glass compared to the influence that Speer was to have upon me.

He rented a flat (which he had done for many years) on the second floor of a house in Upper Fitzwilliam Street. This was small: there was a sitting room, a bedroom, a cramped corridor that was the kitchen, in which there was a Baby Belling cooker on a cupboard, and a bathroom. The place was chock-a-block: pictures, vitrines of china, a bronze of the equestrian Marcus Aurelius on the floor, part of a pietra dura cabinet under a table, an armchair decked with a fur throw. Speer told me this was made from the pouches of kangaroos and had come from Australia. In a corner to the right of the chimney there was a portrait (unlit) of a seated gentleman, half-length in profile, wearing a crimson silk dressing gown. It was Speer by Harry Robertson Craig and had been exhibited at the RHA in 1955.

‘Terence de Vere White reviewed the exhibition in The Irish Times,’ Speer told me, ‘and said I looked like Whistler’s Mother.’ (I looked up Whistler’s famous portrait of his old mother, seated in profile, three-quarter length, against a blank wall when I went to the library the next day.)

Speer did not tell me at that time what Lennox Robinson, in reviewing the RHA exhibition in the Irish Independent, had written about his portrait:

Robertson Craig has portraits of two attractive young men, whose acquaintance I should like to make. One of them is, extraordinarily, called Speer Ogle. I can hardly believe this; it is surely a name invented by Henry James; it is a character out of The Turn of the Screw, he is Miss Jessel’s half-brother, yet he does not look a bit evil.

Speer’s pictures were lit by placing lamps beneath them, rather than using picture lights; a divan was home to a tiger skin with the head intact. The divan was also littered with loose engravings, mainly of Rome.

‘They are not Piranesi,’ said Speer (I looked him up later in the library too), ‘they are only Domenico de’ Rossi.’

He saw me looking at a bronze statuette of a young man almost hidden by gin and whiskey bottles on a small table. ‘That’s Antinous,’ he said. ‘He and Hadrian were rather close. But it’s only a nineteenth-century tourist bronze from the museum in Naples.’ (I wasn’t sure what all that meant.)

I admired the modest glass chandelier hanging from the ceiling in the centre of the room. ‘Oh! But it’s just from Woolworths,’ he said. ‘It’s plastic.’

He reached up and flicked the drops with his fingernail. ‘See! It doesn’t tinkle.’

It was a lesson I was later to absorb: junk can have style and, if mixed with beautiful things, can appear beautiful too. Looking together at a dark oil painting of a lake by moonlight surrounded by trees, Speer said, ‘I’ve never liked the boat on the lake. I think it takes away from the composition. I once took the picture to Old Gorry the restorer and asked him to sink it, but he couldn’t.’

The Story of San Michele by Axel Munthe was open by an armchair. ‘I’ve read it millions of times,’ said Speer. ‘San Michele is on Capri near the villa of the Emperor Tiberius. It’s a beautiful spot.’

He said ‘Tiberius’ in such a way that I was encouraged to find out more in the library.

He told me that, through Terence de Vere White,² with whom he was friendly, he had met Compton Mackenzie, and he urged me to read Mackenzie’s novel, Sinister Street. At a later stage he gave me a present of a paperback Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin.

There was a small crucifix, with an ivory figure of Christ on a malachite cross, hanging in a corner. It looked very nice there but, nevertheless – little Protestant that I was and knowing that Speer was also Protestant – it caused me some worry, as did the framed photograph of Pope John XXIII on the mantelpiece. But, in time, Speer revealed that he had met Pope John on several occasions.

‘It was at the time of the Rome Olympics,’ he said. ‘I had a job meeting athletes and dignitaries at the airport in my car and taking them to wherever they wanted to go. One or two of them had an audience with the pope, and I went with them.’

All the furniture looked lovely to me and Speer explained that he had inherited it from his grandmother and great-aunt, who together had brought him up.

‘My father farmed in County Carlow and was devoted to my mother,’ he told me. ‘But when I was born and my mother brought me home as a baby to Kilcomney – that was the name of our place – my father told her to take me away again, as he had wanted a daughter. And so I was left with my grandmother and great-aunt in Kenilworth Square and brought up by them. I hardly knew my mother or father at all.’

This story of his background, both heartless and affecting, was as good as anything that I was reading at Trinity in the novels of Walter Scott. Early on, he told me about his younger friend Henry, a Scot who worked in the British Foreign Office, and to whom he was devoted (and would remain so for the next fifty or more years).

Over the ensuing years, the notes requesting assignations which Speer left for me at my rooms became more frequent and our friendship – which was always Platonic – deepened. He prided himself on being able to produce a full dinner of roast pheasant and all the trimmings on the Baby Belling (with no fridge) and I was sometimes treated to this. He had beautiful antique silver, old Waterford glass and lovely china, and would somehow manage to set a table (or the corner of a table) in the crowded sitting room. But mainly he would take me out to eat. Although he sometimes talked of Jammet’s, he never took me there, and a favourite, when it came to posh, was the Beaufield Mews. This was a restaurant arranged in a converted stable with a large antique shop – with a superb stock of beautiful things – above. We would look at the antiques – it did not seem like he was teaching me, but he was – and then we would dine. But more usually we went, later at night after the library in Trinity had closed, to a much more modest Indian restaurant on Leeson Street called the Golden Orient. We always ate the same thing: pakoras, followed by beef curry with poppadoms, followed by lychees and accompanied by a carafe of white wine. It was hardly gourmet. Speer liked his curry very hot and derived enormous amusement from getting the friendly waitress to say the word ‘vindaloo’ in her (very) Dublin accent.

‘It can’t be hot enough for me,’ he would insist when ordering.

‘Shur you mean a vindaloo,’ the waitress would reply over our suppressed giggles.

But Speer would want to hear it again.

‘No, I mean even hotter,’ he would say in his precise manner.

‘I’ll ask the chef,’ the waitress would say, ‘but a vindaloo is as hot as you get round here.’

Sometimes, on Sundays, we would go to lunch in a small (and to me horrid) hotel he knew in Dun Laoghaire: they had a dog there that he liked, and he was passionate about dogs. Then we would walk over Killiney Hill. More lavish Sunday expeditions involved the Downshire Arms in Blessington and a walk at the Sugarloaf. He took me to the Sunday evening promenade concerts with the Radio Eireann Symphony Orchestra conducted by Tibor Paul in the Gaiety, and he introduced me to a Christmas Messiah with Our Lady’s Choral Society in the National Stadium. When Nelson’s Pillar was blown up, he heard it on the early news and dashed down to O’Connell Street and retrieved a piece of the sculptured stone rope which had been part of the Nelson statue: he gave me a fragment.

He taught me a lot of nonsense too, which makes me laugh when I think of it today. One does not carry an umbrella in the country; no brown shoes after six o’clock; and there was something about it not being done to look out of an open window that I never fully understood and I did on occasion peek out the windows of 13 Upper Fitzwilliam Street when he was not looking. He called an apple tart an apple cake and pronounced the word ‘recipe’ as ‘receep’ (as did my elderly Aunt Isa). He struck terror into me by telling me how one must eat an oyster, warning me with frightening detail that if one ever ate an oyster that was ‘off’, one would never be able to eat an oyster again. He then explained the procedure for getting the oyster from the shell to one’s mouth and then the vital moment, allowing it to linger for a split second on the back of the tongue, when one could establish if it was ‘off’.

‘If you are in any doubt, you must spit it out immediately,’ he said, ‘even if it goes on the floor.’ It was years before I was actually able to enjoy eating oysters.

He had many deliberately old-fashioned affectations, chief among them being a veneration of Queen Elizabeth and Winston Churchill; by the same token, he maintained that Ireland had become little more than a hotbed of treachery and ‘Republicanism’. The destruction of Nelson’s Pillar was really the last straw. Although they were voiced in apparent deadly earnest, he was very amusing in enunciating his views, but I am glad to say that I knew not to take them seriously, and I did not absorb them.

I have perhaps made him sound effete, an aesthete in the manner of Evelyn Waugh’s Anthony Blanche, but he was not that in the least (and he affected to be horrified by such characters). In fact, he was not really like anyone else at all. Above all, he was enormous fun.

I was very lucky to have met him and even luckier that he took me up; and our friendship over sixty years is one of the most treasured memories from of my life.³

Endnotes

1.Mary Campion, ‘An Old Dublin Industry – Poplin’, Dublin Historical Record, vol. 19 (1963).

2.Irish novelist, biographer, and lawyer (1912–94). Literary Editor of The Irish Times, 1961–77. One-time trustee of the National Library, the Chester Beatty Library, a director of the Gate Theatre, member of the Arts Council and the Irish Academy of Letters. Professor of Literature at the RHA. Married, as his second wife, to the biographer Victoria Glendinning. Obituary by Maeve Binchy, The Independent, 18 June 1994.

3.Speer died in his 90th year in Rome, where he had lived for more than fifty years, on 10 December 2016 (after this account was written) and is buried, with his grandmother and great-aunt, in Mount Jerome, Dublin. Henry predeceased him by about two years.