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An identically worded paragraph in the Irish Press and the Galway Observer newspapers 90 years ago next month recorded the dispersal of one of Galway’s, and Ireland’s, priceless treasures.
“The entire library of Lady Gregory, comprising thousands of volumes, literary, fiction, art and science, and religion, was sold for less than £50″, both newspapers reported after the library stock was among more than a thousand lots of valuable furniture, paintings, engravings and marble busts that were sold in a two-day auction of the contents of Coole Park, Gort, Co Galway, in mid-August 1932.
The library had been assembled over the preceding century and a half by Lady Gregory and her husband and by his father, grandfather and great-grandfather. It contained hundred of classics from ancient Ireland, England, Greece, Rome and the Middle and Far East. It had been built by Robert Gregory (1727-1810), a confidante of politicians Edmund Burke and Charles James Fox and host of the travel writer Arthur Young. He had bought Coole Park in 1768 after making his fortune as a director of the East India Company.
“I shall be sorry to leave all these volumes among which I have lived”, Lady Gregory wrote shortly before she died. “They have felt the pressure of my fingers. They have been my friends. Of the successive generations that have possessed them I think that it was to one only they were dumb.”
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Lady Gregory considered the library to be “the very heart of the house”, but she was its legal owner for only 10 years, between the death of her husband Sir William in 1892 and the coming-of-age of their only son, Robert, in 1902. She was chatelaine of the house from 1902 until her own death, but she had an uneasy relationship with Robert’s widow, Margaret, who became the legal owner after his death during the first World War.
As a member of the landed aristocracy before becoming a co-founder of the Abbey Theatre, patron-cum-collaborator of William Butler Yeats and prominent player in the Irish cultural revival, Lady Gregory wanted Coole Park to remain in Gregory family ownership through her only grandson, Richard.
But Richard’s mother, Margaret, was determined to sell Coole Park and to return to England with her three children. She only allowed Lady Gregory to continue to live there “year by year ... so long as she pays all charges and expenses”. On hearing that Margaret coveted the library’s priceless contents, Lady Gregory’s friend and ministering surgeon, Oliver St John Gogarty, remarked with characteristic causticity that the library was the very last thing that Margaret should request.
Margaret, nonetheless, got what she wanted. The auction invited bids for “the entire contents” of Coole Park “after the removal of all heirlooms, entailed pictures and books”, according to the advertisement on the Connacht Tribune front page.
The auction took place barely two months after Lady Gregory had been laid to rest in Galway city’s “New Cemetery” at the end of May 1932. The newly elected President of the Executive Council, Éamon de Valera, was represented at her funeral, where the mourners also included William Butler Yeats and other Abbey Theatre directors and prominent actors.
“Along the twenty-one mile route [from Coole Park] to Galway farmers and shopkeepers ceased their work while the cortage passed by”, reported the Connacht Tribune. “Her old servants and employees were prominent ... following the hearse came numbers of her ‘beloved poor of Kiltartan’”, it added.
William Butler Yeats broke down and wept on the platform at Gort railway station when told on his arrival there on the morning of May 23rd that Lady Gregory had died during the night. He called her “my greatest friend” and he remained in Coole Park with her coffin before its removal to Galway.
“They came like swallows and like swallows went/and yet a woman’s powerful character/Could keep a swallow to its first intent”, Yeats wrote of the numerous artists and writers that Lady Gregory had hosted at Coole Park. “Where is the brush that could show anything/of all that pride and humility”, he asked regarding Mancini’s portrait of Lady Gregory that now hangs in Dublin’s Municipal Art Gallery, donated by her nephew Hugh Lane.
Lady Gregory told Yeats in her last letter to him that she had had a full and largely happy life and that their friendship had made her later years “fruitful in work, in service”. She added: “I do think I have been of use to the country – and for that in great part I thank you”.