The Children of Castletown House (eBook)

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THE EARLIER YEARS – 1860-1934

Our great-grandfather was Tom Conolly of Castletown (1823-1876), a confidante of emperors and kings, whose brother, John Augustus, won a Victoria Cross in the Crimea War. Tom spent most of his adult life trying to equal his brother’s daring feats, latterly as an adventurer, buccaneer, spy and gunrunner in the American Civil War. He spent the family money, and on one occasion famously shod his carriage horses in silver to win a wager at the Great Exhibition in Paris in 1861. Yet when he died in 1876, aged just fifty-three, he left his widow alone, with three small sons and a daughter, to cope with his debts.

By 1900 his eldest son, Lt Tom Conolly (junior), was the thirty-year-old owner of Castletown. Tom had served in the Scots Greys in the Sudan, and was now fighting in the Boer War along with his third brother, Edward Michael (Ted) Conolly, who was serving in the Royal Artillery. They both fought in three inconclusive battles at Driefontein, Johannesburg, and Diamond Hill. Young Tom was already an adventurer of note. He had sealed a personal pact with his old school friend and army colleague, Jack Seely, vowing that neither of them would surrender to the enemy unless they had been wounded. They were reacting to reports of British soldiers being overwhelmed by the Boers and surrendering all too easily.

On 10 July, the small garrison post at Nitral’s Nek, held by Baden-Powell’s force, was relieved by the Royal Scots Greys, together with five companies of the Lincolnshire Regiment, and two guns of the Royal Horse Artillery. At dawn on the 11th, an overwhelming number of Boers attacked the position. The garrison held out all day, waiting for the help that never arrived. By evening, ammunition had run short, and they were forced to surrender the entire squadron of the Scots Greys, plus ninety officers and men of the Lincolnshire Regiment.

Col. John Augustus Conolly, who was awarded one of the first Victoria Crosses in the Crimean War. He was our Uncle Ted’s uncle and was born at Castletown.

As they dropped their weapons, Tom Conolly remembered his vow with Seely, and decided to try to shoot his way out. He shot the Boer closest to him, but was then himself shot dead on the spot.

His act of bravado was needless, as the entire squadron was disarmed and released a few hours later. The Boers did not, as it turned out, wish to feed their prisoners. Ted Conolly had lost his charismatic, swashbuckling elder brother; and Castletown lost a favourite son.

Jack Seely later became the grandfather of racing journalist and commentator, Brough Scott, who wrote Galloper Jack about his friendship with young Tom Conolly, and about his grandfather’s warhorse.

In 1903, the owners of large Irish houses lost their ‘outside’ means of support, when the income to maintain them was removed through the passing of the Wyndham Act, and the Land Reform Bill, which allowed long-term Irish tenants to buy their holdings from distant landlords at peppercorn prices. Owners of estates could only keep the lands that immediately surrounded their main house, which they farmed themselves. The Act changed the fortunes of tens of thousands of less fortunate Irish families, and set them free to prosper with land of their own, but for many of the landed gentry it meant disaster.

The Government issued compensation in the shape of Land Bonds, which were to be cashed in at some later date. For Ted, all the great estates that his four times Great Uncle, Speaker Conolly, had acquired all over Ireland were gone in a stroke.

With very little money to pay for servants to care for the fabric of such a large house, Ted had little choice but to rent out the house as often as possible to wealthy tenants who invested money to keep it in good order and to pay for servants to maintain it.

Tenants were not continuous, but for the twenty-eight-year period, from approximately 1891 to 1919, Castletown was rented to Thomas F. Kelly, an Irish-American businessman with strong Republican sympathies. He claimed to be a millionaire and agreed to financially support the Irish poet, Padraic Colum, for three years.

Other impoverished writers quickly sought Tom Kelly’s backing; amongst them was a young James Joyce. Joyce was living on virtually no money in Phibsboro, Dublin, and was having problems getting his writings published. On 10 December 1903, he walked the 14 miles to Castletown to confront Tom Kelly and try to persuade him to finance a weekly literary pamphlet called The Goblin, which he was keen to get off the ground. But a servant took one look at the rough state of his clothes and refused him entry. James Joyce had no choice but to walk all the way back to Dublin! He penned an angry letter the following day protesting at his reception, and got a telegram apologising by return, as well as a letter in the next post.1 However, Tom Kelly did not, in the end, finance The Goblin, which was never published.

The second person to rent Castletown was Sir Peter ‘The Packer’ Parker, Chief Justice. He was so called because he is reputed to have packed in the juries at some speed.

The last was Capt. Arnold S. Wills, a soldier serving with the British Mounted Regiment, the 18th Hussars, stationed at Curragh. He was born in 1877, the son of Sir Edward P. Wills, of the Wills Tobacco Company, and between 1910 and 1911 was Master of the Kildare Hunt. He was unpopular for his tendency to dig out foxes that had gone to ground. One property owner was reputed to have pleaded for the life of a gallant fox, after a long run, but to no avail. Poor Mr Reynard was dug out, and a deputation was raised to remove Capt. Wills. He finally retired as Master of the Kildares after confronting a rather graphic banner outside Lawler’s Ballroom in Naas, for the Hunt Ball; it read:

Birds have their nests – Bees have their hives

The Kildare Hunt doesn’t want Capt. Wills.

However, Capt. Wills was good for Castletown, and made many improvements, including providing new curtains and a carpet on the main staircase. He also purchased several items of furniture, including the elegant Georgian dining room chairs2 and, as a member of the Kildare Polo Club, he also brought the Castletown Polo Field back into play.

In 1904, Ted’s older sister, Catherine Conolly, married Gerald Shapland Carew, a Tea Taster and Broker3 in London. They had no idea that one day they would become the 5th Lord and Lady Carew, because a cousin held the title, who had younger siblings. The 3rd, 4th, and 5th Baron Carew were all of similar age (from the same generation, two brothers and a cousin), and died in 1923, 1926, and 1927 respectively. This meant that the cousin, our grandfather, held the title for precisely ten months before he died, at which point it passed on to our father, aged twenty-two.4

On 23 April 1905, at 28 Belgrave Square in London, Catherine (Conolly) Carew gave birth to our father, William Francis (Bill) Carew. He and his younger brothers, Gavin and Peter, lived there until they moved into 120 Tedworth Square, Chelsea, living next door to the Dowager Marchioness of Sligo, their father’s aunt.5

Ted Conolly watched his sister’s three Carew boys grow up in London, where they all attended Sunningdale Prep School; our father then went on to Wellington College, Berkshire, Gavin to Shrewsbury School, and Peter to the Royal Naval School at Pangbourne. The boys of the next generation were deliberately sent to separate boarding schools at the age of eight, because of the exploits of their father and his brothers, who apparently wreaked havoc together at their Prep School.

At the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, Ted Conolly returned to serve in the Royal Artillery. His nephew, aged ten, visited Castletown on the occasional school holiday (when the house was not let), accompanied by his mother Catherine and his grandmother Sara Eliza (Shaw) Conolly (a Celbridge girl, and widow of his gunrunner grandfather Tom Conolly), and his uncle Henry Shaw and other friends.

His great aunt Lady Sligo’s family name was Brown, and it was in her house that the Carew boys’ mother, Catherine, is believed to have introduced her only surviving brother, Ted Conolly, to Eileen Agatha Brown in 1918. Eileen was born in 1889, the daughter of the 6th Marquis of Sligo, and was just twenty-six when she met Uncle Ted, who was aged forty-one.

As cousins, they were allowed the freedom to travel together without much comment, but when the romance became obvious, Lady Sligo is thought to have thoroughly disapproved; Ted Conolly had no money to look after Castletown, let alone a wife. There was no happy ending to Ted’s story. Eileen was the love of his life and he regretted losing her, letting everyone know that ‘he could not afford to get married’. Had he led an ordinary life, without the responsibility of Castletown on his shoulders, perhaps old Lady Sligo would have given her consent in the end … who knows? Believing that the freedom to keep your property was part of what they had all been fighting for, he returned to Castletown alone. When the house was rented, he lived in the Garden House, which had been built sixty years previously by his father Tom Conolly for his land agent.

Later, Ted returned to the main house and lived in just one bedroom, bathroom, study, and the dining room. He had a...