there was only one other student, Neil Burton,7 studying the same subject as me (the entire class of postgraduates numbered only about ten or twelve), Alistair gave us a lot of his time. Neil and I got on very well and I liked his lovely Oxford girlfriend, Andrea, very much. The course was a two-year one, culminating in exams and the submission of a 10,000-word thesis. When it came to choosing a topic for my thesis, it was Anne who suggested Irish sculpture and, specifically, Irish church monuments.
‘They are there to be discovered,’ she said, ‘it’s only a matter of getting into the churches and that’s much easier than getting into private houses to look at pictures. But do prepare! You must go through the Journals of the Association for the Preservation of the Memorials of the Dead in Ireland. They are in the library here. They document some monuments but not the sculptors, of course. It’s for you to identify the sculptors.’
And so I spent the Christmas and Easter vacations combing through these turgid journals (and other sources) and compiling lists of what I had to find. In the dishevelled Volkswagen Beetle – left-hand drive, convertible, with a tattered roof, and an uncertain temperament – that I had brought home from Munich, I had a merry time driving the length and breadth of Ireland that summer in pursuit of sculptors, and photographing and recording all that I found. I had many interesting encounters. Finding Helen Roe8 and Nora O’Sullivan deep in the undergrowth of a churchyard in County Laois was one. Helen, who was a medievalist (and delightful), asked me what I was doing.
‘Looking for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century monuments,’ I explained.
‘But those are not monuments,’ she objected, ‘they’re modern.’
On a sunny Sunday afternoon, battling my way to see the sculptor Joseph Wilton’s beautiful – but vandalised – Dawson monument at Dartrey County Monaghan, I came across the architect Jeremy Williams9 encamped with a detachment of other enthusiasts in the stables at Dartrey, which they were supposedly restoring. It was my first time meeting Jeremy, who was to become a friend for life.
I found lots of monuments, far too many to incorporate coherently into a shortish thesis, and so I picked a single sculptor – an Englishman who had settled in Ireland in the early eighteenth century, William Kidwell – and I investigated him and wrote him up. Kidwell was hardly a ‘name’, in fact he wasn’t a name at all and, as a sculptor, he was very minor indeed; but my thesis appealed to the external examiner, Professor John Steer. Depressed by the annual task of reading theses on the usual subjects, such as Robert Adam, Alexander Runciman, David Wilkie or Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Steer was taken by the nonsensical novelty of Kidwell and insisted on giving me a high mark. Alistair Rowan suggested I turn the thesis into a ‘Shorter Notice’ for the Burlington Magazine and he sent it to the editor, Benedict Nicolson, who published it. The dottiness of all of this did not stop there. Charles Brett10 of the Ulster Architectural Heritage Society asked me to put together all my monuments in a dictionary format and he published my text under the auspices of his society in an ugly little typewritten book.
Finishing in Edinburgh, I was, like all new graduates, in the dire position of having to find a job. I applied for whatever was on offer in the provincial museums of England, but without success. Then one Sunday morning, Desmond Guinness – whom I did not know – telephoned me at home in Trim.
‘It’s Desmond, Desmond Guinness,’ he said in his whispering voice. ‘Is that Homan?’ It was as though we were old friends. ‘Miss Crookshank tells me that you have written the most marvellous thesis, and I so long to read it.’
He invited me to Leixlip that afternoon, asking me to bring my thesis with me and, at the end of about an hour’s chat, he said that if I had no better offer, he could give me work at Leixlip for a month or two sorting photographs and Georgian Society files.
‘Could I start tomorrow morning?’
I was delighted: it was a break, and I have never forgotten Desmond’s kindness.
The couple of months I spent at Leixlip that summer were just wonderful. Desmond’s wife Mariga was not there, although she appeared for a week or so, making her presence felt by the rustling of her petticoat under a long tartan skirt as she descended the stairs. Patricia McSweeney, an American, was Desmond’s secretary: ‘raven-haired Miss McSweeney’ as she was referred to in a newspaper interview. She was the greatest of fun. We worked from an office upstairs, which Desmond also sometimes shared, and Patricia and I had many hilarious moments together. I was still quite timid and shy – and, frankly, in awe of the circumstances in which I found myself – but I was treated by Desmond rather in the manner of an eighteenth-century tutor in an aristocratic household. I was included in the dining room at lunch every day, with Desmond and whatever guests there were, and in that way I encountered a host of exotic (to me) individuals. His brother Jonathan; the legendary wealthy aesthete Rory Cameron11 and his handsome boyfriend (and gardener), Gilbert; Desmond and Helen Leslie; sundry rich (and confused by Leixlip) Americans; Mark Bence-Jones12 and his wife, who asked for a glass of milk with her lunch rather than wine; and many more. I was invited to the Leixlip ‘Dinner and Dancing’ in Horse Show Week. It was all terrific. I observed and took things in: Desmond’s sense of fun and style, his ease, his kindness and thoughtfulness, his lack of snobbery.
One afternoon, I was in Dublin and walking through Trinity when I was hailed by Anne Crookshank.
‘You must go immediately and ring James White,’13 she said. ‘John Gilmartin14 has got a good job in the Birmingham Museum and is leaving the National Gallery. I’ve told James that you are the man to take John’s place.’
I did as I was bidden. James invited me to come to the gallery. We had a brief talk and he asked me when I could start. The post was a menial one, with a desk at the end of the library, but as Michael Wynne was James’s only curatorial assistant, there would be lots of interesting work to do. I would be the ‘temporary cataloguer’. When my mother rang my brother Elliott to boast that I had now got a proper job, he asked what sort of job.
‘As a temporary cataloguer in the National Gallery,’ she said proudly.
‘Temporary?’ said Elliott. ‘The postman who brings the letters to Rathcormick has been temporary for thirty-five years.’
But my mother’s satisfaction was undimmed. She had been indulgent of my migration from incipient solicitor to the unfamiliar territory of art historian and, although never without some strictures, she had always tolerated all my other nonsense as well – such as my enthusiasm for foreign travel.
‘But I always knew you wouldn’t let me down,’ is what she said in reporting Elliott’s reaction.
In the diary pages that follow, written at the time I worked under James White in the National Gallery, I seem to denigrate James. But this is a callow youth who is writing. Yes, there were things about James that could be denigrated: his lack of academic credentials, for a start. And his eye for a picture could sometimes be shaky. His writing on art tended towards the haphazard. But James had many other qualities that elevated him above the ordinary as a director and which accounted for his success. He was a superb communicator, both as a lecturer on art and in handling public relations. The gallery (and James) was always in the news. He could get on with people – from the man in the street to the highest in the land, be they politicians, business tycoons, foreign ambassadors or the old Anglo-Irish gentry. Had I been endowed with even a fraction of his political acumen, I would, in later years, have been a great deal more successful as director of the gallery than I ever was. James liked to be liked but did not bear grudges if he was not. Working under him could be something of a roller coaster, as some of my diary entries imply. He himself worked at speed; he got things done; all was possible; and he expected those who worked with him to be of the same frame of mind. Maddening he might have been on occasion, but he was also endearing, and by the time I left the gallery after just over two years, I was very fond of him. He too liked me (as later chapters here will show) and, after I went to London, he would sometimes look me up and ask me to dine with him and over dinner indulge his penchant for naughty chat. His wife, Aggie, was someone I came to admire greatly too. She was stylish and dignified,