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