GRATTAN DE COURCY WHEELER: An Appreciation
Grattan de Courcy Wheeler was a fine example of a type now fast becoming extinct. With genial outlook and attitudes fixed in the mid-20th century, or earlier, and quite unaltered as he moved through his life, he yet was fascinated by, and closely informed about, the trends and details of modern politics: a socialite with an underlying serious purpose to his life.
His home was in Ireland but he spent most of his life, from the ages of 13 to 52, in England, and over many years he achieved success in bringing together people of opposing political perspectives. This he did in the firm belief that once talking to each other in neutral territory they might gain greater understanding and a tolerance of widely differing viewpoints. To this end, he hosted many gatherings at his family estate, Drummin, near Carbury in Co. Kildare – some 30 miles to the west of Dublin.
He was also the moving force behind the Tyrell Trust. It was established in the mid-1990s to restore the 15th century tower house and walled garden at Grange Castle, Co. Kildare, near his home, and to build a conference centre in its grounds. The somewhat ambitious objective was to make it a tourist centre with the ultimate purpose of promoting a better understanding of the two main cultural traditions in Ireland – the Gaelic and the English. To that end, he persuaded the Irish Ministry of Arts to provide a large sum of money, and Cambridge University to house there the Murray collection of archaeological artefacts. The project made real progress and seemed to hold a bright future until Grattan succumbed to one of what were sadly becoming increasingly frequent bouts of depression and ill-health. It caused momentum abruptly to cease and the project to sink in 2003, taking with it a fair bit of his own money.
Grattan de Courcy Wheeler was brought up in the family home, a solid, handsome, grey house, typical of mid-18th century Ireland, and originally surrounded by some 2,000 acres. The Grattan’s were a Derbyshire family, three brothers of which had settled in Ireland at the beginning of the eighteenth century. One of their descendants was John Grattan, who had made money in the City of London, and who decided to build a house for his family at what is now called Drummin.
The new enterprise ran into immediate trouble: while overseeing the laying of the foundations, John Grattan was accosted by ‘an aged crone’ who emerged from the surrounding bog, shook a horny finger at him and placed a curse on the family, saying that the house would never pass directly from father to eldest son. Clearing the site was it seemed desecrating the home of some fairies, which had deeply upset those in the neighbourhood.
The crone’s prediction was in fact fulfilled, whether for that reason or for one more scientific, and the estate, in former years known as ‘Drummond’, followed a circuitous route before eventually coming into the de Courcy Wheeler family. That occurred in 1915, when Grattan’s grandfather, Robert, a doctor who had recently married into a Glasgow fortune, inherited the place from Miss Ann Grattan, a good friend of his without close family of her own. In due course the property passed to the doctor’s son, Cecil de Courcy Wheeler, but in the 1950s the Irish Land Commission, armed with compulsory purchase powers to distribute land among poor tenants, reduced by 90 per cent the Drummin estate.
Cecil, however, bought an adjoining two hundred acres and started farming, principally growing mushrooms. For a time he prospered, and would proudly give Grattan’s weekend guests a guided tour – almost obligatory – of the extensive sweep of Nissen huts. These nurtured within them mushrooms of all sorts, shapes and sizes, to be sold mainly in the north midlands but also across the country and for export – in doing so he became Co. Kildare’s largest employer. Grattan, with his ever-present sense of the ridiculous, used to chortle when recalling a debutante who, at the end of the forty-minute tour, turned brightly to his father and asked “Do you grow toadstools?”
Born on 26 April 1947, Grattan attended Headfort, an Irish prep school recently established in the family seat, an imposing Georgian house in Co. Meath, by the Marchioness of Headfort. Here he displayed what was described as a sublime talent as a draughtsman. Aged thirteen, he progressed to Sherborne School (Harper House) in Dorset, where the authorities described him as ‘Irish, disorganised, but very good value’.
He failed in his bid to follow the family footsteps to Trinity College, Dublin, but that was to turn out much to his benefit, as he was accepted instead by Christ Church, Oxford, which he used later to say was where he first met all his best friends. Confirming one part of Sherborne’s comment, he arrived at Oxford a week late for his first term; asked why by an indignant tutor, he explained that there had been ‘some mix-up with the dates.’ “Clearly so”, was the acid response.
After two terms, evidencing an innate and already chronic reluctance to make up his mind about anything important, he changed his course, from History to Politics, Philosophy and Economics. He was taught by several eminent scholars, including the historian Robert Blake and the economist Roy Harrod, but the broad consensus among his tutors, albeit couched in the civilised language in those days customary among Oxford dons, was that he was opinionated and should work harder. Yet he was unabashed when recounting how one of his tutors, not a lone voice, wrote: ‘He should think before he speaks – and one of his thoughts could with advantage be that he might conceivably be mistaken.’
Grattan gravitated towards the more agreeable realms of Oxford’s social elite, and the boy from distant Kildare, deploying the charm which served him so well, perhaps too well, in later life and, without the benefit of well-placed family connections or a smart public school, was soon elected to the University’s most socially sought-after clubs: the Bullingdon and, at Christ Church, Loder’s. He was also an active member of the Oxford University Conservative Association. A third class degree ensued, albeit in the upper half.
Leaving Oxford in 1969, and after a certain amount of family prompting, he looked around for a career. He first took up with a small firm of London stockbrokers, where he guided clients towards a number of largely unknown shares. When they rose he would explain to satisfied clients “Oh that’ll be the Boys. They’re in there now. The Boys know what they’re doing”. Enquiring about the subsequent falls the clients would learn that ‘It’s the Boys. Oh, yes. They’ll be out of there now. No flies on the Boys.”
That firm went out of business, so Grattan changed direction, preferring, he then decided, the life of a soldier. Armed with a reference from the Dean of Christ Church, who opined that Grattan had ‘plenty of determination and self-confidence’ and was ‘thoroughly honest and straightforward’, he was accepted by the Household Cavalry. However, confronted with the reality of the sword drill, presentation and punctuality beloved of the Guards Depot, he soon had second thoughts, and by the early-1970s had returned to the City.
Around 1973, having, it is said, met one of its directors at a dinner party, Grattan found employment at Kleinwort Benson, one of the most prominent London-based merchant banks, in its corporate finance department. For junior personnel much of the work involved drafting public documents. To Grattan, a broad picture / people person rather than a technician, this did not appeal or play to his strengths. “I’m going to have to screw the loaf”, he would say to his friends, on being presented with another cerebral challenge.
So, in 1975 he moved on to the Northern Trust Company of Chicago. At that time American banks were establishing themselves in London and thought it essential to recruit Oxbridge graduates to attract business from top British firms. Here he began to flourish. In the final, golden days of traditional banking, when large international banks were recycling petro-dollars at enormous margins, he succeeded in taking a number of high-flying businessmen through Northern’s doors. However, in the mid-1980s, after ‘Big Bang’ and other innovations, the pace of business increased and winds of change began to blow City life in new directions, leading Grattan in 1991 to a new berth.
This was in the Berkeley Square office of the Bank of Ireland. For a few years he thrived there, but sadly he began, intermittently but increasingly, to suffer from a debilitating type of bi-polar, delusionary depression. Eventually his employer lost patience with the problems it caused, so in June 1999 he returned to Drummin, which by then had been passed on to him, albeit sheltered in a trust, by his father.
With the mushroom venture over, Grattan then began energetically to entertain an ever-increasing and eclectic circle of friends. At the same time, he helped to look after his disabled sister, Diana, with kindness and dedication until her death in 2003.
Meanwhile, despite accumulating many friends he remained star-crossed in love. A local girl for whom he fell was put off by Cecil telling her that his son was a doubtful prospect, with the likelihood of diminishing income and increasing ill-health. That exacerbated an already difficult relationship with a father who had long found it hard to perceive much purpose or energy in his son. When a guest once asked him what Grattan actually did all day in Ireland, there was a long pause before he replied “He occupies his time.”
The love of his life was an American, whom his friends thought would be a perfect match. However, Grattan’s chronic twenty-four hour outlook on life, and his reluctance to make important or difficult decisions – which he called “putting it on the long finger” – such as that of asking the girl to marry him, contributed to her finally going back home. His consequent sadness was perhaps softened by his inclination for gallant but innocent flirtations with attractive women, and in time he seemed to abandon romantic ideas.
In his eulogy at Grattan’s funeral, Jerry Healy said “Grattan had inherited two great characteristics from his varied ancestry, an appetite for history and a talent for friendship. He was inebriated by history. He wove the national with the local, the political with the personal. He wanted to know not just what your politics were but who you were, who your father was, and your father’s father and so forth, if at all possible hoping to fetch up at some aristocratic terminus.”
Grattan was pleased to trace a connection with the de Courcy Barons of Kingsale, Ireland’s Premier Baron through its creation circa 1340. However, the connection was somewhat distant, being to Almericus, 18th Baron Kingsale, who died in 1719. Rather, at the time of Dr Robert’s coming into Drummin in 1915, the de Courcy Wheelers were doctors, soldiers or clergymen.
Returning to live in Ireland, Grattan drew solace from an encyclopaedic knowledge of the history of Ireland and of its important families. He would often help guests, in particular Americans, to trace their Irish roots, wherever they were. Although his abiding interest in the country’s politics made him quite aware of the dangers of ‘The Troubles’, he felt that his own presence in any part of the country was quite natural.
On one occasion, lost in the then ‘Bandit Country’ of Co. Monaghan when in search of an American guest’s origins near Carrickmacross, Grattan turned into a cul-de-sac and was at once surrounded by a group of menacing men mending a car in the road; quite unruffled, in tweed coat and tie, he addressed them in a natural brogue with “Hallo there, would ye be after tellin’ me the way to Crossmaglen?” After an ominous, pregnant silence they did so, with Grattan, when they were well clear, reciting the old Irish adage ‘Twixt Carrickmacross and Crossmaglen there are no straight roads and few straight men’.
His return to Ireland, although having occurred a little ahead of plan, in fact presented him with the perfect backdrop to his memorable combination of gregarious friendliness, strongly held but well-informed opinions, and eccentricity. With an Anglo-Irish / Scottish Protestant father and an Irish Catholic mother, Pamela Stapleton, and educated in England, he might have fallen between two stools: an Englishman in Ireland and an Irishman in England. But he turned the situation to advantage, bringing Irish wit and benevolence to his many friends in England and English good sense to all that he did in Ireland.
On the other hand he could be infuriating, vacillating, stubborn, selfish and frightening – behind the wheel was the only place where he was decisive, and not in a good way. Yet life with Grattan was never dull, his generosity was legendary, and his charm enabled him to get away with much and still be loved by all.
To his dining-table he liked to invite people of influence in English and Irish politics, and at various times they included an ex-Taoiseach, Irish government ministers, members and former members of the UK Parliament, writers, academics, English and Irish aristocrats, as well as locals in Co. Kildare and adjacent counties: a deliberate mix of what he used to call ‘the front and the back of the church’.
He himself did not edge to the front. For instance, on a day when his dining-room was filled with long tables to accommodate a gathering of politicians and assorted people of influence, he sat quietly at a small corner-table with just the local butcher and Jim Pender, the man who for over 40 years struggled to tame the overgrown demesne – and incidentally sat with him for long hours at the end.
Similarly, on one occasion he was the intermediary between a senior member of the UK Parliament and the grandson of Eamon de Valera, founder of the modern Irish state, then an active Irish politician. Their meeting was aimed at trying to get the Republic’s politicians to take a more balanced view of their relations with both the EU and the UK. Grattan and the two men discussed their plans over lunch in an upstairs room in a Dublin club, while politicians of all parties, including the leader of Sinn Fein, queued up below, each one waiting for an interview.
As year followed year, with no refurbishment of the house and without a loving wife to help keep things in good order or to maintain Grattan himself in good shape, in the sense at least of ensuring that he took his medicines, the discomfort of staying at Drummin began to deter English friends, or more particularly their wives, from going over to see him. However, keeping in touch was always important to him, so he began to regularise spring and autumn pilgrimages to England.
When in London, he would preside over lengthy ‘Edwardian’ lunch-parties at the Turf Club or at Mon Plaisir, an old-fashioned French restaurant that he had discovered in Soho. There he would sit, now rather hunched and heavy, clothes a little threadbare, the wide bald brow reflecting his ready chuckle or else the measured tones of his opinions, imparted slowly and with emphasis. Sometimes his voice would reach almost a squeak of indignation, as he spoke of people or things to which he took exception: the EU, for example, he placed firmly in the same department as the devil and all his works. Lunch was usually preceded by champagne cocktails and by his prolonged contemplation of the menu, with numerous changes of mind, while a waiter patiently stood by, pencil in hand, and hungry guests prayed for him to get on with it and order the inevitable roast chicken. A Dr. Johnson figure, solid at the head of the table, as the afternoons wore on.
Back in Ireland, his life retained the flavour of an age that in England and elsewhere had become scarce at least 50 years earlier, and people still came regularly from far and wide to enjoy what remained, notwithstanding an increasing shortage of funds, unflagging, genial entertaining. His menus changed little. Mary Donegan, his long-suffering but devoted house-keeper for the final 21 years, would prepare a starter of onion and mushroom in a cream sauce or a large helping of smoked salmon. There followed roast lamb and boiled potatoes, then fresh fruit salad and, finally, cheese. Champagne would be followed by white Burgundy and good claret, of which there was an unfailing supply. Normally the gatherings were of eight or more. Lunch would edge towards dinner, and dinner ‘into the second candle’, as Grattan would say, with incessant talk from interesting, talented or well-informed guests.
Week-end parties included visits to historic sites, about which Grattan seemed to know everything, and lightning tours around the county, where he and his guests would arrive at the house of some unsuspecting occupant who would be surprised and pleased to see the party, usually in equal measure. Some sociable talk and impressive introductions, and then on to the next rambling mansion. Returning to Drummin, the proceedings would continue into the early hours of the morning, the last to retire being the host himself, after dozing in a deep armchair, decanter at hand and cat on his lap – ‘my woman substitute’, he used to say.
When there were no guests, he would dine alone, frequently off a large bar of chocolate and a bottle of claret. Those addictions may have exacerbated the diabetes which overtook him, after he had characteristically declined, as unsuited to him, to have an operation which might have given him a few more years of life. So he died, seemingly content, in the family home, on 24 August this year, aged 73.
October 2020