Lady Gregory's descendant shares a voice from past

THE YOUNG woman in jeans and a T-shirt, with the cropped hair and Scottish accent, flashed a photograph of her great-great-grandfather with the Prince of Wales on the big screen and said her brother had exactly the same facial hair.

Her brother could have Sir William Gregory’s sideburns but Julia Kennedy looked nothing like her great-great-grandmother Lady Augusta Gregory.

“I never met her but I learned about her through my grandmother Catherine,” the young scientist explained, as she presented what was being billed as a world premier at this year’s Yeats International Summer School in Sligo.

She was there to read from Lady Gregory’s unpublished memoir, An Emigrant’s Notebook, written in 1883-4 and which experts say provides a rare insight into WB Yeats’s ally and co-founder of the Abbey Theatre.

According to Prof James Pethica, Lady Gregory’s biographer and director of this year’s school, she became much “too cagey” in her later writings but in this document, she speaks from the heart about many issues that troubled her about Ireland.

The memoir contains many anecdotes about the land wars and also about family life in the big house in Galway in which Lady Gregory, “the fifth girl and very much a plain Jane” according to her descendant, remembers her youth.

There was a story about the family’s Catholic nanny who told the children about her first outing to a theatre when the show was interrupted by shouting and clapping as news broke in the hall that the French had landed in Killala. There were also stories of red-coated soldiers and policemen on high alert among the shrubs in the lush gardens as resentment grew against the landed classes. “Every time I have come back to Ireland I have been more and more struck by the squalor, the dirt and the hopelessness in every village in every little town,” Lady Gregory wrote. “And how are we to remedy it, we of the upper classes?”

The house at Coole Park in Co Galway is long gone – sold by the State to a builder who demolished it in 1941 – but many students at the Yeats school were hoping to fit in a visit to see the estate with its famous tree, where so many friends, including Yeats, Shaw and Synge carved their initials.

Meanwhile, musician Mike Scott got a full house at Sligo’s  Hawk’s Well Theatre this week for his Yeats to Music, Poetry to Song performance.

Stella Mew, chief executive of the Yeats Society, was very impressed.

“He was terribly sensitive to Yeats’s poetry,” she said. “It was really very moving. One woman told me afterwards that she cried.”

Students are keeping their eyes peeled for another Yeats fan who has two appointments to keep at Lissadell House this weekend. If Leonard Cohen does pop in, several people have offered to share the notes of the lectures he has missed so far.