DURING OPERATION Market Garden - the disastrous Allied attempt to break through to the Rhine in 1944 - Lieut Col John Ormsby Evelyn "Joe" Vandeleur led the Irish Guards Group that began the initially successful ground-based assault, writes Eibhir Mulqueen
The push towards Arnhem on the Rhine comprised the euphemistically named "Garden" campaign of the operation, while "Market" was the airborne end. Together, the operation aimed to secure a series of bridges across the German-occupied Netherlands to allow a rapid advance into Germany.
Joe Vandeleur was born in Nowshera on the then Indian north-west frontier, now Pakistan, and rose to the rank of brigadier while serving in the army. He died in Maidenhead in 1988 at the age of 84.
As an adviser to the 1977, Richard Attenborough-directed film of Operation Market Garden, called A Bridge Too Far, he apparently told Michael Caine, the actor who played his role, that the command he gave to begin the attack to secure the first of the bridges was a quietly spoken, "Well, get a move on, then", into a microphone. Caine used the line instead of the scripted, "Forward, go, charge".
Operation Garden was all a long way from the ancestral garden established by Joe Vandeleur's great-great-grandfather, John Ormsby Vandeleur, after he built Kilrush House on the 400-acre family demesne in west Clare in 1808. Lewis's Topographical Directory of Ireland of 1842 described the house as "a handsome and spacious mansion immediately adjoining the town, and commanding an extensive view of the Shannon, and the Clare and Kerry shores".
In the early 19th century, Vandeleur oversaw the development of a port and customs house in Kilrush and the town's main streets and square were planned and developed. His son, Col Crofton Moore Vandeleur, who inherited the estate in 1828, continued the market town's development. Sites were donated by him for a courthouse, a Catholic church and a Sisters of Mercy convent and a fever hospital was built. By 1831 there were 712 houses in the town, according to Lewis.
But evictions during the Famine, when the local economy collapsed, were the catalyst for the first groundswell of resentment against the local landlords. Around 1,000 people were evicted from the Vandeleur estate in the late 1840s, a policy continued by Crofton Moore's son, Hector Stewart Vandeleur, who he took over the estate in 1881 as the Land War was beginning.
An absentee landlord, his draconian measures, through his agent, drew considerable attention from the media. The New York Times ran a series of reports in 1888 during the height of the Land War in the area. In July, it stated that preparations, including 500 dragoons and infantry, for the evicting of 114 families were as elaborate as for a small war.
"All the houses are barricaded, but the police are provided with battering rams. Parish priests are actively at work counselling submission, and it is hoped that there will be no blood shed. The arrears of rent amount to €80,000." The local population was incensed, mounting a campaign of obstruction during that summer, shutting shops, cutting bridges, and ringing warning bells while efforts continued to reach an agreement.
Photographs of battering rams demolishing cottages by Robert French of the Lawrence Photographic Studios, Dublin, became the defining images of the era. The following year, a compromise was agreed on the rent arrears and the tenants were reinstated.
Kilrush House was burned down just 111 years ago, on a stormy March 26th in 1897, apparently following a chimney fire in the servants' apartments. The Clare Journal remarked that efforts by a relay of men with buckets to put out the blaze were "sickening". The "splendid" billiard room was the last to succumb.
It marked the end of the Vandeleur presence in west Clare. The house was never rebuilt and within a few years the estate was taken over by the Land Commission under the Land Purchase Scheme.
Hector Stewart Vandeleur's male heirs both died prematurely, one in the Boer War, the other on the Western Front. Their first cousin, Col Crofton Bury Vandeleur, was Joe Vandeleur's father, who had the family name ascribed to the flower, Streptocarpus vandeleurii, after discovering it unclassified in South Africa.
Today, seeds of the rare vandeleurii have been purchased for germination by the operators of the restored Vandeleur garden, which lay disused for over a century within its four walls.
Work began on the restoration in 2000, with many sub-tropical plants planted around the original perimeter path system, and a Victorian-style, timber frame glasshouse was added in 2006. A cafe and centre with meeting rooms and exhibition area are housed within refurbished stable buildings.
Visitors, especially those with memories, memorabilia and photographs of Vandeleur days in Kilrush, are always welcome to the gardens.